Friend #27 - Debbie

Confession:  I’ve always wanted to be an actress.  I think it started in the high school drama club, the endorphins you get performing in front of a crowd that is fixated on your every movement and emotion.  I wasn’t particularly good at it.  I have a difficult time controlling my eyes and facial movements that react honestly, in the moment and often can’t be duplicated.  But I am fascinated by those who have that gift.

So when a friend suggested I sit down with a real life actress, I leapt at the opportunity.  There were so many questions I had about people who live their lives portraying others.  I’d always had a notion that great actors must have, at some point in their lives, developed a skill for putting on a façade in their real life in order to escape that reality.  Debbie told me that wasn’t really the case.  Great acting is about putting on a coat of someone else’s back story to wear during the duration of the performance.  Because of this, actors need to have a great deal of empathy.  They need to feel for others as if they were feeling the emotion, themselves.  Debbie believes this is why the LGBTQ community has been so accepted into the theater.  It’s the nature of their jobs to provide empathy to all people regardless of their orientation.

And Debbie should know.  She has been in the theater world for a long time.  Over the past thirty years she has worked for Childsplay, a local theater that puts on family friendly shows in Tempe, Arizona.  Because of her age, she has most recently been delegated to more directorial duties, claiming she is too old to be the starlet.  Well…maybe…but you can still see the vitality in Debbie’s cheeks, the passion in her eyes, the warmth in her voice.  I asked if she ever wanted to pursue her craft in Los Angeles, figuring there must be loads of opportunity there, but Debbie just laughed.  She claimed she was too short and curvy for what LA wanted…but she also never had aspirations to act commercially.  The stage has always been the love of her life.

She was married once for seven years.  He was a nice man and at first, he loved how passionately she felt about the theater.  He was the type of man who would help her with sets and behind-the-scenes work, but eventually he grew jealous of Debbie’s first love.  Debbie believes her marriage was a sacrifice she gave up for feminism, as many women of her generation did.  The feminists taught the young girls to believe they could do anything but the young men still wanted nurturing women like their mothers.  Debbie couldn’t deny the feminist part of herself…so she chose the stage.

As we talked, the mental pedestal I had placed the actress on began to subside.  The light coming through the window caressed the soft lines of her face, making them more distinct and the actress on the pedestal became more real. 

We both went to Western Kentucky University.  Debbie was a few years ahead of me but at the time she was attending, Western had one of the most prestigious drama departments in the nation.  She got her masters at Arizona State University and then the desert just stuck, much like it did for me.  She said her mother should have been an actress but there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for acting where Debbie grew up in Memphis.  So Debbie’s mother sang, instead.  Debbie has one brother who is a writer and shares the creative passion of telling a good story that she does.  She has another brother and sister that chose more scientific paths.  It was a creative family but not so different from the family I grew up in.

And you would think as an actress, Debbie would crave the spotlight as if it were a bit of espresso injected directly into her veins.  It is the passion that drives her but not necessarily the thing that energizes her.  Instead, Debbie admits she is a bit of introvert finding rejuvenation within the quiet moments as she is gardening at home or spending time with her two cats.  It’s as if the creative energy that drives her bursts forth so dynamically from a person who is so magnificently ordinary in so many ways. 

Of course, if you were sitting next to her in a restaurant, you might be captivated by her stories or her ability to be animated.  Debbie seems to always carry the art of the dramatic around with her like a prized handbag, but by the end of the conversation, we were reduced to comparing notes about the changes at the university we both shared like two old friends.  And I’d like to think we had become friends as the mysterious aura of “actress” faded into the reality of two women who simply had a lot in common.  She tells her stories on the stage.  I tell my stories on the page.  Yet within those differences, there is a lot of the same.