How Did Margo Martindale get MY Career?

You may or may not know who Margo Martindale is but she has my career and I want it back. She’s off being in Academy Award winning movies (Million Dollar Baby), hanging out on TV sets with my soul mate (The Riches –Eddie Izzard) and winning Emmy Awards (for Homeland, I think). Now she’s going to have her own TV series. I hate her.

I don’t know her but I have a friend who went to acting school with her and says she was the pudgy girl among all the Kate Moss wanna-bes. They all scoffed and she went on to work more than all of them combined. The balls that took. Fish out of Hollywood water.

Even in High School I played the mothers. I wasn’t super fat or anything, I was always more “mature” looking because I had big boobies (and a little thicker waist, I admit it.) I wore a size 12 in a Twiggy world. When I turned 20 I turned down playing Gertrude in Hamlet because I wanted to be an ingenue for once. I did get a good role –Fran in Promises, Promises and a draconian diet prescribed by the director. So started 30 years of the craziest diet history. All rice diets, Master Cleanses, grapefruit, thin mints and nothing else.

I never, ever got thin enough –to anyone’s liking –and my self-loathing took on epic proportions. My review for Promises, Promises said I was “perfect for the role from the neck up”. Piece of shit journalist. He went on to say how much I looked like Shirley MacLaine in the movie and maybe that’s all he meant. Or maybe he meant I was a big tub of lard. I, of course, knew he meant the latter.

So was that what stopped me from fame and fortune? Did Margo just not care? I don’t know about her but my weight was just one more thing that kept me depressed and crazy. No other career –aside from modeling or ballet dancing –puts so much emphasis on  appearance. Especially at 20. And 30. And… I would tell myself that when I was older and the right age to be a character actress THEN I would go to Hollywood and be a STAR!

But my weight was/is just a symptom of my bigger issue – which was/is my mental health. If no other career wrecks  your metabolism quite like acting, it is equally true that no other career messes with a bi-polar quite like acting.

I was going to list my litany of acting successes here for you all to see that I had the “right stuff” but I realized I repeat those successes more for myself than anyone else. I keep trying to convince myself to “go for it’ by reminding myself that I was successful when I tried. And then I remember the failures –because every actor has been told No more than a pimply fellow at a 7^th grade dance. There weren’t that many. You know why? Because I quit acting and became a director. I got my MFA in directing. I was going to be the one saying No instead of hearing it. Control issues anyone?

The truth is that every NO plunged me into such despair and every YES threw me into a mania so that the chemical roller coaster in my mind was out of control. This was long before I knew about my own manic-depression, when my sister was still sleeping for three days straight and then staying up “cleaning” for another three. My mother once told me that of all our family I had the best mental health. OMG! Not a high bar. My niece once wrote me a letter telling me she admired me because I was so calm. Another very low bar since she was living with my sister and mother at the time. My Al-Anon friends got a big ol’ chuckle out of that one. They know me, you see. They know me.

I would constantly tell myself –give myself permission –to pursue acting when I had a “stable base”. When I wouldn’t experience all the extreme highs and lows. To me, that meant getting married, having someone who would love me whether I was the lead in a play or not. Several problems with that idea; I never dated anyone who hadn’t either seen me in a play first or met me in a play.  I once dated a theater professor -who should have known better –who saw me in As You Like It, pursued me and on the third date told me, sadly, that I wasn’t anything like Rosalind. No shit, Sherlock. It’s called ACTING you moron.

My first real boyfriend in high school didn’t show me any affection until seeing me star in the fall theater production. The night that The Dark at the Top of the Stairs opened, he kissed me. Being a star made me worthy of his affection. Otherwise I was just a slightly pudgy theater geek. An other.

What a lesson I learned from that. Want love? Be fabulous! Another actor friend of mine told me her new boyfriend told her she was “fabulous for 15 minutes”. That was me –scared shitless the boys would find out I was just a really insecure girl yearning –and I mean yearning –for love and acceptance. And when they did, my shiny fabulousness vanished –and so did they.

So here I am, at 60, still yearning –for both love and acceptance –but also for the guts to commit to my first love –acting. Is my mental health strong enough to take that roller-coaster ride? That ride that has actually killed a lot of people who were fragile and scared? 

I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.

Maybe when I’m 70.