You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (12 page)

WHATEVER, YOU GUYS!

Nothing got friendlier between us after that, but he never shoved me like an MMA fighter again, and I never corrected him on his lines again. (Even though he DID mess them up. A lot.) For years after that play, my family would tell the tale of how “That kid Jackson tried to murder Felicia,” and we were pretty convinced he was going to grow up to be a serial killer. I recently looked him up on Facebook. He became a dentist, so same difference.

Here’s the awesome irony, though. A local newspaper critic attended that specific matinee performance. Afterwards, we got an amazing review that singled out the “fantastic physical performance of the young actress playing Scout.” I even got an award that season! So basically, what I learned was that I love the stage, and that it’s advantageous to have slightly older men physically assault me. (Just KIDDING! Gawd.)

I’m sure my aunt would have mentored me through many a great role after that, helping me conquer the Northern Alabama theatre scene with my glorious skills, but it was not to be. My family moved to Mississippi right after the play ended. But I’d developed a taste for the stage, and I wanted to keep doing it. I couldn’t let go of the idea that I was pretty amazing.

We moved a lot during my childhood because of my dad’s medical training, but whenever we’d arrive in a new city, I’d immediately search the
Pennysaver
or community center bulletin boards for auditions. Of any kind. And no matter what little backwater town we landed in, people were putting on a show! Usually a revival of
Oliver!
(I was in that play four times as an orphan. I also played a prostitute twice in
Sweet Charity
before the age of fourteen.) Sometimes the productions were
very
small, like an 8x8 space behind someone’s garage, or at an old folks’ home where the star was an eighty-five-year-old with Alzheimer’s, but as long as they accepted me, I joined up. I couldn’t help it. Like tuberculosis, once you catch it, the need to perform is always inside of you.

Unfortunately, when you’re the “new kid,” you don’t get the juicy roles right away. There’s usually a seniority system, and sometimes I was passed over for a speaking part by someone who wasn’t great, which was disappointing to me but enraging to my mother.

“They only picked her because she was Jewish!”

Well, Mom, I was auditioning for Anne Frank in
The Diary of Anne Frank
at the Louisville Jewish Recreation Center. I think maybe there were justifications.

As I mentioned before, my mother never had the follow-through to be a true stage mom, but she was supportive in pushing my performance career in strange and arbitrary directions. Around twelve, she signed me up for singing lessons with a woman named “Miss Hilda” who led a church choir and looked like she’d been a spinster since the late 1890s. The woman wore dickies with her sweat suits.

Miss Hilda taught me German art songs, which is SUPER useful when you’re auditioning for
Tannhäuser
, but if you’re trying to rock a solo from the Who’s
Tommy
, not so much. My mom couldn’t tell the difference. Singing was singing, and her daughter was amazing at it, therefore everyone must listen! She became alert for opportunities for me to shine with my newfound skill, on stage and beyond.

One day we got in the car and started driving to Ohio. Randomly. My brother and I were confused.

“Where are we going?”

My mom had a copy of the newspaper in her lap and thrust it at me. “They’re rebooting
The Mickey Mouse Club
and searching for new talent! You’re auditioning!”

Panic. “But I don’t have a song prepared!”

“Just do that one Miss Hilda taught you last week!”

“Um . . . really?”

“Either that or ‘Happy Birthday.’ You have such a beautiful voice, it won’t matter, you’re a shoo-in, baby!”

I wrapped my mom’s faith around myself like a straightjacket as we drove three and a half hours to a nondescript Holiday Inn in Cincinnati. I marched into the run-down ballroom with a number 239 pinned
to my shirt and, when prompted, began singing Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” for the touring Disney audition committee.

“Meine Ruh’ ist hin

Mein Herz ist schwer,

Ich finde, ich finde sie nimmer . . .”

“THANK YOU!”

And that was the closest to becoming a Disney kid I ever got. Thank goodness.

Several years later, we were living in San Antonio, and my mother met a man whose daughter took ballet class with me. Of course, the conversation turned to my
fantastic
singing voice, and it turned out that the guy knew a guy who had a brother who recorded music and made albums. In his garage. Talk about kismet!

Except he didn’t do pop music (or German lieder), he specialized in Tejano music. The accordion music that the Tex-Mex region adores. Objectively, it is very danceable.

To most humans, I would not be the FIRST person you’d pick for stardom in this particular field. For one, I didn’t speak Spanish, and two, there was that
really
Caucasian thing going on with my face. At this point I was a bit older, fifteen, and I strongly registered my objections, but when my mom saw an opportunity, she couldn’t let it escape.

“Your voice is so pretty! That girl Selena is popular, and you’re just as pretty as her! You can do this!” There was no arguing. I would be her Central Texan Eliza Doolittle.

My mom immediately bought language tapes to play in the car. “
Mi casa, su casa
 . . .” everywhere we drove, I drilled. I started flamenco
class, which had nothing to do with Tejano but was similar enough to tap dancing that I enjoyed it, and after a few weeks of intense training, we met with the recording guy to talk debut album concepts.

Now, this guy should have been rightfully laughing us out of the state, but my mom is somehow able to make the most insane ideas seem plausible. At least when you’re in her sphere of contact. Once she’s gone, you start to catch yourself, like,
Hey, now. Wait a second . . .

We sat there in a tiny recording studio behind a nail salon, and my mom painted the headline “White Tejano Star Takes San Antonio by Storm!” with such vivid enthusiasm that the producer dude, slurping from a two-hundred-ounce sweet tea cup, was totally digging it.

They brainstormed as I sat there silently, praying for an earthquake or tornado to kill us all. I kid you not: the strategy was to change my name to “Felicia Diaz.” Which was pretty considerate, because I got to keep my first name, just add the accent, like “Feliz Navidad.” I don’t know why I was so uptight about it; the plan screamed success!

The two of them came up with tons of debut song concepts, mostly with the word
corazón
in them (my violin playing was a HUGE asset, special skillz, y’all!), and we left planning to come back the next week to start recording.

In a very sad way, fate intervened. Before we could get into breaking the lyrics down phonetically for me to learn so I could insult millions of people and their culture in MP3 format, the superstar Selena was murdered by a fan. The whole future of Tejano looked to be a bit iffy. I was able to get that violin scholarship to go to college during the confusion, and my future of becoming a superstar disappeared into the mist.

Lo siento, mi amor
.

[
 Hollywood, I’m Inside You! 
]

Because everyone discouraged me from getting a degree in theatre (thank you, everyone), I did the math-music thing in college, but in the back of my mind I was always going to move to Hollywood and become an actor. I could analyze my motivations until the day I die, but there just wasn’t any logic to it. I never had a doubt that it was how my life was going to go, and I was going to make it happen. My mother was often impractical, but she did instill a “leap and look later” attitude that’s pretty much responsible for my whole career.

Days after I got my Real Degree, I moved west. I didn’t go completely unprepared (I was only 95 percent stupid at the time), I had a few cards up my sleeve. I’d saved up a lot of money by living at home and playing violin professionally and having my mom drive me to college for four years, so that torture paid off in the end. I had also volunteered at tons of film festivals in Austin and made connections with “Hollywood insiders.” Most of them were screenwriters, which I later found out are the most useless connections you can have (only LA valets get treated worse than LA writers), but my friends did help me figure out where to live, how not to get killed on the freeways, and what kind of acting head shots immediately went into the trash. My first photo is NOT an example of what they suggested was successful.

Maybe it was my obsession with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard’s relationship
coming into play, but for my first LA photo shoot I decided to go for the “Look as old as you can at age twenty-one in an Ann Taylor silk blouse” strategy. Ultimately, in my mind, the pictures didn’t matter. Because I was still wrapped in that blind, unerring faith: Felicia Day was one audition away from a
Vanity Fair
cover, no matter what.

You see, I was raised on the great American girl dream. Talent and experience don’t matter. If you’re pretty enough, you’ll be discovered while sitting at an outdoor table in Los Angeles, plucked out of obscurity and placed onto magazine covers by a producer randomly driving down Sunset Boulevard in his Land Rover who pulls over, yanks a cigar out of his mouth, and yells, “You! Get in the car! I’m making you a star!”

Strangely, no matter how many cups of coffee I’ve ordered at outdoor cafés on Sunset Boulevard, this has never happened to me. I did, however, make one of the most inauspicious filmic debuts of any actor ever, so that’s something I can brag about.

There’s a weekly paper called
Backstage
where producers post notices to find unpaid and/or nonunion actors to audition for their terrible-quality stuff. Mostly student films in black and white with no sound included. As a newbie actor, applying for these projects is the best way to get experience, because no one with any résumé credits whatsoever would stoop low enough to do the work. You send out hundreds of head shots and get maybe one audition out of the bunch. And each response makes you feel like,
This is my big break! I’m on my way to a party in the Hollywood Hills, watching Johnny Depp undress to get into a hot tub. Better shave my legs!

From one of my first submission batches, I got called in to audition for a movie in a building that was located on Hollywood
Boulevard. After living in LA for over a decade, I now know it’s the sleaziest place in town to have a meeting, but at the time I was like,
Damn, girl. You made it already!

The role was for an “Untitled” horror film. (Really, how hard is it to come up with a name? Just pick one and change it later, guys.) I arrived at the address to find a dozen girls sitting on the floor in the hallway waiting outside. No chairs.

One after another, the actresses went into the room, read the lines, and then proceeded to SCREAM at the top of their lungs.

“AAAAAAAAH!”

Sometimes there was a pause, muffled discussion, then a second take.

“AhhhhAHHHH AH! Ahhhhh!”

The casting director, a kid who looked like he was a high school intern from Omaha, would escort the actresses in and out, shuffling through cute girls like a deck of cards. “Next!”

The whole process made me nervous. I’d never screamed on cue before, so I practiced a few silent ones with my mouth closed while I waited, like a cat coughing up a hair ball.

“Mmmmm! MmmMMMmm! MmmmM?”

Eventually, channeling Miss Hilda’s vocal training in the back of my mind, I convinced myself that I could nail this situation, no problem.

When it was my turn, I got escorted inside the office and saw that it wasn’t really an office at all, more of a closet. There were actual brooms hung up behind the door.