Lost Memories

I wish I was young enough for blogs to have always existed. There is so much that I have forgotten, so much that I would have loved to go back and re-read. I always said that I would someday write a book about it all (doesn’t everyone?), but now I find that I just don’t remember enough of it. Sure, you remember the high points, but the detail tends to get lost.

They say that when you get old, you can’t remember what you had for lunch, but things that happened to you in your youth are crystal-clear. I hope so – I could then look forward to it all coming back. :)

For some reason I was remembering my time at the Strasberg Institute in LA in the very early eighties, when I still thought I’d become an actor. (That was before I decided that it wasn’t worth taking the chance that I would one day wake up to realise that I was a fifty-year-old waitress still hoping for a break.) I can’t remember a lot of the people that I knew at the time. I can’t remember my instructor’s names. I know that Rebecca de Mornay was in my classes, but she didn’t stand out enough for me to have any remembrance of her. I only realised that she’d been in my classes when I later worked for a time for her father, Wally George. (There’s a story!) I looked up Fox Harris (who was much older and not in my classes, but who was a close friend of my first husband), and found via IMDB that he died during that decade. How sad. We spent a lot of time hanging out together. So many people, so many events that I have obscure half-memories of now.

Anyway, that was a wonderful opportunity. No one is as driven as a struggling actor; you juggle crappy jobs and go to classes and do tons of free work, all the time hustling for a chance for someone to notice you. You go to auditions, walking into a room with thirty or so other girls, all pretty much the same age, all pretty, all clutching their books filled with headshots and tear sheets, and you know the people at the table in the other room must be punch-drunk with choice. You all believe that you’ll make it, someday, and you work and starve and scam for it, everyone living for nothing else, running from class to audition to job.

Anyway, I wish that I hadn’t lost along the way every journal, every photo album, every notebook of poetry that I ever had. My highschool yearbooks are gone, and most of my mementoes. Lost along the way via many, many moves, being too poor to ship anything and having to jettison anything that will not fit into a suitcase, lost due to leaving boxes with ex-boyfriends who threw them out. I wish I had it all back.

Failing that, I just hope that it all does come back in detail some day. I always said that getting old wouldn’t be so bad if you could have lived a full life, but what a bitch if you can’t remember any of it!