In search of a home.

Spoilers for Season Four of Battlestar Galactica through “Islanded in a Stream of Stars” included below. Be warned.

Going home was a pretty defined concept for the first seventeen years of my life. After I left for college, however, things got a bit more…mutable. Home became—depending on when and where I was, and who I was talking to—anything from a small, shared dorm room with a bunk bed and two desks, to a series of three- and four- bedroom apartments in various states of disrepair in upstate New York and New York City, to a house in suburban New Jersey, to my first “very own place” in Cleveland, to a new bedroom with its own balcony in the house that my parents built. After my senior year, in college, though, home could never again be the blue bedroom in the front corner of the house in Michigan that I grew up in, because my parents moved. Which is fine; I love the sprawling, open house my parents built on 20 acres of semi-rural land, right in the curve of the woods, with the neon green of the spring buds filling the windows of the house with the proof of spring, and herds of twenty deer making a daily dinnertime grazing trek across the open spread of the meadow.

It’s been a relatively peripatetic life since college, with a number of years in NYC and New Jersey, some time outside of Philadelphia, a couple of years back in Ann Arbor, and a sojourn to Cleveland for grad school, before returning to New York City. For the past ten years or so, home has generally been the place where I wasn’t: Michigan when I was talking to friends in New York or at school, the city when I was visiting my parents, and anywhere else when I was living in Ohio. Although I referred to these places as “home,” I was mostly using the word as shorthand for “the place in which I store most of my stuff.” For about ten years, the places I have used the word home for have been, of necessity, impermanent, and “home” has weakened, becoming diluted with generic use.

I moved to New York City, both times, because I am an actress. It’s not just what I do—in fact, most of the time it’s not even what I do; that honor is given over to temping, or more recently, helping to operate a theater—but who I am. It’s how I identify myself to the people I meet, and it’s also how I see myself when I look in the mirror; it’s how I define myself to myself. And right now, New York is the center of the theatrical world. It is a remarkable city in which to live, and there are things about living here which I love: the May morning air on a run around the reservoir, playing hide and seek with the sunset while walking down an avenue on my way home from work, buying fresh flowers on any corner, any time of year. But I have never loved living here and I have always known that home would end up being somewhere else. I was excited to move back here after finishing grad school, and also utterly unsurprised, less than a year later, to realize that instead of living here, I feel more like I am simply trying to keep myself busy until my life can begin. And so I have begun to think about the possibility of leaving.

My family are all back in Michigan, and we’ve always been incredibly close. I’m getting to a time in my life where struggling out here by myself is not balanced by my quality of life. But, while Michigan has a number of wonderful professional theaters, the amount of work there is several orders of magnitude smaller than in New York City, and even in years where the local economy is not falling apart, is insufficient for me to support acting as a career. So what do I do? Is it worth it to me to change the way I see myself, to find another vision of who I am, if it means I’m happier in the small ways on a day-to-day basis? If I can paint the walls in a place that I own? Watch tulips that I planted come up in the spring? Call up my sister because I had a bad day and then meet her for a glass of wine after work? A place where I could send my children out to play in the afternoon and be thrilled at their stories of adventure and imagination when they came back to the house, dirty and smiling, several hours later? I wrote a piece several years ago for popgurls in which I talk about home as a process—is part of that process finding a way to re-imagine the thing about myself that I’ve always taken as a given?

You know, sometimes I wonder what home is. Is it an actual place, or is it some kind of longing for something, some kind of connection? – President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) to Admiral William Adama (Edward James Olmos) in “Islanded in a Stream of Stars”

In a serendipitous bit of timing, I am not alone in wrestling with these questions. Battlestar Galactica is hurtling toward a series finale after four brilliant seasons. In a universe very like our own but just a little bit somewhere, or somewhen else, the 39,651 remaining survivors of a catastrophic war finally found their touchstone—the mythic Earth, their one remaining idea of home—only to discover a decimated planet utterly incapable of supporting life. What do you do when the dream that sustains and motivates you cracks into an infinite number of pieces and blows away before your eyes? Who do you become when the ship that defines your job—which also defines your life—is disintegrating around you? Who can you possibly be, when you’ve touched the charred remains of your own dead body, and yet can feel your feet against the ground, blood pulsing in your ears, rush of adrenaline all the way into your fingertips? These are the questions the show poses. With the adjustment of a few life-threatening (although no less life-changing) givens, they’re the same questions I ask myself crawling out of bed early in the morning to go to another open call. And they’re the same questions we’re all asking ourselves in front of the news at night, watching the sparkling, brightly-colored vision of the American consumer culture bleed out into a pale, tattered fretwork of failed aspirations. Battlestar Galactica has three more weeks to answer. I have a couple of months. And we all have…as long as it takes.

Do you miss Mother?

I called my mother this evening to discuss the piece on CBS news about Sandra Day O'Connor's husband getting a new girlfriend. Her response: "So, are you projecting that this is what is going to happen to me and your father?" Let me just mention here that both of my parents are in extremely good health and showing no signs of senility other than the typical amount parents seem to inflict on their children. Well, um, no, I wasn't. But it seems that a new spot has just opened up on the extremely lengthy list of Things I Worry Vaguely About. Yay.

We move on to happier topics, or at least ones that don't involve aging and/or death, and as we wrap up the conversation she says, "Call and let me know how the audition goes tomorrow."

For those who haven't ever done an on-camera audition for a commercial, let me promise you one thing right now: it is less exciting than you can possibly imagine.

"Sure," I tell her. "Yeah, I'll call you up and tell you how I stood in front of a blue screen, acting out the two partial lines I have telling my husband to stop calling up our auto insurance company in the middle of the night, while the very sweet, but seemingly incompetent, intern at my agency stands off-camera, reading the lines of the husband. Then I'll pretend to be a Rachel Ray-style cooking show host whose show gets interrupted by auto insurance experts who want to make a burrito. Or something. I might have three lines in that one."

"Well," she says. "You can't do that first one without lying down with a pillow."

"And yet, I'll be standing up, miming an invisible pillow, and trying to decide exactly how much I can get away with closing my eyes while feigning sleep, before whoever ends up watching that tape starts thinking I don't have any eyes. 'Cuz that's what they're looking for to sell their product."

And that will probably be the high point of the audition.

Don't get me wrong, it's better than the audition I didn't go to last week where there was no dialogue, and my friend had to mime grocery shopping as a "struggling single mom" (so, I guess, the bags are heavier?). This one may even be enjoyable.

But still, I can tell my mom exactly "how the audition went" right now.