You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (33 page)

Looping dialogue.
This is something that happens in post-production. If the sound on your line is not clear, maybe someone talked over you or you mumbled a word, you need to loop it. This involves
going into a little booth, putting on headphones and saying your lines in time with yourself on screen. It’s a hard thing to do, because you need to get the timing right to a millisecond while doing some legitimate acting. There were three beeps and when the fourth beep would be, that’s when you start talking. Thanks to my early days with
The Care Bears
, I could rock that.

How do these things help me in the rest of the world? They don’t. Not even a little bit. Not anywhere.

There was one last reason that working at a real job felt terrifying and it was the one that was hardest to admit to. My exit from the film industry would be final and official the second I took another paying job. Cue the exit music. Fade to black. Roll credits.

There was a radio station in my new hometown that played some great music. It was the stuff that was familiar to me, a far cry from the thing called “bluegrass” that seemed to permeate this part of the country. Incubus, No Doubt, and U2 were all a part of a soundtrack that carried over from L.A. Those songs had accompanied me on my long car trips to horrible auditions in horrible traffic. Although they were not great memories, there was something in the continuum that was comforting.

Radio seemed kind of connected to the entertainment industry, so perhaps someone could be convinced that I was qualified. I called the radio station and spoke with the “Drive Time” guy. I expressed my interest in learning about radio and asked if he could use a volunteer. He seemed legitimately confused by the question; I wanted to work for free? He told me to come in the next day to meet with him.

I tried to dress like a professional for my meeting, but a professional what, I wasn’t sure. Riffling through my wardrobe, I tried to emulate the mannequins in the Banana Republic window, as it seemed like they all
worked in offices. As I walked into the station building, it became clear that I had totally overdressed. Everyone was in faded jeans and promotional t-shirts with car dealership logos all over the back. My shiny black dress pants and button-up blouse made me look like I intended to audit them.

Cameron was in his late twenties and was cool the way DJs should be. His office had stereotypical DJ décor: it was overcrowded with boxes of CDs and promotional stuff intended to be given away after it had been thoroughly played with and enjoyed. On the wall was an award he had won, something about having “good ears” and being able to predict the popularity of songs.

I explained my desire to learn about radio and told him that I was happy to help out, in exchange for learning the ropes. I quickly ran through my past in the film industry, just to explain my lack of education or a resume and to justify that I could be a hard worker. He asked some questions about the film specifics and when he heard the answers he pointed at my face.

“Oh my God. You’re that girl!”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I don’t know why I am pointing at your face.”

“Everyone reacts differently.”

“Is it weird to be pointed at?”

“Well, you’ve been pointing for such a long time, that it’s starting to become kind of strange.”

“I’ll put my finger down now.”

“Thanks.”

With all that pointing, I worried that my point had gotten lost, so I reiterated my interest in learning about production.

“Do you want to be on-air?” he asked.

“Oh, no. Not on-air, I don’t do live. I just want to learn production. The technical stuff. Like…you know…the buttons.”

“Well, I don’t need a volunteer but I will put you on the payroll. We
will start you off with production and then we’ll talk about getting you on-air. I really need someone on-air.”

“I don’t want to be on-air. But the production stuff sounds good.”

It seemed that we had some sort of deal, but I left not really knowing what I had agreed to.

I was cooking dinner when Jeremy got home from school that night. He started setting the table and using a gentle tone that would be appropriate if you were speaking to someone who was walking through a minefield and is prone to seizures.

“Do you want to tell me about your meeting with Cameron?”

I moved ineptly around my new kitchen, salting the water for pasta. “It went okay. Cameron is really nice and the offices are cool. The studio has a giant sound mixing board and there are a million CDs just lying around everywhere.”

“That sounds interesting. How did you guys leave it?” He got the plates down from the cupboard.

“Well, he said that he would put me on the payroll.”

“Wow. That’s great! How do you feel?”

At that point that he must have noticed the tears gathering in my eyes because he started to back-peddle.

“I mean, it’s not great unless you think it’s great.”

“I don’t know what to think,” I took a breath and displayed my shame. “I don’t know what ‘on the payroll’ means.” I laid my head on the cutting board and burst into humiliated tears.

He put the plates down and picked the chopped garlic out of my hair. “It means you are going to get paid to do a job-job, babe. It means you did well.”

Jeremy showed incredible patience and zero eye rolling as he gathered up his mess of a girlfriend into his arms and kept her there for a long while.

Somehow, I ended up on a payroll. The job paid about $150 a week and I’d never felt richer. That was about what I earned per hour for my
old gig but that didn’t matter. We went out to dinner and celebrated my first real job and spent three days of my pay.

Finally, there was something to fill my days and provide me with a purpose. On my first day of work I learned how to “rip” shows. Basically, I downloaded CDs of syndicated programs, like
Rick Dees Weekly Top 40
, into the computer so that our station could play them. It required putting a CD into a big machine, tapping a few keys, and then I’d read J.D. Salinger for twenty minutes until it was done. Next, I’d go into the program and insert the local commercials for tanning salons and mattress sales in to the syndicated material. I parked in the same place every day. I carried the same travel mug filled with English Breakfast tea. I learned how to fill out a timesheet so I could be paid my $8 an hour. It was official and ordinary and wonderful.

After a week of ripping shows and Salinger’s entire literary catalogue, I was ready to learn something new. I started bugging Cameron to teach me how to work the mixing board with all the sliding bars on it. He still wanted me to be on-air with him, as his drive-time partner. I just wanted to play with the buttons.

With the latest Ryan Seacrest countdown loaded into the computer, I went into the recording studio and sat across the desk from Cameron to watch him work. It was exhilarating to listen to him, to see someone so perfectly in his element. He had been doing radio for years and he had a wonderful rhythm and ease. The way he seamlessly hit the post was magical; he stopped talking the moment before the lyrics started.

When Jack Johnson and his strumming ukulele started to fade out, Cameron turned up the volume on his microphone and promoted a local car show that was coming to town the next weekend. He followed that up with,

“I am also happy to announce that we have a new afternoon DJ here at Mix 107.5, let me introduce you to Lisa.”

I saw a button on the mic in front of me glow red. It was on. I was on. My eyes got big and my throat closed. It occurred to me that if I just
yelled, “Oh, fuck no,” Cameron would be forced to turn off the mic and save his listeners from a flurry of filth, but I decided that is not what one does in a real, eight-dollars-per-hour job.

“Hello?” I croaked in to the glowing monster before me. It sounded like I was answering a phone. A phone that had a serial killer on the other end of it.

With that, Cameron made me a DJ. With a combination of grooming and manipulation, he got me to agree to being on the show every afternoon with him as his drive-time co-host. Slowly and with great uncertainty I became more DJ-ish. I chose my DJ name, Lisa Bailey, paying homage to that hot nerd, Bailey Quarters from
WKRP in Cincinnati
, a show I watched religiously with my dad when I was a kid. The anonymity of radio allowed for a little more bravery. We attempted witty banter and discussed current events. I ventured into old territory and did a voice-over commercial for a local carpet company. The headphones fit better than when I did
The Care Bears
gig.

To manage my live-performance nerves, I convinced myself that no one was listening, which was not a difficult thing to believe in our small town. Our low audience numbers were confirmed by our contests and giveaways. We would announce that a car wash gift certificate or free lunch at Red Robin would be given to the 7th caller, and inevitably the one and only caller would receive the prize. One time, not a single person called in response to a trivia contest and out of fear of total embarrassment, I called a friend, gave him the number to call back with instructions to say “Harrison Ford.” For his trouble he received a Trivial Pursuit 20th Anniversary Edition board game.

Occasionally, we went out into the community to try to drum up more listeners by giving away free stuff. We did “remotes,” where we would set up a tent plastered with our logo at cell phone stores, hot tub sales, and charity 5Ks. I wore my Mix 107.5 baseball cap pulled down low over my eyes and distracted passers-by with free t-shirts and magnets so that no one even noticed my film face. I drove the radio station
Jeep, wrapped in the colorful logo, and took pleasure in knowing that if people were staring at me, it was for completely different reasons. They wanted free CDs, not autographs. I was Lisa Bailey now.

That morning when I walked into work, I knew things would be different. The US had invaded Iraq and the radio station went “wall to wall,” meaning we didn’t play music or do our regular silly banter, we just streamed the latest information from various news sources. I sat on the floor under a poster of Pink and listened to the first days of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The television in the studio displayed MSNBC on mute and showed endless lines of deployed men and women, obeying orders and bravely sacrificing everything. Leaving their families and their lives and their dogs. I suddenly felt ashamed for ever thinking I had ever given up anything. Our previous radio fodder critiquing
American Idol
contestants felt both pathetically trite and adorably quaint. I stacked and alphabetized CD cases, hoping that the war would be over as quickly as they were predicting.

Outside of the radio station, Jeremy and I had managed to collect a tight circle of friends who had never stepped foot on a film set and didn’t care about the new Screen Actors Guild guidelines for insurance coverage. Friends who came over to play board games and called to ask me if a clove of garlic meant just one of the little segments or the whole big thing. I even met some actual Republicans. My mediocre famousness was fading blissfully into the background, and when people asked what I did, I said with mock confidence, “I’m a DJ at Mix 107.5. Would you like a magnet?”

Marriage had always seemed so contrived. It felt like government bureaucracy and a way for the wedding industry to rake in bazillions of dollars from brides who care more about the dress than the marriage. It was about Cuisinarts and getting a bigger diamond than your friend did, and I wanted no part of it.

Until one day I did. I woke up, looked at the man to my left and confessed that I wanted to be his wife. I wanted him to know he was different. I wanted to be different. He was the best person in the world for me and that needed to be officially announced in front of people that I loved. Turns out most people call that a wedding. Jeremy had been ready for this commitment for a while and had patiently waited for me to clue in.

We invited twenty of our favorite people to stay with us in a villa in Italy for a week, and watch us get married in the garden on a Thursday afternoon. In a surprising Hollywood ending, after six years of separation, my parents reconciled just before the wedding. Suddenly, they were fused back together, that single parental unit I had known in my childhood, making me wonder if any of it—their separation, my film career, anything in my past—had ever really happened at all. All I knew for sure was this moment in front of me.