Rue for Richmond

Apr 23, 2008 - 20:31 PM PST

It started out as just a holiday. I wanted some time back with my old friends and my family. Just a few months time to sort out what was going on with, well with everything. I was done with my classes, but still feeling not quite yet ready to send myself out on auditions; and after six months worth of failed relationships and blurry memories I was growing bored of my current life in LA, not to mention the nicotine addition I’d picked up while trying to deal with my current roommate whose anxiety attacks and death threats were enough to drive the entire building into the crazy house. So it was due to those events that I decided a few months back with people who actually new my last name and could clearly remember at least the majority of the times we spent together would be a welcome break.

Of course this little excursion back down memory lane was the one thing my, father agreed to fund. Despite what he said I think his plan all along was that as long as he got me back in the state he was sure he’d be able to somehow convince me that it was best I stayed put and didn’t go back home to Hollywood. Which lets face it, it worked. Not that he accomplished this feat all on his own. No, actually my father didn’t really have much influence in the matter. It was more my friends, my mothers family, my old coworkers; they were the ones who really pulled the trigger. Naturally, they knew just what to say to get me doubting whether LA really was the place for me all along. They planted the seeds so carefully, that one would almost say that I was the one who cooked up this idea of me taking my old position back, “only it would be better because I’d be at the C-ville store so I wouldn’t really be moving back home.” Right, well let me tell you: ITS EXACTLY LIKE I MOVED BACK HOME!

I mean of course things started out alright. When do these things not start out well? I was fine for about the first month. Things were moving along well at the store, the people I worked with were great, I was getting to work along my old manager whom I hadn’t seen for about two years! Everything seemed like it was going to stick. Maybe I’d been wrong, maybe I was one of those people who could be happy in one place, a person who could settle into a house and have a regular job, and basically maybe I was just like 98% of everyone else in the world. I’d accomplished what I said I wanted out in Hollywood right? I said I wanted to try acting, see if I really was any good, find out what it would be like to really be out on my own have a whole state that was just mine, where there were no fathers or stepmothers or grandparent to affect what others thought of and expected from me. I wanted to make a place where I could really be me, whoever that was. And I’d done that. I tried acting; I was good. Really good! And my phone book proves that during that time I set up a whole new circle of friends where I could do and be whatever I wanted at the time. Ask anyone out here to look through my contacts list and tell you anything about the names in there and I guarantee you they would know a thing about ¾ of them.

But now you could say the same thing about me. I’m back here doing what almost every other human being does these days. I’m working a job I don’t really love and spending time with people who I don’t really fit in with, and paying car and rent payments that I really probably can’t afford and shouldn’t have gotten and basically just trying to keep my head above water. Because, the difference between me and all those other people is that I don’t have to ask; I know that this is not enough. Not for me anyway. Every night I go to bed thinking about what I could be doing if I was back in Cali; the classes I could sign up for, the auditions I could go to; the beaches the clubs; the streets, the people; all those things that create the energy and the feeling that lets you know that you’re alive! All those things that you just can’t get out here.

There was a group of us out in LA, Sarah, Claire, Nicola and me. We all met in acting class. It was the first class for all of us in Hollywood. Sarah, like me, had just moved to LA and Claire and Nicola were both visiting from London. The two of them had come just to take the course. Well, when the four of us met, believe me it was almost cosmic! Sometimes you meet people and you just have this connection with them, you know? Well, that’s what it was like with us. You would have thought that we’d all grown up together or we’d been through some tremendously life altering experience together or something the way that we understood one another. It was great! Throw in the fact that you had four gorgeous girls who all happened to be actresses new to LA, which of course meant that everywhere we went, the ropes were pulled back, the cameras flashed and the drinks were free, and you’ve got to understand what made this the best summer I’ve had yet.

Now as I sit here and look back on the year I spent out there, I realize, as is true with almost everything in life, I didn’t really appreciate how much I had with my life in LA. I didn’t see until now that in coming back home I would be turning my back on the things that really mattered to me. Not to the other people that I knew back home, or to my family, but to me I was running out on everything that I had worked for: my fabulous apartment, right off Hollywood Blvd, the job I had working with some of the best promoters in town that couldn’t really even count as a job it was so little work, the ability to walk to anything I needed, I couldn’t have any of that back home. Most of all though, I was turning my back on myself; I had worked so hard for the past months to better myself as an actress and to see if I was any good, and then once I saw that I had loads of talent, to figure out what exactly I wanted to do with it and how to go about making those goals happen. But with one phone call and one plane ticket, I had sent that entire up in flames.