I was eighteen. A limo driver and a card with my name on it was waiting at baggage claim. I had just flown first class from my parents home in South Suburban Chicagoland to Los Angeles for the press junket of Mighty Ducks 3. (Yes, they made a third one. They really did).
I took that limo to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, just like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, and it has been all down hill ever since. If you believe in the metric IMDB rankings maintains, that is. In every other way, it’s been a slow, gradual ascent. But those statistics don’t get preserved on one’s resume.
The limo driver and I made small talk as she guided the big black boat via La Tijera blvd through Palms toward Beverly Hills. Over small talk, it came up that I was just about to go to freshman orientation at Northwestern University. That was when it happened. Her eyes flashed into the rear viewed mirror and met mine.
“I went there. Go Cats. Best school. I majored in theater.”
I would have no idea that a decade later I would be driving the limo for young actors; that I too would have to listen to them gripe about opportunities to publicists, safe in their own bubble that hadn’t popped yet. Only difference between me and that person who dropped me off at the Beverly Hills Wilshire Hotel was that I drove a cab. But I still had to wear a white shirt and black slacks.
My perspective on this thing we do called life has always been upside down. Or felt like I was looking through binoculars the other way round. When you spend your youth pretending to be an adult as I did, there is a reckoning that arrives and kneecaps you at the exact moment when your peers seem to take flight all around you. It can be confounding to say the least: like being sick long before a diagnosis and wondering why you suffer from phantom and chronic symptoms.
Needless to say, that sense of vertigo from being shot out of a cannon into the heights and then missing the safety net entirely leaves you with quite the bump on your head. It also warps any sense of reality that seems to be an important thing to accept as a fact if you one is to mature into adulthood like other humans.
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