by Dyan Sheldon
Move Over Scarlett Johansson, Here Comes Lola Cep
I was never really interested in being a movie star. Since I’m destined to be a great actor it’s always been the theatre that held my heart in its noble and passionate grip. I longed to feel the ancient boards beneath my feet, to smell the greasepaint and hear the roar of the crowds – not compete with Mickey Mouse.
But life has a way of changing things, doesn’t it? A person has to be flexible and willing to compromise when the Fates so decree. Face it – never doesn’t mean not ever so much as it means not until I have to. So if Opportunity shows up in your front yard, you don’t tell her to go away because she’s wearing a Dior evening dress instead of Lady MacBeth’s robes.
You say, “Come on in!” You say, “OK, maybe this wasn’t exactly what I was planning, but it’s a step in the right direction.” (I mean, eventually I was going to do movies – after I established myself on the stage – so really what was the difference if I did it the other way round?)
Anyway, there was Opportunity, standing right in the middle of the lawn, but instead of coming in when I called her, she bolted. I couldn’t believe it.
Luckily, like all great actors, I don’t give up easily. I watched Opportunity run away – and then I chased after her.
Which is why I have a story to tell.
My Mother Strikes Another Blow For The Philistines
I was looking forward to graduating from high school the way Robinson Crusoe looked forward to getting off his island. Talk about dreams come true. As soon as it was over I would vacate my child’s seat in the world’s audience and my true life would finally begin! It was the moment I’d been planning from my first day in kindergarten. And since my mother had dragged me from the bright lights of New York City to the twilight zone of Dellwood, New Jersey, I had even more reason to look forward to the momentous day when I set out to seek my fortune in the real world. Not only would I finally escape the hopelessly dull tedium of my family, but the hopelessly dull tedium of suburban life as well. (Shakespeare’s the only real connection I have with true passion since I moved here, but if you ask me even he would’ve been defeated by suburbia. Gone would be the stuff of true drama and he would’ve wound up with Richard III standing in the supermarket offering his kingdom for a shopping trolley.)
I had everything figured out. Following in the footsteps of so many great thespians before me, I would study acting somewhere that pulsated with energy and creativity – a place who’s spirit paid homage to the noble tradition from which it had sprung. Then I would wait tables (or possibly drive a cab) while I got whatever parts I could in serious plays performed in church halls and on the backs of trucks until I got my big break and made my (later to be legendary) Broadway debut. I couldn’t wait. Just thinking about it made my blood bubble.
My first choice of drama school was the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in England (known to its intimates as RADA). I didn’t really consider it a choice. I mean, just think about it. England is the birthplace of Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier, Dame Judy Dench and George Bernard Shaw (to name but a paltry few). And though I know that theatre started in Greece, it’s pretty obvious that it would have started in England if England had been more than a few druids painting themselves blue at the time.
And RADA’s in London, which is the cultural capital of the Old World. I ask you: is there a single great actor who hasn’t performed there? A single major writer, poet, playwright or artist who hasn’t at least visited? The answer is a resounding NO! Say what you will about the Old World, I think history is exciting. The streets of London are filled with plaques that mark the passing of the burning stars who have lit the darkness of human dullness and ordinariness for centuries. You know, Charles Dickens lived in a house on this site … Oscar Wilde was arrested in this building … Richard Burton passed out in this pub…
I mean, where else would a serious actor destined for immortality go to study her art but London, England?
I was still waiting to hear if I’d been accepted or not when my mother decided to tell me where else I could study. According to Karen Kapok, the serious actor destined for immortality would go to Brooklyn.
Of course I’ve always known that my mother’s soul is as pedestrian as a pavement (she’s a potter for God’s sake, her life is all about mud), but this shocked even me.
“Brooklyn?” I cried. [Cue: rolling of eyes and moan of disbelief.] “You can’t be serious.” I’d applied to Brooklyn because she made me, but I thought it was just a fail-safe. You know, in case the wicked Princess Carla Santini cast a spell on me and I didn’t get into RADA after all. “I’m not planning on a career in Mafia movies you know. I want to play Hamlet and Lear.”
“As far as I can tell, you play Hamlet and Lear every day of your life,” said my mother. “And I told you right from the start not to bother applying to RADA, didn’t I?”
Did she?
Since it’s not the kind of thing you could expect her to know, I explained that although the creative soul can survive without privacy or new clothes or its own phone, it cannot survive without spiritual nourishment.
“London is to the creative soul what a six-course dinner is to a starving man. Brooklyn’s more like a McDonald’s Happy Meal – and we all know how much nourishment’s in that.”
“You can forget the histrionics,” said Karen Kapok. “You’re not going to London. We can’t afford it.”
Like Life, true genius requires flexibility of course (you can’t always get the lead, sometimes you have to accept a small, supporting role and make it big), so I was ready to compromise.
“OK,” I said. “I’m willing to go to LA instead. Maybe they take late appli—”
“LA?” My mother has a very irritating laugh – something the twins have inherited from her. “I thought LA was a crass, materialistic, spiritual wasteland run by Satan wearing Mickey Mouse ears.”
It never ceases to amaze me how a woman who can’t remember to shave her legs more than once a year can remember practically every word I ever said and throw it back in my face.
“I may have said something like that once,” I replied coolly, “but you’re taking it out of context as usual. And anyway, I’ve revised my opinion since then. Many truly great actors have worked in Hollywood.”
Karen Kapok proceeded to grind my hopes and dreams under her clay-covered foot. “But you’re not going to be one of them. Brooklyn College has a perfectly good theatre department, and that’s where you’re going.”
“Perfectly good for what?” I demanded. “Ralph Fiennes, Dame Diana Rigg, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Kenneth Branagh all studied at RADA. Name me one actor of any renown who studied in Brooklyn!”
“Dominic Chianese,” said my mother.
As you can imagine, I said, “Who?”
“Dominic Chianese. He was Uncle Junior in The Sopranos.”
Oh ye gods! And to think that my being related to this woman depended on one infinitesimal sperm being a good swimmer. It really makes you think.
“Well there you are!” My laugh was as bitter as bile. “Eat your heart out Ralph Fiennes! You can’t compete with Uncle Junior.”
Being a potter, Karen Kapok is a major aficionada of the obvious. “He’s an actor,” said my mother.
I reminded her that he’s an actor who didn’t work until he was in his seventies. “Do you expect me to wait over fifty years to get a job?” I demanded.
“What I expect is for you to go to Brooklyn College and live with your dad during the week, that’s what I expect.” She was in her Martin Luther King we-shall-not-be-moved mode. “It’s all arranged.”
“Without consulting me of course!” I wailed. “After all, why
should you consult me? It’s only my life you’re destroying. It’s only my career that you’re shredding into tiny pieces and sprinkling all over the grimy streets of Flatbush!”
“I’m glad that’s settled,” said my mother.
Let’s face it: this is a world where one person’s tragedy is another person’s good fortune. There are women and children in Africa who have to walk six miles a day for polluted drinking water. You can’t call them happy. But the men who are responsible for this long walk to get cholera are happy. Their factories are making so much money they can buy twelve-thousand-dollar showers and four-hundred-dollar bottles of wine.
And so it was for me with this cruel blow to my young dreams. Not everyone was as devastated as I was by this tragic turn of events.
Ella, for one, was ecstatic.
“But that’s fantastic. I’ll be practically right around the corner from your dad’s.” Ella was going to NYU. She hugged herself the way she does when she’s really happy. “We can hang out just like always.”
I don’t want you to think that being able to see the best friend I’ve ever had every day didn’t make me happy too. It made me happy. But not as happy as studying at RADA would have made me.
“Thanks,” snapped Ella. “I’m so glad you value our friendship as much as I do.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic. Of course I value our friendship. But our friendship will endure the trials of time and distance. Whereas I may not be able to endure four years in a city whose only claims to fame are a baseball team that moved to California and a bridge.”
“Woody Allen was born in Brooklyn,” said Ella. “And Barbara Streissand.”
I know she was trying to console me, but it was like throwing a drowning woman a feather.
“So what? I bet they left the first chance they got.”
The other person who wasn’t devastated that I couldn’t cross the continent, never mind leave it, was Sam.
Sam wasn’t going anywhere after graduation. He was staying in Deadwood and working at his dad’s garage (which is pretty much what he’s done his whole life; he’s a genius when it comes to the internal combustion engine). Sam says he doesn’t need to go to school to read a book or learn something new, which in his case is true. He’s very self-motivated. And he doesn’t like institutionalized education. He says it doesn’t teach you to think, just to memorize.
“Brooklyn?” Sam whooped. “But that’s great. It’s practically next door.”
As the Karmann Ghia flies.
I felt like tearing out my heart – or at least my hair. “It may have escaped your notice, but proximity to New Jersey isn’t actually a guarantee of excitement, culture, or intellectual and spiritual stimulation.”
“No, but it means I can come and pick you up on Fridays.” He turned his attention to the toe of his boot. “I don’t like the idea of you going thousands of miles away. I could die of boredom.”
I clasped my heart. “Why Sam Creek – I didn’t know you cared!”
He looked up. “Yes, you did. What I’m trying to figure out is if it’s mutual, or if I’m all alone at the bus stop in the middle of the night and it’s raining.”
“Of course I care.” This is true. The only fault Sam has is that my parents like him. “But you know I’m not ready for a serious relationship. Not until my career is on its way. Until then, I have to think of myself as going steady with my art.”
“Well I like it better if you’re going steady with your art in Brooklyn rather than England or LA.”
I, Lola Elizabeth Cep (or possibly Sep – I still haven’t decided which would look better in lights), do have a very resilient nature of course (as all true actors must). I wasn’t going to let this tragic injustice ruin the end of my senior year. After all, I was still getting out of Deadwood, New Jersey, Carla Santini Capital of the World; I was still crossing the threshold of womanhood; and I was still going to pursue my heart’s passion, even if it was among people who say “tamayda” and not “toemahtoe”.
I put my disappointment behind me and threw myself into the end of high school life with my usual high spirits and enthusiasm. I am, of course, destined to be one of the truly great actors, so it’s no surprise that I convinced everyone that I didn’t have a care in the world.
Even Mrs Baggoli, the drama coach, who was the only person besides Ella and Sam that I told about being sent to Brooklyn like prisoners used to be sent to Australia, was fooled by my performance.
“I must say, Lola, you’re taking not going to RADA very well,” said Mrs Baggoli. “After all I heard about it, I was expecting a few weeks of Meryl Streep in tears at the very least.”
“The world isn’t fair, Mrs Baggoli.” I sighed philosophically. “But whatever the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the show must go on, mustn’t it? In life as on Broadway.”
Mrs Baggoli said I was very mature.
I was so good that I even convinced myself. Right up to a week before the end of classes, when I was suddenly reminded that though the gods have given me talent and dedication, they’ve always been pretty stingy with everything else.
It was Carla Santini who reminded me. Of course.
Carla Santini Reminds Me That I Wasn’t At The Head Of The Line When The Gods Were Handing Out Luck
“Approximately one-hundred-and-sixty-eight hours and counting,” hooted Sam. “Now, that’s what I call getting seriously short.”
“I don’t know…” Ella shrugged. “It feels really strange thinking that after a few more days we’ll never come here again.”
Obviously I didn’t actually feel like that myself, but my actor’s brain totally understood what Ella meant. “Oh, I know, I know!” I cried, casting my arms wide to embrace the infinite mysteries of the universe. “The years of toil and struggle… The moments of dark heartbreak and the moments of pure joy… The days of laughter and of tears…”
“Well, not exactly…” Ella scrunched up her nose as though a bug had flown into it. “I just meant, you know, that we’ve been here a long time.”
“Well of course we have.” To me it felt like about a hundred years of hard labour. “There isn’t an inch of this school that doesn’t hold a memory.”
“Tell me about it.” Sam started ticking things off on his fingers (a habit he’s developed through being a mechanic and having to tell people what’s wrong with their cars). “The time you pretended to faint so you could get out of maths… The time you told Mrs Baggoli you didn’t have your homework because you were chased by wild dogs… The time you ran me and Ella for class office without telling us… The time you got me to steal Eliza Doolittle’s dress from the drama department…”
Like many people, Sam has a very selective memory.
“What about the time Carla Santini stopped the whole school from talking to me and Ella?” I didn’t see why all the memories had to be of things I did. “Or the time she practically had me kidnapped? Or the time she told everyone you’d been in jail? And all the times she called me a liar when I was telling the total and absolute truth…” Several good reasons why, unlike Ella, I felt not nostalgia’s cloying grasp for life at Deadwood High. “Which is why I can’t wait to get out of here.” To be honest, Carla had been so occupied with her graduation (so much bigger, better and more important than anyone else’s) and everything related to it for the last month or so that she’d been almost civil to me recently (which means that she pretty much ignored me). I wanted to end on that high note.
This, however, was not to be.
Towards the end of lunch, Carla’s voice, which had been playing in the background like musak all period, picked up volume and set the lunch trays trembling.
“Oh my God! I can’t believe it! I had so much on my mind that I totally forgot to tell you what Daddy’s giving me for a graduation present besides the new car.”
Technically, this statement was made for the benefit of Carla Santini’s disciples, Alma Vitters, Marcia Conroy and Tina Cherry. Carla, however, is exc
ruciatingly generous when it comes to sharing her incredible good fortune with lesser beings, so there was no one in the cafeteria who wasn’t under a headset who didn’t hear her.
“Oh, God…” groaned Ella. “Not more good news.”
I bit into a carrot stick. “Let’s hope he’s sending her to Mars. The first Princess on the Red Planet.”
Sadly, it wasn’t on a trip to Mars that Mr Santini was sending his only child. It was on a trip to the great continent of Europe.
“Stands to reason,” muttered Sam. “They don’t have any designer stores on Mars.”
“Europe!” enthused Alma. “I’ve always wanted to go to Europe. It’s so old.”
“Me, too,” chimed in Tina. “Continental men are supposed to be so much more romantic and sophisticated than American men.”
Over the years of being a disciple of the Great Santini, Marcia has perfected the envious but admiring sigh. “Oh my God, Carla… You are soo lucky!”
“Oh, I know I am…” It was pretty obvious from Carla’s tone that she didn’t think luck had anything to do with it. Without raising my head I could see the Santini curls swipe the air and those Bambi eyes glance over at me – as though by accident. “I mean, some people have to work all summer at a boring, meaningless job while I get to travel all over Europe practically free because Mommy and Daddy have so many connections.” [Cue: pause for really enormous smile touched very lightly with humility.] “It really doesn’t seem fair.”
It didn’t seem fair to me, either.
Though, of course, I pretended not to hear any of this. I know some people (like Karen Kapok and Mrs Baggoli) say that I exaggerate everything, but it’s no exaggeration when I say that Carla Santini has been my nemesis since I first arrived in the soporific suburbs of The Garden State (so called because most life forms in New Jersey are vegetal). Carla is to Dellwood what the Queen is to England, only Carla’s more attractive, dresses better and has more power than the Queen. For months after she got into Harvard the entire student body of Deadwood High had been bored to their bone marrow by Carla’s tales of what going to an Ivy League school meant (apparently half the rulers of the world went to Harvard, which doesn’t give us much hope for the future if you ask me) and what a great time she was going to have. That scintillating topic of conversation was finally shelved in favour of the car her parents were giving her as a graduation present (a silver, convertible Jag).