The Easter Bunny Gets Real

Who knew? My mother is as addicted to Magical Thinking as I am. She reassures me that I will find love. That I will find myself. Even if I have to retrace my steps 3,000 miles to do it.

Enough is enough. I have to settle down with someone. Three years in Los Angeles go by quickly. My acting career is non-existent, though I do have a fabulous run as the Easter Bunny in a kiddie show. I don't take chances on anything that matters to me. But I'm still in show business since my day-job at a television and film promotional fulfillment company has turned into something resembling a grown-up career. I become a twenty-two year-old account executive, overseeing the distribution of press kits, posters, t-shirts, and various other ad specialty paraphernalia to television stations and video stores. It is better than shoveling elephant shit. If you don't get the reference, go ask someone else in The Showbiz to explain it to you.

I work myself into the ground at my new company, loving the feeling of totally losing myself, of reaching utter exhaustion, of living a kind of martyrdom. When you put in sixty, seventy hours a week, working harder than everyone else, no one can question you about anything you do. I don't want to be questioned. I just want to be right. In control. I am very bossy and some of the people I work with hate me. Maybe "hate" is too strong. They just can't fathom why it all matters so damned much to me, why it is life or death if a press kit goes out on time.

I sleep with my boss a few times, which appeals to my sense of drama since he is in a long-term relationship. I develop deep, if evanescent, crushes; on a slightly dimwitted blonde who works there (who poses nude for an art book and shows me the pictures), on a client at Paramount to whom I send flowers at the company's expense, on a gorgeous television production designer. Nothing comes of any of it.

I work all the time. When I have a free weekend I sit at the beach all day reading and eating hamburgers. A job offer in press and promotion from one of our clients shakes me up. Is this supposed to be my future? Have I spent my whole life dreaming I will live the Jacqueline Susann ideal only to end up writing promotional copy for syndicated television? Okay, so maybe I have needed some stability after my friend Pam's suicide. Maybe the job thing is a good choice. Temporarily. My mother almost kills me when I quit. She has been out to stay for a couple of and has met everyone at work. She sees how much they value me and knows how much I need that. The way she connects those dots touches me. She is a practical lady who cares about things like job security, but when she talks about my job as mattering to me emotionally, as being something important that fulfills a deep need, it dawns on me that she actually understands me better than I imagine. I take a step forward with her and let my hair down and tell her how she is right, but that I have dreams I am afraid of losing, that without those dreams I'm not sure if I actually exist. How I feel like a failure.

She gives me her blessing even though I get the sense that she thinks I am doing the wrong thing. We cry a lot together. Not over the job thing, not really, though that is the pretext. I think we both know that we have broken through to real connection at last. All it took was me admitting how scared I am. Practically all the time. I tell her another truth. Part of why I have quit my job is that I have come to have an overpowering belief that I will find love, not in Los Angeles, but back in New York.

My pragmatic mother grows even more supportive. I learn that she believes in psychic impressions too. She believes in magic. Like me.