Stirring the Pot

MY RECIPE FOR SUCCESS

Ingredients:

1 girl with a dream

0 financial resources

No time for bullshit

Lots of time for therapy

A heaping tablespoon of humor

2 cups of hardheadedness

Many, many disappointing setbacks

A pinch of acceptance of my place in the world

A dollop of flexibility

Directions:

Stir up ingredients and season for taste (learn to balance the sour with the sweet). Don’t overmix the batter (don’t overthink things; put one foot in front of the other). Simmer for life.

This’ll be hard to believe given that I am now best known for being unafraid to grab a microphone and work a crowd, but when I was younger I had a totally crippling fear of public speaking. I’m not only talking about a fear of having to give a speech to the whole school or stage fright the night of the school play. That shit’s
obvious
.

I was also paralyzed by something as simple as a request to read a paragraph out loud to a small class. If a teacher asked me to come to the board and show the class how to do a math problem? Hyperventilation time. Give an oral report on my science project? I’d become totally sick to my stomach and have to run to the bathroom.

To avoid getting to the puking stage, I got creative with my excuses. I conveniently “lost my glasses” a lot (even though I didn’t wear any back then). I was pretty convincing with a sudden bad cough or the development of a splitting headache. One time I went so far as to quickly crack a red pen so that I could let the ink dribble down my leg. I don’t know if the teacher thought my leg was bleeding or that I’d had an embarrassing female accident (as you’ll see on
this page
, I later became very prone to embarrassing female accidents!), but
that
was an instant pass to the nurse’s office. I couldn’t really use it more than once, though. Too bad.

By the time I got to college, I didn’t think it was too much to hope that oral reports and front-of-class participation would be things of my past. I wanted to be a special-education major (little did I know that my son Evan’s needs would give me a front-row seat in that world a decade later) and didn’t see how my fear of public speaking would cause a problem. I saw myself teaching and playing with kids using blocks and games and crayons, not cue cards.

But wouldn’t you know it … Public Speaking 101 was a requirement for my chosen major. What the fuck? There was no way around it. I knew I had to bite the bullet or I would have to give up on the thing that really interested me. I was determined. For the moment, anyway.

As I walked to class the first day, I began to shake just thinking about the
idea
of it. I can still see the big auditorium classroom now—stadium seating sloping down to a classic college lectern and about fifty shaggy students settling in to fall asleep. After introducing himself and giving an overview of the curriculum (all of which sounded terrifying and totally effing pointless to me), the professor announced that he wanted all the students to stand and briefly introduce themselves. Before even the first student had stood to tell us her name and where she was from, I had grabbed my backpack and bolted from the room.

I ran straight to the freshman guidance office and busted through the door in hysterics. I was crying so hard the advisor thought I had been attacked, and she jumped up from her chair to console me. I tried to relay the problem—my fear, the goddamned public speaking requirement—but wasn’t really making much sense. When I finally managed to spit it all out, she was sympathetic to a point but also explained with a little pat on my back that most incoming freshmen were nervous about speaking in public. My response? I
really
spit it out—I put my head between my knees and vomited on the floor. Not my proudest moment. I think the counselor got the picture that my case was a little more extreme than average.

We cleaned up the puke. She calmed me down. And then we got down to business. She said she would help me find a major that didn’t have a public speaking requirement. Nursing looked promising, since it was a career that would still allow me to nurture people and help people heal, and I could potentially specialize in pediatrics; I might be able to work with kids after all. I’d watched a lot of
General Hospital
and didn’t think it looked so hard. Yes, I know now that was a ridiculously insane thought, and I have convinced myself all these years later that I didn’t say it out loud. If I did, the counselor was cool enough to let it slide. What I
do remember is that nursing didn’t require me to stand up and risk shitting my pants in public. That did it for me.

I was relieved that I’d found something else that I could imagine myself doing and that wouldn’t make me confront this ridiculous fear, but I also remember feeling sad and disappointed in myself because I knew that I was going to let a stupid fear keep me from a goal and a dream (special ed). A little voice in my head shamed and berated me. Not an evil-spirit mean little voice, but a wise-conscience kind of voice that told me,
You can’t hide from your fear. It will find you wherever you go
.

For the most part, though, I managed to shake off the soul ache and flick the little guy off my shoulder. I kept focused on trying to pay for and not flunk out of college. For a while there I had the idea to finance my courses by selling weed. I was my own best customer, though, and spent most of my time stoned to the bone. Financially
that
wasn’t working out, and educationally it wasn’t so stellar, either. You try focusing on the intricacies of chemistry or biology after a wake-and-bake bender.

Not yet a nurse, and no closer to staring down my public speaking phobia, I was forced to drop out of college after my second year—no more money, no
more prospects—and head back home to live with my parents. Another not-my-proudest-moment moment.

What followed were many weeks of staring at the ceiling in my old bedroom. And some sobbing. And some serious angsting about what I would do with the rest of my life. I listened to a lot of music. I ate a lot of crap food. I smoked some more weed. I sobbed some more.

And then something happened that in a movie would be depicted as the skies parting, sun shining straight down into my room, and angels singing. The camera would swing to my record collection, and out of the pile I would pull the
Grease
album with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John looking up at me with their crazy hairdos and cheesy smiles. Inspiration had struck!

I was seven years old when I first saw
Grease
, and like so many girls at the time, I declared to my mom that I was going to go to Hollywood one day and be a star like Olivia. Of course, at seven my phobia about public speaking and performance hadn’t yet taken hold—maybe my teenage hormones helped that blossom? At seven nothing stood in my way. (Just so you know, by the time I dropped out of college, I had stopped dancing around my room singing
Grease
songs into my hairbrush/microphone, but I still knew all the lyrics … and I still do.)

By the time I was wallowing at home and trying to figure out a new career path for myself, I was older and a little wiser and knew that making it in Hollywood would be no easy road. I’d need some connections, some auditions, some luck. Oh, and some talent. And I knew I’d need to conquer my fear of public speaking. I simply had to push through and find a way to cope with my nerves.

Whether it was Olivia’s determined transformation from shy wallflower to badass leather-clad vixen (in
Grease
, that is) or the flash I had of myself drinking my sorrows away and telling anyone who would listen what I could have done with my life if only I’d had the chance (known around my house as “Irish therapy”), I was inspired to get off my ass and give acting a go.

So I opened the Yellow Pages. (For those of you who weren’t around when these were in use, this is a big, yellow printed reference book with phone numbers and addresses listed alphabetically by category. Crazy, huh?) I called the Better Business Bureau and got a list of talent agencies both in my hometown, Chicago, and in Los Angeles. And then I started making calls. I begged. I pleaded. I was persistent (aka hardheaded). And as miracles or destiny would have it, I soon found myself on my way to L.A. to audition for producers.