The Heart of a Storyteller

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated my site or even told a story about my life in this space. So today I’m giving myself permission to use this space to not necessarily tell a linear story, such as my breakup or my 90 days in Europe, which I initially planned on blogging about here, but then couldn’t bring myself to do for various reasons. But instead, tell you smaller stories that may or may not build on each other, but ultimately build and have built who I am.

I think its interesting that I started this with “Heart”, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my Senior Solo show I wrote in college, which was called the “Journey of a Heartbeat”. This was an aerial show performed on a 10 foot ladder and followed my heartbeat’s journey from birth, to it stopping, then restarting and all the way through college. I’ve often thought about adding the now 20 years of my heartbeats journey since its initial inception.

Slight side story, the way I even came to this idea as a solo show was because when I was at this little arts college in England (RIP Dartington College of the Arts) I got to pitch a multimedia show to devise. The pitch, which I need to dig back through those college journals for full details, was to create a show to manipulate, monitor, and then sync the audience’s heartbeats together. The idea was to go through the gamut of human emotions and how we physiologically respond to those emotions, then manipulate with words, breath, music, rhythms and ultimately be able to get the audience’s hearts to beat as one. Kind of my ultimate “One Love” concept. For the early 2000’s that was absolutely bonkers to even conceptualize, as technology was so expensive and I had no idea if it could even be a thing. I had even thought of like stethoscopes hooked to microphones that would stay muted, till all at once the theatre filled with the sound of everyone’s heart amplified and then work to make one beat together. I mean this still does kick around in my head a lot so maybe with current tech I can try someday but alas.

Back to the main story, so I had hearts and heartbeats on my mind a lot on my return from England, which I also suffered a great deal of reverse culture shock. There was an aerial theatre class I started taking on return and the way I learned to move into shapes, made me want to create a solo show with aerial aspects to it which lead to that solo show. The ladder was used to represent a ribcage and myself as the curled up heart beating within it. To then using it to represent the birth canal, to a bassinet, to a mountain, then a social scale, then the walls I slowly built up around my heart, then the cage those walls had created for me to feel unable to be loved and to love without being hurt. Not bad for a 22 year old.

This is all to say that the thing that is deepest in my heart, the way I love to connect, the way I experience the world, and the way I love to discover the world is through storytelling. I’ve been known to be a bit of an enabler when asked if someone should do or try something I’ve often responded to myself and others, “Will it make a good story? Go for it!”.

So now I am using this space to start to connect again through my random life stories, so if you’d like to follow along, I’d love to share. I can’t promise how often I’ll write, but the important thing for right now is that I am writing. I’m sharing, I’m doing the thing that makes my heart sing: telling a story.

Packing, Planning & Poltergeist

Olivea, my Disneyland friend/ co-worker/Road Trip Buddy, had requested that we push the leave date to December 7th, so she could go to the Dave Chappelle/ Chris Rock show her husband had tickets ahead of time for.

I moved my ex into the spare bedroom while he was at work. This gave me the freedom to pack in the main bedroom and stage for moving out. I made lists of furniture that I’d have to donate, things to go to storage and items to be stored in my friends house.

I was stuck in limbo for a long time on Nova’s transfer of ownership from the rescue and ex was not making it a priority.

So the decision was to move forward that I was going to NY but if I didn’t get her I would move in with my friend. Both of those paths had similar setups and required me to get a storage unit.

This is where the poltergeist started. The first week after the break up my ex acted like everything was normal and that we were just roommates and that that was hunky dory. I stopped trying to make things less awkward and smooth which then turned into my ex silently standing at random places in the house. Not saying a word, not making eye contact and me not asking why he was there or if he needed something. This went on for weeks until I left. So I was basically living with the ghost of relationship past.

I made sure to keep myself busy and out of the house as much as possible. Spending time with friends I’d no longer get to see and saying my goodbyes. I also did Yoga every single day. Thank you Yoga with Adrienne. Then binging Love is Blind and Married at First Sight playing my favorite game of spot the narcissist.

Olivea and I were getting in practice road trips with each other driving from Orange County to Santa Clarita to drop off items to a friend’s house. We were in my Nissan Leaf which we had considered taking and charging cross country.

That was until the day we drove to Santa Clarita and the charging stations by my friends house were not working. The nearest kind of charger I needed was 9 miles away and I had 11 miles left on my car.

We drove the nail biting 9 miles and got to the station with 1 mile left. It was while we were sitting charging in the now pouring rain and darkness that I decided we definitely can not risk going cross country in my electric car and I needed to get a new car.

I had wanted a Kia Niro Electric car before I had settled on the Nissan Leaf so I went to look for a plug in Niro. It was just out of my budget but I was able to score a 2019 Kia Niro that had leather seats (perfect for dog hair) and fold flat seats (needed for dog kennels).

Once that was locked in I sold my Nissan Leaf to Carvana and actually managed to have the whole thing paid off and get like $13 out of the deal. Now it was time to maximize the storage. There were luggage bars but not the cross bar, so I purchased that. Did a ton of research and decided on a soft storage roof top bag that was weather proof to add to the top of the car.

I also used vacuum storage bags to load up the top rack storage with doggy gates, and all my clothes, shoes and bedding. In the car I loaded toiletries, my laptop and desktop computers, a basket full of dog things. Leaving enough room for Olivea’s bag, some dog beds and the crate for Nova. (As Nova did not do well on car rides previously.)

After donating a lot of furniture, moving everything else I owned into storage, my friends’ places or in the car it was finally time to get out of the oppressive awkwardness that I had once called home.

After a super uncomfortable goodbye around 10pm with the ex I headed over to wait for Olivea to come back from the show and hit the road. As I waited I put on one of the temporary tattoo I had purchased in the month waiting with positive sayings on my forearm. I added the one that read “Free”.

Leaving LA

For as long as I could remember, I never thought I would move back to NY.

To me it always felt like if that were to happen it would be some sort of a failure that I couldn’t make it in LA.

Oddly enough I’ve managed to push past a lot of those feelings as that really is not how I feel at this time about this move. I have realized how much time with my family I had sacrificed and also just how much LA has changed in the 16 years I’d been there.

One of my amazing “hacks” as an actress, is that I’m also a real estate agent and have used that to manage buildings to avoid paying market rate rent for years. Which actually led to my having a remote job in property management I started during the Pandemic.

As much as I love California and my friends the mere thought of starting over again, paying rent or even managing a property as an on site manager was daunting. For those of you who don’t know, a couple of things:

Another thing you may not know, is the benefit of rent control in LA is if you locked in the price of a place when you first moved (2006 I think our 2 bedroom 1 back was $1200 a month in Hollywood) you could only have your rent raised a small amount each year.

Every time I moved it was to a certain extent out of my hands…a familiar pattern you will see. Since moving to LA in 2006 I moved a total of 13 times. Current rents in LA are out of reach for me and specifically where I was considering moving back to (South Bay area) just wasn’t going to happen.

Right before the Pandemic, I was represented across the board and had a literary agent all through the same agency, which then shut its doors in 2021. I had still been doing some fit modeling work but I was living in Orange County and thought this is where I was staying, I was even looking into possibly buying a place in OC. But life had different plans.

Let’s go back a bit to where this all started.

I went through a break up, I had said I would stay in the home we shared to allow time for him to find care for Nova, the dog he adopted in our relationship, while he worked.

My exit plan was to move in with my friends in their house with my dog Luna. A week into the breakup my ex felt he was not able to find a place for the dog or care for her and asked if I wanted her. I said yes as I did not want her to go back to the rescue, I also love that crap out of that sweet girl and I didn’t want her to have to start all over again.

But that meant there would not be room for me and my crew in my friends house with 2 dogs, 2 cats and existing roommates.

The original plan I had concocted was to live at my friend’s house for a few months, then move to Portugal and travel Europe like a local for a year and my parents would watch my dog Luna.

Adding Nova to the equation changed everything.

I seriously considered trying to find a new management job or apartment, but I really couldn’t decide if I wanted to live in LA or OC, and couldn’t imagine squeezing 2 dogs into a tiny apartment and just barely scraping by and go fully back into survival mode. Also all of those ideas would completely throw Portugal away.

My parents had recently fenced their yard in update New York so I asked if I could move back in with them. Get the girls settled with them then do a truncated version of my trip to Europe. Much to my surprise my parents were quickly onboard, which led to a cross country trip from LA to NY in under 50 hours in December.

Thanks for reading.

Marriage Material Trailer

I’m super excited that the Marriage Material Trailer is finally out. Premiere coming soon and to a festival near you. This was such an incredible process of making the first musical thesis at AFI under the direction of Oran Zegman. From months of rehearsals with some of the best women I’ve met in my life. To fun on our gorgeous set to the friendships maintained throughout the post production. I look forward to the feature and to working with so many of these amazing artists again. Check out the trailer!