Lightbulb Over Head Blog

Sooner or later you will face a brutal reality:

Your high school reunion.

The fear will climb you like a maypole and you will think your are thirty pounds fatter than you actually are. You will check the guest list for your high school crushes or old boyfriends and be warmed by those old flames, followed by an endless panic attack concerning seeing them again. You’ll destroy your closet looking for the perfect ensemble and plan hair and makeup for a week ahead of time. Moreover, you’ll plan how to describe your job so that you don’t sound like a glorified receptionist.

You say to yourself + 30 imaginary pounds in the mirror, “Oh college, how have you failed me so completely?”

Then the day arrives. It’s the moment of truth.

Results may vary after this point. I can only speak for myself.

A certain amount of anticipation and dread accompanied my decision to attend my high school reunion, but I never struggled with whether or not to go. I knew from the moment I got that letter inviting me to “The School by the Sea” for my 5th year reunion that I would be there.

Let me explain. My high school education wasn’t what you would call normal. I went to boarding school one thousand miles away from home. When I tell new acquaintances this, they usually react in the following way.

Wide-eyed with wonderment and a mischievous gleam in their eye they ask, “What did you do?”

This reaction makes me laugh because so many people can’t imagine sending their son or daughter of to school across the country at the tender age of fourteen. They figure you must have done something so horrible that you had be sent away to “learn to respect your limits or your elders” or both.

Let’s set the record straight. I wasn’t packed off and sent to boarding school because I’m some sort of juvenile delinquent. I chose to leave home.

See, I always loved summer camp. I went to Camp Seafarer in North Carolina for 8 years and worked there as a counselor for two. I wouldn’t be who I am today without my experiences there. The first year I went, I was ten. I was a shy girl who barely spoke up except to say incredibly awkward things. I was the kind of child who could play on a playground for hours and not bother to learn the names of the other children I was playing with because I was too terrified to ask. Facing a month away from home was frightening and exciting, but when I got there, I slowly came out of my shell. I blossomed, some might say. I went out to activities every day and set goals for myself, striving every day to achieve them. I learned how to sail, how to tie a bowline knot, and how to jump a hurdle on horseback. It was at Camp Seafarer that I was asked to dance by a boy for the first time. There were a lot of firsts at camp, and the best part of it all was that I was in control of my own destiny.

I’m an only child, you see. Every step of the way up until that point, my parents had been there guiding, supporting, micromanaging, and frogmarching me towards some undisclosed success. There are advantages and disadvantages to being the sole object of your mother and father’s love. I was given every possible opportunity; piano lessons, ice skating lessons, vacations, tutors, and educational trips. Anything I asked for, I got and usually more. Every time I soared I was rewarded and every time I fell, I was supported, analyzed, and talked through how to improve upon or avoid this mistake again. I never had that integral sink or swim moment.

However, at Camp Seafarer, I was in control. I scheduled my activities and I auditioned for plays. When I failed, it was up to me to fix it. When I succeeded, I simply basked in the glow of a job well done. It was enough because it was all mine.

Back in Chicago, I went to a middle school that ended in eighth grade and when I reached that point, I had to apply to high schools. I applied to every private school in the city, including my own personal Jesuit nightmare, St. Ignatius College Preperatory School. When I visited, I hated it. The students seemed dispassionate as they marched to classes in their uniforms. They answered questions when they had to and not because they wanted to. They were smart, make no mistake, but I couldn’t see myself fitting in. As the year forged on, I became restless. I wasn’t particularly happy about any of the choices of schools I had applied to thus far.

One day, I saw a friend of mine looking through a boarding school brochure. Inside its laminated story book pages there were kids on bicycles, grassy quads, blue skies, pine trees, and red track fields. It showed kids making clay bowls on spinning wheels and singing in a capella groups. I knew that I could probably find some of those things at the private schools in Chicago, but an idea had formed in my head. Judging by my success at camp, perhaps I could achieve more away from the loving arms of my parents then I could within their reach.

With my parent’s permission, I applied to boarding schools all over the east coast. The next fall, I found myself at Tabor Academy in a dorm with twenty other girls, most from the area around school, whereas I was 1,000 miles away from home, and completely out of my element.

I had the unique opportunity to decide who I was. No one knew me. I could make first impressions on an entire community. Even knowing this, I was terribly afraid I would make some awful blunder.

The first few nights there, I sat on one of the granite benches on the water front. Even though I had worked so hard to get away from home, I missed it. I knew my mother and father would have had some useful knowledge to impart. All they way to school, my parents had pelted me with so much advice that I couldn’t see straight when we arrived. I couldn’t wait for them to leave me the hell alone. As we hugged goodbye till Thanksgiving, my mother wagged her finger. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” she said with great reverence. Afterward, that piece of Polonius’ advice from Hamlet has served as their final words to me whenever they drop me off at my current place of residence.

The seabreeze tossed my thick bush of brown hair across my face as I looked out over Buzzards Bay. All of their advice was slipping through my fingers. I was here to make my way without them.

Sometimes, I thought, you should be careful what you wish for.

I stayed at Tabor for four years. The first two were hellish and I was unhappy. I wanted to be wonderful at science and sports, but that just wasn’t in the cards. Nothing seemed to come naturally to me, least of all social aptitude. No one enjoyed being friends with a stuck up city girl who loved Star Wars and sang the Moulin Rouge version of  “Lady Marmalade” at least fifty times a day in her dorm room while everyone else was trying to study. It wasn’t until I laid anchor in the theater and music community that I found a foothold for myself at Tabor. Teachers and students started looking at me differently. They knew my name and they didn’t call me out on dress code infractions as much. I did the musical every year and toured with my a capella group every spring. It was a damn fine gig if I do say so myself. My last two years at Tabor were some of the happiest in my life. My friends were like family and theater was a dream. I felt so lucky to be there every day.

And so it was that I entered highschool wanting to be an astronaut and left with a passion for the stage, headed to New  York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, no less. I graduated with awards for contribution to theater and choral music and I left thinking I knew a lot more about myself than I would have if I had gone to school back at home in Chicago. My parents were still extremely proud, and supportive, but I had done this for myself.

I had no idea what awaited me in New York. I knew I would get through it as I had gotten through life at Tabor, but I was in no way prepared for my first year there, let alone the other three. It was filled with art, non-sexual nakedness, dance, shock, and student rush tickets to Broadway shows. I was back in an urban environment, pulsing with energy, buzzing with life. I was filled with passion for what I was doing every single day. Imagine: No more math classes. It was heavenly. I thank my lucky stars every day that my parents let me go and paid for my education at Tisch.

Now, it’s a year after my graduation from NYU and I’m living the life of a starving artist. Like everyone else in America, I have felt the pain of our declining economy, losing my job and not being able to get a new one for four months at a time. In December, I broke up with the man I can’t stop loving. In January, I saved a suicidal room mate’s life when I found her bleeding out in the bathtub. In February, I lost a dear friend and collaborator to a successful suicide attempt. By March, I was still jobless and was feeling the desperate strain of my independent reality weigh on me heavily every second of every single day. This is my life, I thought. I can’t stand my life right now.

It had been almost a year since I had performed in a full scale production. I could feel my life blood and passion begging for attention like a poorly tended hearth living in the pit of my stomach. My skin was going numb.

That’s when I got the letter inviting me back to Tabor Academy for my high school reunion.

How can I face all of these wonderfully smart and successful people? I thought. I’ll be a laughing stock again… or worse, they won’t recognize me at all.

I’m not fearless, but I like to think I have a bit more backbone than to let a few momentary insecurities stop me from going through such an important right of passage.

The truth is, as the day approached, I realized how much I had missed that community. I had spent so much of my life pushing forward and away from anything or anyone that had nurtured me along the way, but now I dearly missed the cradle of support that I got from my parents, teachers, and friends at Tabor. I had been a ship my whole life, struggling to break free from my mooring, but now I was ready to return to port, more ready than I ever thought I would be.

As I arrived back on campus, my heart pounded in my chest. My body felt weak, almost euphoric. Many of my classmates had remained in the same area and saw each other more often, but true to form I had left the nest and sailed into uncharted waters.

The whole weekend was like a glorious out of body experience. People I knew well and people I hadn’t all asked how I’d been and seemed to care about my response. I realized that I cared about theirs and I was proud of their numerous accomplishments. I remembered more first and last names than I thought I would. Seeing my teachers struck such a resonant chord with me. They had spent four years as my surrogate parents, setting me up for success, talking me through rough patches, and inviting me for Sunday afternoon tea. The whole reunion was like a warm celebratory ritual with dancing, drinking, and storytelling.

Near the end of the evening I was laughing with a friend who had gone with me to the Caribbean aboard the school’s tall ship to do an on-site marine studies class. We were resting our feet as the rest of our classmates danced the night away. He asked me what I was up to and I told him about the play I was writing, my novel, my new apartment, and how much i enjoyed the process of developing new musicals.

“You’re living the dream.” He laughed and smiled at me.

Until he said that, I had completely forgotten that I was.

At the end of the weekend, I felt my ship had been thoroughly resuplied. I had collected information and maps, and made plans for new adventures, confident that I could sail across the fated sea with a warm wind at my back.

I have decided that once Odysseus returned to Ithaca, he must have longed for another voyage.

“Maybe it’s just my time to get plastic surgery.”

One of my co-workers reported that one of her clients had said this disparaging remark regarding her personal appearance. It shocked me so much that all I could do for a moment was blink. The client she was quoting was in her mid thirties. I thought I must have heard her wrong.

Maybe it’s just my time.

Does it “just become our time” to get plastic surgery these days, like some inevitable, foregone conclusion? What ever happened to aging gracefully like Whistler’s Mother?

There is something sickening about our new trend towards eternal youth. I understand that people want to retain their smooth skin, high breasts, and taught muscle tone, but at some point, we are all going to get older.

Of course, it’s easy to say that at the tender age of twenty three.

To be honest, I can’t exclude myself from that cultural trend. I’ll probably cry when I get my first gray hair and my first wrinkle.

Like so many girls and women today, I have body image issues. I’m not a slight woman. Slightly deranged, perhaps, but not thin. When I walk past a window or a mirror, I look at myself. I eyeball my measurements and press on through my day ashamed of what I see. I check my makeup and wonder how my face disappeared in the full moon of fat I see in my reflection. I know I’m not alone in this kind of life and I know all of these self-hazardous thoughts are partially true, and partially an infectious disease boiling in my brain.

I work at a gym where I am constantly confronted with the fact that I am out of shape. I perform in an industry where skin deep beauty is a skill you can list on your resume and some girl’s with that one skill and not much else “make it big.” Weight and self image are indelible parts of my life because of the vocational choices I’ve made, but I truly believe that they weaseled their way into my psyche long before I decided to become and actress who took a day job at a gym.

Disney is the devil.

Disney is glorious.

This dichotomy echos in my mind constantly. As a child I loved Disney movies. I worshiped Disney Princesses and sang along to every film. I loved Ariel’s red hair and singing voice, Belle’s spunk and her golden ballgown, and how Cinderella got her Prince Charming even though she spent most of her days toiling as a maid. I idolized them each for their own personalities and also for their stunning beauty. I remember every girl in my class going to see each film and planning to dress as that character for Halloween. I never dared to follow suit because I knew I would look awkward and tubby compared to the rest of the perfect Belles and Jasmines. I preferred odd, lumpy, home made costumes like “The Universe,” complete with hula hoops fit for dangling planets made of tin foil.

Looking back, all of that Princess worship seems relatively innocent, but as an adult looking back at the very animation of Princesses, I have to say, they became increasingly sexualized as time went on. Snow White was a domesticated pie-serving Betty-Homemaker and the last animated Disney heroine, Megara from Hercules, is a bit of a con-artist and seducer who is in league with Hades to meet her own ends. Hers is a story of depravity and eventual redemption. Obviously all of the princesses are idealized, but this one is actually a seducer with a waist the circumference of a pin. Hades is able to wrap his thumb and forefinger around it. That’s sick. She’s was voiced by Susan Egan, the original voice of Belle on Broadway… but that’s neither here nor there. Her voice is sultry and her words laden with double entendre. I’m including the following video to give you an idea of what I’m talking about. It’s appropriately backed with the song, “She’s a Lady,” by Tom Jones.

When the movie came out, I loved her. I loved her power and her prowess. I loved the song she sang. I loved her hips and her sensual physicality. I wanted hair like that. She was sexy and I knew it with every fiber of my being.

I was twelve years old.

I was twelve and I was heralding this woman as a sex symbol. Isn’t that just a bit young to be thinking of someone in that capacity? Don’t even get me started on Jasmine in Aladdin. I loved the way she seduced Jafar at the end of the movie in order to cover for her beloved street rat. I wanted to wear that little red slave girl outfit with the transparent silk scarf draped over my shoulder.

These days, Disney doesn’t even use animation to mask their oversexed young women. They have created real life Disney Princesses in the guise of Miley Cyrus and Vanessa Anne Hudgens, both of whom are idolized by young girls and both of whom have been involved in what I would describe as “provocative picture scandals.” These pictures are so accessible that when I typed their names into Google, their taboo photos came up in the first few image results. Think about how many 10-12 year olds type those girl’s names into search engines every day to be met with sexualized images of their role models. Whats worse, the role models were the ones taking them. They weren’t victims of an evil photographer or director. They chose to take these pictures themselves.

No wonder young girls are dressing more provocatively than ever. They are being taught by example that it is desirable and cool to be sex symbols. They plaster their facebook pages with pictures of themselves in bikinis and bras taken at arms length or in a mirror. They pout their lips and push out their budding chests. They lie about their ages advertise themselves for the attention of male websurfers, hoping one will comment on their wall or their online journal to tell them they are beautiful.

The first time I was told I was beautiful by a man was on the internet. I can still remember the fluttering feeling that pulsed in the pit of my stomach as I read the navy blue comic sans font in the instant message. I got up from the computer and danced around the black swivel chair in my mom and dad’s study, unable to believe that someone could possibly see the beauty I could never find when I looked at searched myself so desperately in the mirror.

Even so, it wasn’t exactly how I’d always imagined it.

I still had to face my classmates every day. Things didn’t get any easier when I went to boarding school. I was an odd, musical theater loving, Star Wars fan whose sense of humor wasn’t exactly main stream. When it came to dances, I was so shocked and frightened that I never stayed for long.

High School dances look like orgies these days. At my high school, all the girls gathered near the stage and danced with each other in a circle, just waiting for a guy to come and “grind” with them from behind. For those who don’t know, “grinding” is a club dance where a man stands behind a woman and the two begin rubbing against each other in a lascivious rhythm. Some people may think that I’m being overzealous in my “wee” crusade here, but I’m just trying to express my own experience. I realize that this is common behavior in high school, but that’s exactly my problem with it. Dry humping has become common behavior at chaperoned school dances. It’s one thing in an +18 nightclub, but in high school? I remember when I was a camp counselor at a summer camp for 10-17 year olds, it was my job to walk around the dance floor with a ruler, making sure all of the couples had at least a foot between them. Let’s just say grinding wouldn’t have made the cut.

So here we are, modern Disney Princesses reaching the age of our former stepmothers and villainous evil queens, realizing our lips aren’t as red as they once were and our skin is no longer as white and smooth as fresh fallen snow. In a way, I suppose it makes sense that we are desperately trying to purge ourselves of all the undesirable traits we find creeping up on us as the years roll on. Perhaps our time is waiting for us just over the hill… and beyond the mossy knoll. With just a little help from a good surgeon and the right diet, we can be ready for our 11 o’clock number.