by Judy Greer
Luckily, I never got asked to leave acting school, and I never transferred. I just stayed. Maybe I was lazy, but I was having fun. I loved living with my roommates, I loved Chicago, I loved having a small group of people to work with every day, and after a few years I started to really love acting. I think what I’m really saying is I owe my career to my education, and I owe my education to Marci Urbaniak. OK, my parents paid, and my mom was the one who got me the last-minute audition, and I was the one who went to my classes (even on the day it was minus-eighty degrees outside and I cried walking to school and my tears froze on my face), but if it wasn’t for my first frenemy telling me I couldn’t hack it, I wouldn’t be where I am today, sitting in bed writing a book about myself.
Carey Christmas
HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF CAREY, OHIO? IT’S IN THE middle of Ohio, or central Ohio, as I have heard my relatives call it. My mother grew up there, and a majority of her side of the family still lives there. My parents moved back several years ago. They bought a cute house on a farm. They didn’t buy a farm; they bought a house on a farm. It’s the best of both worlds if you ask me. They get to be surrounded by farm but without having to actually grow anything. We went to Carey all the time when I was a kid. It was a two-hour drive from where we lived in the suburbs of Detroit. It’s a rural town that had a population of about two thousand people, although it may be larger now. It’s filled with my family members, and we’re super fertile (my mom warned me of this when I left home for college). If you’ve ever seen the TV show Friday Night Lights, it’s that kind of town, where everything revolves around the high school. It’s very Norman Rockwell meets recession. There’s one main street, a few bars, a few restaurants, a drugstore, supermarket, library, Ford dealership, and some various lodges for Elks or Moose (not the animals), a giant famous Catholic church, and even a nine-hole golf course made out of an old cow pasture. Since my mom’s side of the family was so giant, there was a special Greer family Christmas party every year, in mid-December, so that the whole Greer clan could celebrate together, like a mini family reunion but in my aunt’s house instead of a park. We called it the Carey Christmas, and it was a big deal when I was a kid. My aunt would hire a local guy to dress up in a Santa suit, and he would show up halfway through the day. Everyone would gather around with their cameras, and he would have a giant bag of toys, one for each grandkid with his or her name on it. As Santa pulled out each gift from his giant bag, he would call out the name on the present, and we would have to go up and sit on Santa’s lap and tell him that we were good little boys and girls and ask for what we wanted for real Christmas. A photo would be taken, Santa would give us our gift, and he would move on to the next grandkid.
Even at a young age, sitting on this stranger’s lap bothered me a little. I don’t remember ever believing in Santa, so the idea that I had to do this every year felt false. I wanted to believe in Santa; I just didn’t. You can’t help what you believe and what you don’t. I blame my mother’s handwriting. Every time there was a gift under our Christmas tree from Santa, it was clearly my mother’s handwriting. I think my parents knew better than to have my dad do it; as an engineer, he basically used graphing equipment to handwrite anything, but my mom’s was just as recognizable, just in a beautiful schoolteacher kind of way. Maybe they didn’t want to have to buy so many different gifts, they kept it simple and just stuck to the main ones, none of the stocking stuffer bullshit. Or perhaps they didn’t want to give some fake dude all the credit for all the gifts they spent their hard-earned money on during the holidays. Maybe they wanted all the glory, and honestly I can’t really blame them. I would be pissed if my kids were screaming out someone else’s name on the second-happiest day of the year (I considered the day The Wizard of Oz was on TV the happiest day of the year).
Actually, fuck Santa. Sorry, that got dark, but I do kind of wish I had believed in him. It seemed so fun for all my friends, and I would have loved to have that dramatic memory of the day I found out there was no Santa. I didn’t get that milestone, so now I have to rely on celebrity divorces for that kind of shock and betrayal. I have no memory of any gift I ever got from Carey Christmas Santa, but I have photos of myself all the way up to the age of seventeen sitting on his lap. I now think that might have been too old to be sitting on a stranger’s lap, even if I was surrounded by a hundred family members and a gun case filled with rifles was in the next room.
On Santa’s lap, age 17
There are other things about Carey that I remember fondly. I was very best friends with my cousin Mandy, who grew up there. We joked that we were the city mouse and the country mouse. She would come visit me, and we would go to the mall, and I would visit her, and we would feed sheep and play in the crick (aka creek) behind the barn. It was fun to run around their farm and play with the little goats and barn cats. They used to have pigs too, which I am so mad at myself for not taking full advantage of. I’d love to play with a little piglet. It’s harder than you’d think to find a piglet to play with for an afternoon in Los Angeles. I watched cows get slaughtered in the snow outside my aunt Deanna’s kitchen window. I saw the dead deer that my cousins and uncles would kill during hunting season, and I’d eat it all too. That’s pretty good for a girl growing up outside Detroit. I didn’t think much of it at the time, because it was just what we did, but as I look back, hanging out with my family on farms in Small Town, U.S.A., was awesome. Summers were the best. We would ride our bikes all over, catch lightning bugs in the fields at night and put them in Mason jars with holes punched in the top, swim in my aunt’s pond, and sleep with the windows open all night, listening to the sound of the crickets. The sound of crickets is a major player in my noise machine lineup. It makes me feel like the little city mouse in the country again, and when I hear them, I can still smell the faintest whiff of cow manure as I drift off to sleep.
The only thing about Carey, Ohio, that I remember being scary, besides the year I read In Cold Blood, was the church, Our Lady of Consolation Basilica and National Shrine. I like old churches—I like to visit them when I travel, probably because they remind me of OLC. I think they are cool and creepy, and they remind me of scary devil movies, and this one is no exception. I grew up going to Mass there when I was a kid visiting Carey. It is huge, like Italy-church huge. And old, not Italy-church old, but still, old. It has all the makings of a great devil movie set. A huge choir loft, spiral staircases, many entrances and exits, giant stained-glass windows, a huge organ, a massive altar with hundreds of red glass candles of different sizes burning 24/7, a life-size Jesus statue lying in a coffin on one side of the altar (stage right) complete with cuts and a crown of thorns, and, the pièce de résistance, on the other side of the altar (stage left) a statue of Our Lady herself, holding the baby Jesus and a scepter. It is claimed that miracles have happened at this shrine and that they started in 1875, when the gift of the statue of Our Lady was carried a hundred miles on foot in a processional, from St. Nicholas Church in Frenchtown, Ohio, once construction of the shrine was completed. A storm raged throughout central Ohio during the processional that day, but not a drop touched the Mary statue. A miracle! And ever since, people have traveled from near and far to get a few drops (or a bottleful) of the holy water that runs out of a tap on the side of the church. When I got a little older and was allowed to watch scary devil movies, I realized that this echoey building of faith, art, and history could provide a lot more than just comfort for the tired, weary, and faithful. It could be a place of paranormal murder, and I suddenly started to like going to church a lot more. I pretended that a gust of wind was going to slam the carved wooden doors shut and lock us all in. That all at once the candles would flicker, extinguish, then light again! I pretended that no one was in the choir loft when there was singing and organ music. But the best part of all was the basement. Because there were so many miracles related to OLC and churches like to show off to their parishioners and the Vatican, there are glass boxes that line the perimeter of this basement p
rayer room, filled with discarded crutches, braces, helmets, gurneys, cabinet after cabinet of devices that were no longer required by the infirm. I’m sorry, but it’s creepy. The few cabinets that don’t store proof of miracles house the many dresses of Our Lady. Oh yes, she has more dresses than I do. She’s fickle and gets to change clothes depending on the holiday, time of year, if she gets dirty. I don’t know the ins and outs of why/how/when Mary gets a new dress, but it’s really impressive to see the racks and racks of little outfits. I’ve always been a bit jealous.
I eventually got more interested in my real life than my fantasy life while sitting through Mass in Carey. The altar boys became better eye candy than the stained-glass windows (the altar boys who weren’t related to me, that is; sometimes I had to ask my mom if one was a first or second cousin, just to be sure). And when I went off to college, I stopped making it back for the Carey Christmas. Now that I’m all grown up, working and traveling so much, I hardly make it back there at all; usually my parents come out to see me. But in a lot of ways, I consider Carey one of my homes. I never felt like I totally belonged there, because I wasn’t cut from its cloth, but I was the next-best thing, and when I do make it back, I always make sure to go to the shrine. I’m not a practicing Catholic anymore, but I like to light a candle anyway and think about one of the many miracles in my life: Carey, Ohio.
My First Pube
A THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY IS A VERY IMPORTANT BIRTHDAY for a young girl—well, it was for me. I was finally going to become a teenager. My dad told me that when I turned thirteen, I could buy the teen mags at the drugstore, like Teen Beat, Tiger Beat, and basically anything with boys on the cover and the word “beat” in the title. Being thirteen meant I was three years closer to being sixteen, which was just two years away from being eighteen, and then, before I knew it, I would be twenty-one, which to me meant I was a grown-up! Once I turned thirteen, I was sure my hair would start to straighten, I would grow boobs, and Jeff Hunt, my adolescent crush (read: obsession), would fall in love with me. Spoiler alert: none of that happened. I don’t even remember if I was obsessing about pubic hair or not at the time. I had one goal and one goal only: BOOBS. Pubic hair you could lie about; boobs you could not. It was obvious when girls stuffed their bras—besides, what do you do in the summer at pool parties, assuming you get invited to them? How do you stuff a bathing suit? Duct tape and a couple of overripe plums? And if you can’t figure out how to stuff a bathing suit, how do you explain your sudden flatness? Weight loss? I needed boobs! Ones that would make boys (Jeff Hunt) notice me and offer to buy me a Slurpee. I was convinced that if I could just get a boy (Jeff Hunt) to walk with me to 7-Eleven and buy me a Slurpee, I could win him over with my charm and quick wit, but I needed the boobs to get the ball rolling.
That summer I turned thirteen, my parents and I were going on our summer vacation, which was always a road trip to somewhere boring—sorry, “serene.” I still don’t understand why we never went anywhere far away enough that we had to take an airplane. We never flew anywhere. Not even Disney in Orlando (is it “world” or “land”? I will never remember because MY PARENTS NEVER TOOK ME THERE!!!). We went to northern Michigan (a lot), Iowa, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and places like that. I slept in the car a lot on those trips. To this day, anytime I am in the car for an extended period of time, I get so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open. Even if I’m just running errands or driving to an audition, if the traffic is particularly terrible and I’m in the car forever, I will have to pull over and close my eyes for a few minutes—it’s not safe to drive like that. My mom said that when I was really little, in my car seat, I would dress and undress my Barbies between naps. When I got older, I read, and read, and read. Thank God I never got carsick! Sometimes my parents would let me bring a cousin or friend to keep me company during our trip and probably to keep me out of their hair. But often I would just go alone.
So, this particular year, we went to visit my mom’s cousin, who I’d never met, in Wisconsin. Her family owned a lodge, and we were going to stay there for the night on our way to a cabin on a lake in Minnesota that was owned by my father’s uncle, who I’d also never met. When we arrived at the lodge, I thought it was real fancy. It reminded me of where Baby and her family stayed in Dirty Dancing, minus the hot, oversexed dancers. There was a main building that had hotel rooms and the dining room, and then there were little cabins and clusters of buildings that had several hotel rooms in each one, like mini strip malls. They were scattered around the grounds, with trees everywhere and little paths connecting everything. I remember being so excited because I had my own room, and I never got my own room. I thought it was appropriate that I finally get a room of my own because I was a day away from being thirteen, practically an adult, voting was just around the corner. That night, we went to dinner in the dining room of the main building with the cousin, and I remember my parents were drinking wine and decided to stay later than I wanted to, which was fine by me because I needed to be alone anyway to say good-bye to my preteen self and hello to the new teenage me. So I went back to my room alone (another sign that I was fully grown up). I decided an evening of solitary pampering was the perfect way to celebrate this rite of passage. I mean, I had my own room, and in the movies when women had their own hotel rooms, they always took hot bubble baths, applied lots of colored lotions, wrapped their hair in a towel, turban style, and danced around lip-synching to a lady-power song. If this was how independent women were supposed to behave, I thought I should get started.
I used the mini shampoo to make my bubble bath. This never works for long, if at all, but since no one told me I’d have my own room, I didn’t come prepared with the proper bath supplies. I didn’t come close to getting as many bubbles going as they do in the movies, but it was pampering enough. It wasn’t until I was drying off, pre-lip-synch dance, that I noticed it. One curly black hair stuck to the skin of my pelvis. One hair. At first I almost barfed, thinking it was someone else’s hair left over from the previous occupant of the tub, but when I tried to remove it with the towel, it hurt. And that was when I realized it wasn’t a stranger’s pube but my own! My very own pubic hair! I got excited because I knew in my heart it was a sign. My life was turning around. I wasn’t going to be flat and ugly anymore. My hair was going to grow. I was going to start looking more and more like Alyssa Milano every day. But most of all, I was going to be OK. I would have friends. I would be popular. Jeff Hunt would fall in love with me. It was all starting, and now I had proof because of that one little black curly hair. I think this ecstatic feeling is why I still have no idea why women shave/pluck/wax off all their pubic hair. It was a curly miracle to me, that night in the woods in Wisconsin, and I remember all it symbolized. Why would I get rid of it? It meant something—mostly that I wasn’t a total freak, but still, it meant something. I liked it. It made me feel like a woman, not like the girl I was so desperate to leave behind on my vacation, but the woman I would morph into as the summer ended, and, surely, by the first day of high school I would walk through the halls, my metamorphosis complete. The crowds of upperclassmen would part and make room for this mysterious new student who was literally bursting with confidence (when I say “bursting,” I mean my boobs would be about to pop my shirt open). I fell asleep with this fantasy dancing around in my head.
The next thing I remember is maybe the scariest moment in my life so far. I was sound asleep, and there was pounding on the door and my mom was yelling for me to wake up. When I opened the door, she was standing there, talking very slowly and deliberately, so calm, in fact, that it was eerie. She said that I needed to run up to the lodge and call an ambulance as fast as I could, that my dad was really sick and I had to go, now, quickly, or he would die. My dad has diabetes—not the fat kind but the kind you get when you’re a kid and have forever. It was a major part of our lives and the source of most of my parents’ arguments, mostly because when my dad’s blood sugar got too low, he turned into a total asshole. Not his f
ault, but it was pretty obvious when he was low, and you can’t really get that mad at him for it. But still, no one likes an asshole.
I immediately took off running on the path to the lodge. It was so dark that I couldn’t see a thing, but I just kept running through the woods until I finally saw the lights from the main building ahead of me. Once I got there, I didn’t know what to do. Even though it was the middle of the night, I thought somehow there would be someone there, waiting to help me. There was no one. The front door was unlocked. I ran inside and started screaming at the top of my lungs, “HELP!! HELP! SOMEBODY HELP ME!!!” I screamed and cried and screamed louder, but nothing worked. No one came. Just then my mom ran into the lobby. She ran right behind the desk and grabbed the phone and called 911. Like she had been there a million times, like she worked there. How did she know to do that? How did she know exactly where to go and what to do? In that moment I felt worse than I had ever felt in my life. How stupid was I? Why didn’t I think of that? Of course the phone, of course 911. I’m the worst daughter, and if my dad died, it would be my fault. My mom told me to wait in front of the building for the ambulance and show them where our rooms were, she was going to go back to my dad. It seemed like the trees got bigger while I was standing there, the sky got darker, and there was no such thing as time anymore, just darkness and quiet. I made a million promises that night, to whatever was out there, that I would do anything if my dad was OK. I apologized to the universe for everything bad I had ever done and pleaded that my dad shouldn’t be punished because I was a terrible person. And then I noticed something in the dark moving toward me—a shadow, and it was getting larger and larger. It had to be a bear, I thought. I was in the middle of the woods, it was nighttime, I needed to be punished for not thinking to dial 911, and I had just admitted to the gods that it was probably my fault this was happening at all for having stolen Amy’s hamburger gum at her birthday party six years ago and lying about practicing piano, among my other sins. It was clearly a karma bear coming for me. This was the moment in my life when I learned something very valuable about my intrinsic nature. You’ve heard of the fight-or-flight response? Well, I learned that I am not a fight-or-flight type of person—I am a paralyzed-frozen-in-fear type of person. I froze. I froze hard. I don’t even think my heart was beating as the shadow, obviously a bear, stretched out longer and longer and got bigger and bigger, as though the shadow itself were reaching for my toes, and then I heard a sound, the tiniest little squeak. Wait, why was it squeaking? Would a bear squeak? Was it … could it have been … a meow? And then there was another squeak, and then another, and finally the creature presented itself. My karma bear was a kitten, a small, fuzzy, dirty, squeaky kitten. I burst into tears; I couldn’t handle this. I wasn’t ready to be a grown-up, pubic hair or not. There was still no ambulance, I had no idea what was happening to my dad, the kitten was now rubbing back and forth against my legs, and all I seemed to be capable of was standing there and crying. I wasn’t blessed with a fight response, I have no flight instincts whatsoever, but where I really excel is in the lesser-known stand-and-cry reaction. It hasn’t been as extensively researched by psychologists, but it’s a thing. I’m a living, breathing example of it.
