I have graduated from college. I have graduated from acting school. I am a professional actor. Or I would be a professional actor if I had ever gotten a union job.
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My parents–well, really my father — would not allow me to work, other than babysitting, before I was an adult.  ‘Adult’ was apparently something my father thought he could proclaim when the time came and not necessarily on my 21st birthday.  My babysitting money got me through adolescence.

You see, my Dad was raised during the Depression, and to him it was a sign of success and his hard work that allowed him to support a family in which HIS wife and daughters did not have to work.  It also meant that we were dependent on him. As luck would have it, Mom was one of the original Feminists, and SHE thought that women should have knowledge and self-sufficiency, so she quietly supported me and my sister in our efforts to gain some freedom from Dad’s purse strings.  She was very cool that way.

But working…having a job and a boss and having to be on time and responsible…that stuff somehow was incomprehensible to me.  I was a horrid employee when I started working.  Not because I didn’t know the work, or the score, or what I should do, but because I had never been responsible for anything, ever.  So I learned the hard way, and I learned by feeling like an idiot most of the time until I wasn’t one anymore.  I really, really hated feeling like an idiot.  I knew that I was capable of more, but I had never had to demonstrate it.

My first job ever was working the midnight shift in a plastics factory which made small molded toys and parts such as GI Joe figures, the top button covers of seatbelt buckles, and other small items.  It was Hell as far as I was concerned.  I learned two very important things:  I did not like someone assuming that I would not follow rules, and I cannot survive without human interaction.  Upon my arrival on the first day, I stood listening to a woman who shouted the rules of engagement: NO talking with coworkers, NO bathroom breaks unless I asked the foreman, NO extra breaks of any kind, NO asking anyone anything unless it was the shift foreman…..I was terrified.  What must those who worked in such jobs felt, decades before I was ever born?  I remember thinking that if they survived THAT, then I surely could survive with ….wait.  No, I could not.  Because I DID NOT HAVE TO.  It was an eye-opener, and I have never forgot it. Perspective hurts sometimes, but it’s critical to insight.,

After five days, I quit that job.  I fled.  think I may have never gone back for my meager paycheck. I don’t remember.  Then I got a job as a waitress which got me through college for the next four years.  That job involved talking with people, and the rules didn’t seem so authoritarian.  I could think and smile and talk.  And I could follow rules with which I was familiar.

I was grateful for every paycheck, every tip, I was grateful for what I learned about people, I learned to stand up for myself, and  I am STILL grateful for the independence I earned.  When I was employed in my first professional job, I was stunned that my paycheck actually paid bills.  I learned that working not only earns a living but also a life:  gratitude, gratification, pride, capability, strength, responsibility, and insight.  All things that have carried me through life.  I wish that for everyone.  I am humbled.

After college, when I wasn’t yet ready to start doing something serious with my BA in English (that is, teach, the only option I knew of besides being a secretary), I did a few miscellaneous short-term jobs to get some experience of the working life. Two of them stand out in my memory, both of them terrible but in different ways.

For a while I worked for Manpower, which sent me to various places, all of which I’ve forgotten except for Nelson Tire, located off the freeway in Oakland. The office was at the front of the building, and at the back was a huge shop full of car tires and truck tires and tire tools and smudged and grimy guys working on tires and making a lot of noise. My job was filing. On my desk in the morning would be a stack of papers, all of them gritty with rubber dust. I was to put each one in its proper file drawer. That was it. Pick up papers, put them in drawers. It seems in my memory that I did that job for months, but it was probably only a couple of weeks. I survived it by driving over to the Oakland Airport at lunchtime and eating my cucumber and cheese sandwiches there while watching the travelers hurrying off to interesting destinations. Nelson Tire revealed to me a level of deadly boringness I had not experienced before, not even at my previous summer job in the Stanford Athletic Department, proofreading every single football ticket for the eighty-thousand-seat stadium.

The other post-college job I recall vividly was at an Oakland child care center in the Fruitvale neighborhood. I worked with the four- and five-year-olds who came before and after their brief hours of kindergarten. It was a poor neighborhood; most of the children were black. I’d had, previously, no experience with child care, no experience with children this age, and no experience with poverty. (Why did they hire me?) Everything about the job was overwhelming–the noise, the chaos, the smells, the children’s neediness, and my own deep ineptitude. I remember some adorable children (a tiny girl named April who smelled like sewage and said in a hoarse little voice with a big enchanting grin, “Tie my shoe, honey!”), some frightening children (Aaron, who jumped up on my back in the playground and toppled me to the ground), and some heartbreaking children (Angelique, in whom I sensed both a sharp intelligence and a fierce rebelliousness, a combo that probably boded ill for her future). It was an intensely interesting job (the opposite of Nelson Tire), but I could not do it. I had no idea how to manage and instruct this swirling, shrieking herd of children, how to keep them safe from each other and from the perils that threatened them, how to keep myself safe from them. One day, during the time the children weren’t there, I was sweeping the floor, and another of the teachers, a no-nonsense black woman who had been there for years, took the broom from me impatiently. “You don’t even know how to sweep a floor,” she said.

That was toward the end of my period of short-term jobs. I went back to school for my teaching credential, and ended up teaching high school English. That was hard, too, but it was not boring and it was not impossible.

When my first husband and I separated, I took my nine month old daughter and moved back to Houston.  At the time I still loved him deeply.  We were on cordial terms although we knew we were not going to be together again.  We were trying to work out, child support, who would raise the child and thinking about a no fault divorce.  Meanwhile, my brother and his wife allowed Jennifer and me to stay at their home while I found work.  My niece was a couple of years old at the time and my brother and his wife constantly had vicious fights.  When I could I would take the two little girls out for a walk or to play.

Jenny was just learning to say a few words, Judi was past  using diapers and bottles.  I first worked at a nursery school which was very poorly organized and hired women who were just short of incompetent.  So I quit and took Jennifer out of that environment.  I went to charity stores where I found the perfect blue polkadot dress to wear to interviews for about a quarter (doesn’t that seem impossible)?  Interviewed many places and ended up working as a file clerk (before computers became widespread) doing this rolling machine, tiny card by card.  I eventually saved enough money to leave my brothers home and to move to a hippie area in Houston which had good bus service.

Meanwhile, I got back in contact with two friends, William and Andy.  William and I used to go out with each other and just end up at interesting places, where we had adventures.  Bill was my night in shining armor and would come and pick Jenni and me up even though it was 15 or 20 miles from where he lived.  My mom, would pick me up after work. She used to drop me off to pick Jenni up at the home nursery where she stayed when I was working. She would sometimes take me to my brother’s home or Jen and  I would take the bus. Another friend had found out I was back in Houston, probably through Andy. She recommended  me  for an opening,I  interviewed well and got a job working at the University of Houston library.  I spent Christmas that year at my friend William’s apartment with Jenni, in order to have time with a friend and to be with a happy person.

We drank magic Christmas morning and all three of us slept together.  Jenni slept later than we did and we were chatting away when a friend of Bill’s that lived below him came up a flight yelling and screaming about the fact that Bill had a woman with him, knocked the door until it shook and soon after the door was opened,fists were flying and Bills jaw was broken.  As this happened, I called the police, hoping they wouldn’t know we were high and would help my friend out.  The crazy jealous young man eventually left, my daughter slept through the event, and the police arrived.  Jen and I got ready to go, William took us back to my brother’s house, and then went to a hospital to get checked out.  He had a broken jaw and I don’t remember, but his nose may have been broken too.  You might think that this was the only shock of the day and the times, but it wasn’t.

Later, John my husband called that day and told me he definitely wanted a divorce. He also let me know how wonderful his girlfriend was (I had met her before I left Indiana where we had lived in a little town called Mishawaka).

A few months later I was working filing those tedious cards, had one of the worst headaches of my life and couldn’t concentrate and just hung on until I could leave those ugly files.  Mom picked me up dropped me off to pick up Jenni and we rode the bus until we were close enough to my brother’s house, to walk. Soon after I arrived I got a phone call from my favorite sister in law Jill…

“Hi Jill I’m so glad to hear you, this has been a horrific day and it is the first good thing that has happened today.”  She was silent for a bit as we chatted.  And then she hesitated and told me, I’ve got something to tell you,  Johnny is dead.  He died of a heart aneurism in the hospital and his last words were “God take me”.

My brother congratulated me, because he said, “I would now have some money”.  I couldn’t wait to leave.

It is 1986, and they are casting the original Broadway company of "Les Miserables." I want to play Jean Valjean.
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