Archive | Age Matters
There You Are
My routine this fall: Watch the sunrise with the seagulls and the seals, then walk into the dunes. For the rest of the morning, write. Afterward walk into the woods and sometimes go thrifting, naming my finds consolation prizes or rewards depending on the day’s work. From then, bid the sun farewell from a west-facing beach, and make dinner from fisheries and farmstands in the area. Star-gazing from the hammock beneath the birch trees, and asleep by 9:30, tucked in with a grey-gold permakitten purring at my feet. This has been my perfect life, and it has turned me into the space crone mermaid of my dreams.
Last night I was telling a dear friend in Brooklyn about how sad I’ll be to leave the Cape next week. “I’m running out of supplies,” I told her. “I’m on my last bag of Oslo Coffee beans and down to my last bottle of vitamins. I’m even running out of wine. But it’s so hard to imagine not being able to run to the sea 
as soon as I wake. And how will I get unstuck in my writing when I can’t walk in the woods to clear my head?” “Spend this last week just soaking it all up,” she said. “It will be the best week of your life.” She is an artist and knows how to be inside the moment while also storing it for her paintings and drawings. I was grateful for her glorious plan, and grateful for the reminder of why I love New York City so much. It is there–scratch that, it is here–that I find my people one way or another. What’s most beautiful: once you find kindred spirits, they’re inside you wherever you go, whether they be tree spirits or seal spirits or loudmouth millennial spirits. Love is love.
Art credit: Detail from a Marlene Frontera drawing. Photo: me.
The #MeToo of My Tween Acting Career
This morning, as the sun rose wanly here in Truro (yes, I’m back for the rest of the month), I caught up on the Harvey Weinstein revelations. Nothing unpredictable, I’m afraid, which made them all the more appalling. Woman after woman coming forward with the same clutch of details: the bathrobe, the massage requests, the obsession with showers, the need—nay, the demand—for sexual attention. What angered me most: Harvey claimed he was offering career ascension to hundreds of young women, but all he really was saying was: If you submit to my sexual demands, I will not harmfully, aggressively cockblock your career.
He is a larcenous pig not unlike, say, our alleged president.
As the estimable Gloria Steinem has written—as the Academy of Motion Pictures itself has acknowledged—such predatory behavior is hardly unique to Weinstein. Instead, this “isolate and destroy” brand of toxic masculinity has meant that we women have felt damned if we do and damned if we don’t in terms of sexual resistance.
Again, not news to anyone walking as female in this life.
But Sarah Polley did raise an issue I hadn’t considered in 15 years. In this week’s New York Times, the director addressed her reason for walking away from acting: She felt like prey. Scratch that. She was prey. And it made me think about my own career as a tween actor.
I never talk about why I quit acting. The truth is that it’s probably no loss to the world. As as an adult, I’m good enough on stage or in front of a camera as a commentator but not especially adept at pretending I’m anything but myself. As a young person, though, I really, really wanted to be an actor and experienced a surprising degree of success. Continue Reading →