It’s a travel day, which means we hop on the tour bus at dawn and drive ‘til sunset, stopping for meals and smoke breaks along the way. I’ve downloaded the audio book of Jane Fonda’s autobiography, which is a curiously intimate experience. I feel like I’m taking a road trip with Barbarella, and she’s regaling me with stories for seven hours. By the time we get to Atlantic City, I’ll know her better than most of my friends.Jane’s right in the middle of a fascinating story about when Greta Garbo told her to become an actress (Garbo was naked at the time. Seriously, read this book) when we stop in a random South Carolina town for lunch at Subway. Most of our meals are at Subway now, because my costar and I are trying to get skinny, so audiences will find us funnier. It’s a proven fact that audiences prefer their quick-change comedies performed by people with flat stomachs. It’s in a book somewhere. Look it up.
Our sound guy Max had been snoozing on the bus, and when he emerges he takes a moment to survey his surroundings. It’s disorienting, falling asleep and waking up in different cities all the time.
“Holy shit,” he says at last. “My family lives here.”
Our company is made up of theatre gypsies who’ve spent their adult lives chasing work from city to city, so it’s fairly common for at least one of us to have a story about whatever locale we pass through. I suggest Max call up his people so we can see who managed to create our bizarre sound man, but he shoots the idea down. He hasn’t been home in seven years. His mother’s no longer alive, and a twenty-minute reunion with his father over five-dollar footlongs wouldn’t really work out so well.
Max is silent over lunch, which is unusual for anyone in this group. I choose to let him keep his own counsel. When we stopped at a mall food court in Gainesville, Florida, I was overwhelmed by memories of the last place I called home before Atlanta. I was nineteen, and dating a U of F student whom I adored in that all-consuming way you can only really pull off the first time you’re in love. He was also the first boy to rip my heart out and pulverize it. Every inch of Gainesville served as a reminder of that wound. I didn’t eat lunch that day. Instead, I sat outside the mall and smoked, which only made it worse because I was beside the movie theater where we saw The Phantom Menace on our first date. A shared hatred of Jar Jar Binks became the foundation of our relationship. But that's a story for another time.
It’s a disquieting discovery I’ve made on this tour of America: When you leave a place, no matter how much time elapses or how thoroughly you think you’ve changed, part of your heart stays frozen in that precise moment in time. If you ever come back, that little piece thaws, and it feels as though minutes have passed instead of years.
This weekend, we journey to my home state of Mississippi. It’ll be the first time I’ve performed there in over a decade. When I left, I was doing children’s plays for a hundred kids or so. I return on the national tour of a two-man show, performing in a thousand-seat opera house. I’d say it’s a dream come true, but I honestly never considered the possibility of something like this ever happening. My entire family will be in attendance, plus folks from my hometown, and my fiancé Preppy’s parents. Preppy himself will be stuck working in Atlanta, which I’d seen as kind of a bummer, but now that the day is upon me I realize his absence actually scares the shit out of me. When I’m confronted with that much of my history all at once, I need an anchor to remind me I’m not an anxious adolescent anymore.
But the reason Preppy can’t be there is because he’s at home, maintaining our life, and I’m latching on to that. I’ll deal with the little piece of my heart which defrosts when I return, secure that Preppy’s absence is a reminder of where the rest of my heart lies. My talkative new friend Jane Fonda says with each passing year we become ourselves just a little more. I like that notion. The version of me approaching thirty has plenty to offer the place an optimistic eighteen year-old left behind.
