All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [32]
It was a difficult decision for me. Theater was one of my minors, and I had been doing what I know today is acting—living truthfully under imaginary circumstances—since third grade. I vividly recall one day after school crossing a field of golden grass in Marin County and deciding I want to walk, think, and, most important, feel like the girl in the book I was reading at the time. I closed my eyes, set my intention, conjured her narrative, and opened my eyes again, fully expecting to perceive the world as truly different, for the air on my skin to seem strange! Well, it wasn’t quite that dramatic, but I was on to something. My imagination had found a dynamic expression that gave me years of solace and friendship. My books were my best friends; their characters peopled my interior world. Acting in my room or outdoors, where I spent hours and hours, gave me an essential, private, and sanctioned outlet for expressing my feelings, many of which were not welcome in the family. Through acting I could siphon off anger, soothe loneliness, cry out some of the pain, and hide from the shame and confusion that so often dominated my home. Rather than be rejected for feeling, I could create my own safe space and have a modicum of control in an often out-of-control world. Acting helped me survive, and it enriched my life.
The summer after college, I was increasingly conflicted about my commitment to the Peace Corps and the fear that if I didn’t pursue acting now, I never would. It didn’t help when my sister would tease me about the Peace Corps in front of her friends on the road and at home, commanding me to “pop a squat” to show them how I would be living in Africa. I started avoiding my Peace Corps recruiter’s calls. Without telling them—an immature move, to say the least—I decided I could postpone the life of service I hoped to lead. If I didn’t give acting a try at twenty-two, I suspected I feared I would carry a regret the rest of my life.
Never one to do things in a small way, I covered my terrific uncertainty with bravado and painted “Hollywood or Bust, Cecil B. DeMille, here I come!” and “I am ready for my close-up” on the BMW 325e my sister had given me for high school graduation. Then I attached a small U-Haul trailer to the back and headed west.
I’d thought I might be able to volunteer at Planned Parenthood and pursue other forms of activism while I took acting lessons and went to auditions in L.A. Before I left, my mother and sister’s manager, Ken Stilts, met with me about what kind of plan I had in place for myself upon my arrival in Hollywood. I began to tell him about the activism opportunities I had researched. He scoffed at me, saying, “Are you going out there to save the world, or to act?” Daddy Ken, as we all called him, was a condescending, hard drinking patriarchal figure who always had to be right. Once he shamed my sister for getting a tattoo—even though it was a heart and cross with a banner that said “Mom.” He humiliated her in front of her entire organization, refusing to speak with her for days. He bullied me, too, but in the absence of much healthy fathering, I thought that it was normal, and I was intimidated enough to listen to him. I internalized his message that I had to choose between a creative life and a life of service.
It is a message I still hear today from some people—many of them in the media—whose imaginations are so limited that they believe I can legitimately be only one or the other, a creative person or an advocate. It’s interesting to watch the cunning ways that artists, women in particular, are endlessly discredited, trivialized, and infantilized. The cynics contend that if I were to give up acting to focus exclusively on public service, well, my service would never be valid, because I had once had a career as an actor. (Forgetting, of course, the previous job description of that right-wing icon Ronald Reagan.) Or that when I opt out significantly from acting for a period, as I tend to, it’s because my movies