So, recently I saw some pictures of Maggie Gyllenhaal (one of my favorite actresses - World Trade Center, Happy Endings, Secretary, Mona Lisa Smile - and sister to Brokeback cowboy Jake) as the main character in a new movie called Sherrybaby. She had blond hair for the role, and it made it obvious that she looks like you! This is a complement, trust me - she is one of those actresses referred to as a thinking man's sex symbol. So let your husband know that's what you are, and I'll see you soon!
I apologize, Maggie, but I was relieved she told me it was a compliment. I was a little worried at first, but I could handle being a thinking man's sex symbol.
I told Abbie about this email and asked her what she thought. "Ha!" her husband shouted, "what did I tell you?! I told you they looked alike."
This autumn at a conference, a genteel southern woman asked me, "Has anyone told you you favor Maggie Gyllenhaal?"
I was just introduced to a friend of Vince's and he told Vince that I look like Julia Stiles and that I even have Julia Stiles hair.
So, I started thinking, "maybe I really should have been a movie star, like I wanted to be, when I was say, six years old." In fact, this summer I did a photo shoot of what I would have looked like, had I become a movie star and had the benefit of professional photographers with a talent for photoshop:
So, why didn't I become a movie star, other than because the vast, vast majority of people don't become movie stars? I did start off acting at a young age. I loved singing and dancing and putting on "performances" for whatever relative would remain captive on the couch. But there is a big difference between showing off to a patient relative and actually going out on stage and staring into the footlights and the blackness beyond and convincing that silent blackness that you are a Jet, and a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dyin' day.
The summer I was 12, I went to an intensive acting school, where we put on both an exerpt from West Side Story and a number of small one act plays as our final project. Somehow the trials and tribulations of elementary school had failed to provide me with the experience I needed to be a convincing gang member in New York. It left me even more unprepared to play a scientist in an experiment gone awry. I have no idea what our one act play was, but it had something to do with three or four people fighting over territory in a small room. Our costumes were assembled from clothes we brought from home. The director didn't like what I had brought and made me wear a long, tight skirt and a little, teeny, tiny strapless shirt that gathered into an elastic just below the bottom of my bra and then stopped. She said I would represent Africa and our play would have another level of meaning- we would all be different countries.
I was mortified. I didn't think I looked African. I thought I looked like a mostly naked girl. A mostly naked girl who didn't know that strapless bras existed and so just tucked her straps into her shirt and hoped for the best. I was so mortified I didn't tell me parents that there was a final performance. I didn't want them to see me nearly naked on stage. During the performance, there was a moment when one of the other girls was supposed to shove me. We had practiced this shove multiple times, but during the performance, the other girl's adrenaline was pumping and she used all her force to throw me to the ground, which caused my tight skirt to end up bunched up around my hips, quite close actually to where my strapless shirt ended up. The audience gasped, whether due to the loud thump made when I fell, or to my sudden nudity, I have no idea. All I know is that that night I decided acting wasn't for me.
So, even though I may favor a movie star, there are some very good reasons why she is the one on the screen, and not me!
No comments:
Post a Comment