Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [43]
Jed wasn’t crazy about the idea of getting up at dawn every Saturday to drive to New York (I said I’d do it). But what he was really worried about was the pressure-cooker atmosphere and sometimes dog-eat-dog mentality that Juilliard is famous for. He wasn’t sure that would be good for Lulu. Lulu wasn’t sure it would be good for her either. In fact, she insisted that she didn’t want to audition and wouldn’t go even if she got in. But Lulu never wants to do anything I propose, so naturally I ignored her.
There was another reason Jed wasn’t sure Juilliard was a good idea: Many years ago, he’d actually been a student there himself. After graduating from Princeton, he’d been accepted to Juilliard’s Drama Division, notoriously even harder to get into than their world-famous Music Division. So Jed moved to New York City and studied acting with classmates who included Kelly McGillis (Top Gun),Val Kilmer (Batman), and Marcia Cross (Desperate Housewives ). He dated ballet dancers, learned the Alexander Technique, and played the lead role in King Lear.
And then Jed got kicked out—for “insubordination.” He was playing Lopakhin in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and the director asked him to do something a certain way. Jed disagreed with her. Several weeks later, out of the blue at a rehearsal, she became furiously angry at Jed, snapping pencils in half, declaring that she couldn’t work with someone who “just stands there, sneering at me, criticizing every word I say.” Two days later, Jed was told by the chairman of the Drama Division (who happened to be married to the director Jed had offended) that he should find something else to do. After a year of waiting tables in New York, that something turned out to be Harvard Law School.
Maybe because I think it has a happy ending—Jed and I wouldn’t have met if he’d stayed at Juilliard—I’ve told this story at party after party, where it’s always a big hit, especially after I embellish it. People seem to think it’s cool that a law professor went to Juilliard and knew Kevin Spacey (who was a few years ahead of Jed). There’s also something about insubordination and getting kicked out that Americans love.
By contrast, when we told the story to my parents, it didn’t go over well at all. This was before Jed and I were married. In fact, I had only recently revealed to them the fact of Jed’s existence. After hiding him for two years, I had finally sprung on my parents that I was seriously dating Jed, and they were in shock. My mother was practically in mourning. When I was little, she’d given me lots of advice about how to find the right husband. “Don’t marry anyone too handsome—dangerous. The most important things in a husband are moral character and health; if you marry a sickly man, you will have a terrible life.” But she always assumed that the nonsickly husband would be Chinese, ideally someone Fukienese with an M.D./Ph.D.
Instead, here was Jed—white and Jewish. Neither of my parents found it remotely impressive that Jed had gone to drama school.
“Drama school?” repeated my father, unsmiling on the sofa where he and my mother were sitting side by side, staring at Jed. “You wanted to be an actor?”
The names Val Kilmer and Kelly McGillis didn’t seem to mean anything to my parents, and they continued to sit stonily. But when Jed got to the part about being kicked out and having to work as a waiter for six months, my mother choked.
“Kicked out?” she said, throwing my father an anguished glance.
“Does that go on your record?”