The Prodigal Daughter Returns

To Vancouver, Washington.  For her sister's wedding.

(It's probably clear from that Biblical allusion that I know nothing of that particular story other than there was a guy who went away for a while and then came back.)

I am jet-lagged, fog-brained, and completely disorient(at)ed by the oversized roads, attentive sales assistants, and cacophony of American accents.

After 9 hours of plane travel, 3 hours of car travel, and 8 hours of time travel, I arrived at my mom's house last night just in time fall into a 10-hour coma.  I managed to get a Burgerville dinner in there somewhere, making every other harrowing part of the journey worthwhile.

My sister's wedding is on Saturday (more to follow), and I am doing my best to shove 9 month's of maid-of-honour duty into three days.  Today this meant buying shoes, getting a dress fitted, acquiring appropriate undergarments, and offering my time/energy/help to my super organised, slightly stressed-out sister, who promptly turned me down.  All she's asked is that I do a reading at the ceremony.  I'm sure she'll tell me what it is at some point, but doing cold readings is pretty much 97% of my job, so it'll be fine.  Oh, and a toast at the reception, but I'm an improv pro, so that'll all work out, too.  If all I have to do is show up in a dress that fits on the day and speak in front of a large crowd of people, I'd call that my ideal bridesmaid scenario.  If I don't trip or fart on the way up to the podium, nothing more need happen.

(I genuinely have a fear of farting at my sister's wedding that has cropped up in the last week or so. I often perform in front of large groups of people, I have never farted then, and I do not have a general problem with flatulence, so I'm not sure where this fear derives from, other than my certitude that I will do something inadvertent and absurd to ruin the perfection that will be my sister's special day.  But I won't.  I promise.)

It is weird to be home.  It gets weirder the longer I live in London, the more it feels more like home.  Do I really live 5000 miles away?  How was I just there and now I'm here?  Is this delicious boysenberry jam trying to convince me to stay?  Why does everyone hate healthcare so much?  These are the questions that have plagued me for the last 24 hours.

I felt nostalgic driving down the evergreen-rich stretch of I-5 between Seattle and Vancouver, and I love seeing my family, but this place doesn't feel like home anymore.  I guess it hasn't felt like home for a while, but it's a new revelation that somewhere else does.  Maybe it's just a product of living in the same place for more than a year -- which I haven't done since college -- but leaving London showed me just how much I want to stay there.

The Curse of 27

A month and a half ago, I turned 27.

I turned 26 in a sleep-deprived, elated state whilst performing as part of a Future Cinema event at a party in Cannes.  It was at once the most exhilarating and confusing time of my life to that point.  The intervening year has brought huge changes -- the end of a relationship, a period of couchsurfing, settling into a new home and a new city, finding a job and more jobs, committing myself to my artistic pursuits -- many of which were precipitated by that fateful birthday night on the dance floor of the Stella Artois tent on the Mediterranean coast of France.

I sometimes look back at the previous year of my life and think, 'Shit, some amazing things happened, but I am so glad to be through that.'  I could look at turning 27 simply as a fresh start, another chance to recommit to myself and embrace all of the positive aspects of ageing and getting to know oneself better; but I also get it.  I get why 27 is the year of the curse.  I get why there is a '27 Club'.

Let me just preface the rest of this piece by saying that I am not suicidal, and that I do very much wish to reach my 28th birthday, and many more birthdays to come.  I am a mostly well-adjusted individual who is somewhat blindly groping her way towards the next big changes in her ever-evolving life, and I am scared shitless.

As a child, I imagined my 20s would be full of grown-up life.  I was convinced that 6th-graders were on the verge of adulthood, so imagining a person in his or her 20s as anything other than accomplished and omniscient was beyond my grasp.  Twenty-seven was grown-up, and grown-ups wore suits and and had families and took their kids with them to work so that they could see what they, too, would someday become.  Never mind that my parents were in their late-30s/early-40s when I was tagging along to the classroom and office to learn about their working lives, because to me, 25 and 45 were pretty much the same thing.

Thanks mostly to my (wonderfully supportive, non-granchildren-demanding) mother's insight, I also grew up thinking that 28 was the perfect age to start having kids.  The reasonable aspects of that deadline have begun to fade in the past few years as I realised that traveling the world, postponing career aspirations, and following the wrong men around are all valuable, life-lesson–rich pursuits, but they do not lead to financial stability, personal contentment, strong partnerships, or any of the other prerequisites (of which I was entirely unaware as a child) to starting one's own family.

Twenty-seven is an age where reality comes to a head with expectations.  I suddenly find myself closer to 30 than 20, but only marginally closer to mapping a route to my artistic career goals.  I get it, 27 is scary, even for those 27-clubbers who died in the throes of success and acclaim.  Even when you start to get what you want, knowing how to cope with that reality adjustment is scary.  A taste of success can be thrilling, but it can also spin back into self-doubt.  After all, a one-time success can be just that, and who's to say that the next thing you come up with will be any good?

The pressure of financial independence and worth begins to set in.  At 23 or 24, the temping and food service jobs seem, well, temporary.  At 27, I still have never had a job (that wasn't temporary) with any kind of financial security, let alone benefits.  I have scraped by, borrowed money, and moved to a country where at least access to health care is free and universal.

Instead of a blossoming career that unfolds seamlessly before me, I have the fruits of my own labour.  I suddenly find myself living by clichés and mantras.  'By doing things, things get done'; 'You get out what you put in'; 'Making things happen makes more things happen'. (Okay, that last, less eloquent one is my own, but it's true!)  The walls of my room are plastered with affirmations and reminders: 'Take yourself SERIOUSLY'; 'Stop being so CAREFUL'; 'LOVE and NURTURE yourself'; 'TRUST YOUR TALENT'.  I feel like a nut sometimes, and when I bring a guy home for the first time, I often wonder if I should quickly hide them away and pretend to be more normal and sane and together, but I'm not.  I am 27.  This is what I need right now.

What I have gained at 27 that I lacked at 23 is personal insight and the increasing strength to listen to my own desires.  I was always mistaken for someone older, a fact which led me to believe that I was mature and worldly beyond my years.  In reality, I was just desperate to grow up, to get to that place where I imagined I'd have it all together.  I was mature, but without the life experience to back my old soul.  As I grow older and begin to know more about myself, I only learn how much more I have to learn.  See the way I'm embracing cliché?

Hackney Weekend

Having been slightly disappointed by Lovebox on the previous weekend, I didn't know exactly what to think going into BBC Radio 1's Hackney Weekend on Saturday.  Would I spend another two hours being outraged at the lack of variety of acts and fighting the urge to leave and walk home?  I mean, I like Drum & Bass as much as the next guy, but between the hours of 5 and 7pm, when you aren't on any Class A drugs, and that seems to be ALL that is playing on every single one of the five stages, it's enough to make you want to eat your £50-ticket and storm out.  If the Groove Armada hadn't swept in with one of the most engaging, beautiful, theatrical sets I've ever seen, I think I would have done just that.

But that was Lovebox, and this was Hackney Weekend.  For starters, the tickets for HW had been FREE (and well worth the faff of an endlessly crashing website on the day of release), so if it was terrible, I could just wash my hands of it, nothing lost or gained, and walk out.  That was the contingency plan.

We were warned by email, website, and news coverage to allow two hours to get through the queue.  This seemed outrageous, but we weren't worried about catching the early acts, so we moseyed up about two hours after the 1pm start, drinks in hand, prepared to wait.  I guess if you were trying to get in for half ten when the gates opened, then it might have taken two hours.  We ended up abandoning a Strongbow and half a Crabbies because we couldn't finish them before the bag search.

We were in by 3:30, having breezed through the hyped-up security points.  We arrived at the main stage and caught the end of Rizzle Kicks.

(A brief warning: All of my video footage from this event is pretty shoddy.  The iPhone 3GS does not agree with heavy, resounding bass, so I've done my best to trim and dull the sound, but please forgive the appalling quality.)

I have had a slight crush on these Brighton boys since I first saw this video, but my Brighton-boy date has some personal beef with them involving the ill treatment of a lady friend, so we didn't stick around for long.  I always try to side with the better treatment of ladies.

We did buy a £7 programme so we'd know what was on which of the six stages at any given time, and it was a valuable investment.  We could see right away that we didn't want to see much on the Main Stage until Jay-Z at 9:50pm, so we headed to the In New Music We Trust Stage, which proved to have the best lineup throughout the rest of the day.

After a wander to suss out the food situation, we settled in out of the rain with some terrible fish and chips to wait for the Maccabees.  This ended up being our first happy accident of the day (the waiting, not the fish), as we ended up seeing Rudimental.  The opening -- which I tried (and arguably failed) to capture in the video below -- was incredible.

Yes, I had to mask most of the sound from the above clip, and it's pretty shaky and blurry, but those drummers are wearing rabbit heads, and that's the kind of theatricality that I love.  They proceeded to play a fantastic set, including this song, which has one of my favourite music videos at the moment.  It was amazing.  I can't actually remember whether we saw the Maccabees.

We made another tour of the grounds, and stumbled on Nicki Minaj.  Now, I know that Nicki Minaj is not the most amazing singer, but I am a fan of her cheek (pun intended), and I expected her to put on a good show.  What I saw was not bad, it was just exactly how it sounds on the radio.  Because it was all prerecorded.  

See that woman in clear view singing along to the Nicki Minaj track?  That's what Nicki Minaj was doing.  Singing along (sometimes) to a recording of her singing.  Sometimes she just skipped around the stage, clearly not lip-synching to the track that was playing.  I still sang along to Super Bass, because hey, it's catchy.

We caught Jack White back at the In New Music We Trust Stage (why he was there is a bit confusing) with his all-male band.  We got there early, which meant we were up front with the die-hard fans, so we were in a bit of a jump-or-be-jumped-on situation; I chose jump.  Jack White was incredible, and finished just in time for us to get a drink on the way to the Main Stage for Jay-Z.

Jay-Z was... exactly as amazing as I expected.  He opened with 'Run This Town', and as he stepped out of the darkness onto a smoke-filled stage, who should step out from behind him but Rihanna.  It was an incredible, high-energy opening to a set of greatest hits.  Check it out here (somehow the BBC's footage is slightly better than mine).

This was one of my favourite moments, and also one of the only ungarbled bit of footage I have:

After 'Dirt Off Your Shoulder' and '99 Problems', the unmistakable opening of 'Paper Planes' began playing, and sure enough, there was MIA, guest star number two.  Unfortunately, her mic stopped working halfway through the one song she came to perform, but she managed to grab one off a backup singer (rapper?) and carry-on.  

Jay-Z's set ended around 10:15, but we all knew the license ran until 11, so we eagerly (and at this point, damply) awaited the encore.  Several minutes of theatrical silence from the stage and cheers of 'More!' from the audience followed, and then a gigantic American flag dropped down from the rafters.  It looked like this, only slightly less blurry:

Jay-Z stepped out onto the stage with his signature hoodie pulled low over his face, head bowed towards the audience, back to the American flag, hands clasped in front of him.  Suddenly, and with great flourish, he pulled back his hoodie, raised his head and began-- oh my god it's Kanye!!  It was Kanye West, not Jay-Z.  They pulled the old bait and switch, and they got us all.  

Jay-Z came back out, and the show finished up with several tracks off their collaborative 'Watch the Throne' Album.  At that point, I realised that all of my footage would not only suffer the inadequate technologies of an iPhone camera, but also the constant and uncontrollable movement of my dancing.  Lesson learned: enjoy the concert, don't try to capture it for others on your new toy.  

Other valuable lessons of the day included: even if you're sure it's about to rain and you really want to get some food and find shelter, don't go to the one food stand without a queue, especially for fish and chips; your fish will be microwaved and soggy and your chips will have been refried several times for similar, heat-retaining purposes.  Also, don't buy too much booze for the entrance queue if you're arriving mid-afternoon, and don't panic about the hyperbolised security warnings: I saw everything from bottles of vodka to much harder stuff inside.  I'm pretty sure the guy who checked my ticket was 16.  

Allow me to conclude by saying thank you to the BBC for creating this free event and giving access and priority to local residents.  It was great to be on what now feels like my home turf, enjoying East London in all of its drizzly glory.

New foot!

Nearly six weeks ago, I stupidly and severely burned my left foot.  Today, the bandages finally came off.

It is discoloured and scarred for the moment, but I can't tell you how sexy it looks compared to the mound of exposed flesh/regrowing skin it was a few weeks ago.

I am off to take a shower with both of my legs inside the tub and then go to work.  Life is good.

I am an actor.

I am practicing saying this out loud.  And also writing it in public spaces.

I have always had trouble answering confidently when people ask, "What do you do?"

My hesitation derives from a combination of self-doubt (every artist's personal demon) and the idiotic responses I get from people when I say I'm an actress.

Proof!  Look at me learning lines at the last minute!

Actually, let's start here: gender.  I tend to say I'm an actor.  To me, this is a gender-neutral term (although my friend Ariel did suggest the alternative use of 'actron', and I like that), and it leaves out some of my personal qualms with the diva qualities (personal prejudice) associated with the word 'actress'.

A COMMON SCENARIO:
New Acquaintance: "So, what is it you do?"
Anne: "I'm an actor."
NA: "Don't you mean 'actress'?"

I don't remember getting this particular line so much when I was in the States, so maybe it's a British thing, but I find it infuriating.

To be fair, some of the people who ask me this question do not speak English as a first language, so it could be a sign of a genuine translation problem, especially for those whose native tongues include gendered articles and pronouns.  Nevertheless, if they continue to argue the point after I say, "No, I mean actor.  An actor can be a man or a woman," I generally sigh and walk away.

If we get beyond or bypass this first hiccup in the conversation, what usually follows is this:

NA: "That's great.  Been in anything I would have seen?"

It's probably because I have not been in anything you would have seen that this question perturbs me so (refer to aforementioned self-doubt), but I also find this type of comment naïve and reductive.

It's like when I tell people I do stand-up and they say, "Really?  Tell us a joke."  It's as though, if you told me you were an accountant, I'd say, "Really? File my taxes."  Because being an accountant means that you want to do my accounting.  Right now.  In this environment that is totally inappropriate for crunching numbers.

I also think that if I had been in something you had SEEN, you probably would have SEEN me in it, thus making the question moot.

As a result, when asked this seemingly uncontroversial question, I usually begin with, "Um..."  In that moment of verbal hesitation, I am considering whether I should just lie; whether I should tell this person that I am just a bartender (I am a bartender, so it's not an egregious falsehood), rather than delve into a lengthy explanation of an actor's struggle to be valued and paid as a part of a creative venture.

No more!  I am an actor, and a damned good one at that.  I landed a paid gig at my first London audition.  In the last year I have shot three short films (two of which I wrote or conceptualised), was flown to France to perform at the Cannes Film Festival, worked with two wildly popular and successful interactive theatre companies, and secured two commercial auditions, all without an agent or showreel.  Imagine what I'll do when I get the agent and showreel sorted.

I am an actor.

Wedding season begins

A few weeks ago, I went to my second cousin's wedding.

This is one of two second cousins that I only realised I had a few years ago when we reunited on my mom's recommendation whilst I was living in France.  I knew my mom still had cousins in the UK (my grandparents are Scottish), but I didn't realise there were any kicking around in my generation.

In the strange turn of events that has reversed the immigration of my family to the US (okay, not my whole family, just me, but it has that "full circle" sentiment), I have bonded with these cousins, and when the younger one decided to get hitched, he invited me along.

I didn't know many people at the wedding.  In fact, other than the half-dozen or so people I am directly related to, I only knew one person.  We created the false appearance of being together by arriving together, and I didn't want to cramp his style.

Weddings are obviously — if I understand movies to be an accurate reflection of life — rife with desperate (probably sexy), single women whose desperation and single status are being thrown in their faces by the ONE THING they want MORE THAN ANYTHING: marriage OR, if you get them drunk enough, any single dude in sight.

Anyway, I wanted to let my non-date get on with the mingling, so I had a lot of time for personal reflection.  Here are some things I learned (or was reminded) about myself:

1.  My camera is shit

Or I am a terrible photographer.  Or both!  My digital camera is definitely old, and when I bought it on sale four years ago before moving to France, I didn't know anything about appealing features, other than low price.

In any case, the only photos that turned out from that day were those taken by other people.

The good news is, I now have lots of fun pictures of me with relatives that I don't get to see very often, including one with a my Gran's sister's sister-in-law (you figure it out) whose name is also Anne!

The bad news is that I have no reasonable photos of the actual bride and groom, or of the ceremony itself.  Maybe I should stop taking my camera out of the house, altogether.

2. I am bad at turning off my hospitality-industry self

REALLY bad.  It is a special combination of social awkwardness and control mongering (sprinkled with a pinch of critical nature) that makes a person want to clear away champagne glasses and serve canapés rather than interact with unfamiliar human adults.

This was the first wedding I had attended in a year at which I was not a member of the service staff, and I found myself either gripping my own thigh to prevent myself from removing empty glasses from outdoor ledges, or engaging in conversations with strangers about what the service staff was doing wrong.  Because it's okay to be a dick about service when you're part  of the service industry.  Right?

3. I like holding babies and playing with children

In fact, I like both of those things way more than trying to make small talk with people I will never, ever see again.  (Refer to above feelings about interacting with unfamiliar human adults.)

I really like babies.  You might call it a 'maternal instinct' or my 'biological clock ticking away', but  I have loved babies since I was about 7 and saw myself fit to look after the 'smaller children' at family gatherings.  I was definitely not old enough to bear them, so there.  I get all warm and fuzzy when I see babies and I like to hold them and coo and cradle them back and forth.  (Also, holding a baby means no free hands to obsessively do the waitstaff's job.)  Sue me.

I also have a survival instinct.  I like to hold babies for a little while, and then I like to give them back.

Playing with children is something I probably enjoy more now than when I was a child.  Okay, that can't be true, but I was kind of an anxious nerd of a kid, and so many games seemed to involve a level of athleticism that I did not possess, so — as not to injure my fragile pride — I spent most recesses in the library.  In fact, I think they made a new rule limiting the number of recesses you could spend in the library per week because of me.

Now, though, I love playing with kids.  They are so much easier to win over than adults.  Instead of talking about the weather — and that painful, 12-minute conversation actually did happen — or explaining what it is you do, you can just be silly and make up games like Put Your Foot On a Rock!  Kids love it when you're silly.  Plus, I have become much more athletic in my 20s than I was as a child, and I can set the bar really low with games like the above-mentioned and by competing against a 4-year old.

4. I am softening on this whole marriage/wedding thing


I used to always say having kids was much more important to me than ever getting married.

I'm sure, if pressed, certain friends would recall me declaring, "I'll never get married!" in a highly impassioned manner.

I've definitely said that if I did get married, I would not have a wedding, "because there are better things to spend money on!"  I still think it's silly to spend what some people do on weddings, but I've been to some really special ones of late (discounting the ones I've worked at), and I guess I can kind of see the point.  Love and celebrating with friends and all that.

That's the end of the list but I just want to say one or two more things.


I had a lot of fun at this wedding.  My list makes it seem like all I did was complain to toddlers about the quality of service, but I only did that for a few minutes before I realised I was at the wrong table.

Thanks to the magical social lubricant that is alcohol, I did manage to have ongoing conversations with adults, and I might have even made some witty remarks.  I danced, I mingled, I ate a delicious dinner, and my trusty non-date let me pass out for the entire train journey back to London, ensuring only that I did not carry on sleeping and miss the last tube.

If more of my days were filled with holding babies, drinking pink Prosecco, and sleeping through long public transit journeys, I don't think I'd have much to complain about.

Home Sweet East London

I love my neighbourhood.

I crutched down to Roman Road today—an area known either for its tourist-attracting market or prevalent pick-pockets, depending on whom you ask—to return a library book and pick up a few grocery items.  It was (momentarily) sunny, the Cockney salesmen were shouting from their stalls, and my foot was feeling pretty good.

(I went for my latest check-up/rebandaging on Monday, by the way, and it's looking good.  Half of the skin has grown back, and my fingers are crossed for full coverage by my next appointment on Thursday.  I'm still using the crutches, but I'm able to put partial weight on my foot, as opposed to its previous state of too-sore-to-touch-ground.  Exciting stuff!)

I had completed my errands and was returning back down the road towards my house as two construction workers approached me.  One of them looked at me, made a sad face and said, "Aw, babes*, are you alright?"  I chuckled lightly and said, "Yeah, thanks."

A minute later, after a very old man briskly overtook me on the sidewalk—this probably would have depressed me last week, but today I just found it funny—, another man who was walking in front of me stepped into a doorway, turned, saw me and said, "Oh, sorry love, you alright?"

Now, British people do have a propensity towards being overly apologetic—the word "sorry" tends to be used  in place of "Excuse me", "Watch out", and "Oh my god if you don't move I will kick you"—and "Alright?" is a common East London greeting, rather than a genuine enquiry after one's well-being, but I still felt the love.

I've now been in London a year (as of the 1st of April), and I've been in my current place since July.  Moving to London was an exciting but rough transition, and it's taken me this long to finally start feeling at home.  I'm doing lots of writing and filming these days, I'm looking for new, less terrible jobs,  and members of my community call me "babes" and "love" and clear out of my crutchy path.  I may have a bum foot at the moment, but the cockles of my heart are toasty warm.

*It took me a while to adjust to the fact that everyone on this isle uses terms of endearment in a very familiar fashion.  I used to get a little bit offended and want to yell things back like, "I'm not your sweetheart!", but now I like it.