Fast Forward - Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between) (2016)

Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between) (2016)

Fast Forward

Some of the most exciting things that happened in my life took place before I turned six years old. I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, which is awesome right there, but three weeks later, before I even had time to work on my tan, we moved to Japan. JAPAN. The home of my most favorite food ever: mashed peas. Well, that was probably my favorite food back then; what a waste, since I could have been eating spicy tuna rolls with extra wasabi. Damn you, Baby Lauren, and your infantile palate! Well, to be fair, you were an infant. Sorry I yelled.

In Tokyo, we lived with my grandmother for a while, and I had a Japanese nanny, or uba—which, incidentally, translates to “milk mother,” something I just found out by looking it up. (Hold, please, while I call my therapist.) Her name was Sato-san, and I loved her, and as a result, my first word was in Japanese. It was o-heso. You might think that’s Japanese for “mommy” or “daddy,” but no, o-heso is Japanese for “belly button,” which I think already proves I am a very unusual, deep, and contemplative person and there’s really nothing left to say, thank you for buying this book, the end.

Wait, a few more things. My mother, the daughter of missionaries, had grown up in Japan and spoke fluent Japanese. She was also incredibly smart and beautiful, a combination that led to this:

That’s my grandmother holding me while we watch my mother, who is on television! Back when there were just three channels in America, and maybe even fewer in Tokyo, and an air of mystery surrounding the whole thing—not like today, when the statistical probability of not at some point stumbling onto your own reality show is inconceivably low. Television had only recently been invented then, and there she was actually on it, and I was so little I was probably just thinking about mashed peas again. Or, more likely, my favorite subject: belly buttons.

In related news, apparently on some GikiWoogle-type page of mine, I am quoted as saying, “Belly buttons are important.” Which, while obviously sort of true, medically speaking, taking into account the life-giving properties of the umbilical cord, was also clearly a joke. Yet I can’t tell you how many times during an interview a journalist gets that somber I’m-going-in-for-the-kill look I love so much and asks me, with knitted-brow faux sincerity: “Do you really think belly buttons are important?” Let me clear the air once and for all: um, no, I do not. Although this book isn’t very long yet and I’ve already talked about belly buttons quite a bit. Damn you, tabloid journalists! You wise Truth Uncoverers! Again, sorry—the yelling must stop.

So, anyway, there she was, my mother, on the largest television available at the time, which was roughly the size of a Rubik’s cube. Also, check out her dope sixties Priscilla Presley look! Her ability to speak the language as a non-native was so unusual at the time that she was asked to appear on a Japanese daytime talk show.

My parents weren’t together very long. They hadn’t known each other well when they decided to get married, and then they had me right away, when they were both just twenty-two years old, and—well, that about sums it up. They were very, very young. At the time, my mom was also trying to pursue a career as a singer, and it was decided I should stay with my dad. They parted as friends, and my father made the obvious next choice, something we’d all probably do in this situation: he moved us to the Virgin Islands, where we lived on a houseboat. I slept in a bunk-bed-type thing that was also the kitchen. I was picked up for nursery school by the bus, which was actually a motorboat. We moved there because…You know what? I don’t remember exactly. Let’s call my dad and ask him. He probably won’t pick up because he’s on the East Coast, and it’s a Saturday in the springtime, so unless it’s pouring down rain, he’s out playing golf. But I’ll give you a visual just in case, so you too can play Call My Dad at home!

I know, isn’t it a shame we look nothing alike? Okay, let’s see if he’s home.

Ring, ring, ring, ring.

I told you. He’s probably not—

DAD: Hello?

ME: Oh, hi! I didn’t think you’d be home.

DAD: It’s raining here.

ME: Well, then, that explains it. Hey, remind me—why did we live on a houseboat that time?

DAD: Who is this?

ME: You have other children you lived on a houseboat with?

DAD: No, I have other children who call me more.

ME: Dad, please. I call you all the time. So this is for the book, and—

DAD: Is this going to be another befuddled father character, like in your last book?

ME: Dad, I wouldn’t call that character befuddled in general. He’s just a little befuddled by technology.

DAD: Wait—what did you say? I couldn’t hear you. I just hit one of these dumb phone buttons wrong.

ME: Um, yeah. I was just saying that the father character in my first novel—the New York Times bestseller Someday, Someday, Maybe, published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, and now available in paperback—is not exactly befuddled, and anyway, he’s only a little bit you.

DAD: Why are you talking like that?

ME: Like what? I was just thinking about how Christmas is right around the corner, but no matter how you choose to celebrate the holidays, books in general make great gifts!

DAD: Like that. Like you’re selling things to an audience. Are you on Ellen right now?

ME: Dad, I wouldn’t be calling you from the set of Ellen.

DAD: Oh, oh, I’m fancy, I live in Hollywood, where people aren’t allowed to call their fathers from the set of the Ellen show.

ME: Dad, please. Why did we live on the houseboat again?

DAD: Well, I was working for that congressman, and the hours were long, and I’d drop you off in the morning and not see you until after 6:00 p.m., and I felt bad about that. I wasn’t sure I was on the right career path anyway. Also, I was sort of seeing this girl—you remember the one who owned the horse? Well, she lived there off and on, and I thought I’d go there too, and write, and…

I’m going to interrupt my father here (well, actually, he’s still talking, so shhh—don’t tell him). But I have to explain to you that, as a kid, I thought my father never dated anyone at all until he met and married my stepmother. It wasn’t until years later that I figured out the young ladies who sometimes came around may have been a wee bit more than the “cat sitter,” that “nice woman I play tennis with,” and the “girl who owned the horse.” And I don’t blame them. I mean, who wouldn’t want to “cat-sit” for this guy?

By the way, can we talk about the unnecessary thickness of children’s belts of the 1970s? I mean look at the— Oops, my dad’s still on the phone!

DAD: …and anyway, she knew these people at the marina in St. Thomas.

ME: So did we, like, sail around the island and stuff?

DAD: Oh, no. The engine didn’t work on the boat.

ME: The engine didn’t…? We lived on a giant floating bathtub that went nowhere?

DAD: It was a strange place, I’ll admit, that marina—but friendly. Very bohemian. Everybody there was sort of dropping out from society, which we were too, in a way—for weeks after we’d left D.C., I’m pretty sure my mother still thought I worked on Capitol Hill. But I got to spend more time with you, which was the goal. It was beautiful there. We drove around a lot and went to the beach. It probably seems strange to you now, but it was a 1970s thing to do, I guess. And we had fun.

(A pause as we both reminisce.)

ME: You did a lot for me, Dad. I love you.

DAD: I love you too, kid.

(Another pause.)

DAD: Who is this again?

When I was about five years old, we moved to Southampton, New York, presumably to live in a house you couldn’t dive off of, and I started kindergarten. One day, during my first few weeks of school, the teacher left the room (leaving youngsters alone with open jars of paste was also very 1970s), and when she came back, she found me reading a book to the class. At first she thought maybe I’d memorized it from having it read to me at home, but after I wowed them with a cold read of another one—take that, Green Eggs and Ham!—they had to admit I could actually read. My father had read to me every night for as long as I could remember, and at some point, I guess, I just sort of got it. But this confused the teacher and the school, because I’d unintentionally undermined their entire plan for the year. If I wasn’t in kindergarten to be taught to read, could they really justify sharing and finger painting as a comprehensive year-long curriculum? If not, what were they supposed to do with me?

I was sent to the office of a groovy guy named Mike. I don’t know what Mike’s actual job at the school was, but I remember sitting in his office drawing pictures of my feelings or whatever (the seventies!), while he leaned back in his chair with his feet up on the desk, which is how I knew he was groovy in the first place. This went on for days. Mike kept asking me if I was bored in kindergarten. Not really, Mike—have you seen the awesome books they have in there? And that’s about all I remember. But by the end of the week, I had apparently convinced Mike that making chains out of construction paper for an entire year would be beneath me intellectually, and he sent me on to first grade.

During my first day in the new class, the teacher held a mock election and asked each student to come up and mark on the blackboard whom they’d vote for in the upcoming presidential election: McGovern or Nixon (the seventies!). McGovern won by a landslide (not in real life but, weirdly, in this class), and I was one of very few kids who voted for Nixon. This gave me an uneasy feeling. Even though I had no idea who either of the candidates was, or even what the word “candidate” meant, I knew that in not being part of the majority, I’d somehow made the wrong choice. Also, how could the entire room not vote for a guy named Nixon, because seriously, how cool was it to have the letter x in your name? That this distinguishing feature didn’t similarly blow everyone else’s mind the way it did mine was my first indication that I was in over my head.

Initially, skipping a grade seemed like an accomplishment of some sort, but what I remember most was how totally baffled and uncomfortable I felt, especially for the first few weeks. I’d never really had trouble fitting in before, and now, instead of feeling special or gifted, I just felt awkward and out of place. Suddenly this thing that had made me stand out and had impressed some people now made me feel like an oddball.

But skipping a grade also gave me the sense, throughout my entire childhood, that I’d been given an “extra” year. It floated around in my head like a lucky coin, something I wanted to hold on to as long as I could, until the day I really needed to use it. I don’t know why exactly, but somehow I got the idea that life was just a massive competition to get to some sort of finish line, like one long extended season of The Amazing Race. In skipping a grade, I’d been given the ultimate Fast Forward. This would ensure I’d be able to skip over whatever the life equivalent is of the shemozzle race in New Zealand, beating out even the most awesome teams like the Twinnies or the Afghanimals, then arrive first and be met by an adorable gnome, an oversized cardboard check for a million dollars from Phil, and a trip from Travelocity.

There were a few years in there where I mostly forgot about the whole skipping-a-grade thing. In elementary and middle school I spent time riding horses every weekend, sometimes working in a barn after school, and having birthday slumber parties during which we’d sneak out in the middle of the night to go pajama streaking. (We’re running! Around the block! In our pajamas! The excitement!) I also enjoyed such sophisticated pastimes as toilet-papering people’s houses (this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in my group of friends—in fact, it was a good sign if people cared enough to TP your house; I remember praying I’d be TP’d more), acting out elaborate soap operas involving my troll dolls, making horse blankets for my thirty-seven Breyer horses, and recording Judy Garland movies off the television with my red plastic Radio Shack tape recorder. I’d stay up late, listening to my cassette tapes over and over, which is why I’m happy to announce I can still perform “The Trolley Song” for you right now!

With my high starched collar,

And my high-top shoes,

And my hair piled high upon—

What’s that? Oh, okay, you’re probably right, let’s do it later.

Anyway, my dad met my stepmother around this time, and they got married, and we moved farther out into the suburbs of Virginia, partly so I’d be closer to the barn where I rode, which was ironic since it wouldn’t be long before I’d replace all the time I’d been spending there with all the time I’d spend doing school plays.

Skipping a grade came up again during my sophomore year of high school, when everyone but me started getting their driver’s license. I wanted off the school bus badly, and not being able to drive until later than everyone else seemed an unfair penalty for being able to read a little bit before them.

The drinking age in Virginia was twenty-one, but just over the bridge in D.C. it was only eighteen, and we heard that fake IDs worked there with surprising regularity. Our desire to get into the bars in Georgetown was due mainly to a wish to be able to dance for hours with the music turned up to volumes that weren’t allowed in our suburban basements. This was during a time in high school when dancing was in fashion. There came a day when dancing suddenly went away, when it simply wasn’t cool anymore. But during that time it was mysteriously deemed okay, and I remember all of us happily jumping around like freaks for any reason at all. Michael Jackson moonwalked on TV, and no one had seen or heard anything like him. With the top of her convertible VW Rabbit down, Virginia Rowan and I yelled along to Wham! and Morrisey and a new singer named Madonna. Bruce Springsteen was everything then. My friend Kathryn Donnelly would regularly get up on a table and sing every word of “Born to Run,” using a broom handle as her microphone. Musically, it was a great time to be a teenager.

I wasn’t interested in drinking at the time, but some of the other girls were, and everyone was petrified of getting pulled over. So that’s how I, at fifteen and without a license, was chosen to be the regular designated driver of Joyce Antonio’s father’s Mercedes. This made perfect sense to me as fair payment for having to suffer through the injustice of being a year younger than everyone else. My friends who wanted to drink were covered. Everybody won!

AHAHAHAHA, what a TERRIBLE idea this was. Literally the worst example of “learning by doing” ever. But I remember all of us thinking it was a really wise and grown-up choice, and feeling very proud of ourselves for figuring out this genius way to solve our need-to-dance-while-drinking-illegally problem. Because really, aren’t laws actually just pesky suggestions? Who needs them? Fifteen-year-olds know everything! The good news was that we’d taken the “Don’t Drink and Drive” campaign seriously. The bad news was that the “Don’t Get on the Road If You Aren’t a Licensed Driver” campaign just didn’t have as catchy a slogan. In fact, driving without a license was such a dumb idea, I doubt it had even occurred to anyone to start an ad campaign about how dumb it was.

Miraculously, we all lived. And eventually I got my license. During the driving part of the test, I worried that my ability to parallel-park on the first try would raise eyebrows, and the instructor would turn to me and say, “I have a suspicion you know how to do this because of all the time you spent sneaking into Winston’s with a fake ID so you could dance all night to ‘PYT.’ ” Lucky for me, he didn’t.

Throughout all of this, my free year was still on my mind, and I was so intent on saving it for the “right” time that I missed an opportunity where it actually might have been helpful. I spent my freshman year in the undergraduate acting program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. It is and was a wonderful program, and I had some great teachers, but at just seventeen years old, I felt lost, and doing things like sitting in a chair for hours attempting to summon feelings of “cold” and “hot” wasn’t what I’d envisioned college to be. I visited friends at other, more academic programs, and worried I was missing out. So at the end of the year, I transferred to Barnard College to be an English major.

Not surprisingly, my Temperatures class, among others, didn’t have much value at my new school, and almost none of my credits transferred. This would have been a wonderful time to start over as a freshman, but I wasn’t ready to let go of my lucky penny just yet! So in order to graduate on time, I had to take a full academic load every semester. To that, I added plays and musicals, and the a cappella group the Metrotones, which toured other colleges most weekends. I was completely overwhelmed and behind on my studies for three years straight. Barnard College has been very good to me, and I love going back to speak there or just to visit, but I’m sure they’ve (rightly) buried my transcript somewhere far below the 1 train at 116th Street and Broadway.

The year after I graduated from college ended up being the moment when I finally plunked my lucky penny down on the table. Most people would just call this “the year after I graduated from college,” but to me, it became the withdrawal on the time I’d put in the bank in my head.

My best friends from school all either had gone abroad, had gotten jobs somewhere besides New York, or had a year of school left. So without any of my buddies to share a place with, I lived in a tiny room in an apartment that faced an airshaft. Somehow, given my pretty limited and lackluster wardrobe, I was hired at a clothing store where I worked during the day. At night I got a job as a cocktail waitress. My days usually started before 8:00 a.m. and I’d get home after 2:00 a.m., dead on my feet but facing the same hours the next day. Even so, I didn’t earn enough money to have much to live on after I paid my rent.

Also, I realized that while I’d spent almost my entire time in school and in the summers being involved in some sort of performing arts, I was now living a life without any of them. Even when I was broke back in college, I was acting or singing in a million productions, and could always find a way to see plays and musicals too: volunteer as an usher, maybe, or get discounted tickets through the student store. Now, though, I had neither the time nor the money to see anything, let alone be in anything. Worried I’d get rusty, I had to resort to standing in the center of my living room/kitchen/bedroom facing the airshaft at three in the morning practicing scales.

Which reminds me—

Iiiiiiiii went to lose a jolly

Hour on the trolley

And lost my heart ins—

Really? You still don’t want to hear it? Oh, you’re worried about the neighbors in my New York apartment building back then? Hmmm. I never met them, but from what I remember, the people upstairs sounded like they were running a cat hotel while training for Riverdance. But okay, let’s wait.

The months ticked by, and I became more and more worried. It was one thing to feel the extra year slipping away, but something worse had begun to occur to me. What if one year turned into two, and two turned into “Poor Aunt Melba can’t come for Christmas this year, Billy, she’s working a double shift again”? I’m not sure how my name got changed to Melba in this negative fantasy, but the way things were heading then, anything could happen!

I felt trapped. And I felt dumb. I obviously hadn’t used my lucky penny at the right time, and now I had no edge, nothing that separated me from any other struggling sap in the city. What was I going to do? Drop everything and move to an engineless houseboat in a harbor in St. Thomas? This wasn’t “go find yourself” 1972 anymore! It was 1989, and the belts were way thinner!

At a loss, I signed up to participate in what was called the URTAs, a yearly audition held in New York by a consortium of graduate programs in the arts. Since these schools were located all over the country, they sent representatives to New York to recruit actors once a year. As my potential new life plan, this made no sense. I was still heavily in debt from undergrad, so paying for graduate school wasn’t an option at all. Plus, moving anywhere else seemed counterintuitive. I’d dreamed my whole life of making it in New York City, and I’d made it! Well, I resided there, at least. Now I was going to, what—move to Denver? It seemed I was getting further away from my dream, not closer to it. But there was only a month left on my apartment lease, and I had to make some decisions. Would I stay or would I go?

To be at the audition, I had to take time off from work I couldn’t afford. I was asked to prepare a classical monologue, a contemporary monologue, and a song. I spent any free hours I had at the Lincoln Center performing arts library, listening to cast albums and reading plays. I had no coach or teacher or really anyone to try my material out on. In the end, I blindly chose an odd assortment: Linda from Savage in Limbo by John Patrick Shanley, Rosalind from As You Like It, and “Somewhere That’s Green” from Little Shop of Horrors. I had nowhere to rehearse, no time to prepare. I’d go to sleep after twelve hours on my feet just reciting the lines in my head. The audition was held in a slightly spooky old theater in Times Square. I’d hardly even done the pieces out loud before. The stage was massive—I’d never performed in a space so huge—and my voice sounded thin. The audience was unresponsive.

But somehow I got in.

I was actually accepted to a few places, but at Southern Methodist University I was offered something I didn’t even know existed: a full scholarship to their Meadows School for the Arts. I mean, who in their right mind would offer to pay for actors to become actors? Bob Hope, that’s who! There’s a whole theater there named after him, and in general it’s a very wealthy school. But I’d never dreamed of such a miraculous thing. I felt relieved to have a new path, and vindicated to still be on track. I wasn’t ahead, but at least I was normal! Going to graduate school at normal-people times!

Except that when I got there, I realized that there was no normal. There were students from all over the place, all of them different ages and at various stages of their lives and careers. This was shocking to me. Didn’t they know the clock was ticking? Weren’t they worried about getting the first tuk-tuk in Bangkok?

Apparently they were not.

I also discovered that being away from New York at a more traditionally collegiate school had its merits and its comforts. I lived in a sprawling apartment complex with new wall-to-wall carpeting and a pool. I got to focus on being a performer without having to worry about my academics or the basics of surviving in the city—something I didn’t have that first year at NYU. I had an incredible acting teacher, Cecil O’Neal. I made great friends. We laughed a lot, loved each other, and tortured each other as only a close-knit company of actors knows how to do. There was a guy in the class ahead of us who nicknamed everyone’s heads, for example, according to what they reminded him of. Members of our class were named “Pumpkin Head,” “Pencil-Eraser Head,” and “Punched-In Football Head,” among others. I was dubbed “Hair Head”; I can’t imagine why.

I still find that, in general, having a plan is, well, a good plan. But when my carefully laid plan laughed at me, rather than clutch at it too tightly I just made a new one, even if it was one that didn’t immediately make sense. In blindly trying a different path, I accidentally found one that worked better. So don’t let your plan have the last laugh, but laugh last when your plan laughs, and when your plan has the last laugh, laugh back, laughing!

People always ask me how I got to be an actor. The good news and the bad news is: there is no one way. That I thought I had some sort of leg up on life or my career by bartering my perceived time chip was an illusion. In life, of course, there is no Fast Forward. Fast Forward doesn’t even always work on The Amazing Race. Half the time the team in first place makes it onto the earliest flight to a new city, thinking they’re ahead, and arrives at the next destination only to find it doesn’t open for two more hours. Then the other teams catch up, evening the playing field once more. On The Amazing Race, this might mean you lose a million dollars. But in life, maybe it’s actually…fine? Because who wants to Fast Forward anyway? You might miss some of the good parts. I’d rather keep pushing the rewind button on my red Radio Shack tape recorder and be that geek who knows the lyrics to the songs from every Judy Garland musical ever.

Oh, really? Now’s a good time? Oh, good! Here goes….

Clang clang clang went the trolley…