Tall Green Tea. Two Bags.

I have fallen in love with a man who has nice eyes and a kind smile. Who speaks to me gently and who lets me alone into his small store of tenderness.

The fact that the man of whom I am speaking is not the man to whom I am married makes this inconvenient.

It also makes it honest.

We learn quickly that a certain amount of fibbing is necessary to make it through life. The classic example being when your mother asks you if said outfit makes her look anything less than fabulous, your answer must be in the affirmative. Even if she is wearing paisley.

The first mistruth I remember telling was a lie by omission. I was three and my reaction to this situation would eventually explain why establishing long-term relationships would prove to be such a problem for me.

My neighbor friend Robbie made me a fish. It was gold and black and crafted from very short popsicle sticks. It had a magnet on it’s back and was meant to hang on our refrigerator. I don’t remember the occasion, but I do remember having to pretend like I liked it.

I remember thinking that being upfront about my feelings toward the magnet fish would result is disaster. The truth was that I didn’t want this fish. I didn’t know why Robbie gave it to me. And I didn’t know what he expected in return. I had a feeling he had some feelings for me and I wasn’t about that. I was three years old, way too young to make a commitment.

But I took the fish, thanked and smiled and it lived on our fridge for about the next decade or so. When I graduated from high school, Robbie sent me a graduation present in the form of a piece of luggage. Considering the fact that there was an event tied to this gift and that we hadn’t talked since the fish incident, I was much more comfortable with this present and sent him a sincere thank you note.

There are plenty of reasons why we have to tell the truth. Ostensibly, the biggest reason is so that we don’t hurt someone’s feelings. Robbie would have been upset if I said thank you but no to the fish and handed it back to him. Hostesses all over the country would be in tears if guests were honest about the fact that yes, the house does look untidy and the chicken is a bit underdone.

Grandmothers would keel over if grandchildren offered honest critiques of their Christmastime gifts. Outdated articles of clothing that smell of mothballs and insecurity. The species would cease to evolve if sex were given and received only when both partners were honestly excited about it.

And so we spend most of our days and years learning to massage the truth to make it palatable. Studying norms so we know what we can and cannot say to the barista when there’s whip in our non fat latte. Judging reactions and escape distances when we need to have a sit down with an employee or boss.

There exist very few circumstances under which one can actually tell another how one actually feels. One of these places is therapy, but let’s face it. Anyone’s who’s talked to a therapist only tells them the parts of the truth that support their ability to continue with the open prescription for xanax.

The other place is in the arts.

The problem with most art is that it’s isolating. Painters hole up in their apartments and studios and commune with only their canvases who ask nothing and say nothing in return. The paper accepts the truth the artist puts on it and gives no critique. Then the piece is put into a gallery where people pretend to know exactly what the artist was thinking. And the artist says whatever is necessary to make the buyer think that the $10K they’re about to drop is an investment. No really, an investment.

Musicians and writers are the same. They create their work in a vacuum. They don’t need to talk to anyone else to get the thing made. And once they make it, they send it off to give it a new life. A life that exists apart from the artists. Apart from the truthteller. Other people have conversations about the work, but these discussions don’t involve the creator and the discussees often lie themselves so they don’t let on that they have no idea what said piece means. They only know it’s supposed to mean something.

And then there are actors.

Don’t laugh. The acting is serious business.

There’s acting the commercial art. Being pretty enough to be put on a DVD cover or magazine page and coherent enough to rattle off lines and look longingly into the distance while the camera rack focuses on the stalker in the background.

And then there’s acting. The discipline. The thing you have to be willing to do in order to one day get to the cerebral vacation that is The Break Up.

I did theater for fun growing up, in college and after. Then I moved to LA where it is impossible to act for fun because everyone in every acting class and every small theater is sure that this is going to be the little dive that the next big thing is going to come out of.

But I loved being on stage. Admittedly one of the things I liked about performance was that people had to like me. They couldn’t reject me if the script said otherwise and I always had something witty to say in return.

I had tried the honesty thing with my parents, but quickly learned that that was not going to work so well. So for example, when I said, “Mom, I think I like my friend Nathan,” my mother responded by telling me I was a slut and that I was more likely to end up pregnant and homeless than graduating with my classmates.

When I very honestly told my father that I had tried to commit suicide one evening, he told me to wash my face. That dinner would be ready soon.

Theatre was a place where one did not have to endure conversations like that. And if you did, it would all be worked out by the end of Act III and you might even get a hug.

It’s no secret that artistic places are havens for people whose lives resemble a badly written miniseries—not the ones about the unfrozen dragons and giant earthquakes whose fault lines mysteriously stop at the shaken hero’s feet. But the ones that girls like to watch when we menstruate. And after each curtain call, we’d wander, slightly dazed, hugging and kissing each other sincerely. Looking for something true to grab on to before we went home and lied to everyone there.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I swore that I would not act. I convinced myself that I could not. And that even if I could, I wasn’t pretty enough to make it, so why bother. Thanks to my mother’s encouragement, talking myself down out of dreams was old hat and came very easily.

Then I met my friend Chuck.

Chuck worked in casting and ran an acting class in Culver City next to the Sony lot. He asked me to come occasionally when he needed an extra body to round out some scenes.
And he taught me to act.

There are many acting techniques and the one Chuck taught is I think, the most effective. And the most dangerous.

Many teachers will teach an actor to dig inside themselves. Find something that makes them happy or sad or envious and project that emotion on to their scene partner. They cause their students to dredge up unhappy memories and pretend like the person they’re acting opposite is the one causing the pain. The problem with this is that eventually, things stop hurting. Wounds heal. You’re not always in love with your spouse, so pretending like your scene partner is your husband doesn’t work the days that your husband has insisted once again that yes, you are the only one who can clean out the catbox. And the playing video games for 12 hours in a row is totally acceptable behaviour.

Chuck does not teach this way. If you need to be in love with your scene partner, then you need to fall in love with them. And only them. If you need to hate someone, then you hate them. You let yourself go and you allow yourself to develop the emotion. You have a bodily reaction to it and then you act. And it’s amazing.

If you ever share a ride with me, you will find that I clearly was never popular. I like having a complete emotional experience on the way to work, so instead of the music that’s contemporary or was contemporary in any previous decade, I listen to showtunes.

I emotionally bruise like fruit and I like it. I like that I wanna cry over stories I’ve read and listened to a thousand times before. I love falling in love with Hugh Grant every time he flutters his droopy blue eyes and says, “…if you’ll just allow me to say ‘no’ to your kind request.” And I like going back to being a kid, remembering all the things that mom and dad said and crying again.

Because those things are real. How important they are in the grand scheme of things is open for debate, but doesn’t your average person care much more about making a connection to another human being be it good or bad than memorizing some dates and figures to be regurgitated in an annual report? The things that really make a person’s day are the strangers that smiled at them, the compliment the barista gave as she handed over the whipped, non fat latte, doing something good for someone who’s down. Our feelings matter and they matter most when they’re real. You can tell when someone’s lying to you and it’s almost not worth the effort. You’d rather them just say the dress isn’t your color.

On my honeymoon, my husband decided to risk the twenty thousand dollars we spent on the trip and go bungee jumping. He stood on a bridge above an icy cold river in New Zealand with about a dozen other fools as loved ones watched, prayed and seethed from a lookout areas many meters away.

Greg was third in line. The first two people jumped silently. Falling to what could have been their death without so much as a loud exhale. But when Greg jumped, he screamed his heart out and everybody loved it!

The crowd clapped and cheered and when he walked back up the hill, he had new friends. People clapped him on the back and congratulated me on such a great catch. And the only two things they knew about him was that a) he might be an idiot and b) he wasn’t afraid to be honest.

It’s fucking scary to jump off a bridge above icy cold water anywhere and the two people who went before Greg tried to pretend like it was no big deal. That they did this kind of shit all the time. But Greg was honest about his fear and that honesty made him a star.

The truth isn’t always neatly presented, it’s not always dignified, but it means a hell of a lot more to people than biting your tongue in hopes of looking strong.

This is not to say there’s no room for tact, but that’s another essay.

And as I started training with Chuck, I was soon told that one of my biggest problems was my inability to be honest. “I can see you have a lot to say,” Chuck would tell me, “but you’re refusing to say it.”

I protested that what I had to say was ugly, uncomfortable and inappropriate. He said that it was real and that was all that mattered.

“But what will happen if I say these things out loud?” I asked.
“We’ll see,” Chuck said. And smiled.

And so one Tuesday night, Chuck told me to go up with a handsome man with nice eyes and a kind smile. And a very intimidating stare. The object was to talk about what we felt.

“You scare the shit out of me,” I said.

And immediately, his stare softened. He leaned forward and looked genuinely concerned that this was my reaction.

“I don’t want to scare you,” he said. “I want to make you smile.” And I believed him.

Acting, the real stuff, not the commercial stuff, is a dangerous thing and not for the feint of spirit. But having a voice for the first time in my life, and having people respond to it not because they have a script that says they have to, but because they have decided to do away with society’s norms long enough to learn this one craft really well is an awesome thing. And that night, the truth was, I loved Derek and standing in front of him and smiling was all I wanted to do. And I adored Chuck for giving me the chance to do it.

When I was a senior in high school, I left snuck of campus at lunch with my friend Samantha one day. This was against school policy, but I had a car and a pass to be gone until 2 p.m. I thought I was golden.

But later in the afternoon, after we were back from lunch, the vice principal called me into his office. It was the first time I’d be summoned to any office for something other than accolades. I was a good student with a perfect record and only one absence that was incurred in the fourth grade because my heart had briefly, but decidedly, stopped beating.

The vice principal asked me what I was doing off campus and I lied to him. I told him that I needed to go home to get a disk for computer science that I left in my bedroom. I was only slightly surprised at how quickly the lie came to me. But in this case, the truth was so lame. Retrieving a furtive disc with a hard to understand computer language on it was way more exciting than saying I was jonesing for some mcnuggets.

When I left his office, I almost asked him not to call my house. But that would have been a very honest thing to say and would have invited questions.

I’m not sure which would have been worse. The questions my VP would have asked. Or the wrath that was my mother when she found out the news.

Being reminded that I was a failure, a slut an embarrassment and a fool seemed all right. It was a truth I’d grown used to hearing. Whether it was real or not, I could take it. Had my VP learned the truth about the bruises on my arms, I’m not sure what I would have become. Or if I could have handled it.

A few weeks later, I was called back to the office, being awarded for something. And mother was there, telling everyone how she’d always supported me. Always encouraged me. And never doubted me for a second.

Such was the case with my mother and me. Truth was relative and at her discretion. On my wedding day, she made out with my caterer and refused to speak to me. She stood me up in my dressing room and sat as far away from me as possible during the dinner. When I tried to ask why, she said she had no idea what I was talking about.

About ten months after the wedding, we started talking again. Neither of us mentioning the months that had lapsed. Both of our lives had changed so much and we acted like the things we didn’t know weren’t there to begin with.

I had learned from my dad that my mother was seeing someone new and that he had spent nights at her place over the thanksgiving weekend. With both my parents now involved in other relationships, the family I knew was gone. Yes, the family sucked more days than it didn’t. But it was mine. And now it was gone.

When I called her to give her my holiday wishes, we ended up talking for a couple of hours. I told her about my class and about Derek. And about how amazing it is to stand in front of someone and be that honest. To lay exactly how you’re feeling on the table for scrutiny. To tell the truth. The whole truth. The absolute and uncomfortable truth.

She agreed that it was amazing and said she wanted to do the same.

She told me about the meal she cooked for thanksgiving. All the food. The delicate place setting. Then told me she ate alone. I said it was good to talk to her and that we should do it again soon.

So much for the truth. Suddenly my experience with Derek became that much more important. And equally as meaningless.

But I knew we were both lying and took comfort in the fact that I could be honest with myself about that.