The 50-Year Secret by Julie MacNeil

Author:Julie MacNeil
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-63393-738-3
Publisher: Koehler Books
Published: 2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

“GROOVY, BABY!”

“The only thing worse than starting something and failing . . . is not starting something.”

—SETH GODIN

RAISING TEENAGERS IN THE best of circumstances is hard. Raising teenagers who have had no rules and feel like they’ve been abandoned by their fanatical cult-member mother is impossible. Steph came to live with us when she was twelve. A year later, I was in the middle of my fourth round of artificial insemination and dealing with a defiant teen who chose to express herself by smoking, drinking, and eventually sneaking out with her boyfriend. Before then, Steve and I were doing okay. Our marriage wasn’t great, but it wasn’t screaming fights and threatening divorce. We survived. We took it day by day and got through it.

But the year we got custody of all four kids, I remember carefully packing up all of our Christmas decor after the holidays. Steve had ornaments and decor from his mom, and I had some that were mine before we got married. Each January, I put them in separate boxes and labeled his S and mine J, thinking that if we got divorced that year it would be easy to separate them.

That’s probably not what someone in a happy, healthy marriage would do. Once we added angry, struggling teenagers to the fragile tightrope we were walking, we imploded.

I gave up my dreams of having a baby. I couldn’t take the monthly heartbreak each time I got my period. I was done trying. With no baby on the horizon, I decided to do something just for me. I figured it was time to pursue my long-shelved passion of acting and performing. Growing up I’d spent many a summer afternoon putting on skits in my backyard and had always loved performing, quitting only upon the ninth-grade Grease! debacle. I found out there was a lot of work for extras in TV and movies in Utah, and I started doing a bit of that and taking acting classes.

I loved it! Once, in class, I was reenacting a scene from Steel Magnolias. I was playing Sally Fields’s character when she has the meltdown at the cemetery after her daughter’s funeral. I had plenty of emotions to draw on when it came to children and loss, and I had everyone in the audience crying. Afterward they said things like, “Julie, you are so good!” and I thought, Wow. I can do this! The self-confidence that had taken a beating over the past few years woke up and emerged once again.

I went to California for a six-week intensive acting class. I didn’t discuss it with Steve; I simply said, “I’m going,” and headed off. I found an agent, got headshots done, and went for it.

I quickly realized that this was going to be a lot harder than I thought. Anytime I walked into an audition, they’d say, “Well, because of your height, we can only use you once in the background.” I got a lot of one-time jobs, but they had to wait three to four months to use me again.

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