All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [199]
Thunderstruck, I blurted out, “Why am I not putting a rocket up my ass and flying to the moon?”
I went straight home and called Carol Lee Flinders, one of my mentors, who cooed, “Oh, the Women and Public Policy Program, founded by Swanee Hunt, is at the Kennedy School. Of course, it’s the perfect place for you!” I did some Internet research, cried when I read the WAPPP website (my people! I thought), and linked over to the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy site, also at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. I asked a fellow board member at PSI, one of the first women ever to graduate from Harvard Law School, what she thought, and the next thing I knew, I was on the phone with the dean of admissions, being recruited to go to Harvard. The Kennedy School offers an intensive, year-long midcareer master’s in public administration, aimed at established professionals from all over the world who want to broaden their horizons and increase their efficacy in public service. Alumni range from Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the United Nations, to New York police commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. Well, hey! Why not add a Sicilian-hillbilly rabble-rousing actor-activist to the roster?
When it came time to fill out the application forms, I had some welcome help from an unexpected source: my father.
Dad and I had become increasingly close in the years since we reconnected during Ted’s therapy sessions and our remarkable experiences during the family weeks at Shades of Hope. He and his wife of ten years, Mollie, are frequent occupants of our smokehouse guest cabin, and they spend summers in our house in Scotland. When Dad sat down with me on our sleeping porch to help organize my essay topics and put together a comprehensive curriculum vitae (not a small task, as I’ve never kept close track of my zillions of endeavors), I felt as if I were being given a second chance to do over the whole college application process that I had missed out on twenty-three years earlier. I needed him, and he was there for me. It was a joyful time.
In early 2009, to my astonishment and unbelievable gratitude, the dean of admissions personally phoned to tell me I had been accepted into the program. The committee vote was unanimous, he added with a smile in his voice. I threw back my head and hooted and hollered at the top of my lungs, racing from room to room in our big Scottish house, my excitement echoing off the old walls. I kept my new knowledge to myself for a few hours that afternoon, reflecting on this amazing turn of events while hiking up the ben in record time. Now, I reckoned, all I had to do was let my various colleagues know I would be unavailable for anything for a full year. And then move to Cambridge.
I still wanted to make movies, but I had purposefully slowed down the pace of my filmmaking career after I went to Shades of Hope to focus on recovery, put it first in my life, and continue digging deeply into my healing process and new way of life. Crossing Over, about labor trafficking in Mexico and California, was my first picture in recovery. I played a little supporting role, gently dipping my toe in the water again, and the experience was just what I wanted. Then I took on a much more challenging project, playing the lead in Helen, an independent film about a woman who suffers major recurrent suicidal depression. As soon as I read the first pages of the exquisite script by the auteur director Sandra Nettelbeck, I knew I had to be involved with the movie. I