Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen - Dyan Sheldon [1]
I understood my mother’s concern about Pam and Paula, of course – they were only seven at the time we moved, which is a very impressionable age – but I couldn’t see why my mother wouldn’t let me stay behind in the City. I could have lived with my dad, he has a spare room. And he lives in the East Village, which is the coolest place in Manhattan if not in the entire universe. I know I could have talked him into it – he’s a lot more malleable than his former wife – but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. She has custody, and she’s keeping it. Though that isn’t exactly how she put it. “Your father and I have our differences, but even he doesn’t deserve that,” was what she said.
But I have a positive nature. I believe in making the best of even the worst situation. I mean, you have to, don’t you? There’s no point being negative about things you can’t change, you only make them worse. And anyway, as I always say, every cloud has a solid gold lining.
The solid gold lining in the black thundercloud of moving to Deadwood was that it gave me a chance to re-create myself a little, as all great actors do. Back in the City at least half the kids I went to school with were kids I’d gone to school with most of my life. They called me Mary. They looked at me and saw the little girl who threw up at Edna Rimbaud’s seventh birthday party. They knew all the dull and embarrassing details of my existence. It was like playing Peter Pan for eleven years. To the audience you’re this little boy in a green leotard, and that’s it. You’ll still be Peter Pan when you’re fifty, while lesser actors get to play King Lear.
Dellwood, however, was an empty stage as far as I was concerned. An empty stage to which I was allowed to bring my own script. I didn’t have to go gently into the good suburban night. I could choose whatever role I wanted – be whatever I wanted to be – and no one would know any better. No one who wasn’t related to me would ever call me Mary again.
Looked at in that way, the move to Deadwood was almost exciting. It was definitely a challenge. The life without challenge is the life without depth.
There was another way to look at it, too. Besides raging against the dying of the lights of the City from my life, I now had the opportunity to bring one of those lights with me into the wilderness. Myself. Lola Elspeth Cep (or Sep). I would be a beacon for all the confused youth of Dellwood who needed reassurance that there was more to living than beer parties and shopping. I would be a source of nourishment to those starving, embryonic souls who were looking for true passion and meaning in their humdrum lives. At last I could start to be the great actor Lola Cep.
A legend was about to be born.
I think it’s safe to say that no one at Deadwood High – student body and staff alike – had ever seen anyone quite like me. And this, of course, was to my advantage. They didn’t know what to expect. My first few weeks were devoted to showing them what to expect: the unexpected; the unusual; the individual; the unique. One week I’d dress only in black; the next my colours would be vibrant and bright. One week I’d be quiet and remote; the next I’d be gregarious and funny. It was a demanding part, but it took my mind off other things.
Like how difficult it was to be a beacon in the subterranean, wind-swept and coal-black abyss that is Dellwood, New Jersey.
I had no trouble getting everybody at school to call me Lola. I told my teachers that even though the register said my name was Mary, Lola was what I’d been called at home since I was a squalling infant in my mother’s arms.
Only Mrs