Her

When I was ten, my father asked me if I wanted to audition to be on a TV show. I had never done acting before outside of school plays and the like, but the whole idea of it seemed exciting. Though it wasn't exactly acting, I did get the part. The show was called Newsbag, a Saturday morning kids show that was the prelude to Fox's morning cartoon line-up. We interviewed guests and read copy from teleprompters and generally tried to be as adult as we could on a show for kids and their parents.

The way I saw it it was just something that I did, no different than how people were in the band or played sports or what have you. But when I got excused an hour early each week to go the tapings, I started to see the way that my fellow classmates and people who saw me in the street reacted to me. After doing that show for two years there were people who both loved and hated me for no reason at all. And I didn't get it.

When I joined the cast of Teen Summit in '89 two years later, it was the same thing on a national scale. I remember clearly being in an Auto Parts store with my Pops and a woman saw us (He had been on the show twice) and literally ran down the aisle to kiss us both and say that she watched it every week. But while you might think that it was the kind of thing that got me laid and made me the man in high school, it wasn't. I wasn't comfortable enough with myself then to exploit it in the name of getting tail and though it opened up a lot of doors for me and led to the beginnings of my career as a writer, I often found myself wishing that I'd never done it as I would have liked to have kept everything that had to do with my high school years completely to myself. Many times, especially my first few years of college, I wish that I'd never done it.

My love affair with words started when I was eight. It was a quiet thing, a private thing. "She" got me through those boring ass lectures in Ms. Armstrong's English Class and through high school lunch hours and through the early parts of Friday Nights. "She" was who I came home to, and I had her all to myself. I didn't understand that by taking her into the limelight that I was in a way giving her up, that she would become a job, a skill, a commodity that at times would have priority lists and dollar amounts attached. I didn't think that she would ever define me more than I defined her.

It's like when I meet people now and they Google me, many of them read the blog instead of trying to get to know me directly. Instead of really wanting to know how I am, the discussion moves towards what I'm working on, information I rarely share with people I don't feel close to. Sometimes it feels like doing "her" for a living turned her into more of my whore than my lady, that I tell her I love her just to keep the magic alive when I'm really in it for the dough. When I think like that or I get into situations where it starts to feel that way, I find myself wishing that I'd never met her at all.

I've had a lot of moments in these last few years where I have looked at my art with this uncertainty. I question myself about my motivations. I try to draw a clear line between my ego and my integrity. I also, at times, have to abandon those romantic notions about art and artists when it comes to keeping the rent paid, my credit respectable and all of the shit that comes with being an adult in this society. We all make compromises and I am not to be excluded. The thing is knowing when to say when, when to hold them and fold them, and when to walk away. As my time to walk is nowhere near I keep playing my hands and putting what I have in the middle because this is the game I was meant to play. Out.