In a New York Minute

My acting teacher is a heroin addict. During a class exercise she pushes her breasts into my back, reaches around to rub my thighs, and asks me what I feel in my groin. Nothing, bitch, nothing at all.

I start classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York when I am seventeen, with more enthusiasm, more energy, and more desperation to prove myself than I now imagine a single human head can contain. I am also a little smug at school since at seventeen I'm the youngest, and there are people I take class with who are already really, really old -- as old as thirty -- and yet I actually have more practical experience than some of them.

I'm very showbizzy already, taking all of a New York minute to embrace the tinsel and glitter of my new life. I yammer on all the time about what is professional, like I would know, and talking about how much I want to be on a soap opera, which isn't an ambition the Academy considers to be particularly worthy.

The move to New York is one of the happiest events in my life so far. I relish the time alone, knowing that each choice I make, every step I take will define the next period of my life. I see myself as a character in a novel. (Any guesses which one? You've got to climb to the top of Mount Everest to reach the Valley of the Dolls...) These are the early, struggling years. I am the only person in my acting class with my own apartment in a new building with a doorman and a terrace. Mysterious family money helps me along. I say mysterious because I never know how much there is, how the mechanics of it work, or when I will run out - an event that happens far sooner than I anticipate or than anyone in my family has the presence of mind to tell me. I am turning out like my father and uncle, a chemist, happily making shit out of money.

I don't worry. I am a fabulous waiter. Plus I think often of how fun it might be to become a prostitute.

Mostly, though, my struggles at the Academy consume me. The grim details are for the next blog, but as my horror at the whole Jim Jones-ness of the place grows, I begin to feel more and more strongly that all the teachers and students hate me. I know I hate them. All except my Theater History teacher. Him, I sleep with. And I do make friends with one other student. She kills herself a few years later. But I digress....

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