Stories I only tell my friends

‘I want to french you.’
‘You… you want to what me?’
‘French you! I want to french you!’
I’m sitting underneath a stage platform, in the dark, with a cute girl dressed in a Jitterbug costume. We are rehearsing a community-theater rendition of The Wizard of Oz. I’m about ten years old, she is thirteen.
‘What do you mean ‘french’ me?’
‘It’s kind of a kiss. Don’t you know that?’
I nod earnestly, but I have no idea what she’s talking about. I do know that she’s older and makes a very pretty Jitterbug. But “frenching” is not in my vocabulary, and I’m petrified of what is clearly about to go down.

As I walked away from my mother I am also walking away from my childhood. When I come out of those big doors, I will have a full-time job, and that job will subject me to pressures and scrutiny that some adults never face. It will fulfil my dreams and break my heart and lead me to experiences beyond imagining. I will never be the same. I’m fifteen years old; my life is just beginning.

‘What ya boys doin?’ demanded a man dressed from head to toe in army fatigues and wielding a gigantic baseball bat.
‘N-n-nothing, just trick-or-treating,’ we answered. The man leaned in to have a closer look. In the blackness it appeared that he might have war paint on his face, but it was hard to tell.
‘This is my neighbourhood. I am on patrol tonight! There will be no monkey business on my watch! Do you understand?’ He looked at my friends, who said nothing.
‘Do you understand!?’ he said again, this time looking at me.
‘Yes, sir,’ I answered, knowing that it was probably a good idea to use “sire” when confronted in the dark by a bat-swinging, army-uniformed dude with security on his mind.
‘Good,’ he said, and he smashed his bat on the pavement, making us jump. ‘I’ll be watchin’.’
And with that he turned and disappeared into the darkness. When the coast was clear, one of my friends exhaled and chuckled.
‘Hey, Lowe, you said you wanted to meet Martin Sheen? Well, now you have.’

I should have been elated. From as far back as the hours spent at the Dayton Playhouse, my driving goal was to have an acting career. I had worked hard, taken advantage of luck and opportunity when it came my way, and succeeded beyond anything I would have thought possible. But satisfaction often took a back-seat to an unnameable sense of unease and low-grade melancholy. These feelings weren’t always there, and when they did bubble up, I was able to quiet them by throwing myself into work or play with a vengeance. But late at night, or anytime I was left alone with myself doubt, fear, and unease would rock me oh so gently, subtly, and quietly, like a baby in a bassinet. Never enough to raise an alarm, yet always enough to remind me it was there. Someday, I would need to get to the bottom of it. But not yet.

My life is becoming unreal, even to me. And in spite of a (very) small inner voice warning me that this kind of chaos is not a good thing, I don't know how to stop it.

'Jodie, i went to the men's room and there were girls in there!' i say, never having seen anything like it. 'I mean, how can a guy pee with a girl smoking a cigarette next to him?!'

In Hollywood, it works like this : You don't get an audition for anything unless you have an agent. He or she gets a call from a casting director who is working for producers who are casting a role written by a writer. In movies, the writer is weak and has little to no say about anything having to do with the script they wrote. The producers have a big say (executive producers do not) and the director has the final word