Episode I: Stuck in the Climb

It starts with the plane. I duck in and it’s tiny and compressed and frightening.

I’m scared.

I’m traveling alone for the first time, to a foreign enormous city where I will then have to exist alone. I’ll be flying back to rural North Carolina in ten days, but I’m not sure I ever will be coming home, and I’m getting this sneaking suspicion that this self I’m leaving to find inevitably paralyzes herself within the circle of her own arms and the plane is tiny.

Apparently it’s time for me to develop some sort of fear of flying.
That’s all I need, because now I’m Julie in Code Name Verity, terrified of heights, curled in the back seat of a tiny aircraft under fire, stuck in the climb, and the climax of the story comes when I fight off the paralysis and leap from the plane to land in occupied France. So it can’t really be that hard for me, Rachel, to open my eyes. The force of the climb pulls my innards away and I leave something toxic smoking on the tarmac. I make myself look out the window and watch what I leave behind.

I spend a while trying to remember what you’re supposed to think about on plane rides—I think it’s something about how vast the world is or how powerful mankind has become or maybe how if physics suddenly stopped working you’d be plummeting in a metal box from 10,000 feet. None of that seems particularly relevant, so I end up focusing on the scales. I consider myself to be quite an expert on scales, having spent dozens of hours comparing them in what I like to call the Improbable Puppeteering Adventure. I realize the states we pass are just the same patterns repeating over again—dirty squares of sidewalk turn into uniform roofs turn into geometric city blocks turn into fields. It’s all the same. I’m the only thing left with a distinct shape. My face stays glued to the window the whole trip.

LaGuardia airport is just north of Manhattan, so for a precious ninety seconds I can see the whole shape of the island. There are so many shapes: the swath of green, the skyscrapers, the jagged triangles and trapezoids of SoHo that’ll I’ll be hopelessly lost in in a mere 24 hours. I’ve studied my maps and I don’t know where the theatre district is just yet but I can point out exactly where to find the Institute from The Mortal Instruments, where to find Simon and Clary’s favorite bookstore, where to find the entrance to the Seelie Court.

The airport in which I arrive looks disappointingly like the one from which I departed. It does take 50 minutes to drive the 3 miles to my studio apartment, which would never happen back in good ole’ No’ Cackalacky. I’m excited about the infamous New York traffic until the cab driver explains that the drive’s taking four times as long as it should.  He asks me if I’ve been to the city before. I say I haven’t. At first he doesn’t believe me. This island is his world—what does that make mine? He deposits me on the corner of 2nd and 91st.

It takes me multiple tries to make it into the right vertical column of rooms. Trial and error will become a theme of my trip. At one point during this process I find myself clutching my bag in a narrow hallway with peeling sick gold paint. Doors are unmarked and spaced impossibly close, making it impossible to tell which room the baby is crying from, where the barking dogs are penned. The thin walls make it seem like the crying and the barking are coming from all rooms at once. In desperation, I stick my key into a door at random. It fits, but doesn’t turn. What does that mean? Should I force it? Can I risk getting caught with the wrong accent and my key stuck in a stranger’s door in ragged apartment complex in New York City?

It’s a long time before I find the right apartment, and when I do, it doesn’t feel like home.

Episode II: Searching for Fey, Finding Faye

The New York subway actually looks like a subterranean lair. How can the masses of people around me be so absorbed in their electronic pacifiers when the walls are crawling with the words ‘Here Be Dragons’? I relocate my mental fey Seelie court from central park to the J-line. It’s easy to make the beautiful wilderness twisted and terrible, but it would truly be a show of might to render these scarred tunnels beautiful.

Six hours and one imaginative subway ride after touchdown I’m weaving back and forth along half a street block. This search technique will come to characterize those parts of my trip where I’m not sticking my key in stranger’s doors. Eventually I admit defeat and solicit assistance from a bouncer. He directs me, hulking outside a door that’s slightly less frayed than the others, but it still takes me three passes to make it. The rehearsal studio I’m looking for is on the 11th floor of an unmarked building.

At first I think I’m in the wrong place. There are no females, and only one other under-fourty, and surely I must stick out like a sore thumb? I do, I quickly realize, but not necessarily because of my gender, age, or curly hair. Plenty of these people have been meeting regularly for ten years, they know each other intimately well, and Hello, Who the hell are you?

I perch on a chair, script clutched tightly in shaking hand. The group moderator dutifully approaches: “You’re an actress?”
“Yes,” I automatically agree. “Wait, no. I’m a writer. I’m here with a play. But I act, too. If I’m needed.” I’m here if you want me, but I expect nothing.

Apparently I am wanted. These men are all writers, and they all write young, striking urbanites, larger than life, a life they’ve never lived. I turn away from the moderator to come face-to-face with an aging hipster. His brightly-colored suit jacket doesn’t fit his protruding belly, and there’s a bow tie wrapped around his wrinkled neck. “You must read Faye,” he says without preamble, then he catches himself. “I’m sorry, what is your name? And will you be acting for us today, Rachel? Yes, Faye, you must read Faye. I will ask if you can read Faye.” He trundles off. Faye. What an unusual name, I think as I sit down. The closer-to-middle-age man next to me leans in. “I have a character named Faye, too,” he confides.

“Then I guess I’m Faye.”

?
Episode III: Not Being Misunderstood

I’m in a tiny studio on the 11th floor of a building in midtown Manhattan. It’s six hours after I landed in the city, and I’ve managed to find myself sharing my own work and reading others’ in a playwriting collective’s meeting.

The critiques are the harshest I’ve ever heard. (“All the scenes we’ve seen tonight are just talking heads. There’s nothing to them,” crows the intimidatingly elderly lady sitting in front of me.) It’s a battle three times over to distribute the prepared copies of my scene, and I attempt to hold my breath the entire time it is being read. As expected, it does not impress, and the primary criticism is that the thoughts I write are too insightful for the teenage characters who speak them. I keep my teenage mouth shut.
I do read the hipster’s character Faye, who turns out to be a wilted starlet. I don’t think I imagine the change in the atmosphere as I tiptoe to the front of the room. Most of the writers have not heard me speak, and they’re at the least curious. What’s a girl doing here? A girl playwright? I open my mouth to be immediately interrupted. “You need to play older,” the author calls out, words slurring with haste. “Cynical. Bedraggled. Past your prime—“
The long-suffering moderator interrupts: “—If you could not direct the actors, please.”

I take a breath and turn to my scene partner, a man twice my age who plays an up-and-coming actor half the age of Faye. Doesn’t matter. I know what I’m doing. Mandy Slade, Velvet Goldmine, duped one too many times, unwilling to entertain even Arthur’s sincere interest. I light an invisible cigarette, fumbling with the lighter for a moment before finding my stride in the pull.
The rest of the scene flows from there.

Once I finish, the playwright rises and begins to thank me, but he’s interrupted by a tiny ancient man with tears in his eyes. “You’re the best actor I’ve ever seen,” he gushes. I stare. He smiles and the tears immediately disappear. “Well, maybe that was too much. But you really are a very good actor.” He walks away. I’m still staring. Other people come, say things to me. I do some nodding and smiling, and try not to think about how far off of the ground I am. I’m an “actor” now—no one calls me an actress any more.

I realize I’m shaking as I step out onto the street. I jump when someone calls my name from behind. It’s the man I sat next to in the playwriting collective meeting, one of the ones with a character named Faye. He slips me his card. He thought my play Acrylic had potential. He wants me to produce it, and he wants to hear about it when I do.  He recommends local studio spaces and casting opportunities, and in so doing implies that he believes me to be a native New Yorker. I’m flattered, but also anxious. There’s no way I can keep up this façade of competency for another ten minutes. I don’t even know which way the subway is. I’ll have to pull out my map and then I’ll be revealed for what I am—a tourist.

Eventually the conversation tapers off and he says goodbye. This is the moment of truth. I take a breath and then begin walking briskly east, hoping that I’m heading toward some sort of residential area. He doesn’t stop me, so I figure I’m at least not heading into some sort of gang territory. It’s close to midnight.

I go three blocks before I let myself stop. The man is gone and I’ll never see him again. But something really exciting just happened, something that would never have happened a few months ago because I would never have had the courage to let a stranger read my work. Actually, I would never have had the courage to keep looking for the studio even once I was convinced it didn’t exist, or for that matter to decide to go to a playwriting collective meeting at all. Honestly, up until only very recently I would not have had the courage to fly into a strange city and explore it on my own for two weeks. A lot has changed.

I feel powerful, and free, and enormous, and warm. Particularly warm, actually, and I seem to be standing in a spotlight. I look up, and there’s a brightly lit sign directly above me. A sign with a very familiar street name.

I’ve blundered my way onto Broadway.