A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes

            I had big dreams as a kid.  I knew I was destined to do something momentous, and also had a fairly wild imagination.  It was in third grade that I resolved I was going to be a movie star.  I was participating in a local theater in North Carolina at the time, and someone who’d watched me perform suggested I get an agent and start doing commercials.  Instantly, my life had direction.  An agent would be the key to getting me from the stage to the screen.  I decided I had to pack my bags immediately, and head west to launch my career in Hollywood. 

            So, I told my mom.

            “Ok,” she muttered with a smirk.

            “I’m not kidding,” I said, “I have to get an agent, and I need to go to California.”

            “No,” she replied, barely even pausing with the dishes to address my dire needs.

            “What!? Why not?” I was shocked by her lack of support.  I’d heard about all these other young starlets whose parents had given up their jobs, their homes, everything they had to take their kids out to Hollywood and pursue their dreams.

            “That’s silly,” she said.

            “But there’s no way I can make it if we stay here!” I argued.

            “Tough,” she said.  “You’ll just have to wait.  I’m not taking you to California.”

            I felt like she’d ripped my dream from my hands, threw it on the ground, and smashed it with her foot like an aluminum can.  When I was famous, I thought, she would regret those remarks.  I wouldn’t be thanking her in my Oscar acceptance speech, that was for certain.  If anything, I might use the platform as an opportunity to ridicule her to the world.  “You know, my mom was never very supportive of my career,” I would say, “but this just proves you can defy the low expectations placed on you as a child.  There will always be people standing in the way of your dreams, trying to bring you down, but you can’t listen to them.  You have to be strong!” 

            Something like that.

            I saved up my allowance money over a couple months, and bought the Hollywood Creative Directory, which was a listing of every agent and casting director in the country.  I began writing letters explaining the situation to various representatives.  My mother and father would obviously be no help in the matter, but I thought possibly my grandma, with some careful coaxing, might support my aspirations.

            “Dear Ms. Sanders,” I wrote, “If you can get me an audition, I will fly out to California.  I can’t come there right now because my parents won’t let me (I’ve asked).  But my grandmother will pay for me if you can get me an appointment.”

            No one wrote back, of course. 

            Years later, in middle school, during the rise of such teen sensations as Britney Spears and Hanson, my friend Kimberly and I decided we, too, would form a pop duo; we called ourselves “Enchanted.”  Kimberly wasn’t much of a singer, but could play the piano.  I took lead vocals, and she did background vocals and played on one of those mini-Casio keyboards everyone had as kids.  We recorded Whitney Houston songs on a karaoke machine to use as our “demo,” and mailed it to Sony Music Entertainment because that was the record label listed on Whitney’s album.  My real incentive to form this group was to capitalize on my eventual fame as a musician, and segway into film and television.  I’d noticed a lot of other famous actresses, including Whitney, had done it that way, so perhaps it was my route as well.  

            “Kimberly, I just want to let you know before we get too far,” I warned, as we dropped our package off in the mail.  “As soon as we make it big, I’m going to leave Enchanted to focus on my acting career; you’ll have to be a solo artist.  I hope you can understand?  Acting just means everything to me.”

            “Sure,” she replied.  Kimberly could give a shit about any of this; I think she just wanted to meet Taylor Hanson since we both had a crush on him.  I, on the other hand, sought fame and fortune and needed a creative way to get there as fast as possible.  We did receive something back in the mail from Sony, but it was merely our original package—crushed and unopened—with RETURN TO SENDER stamped on the front.  Again, there was my dream: lifeless and smushed.

            This was purely a setback though, I told myself.  Actually, this was exactly what I wanted.  Everyone who was famous had to overcome obstacles and rejections, so this was like God telling me I was getting closer.  A step in the right direction.  One day I would talk about this to the press; I’d say how Sony opted to not even bother opening my package, but I’d kept on going.  I didn’t give up because you couldn’t give up or you would forfeit your chances.  Then I’d chuckle. “And hey,” I’d say, “Look at me now!”

            However it went, I knew it was going to happen.  I was going to be famous.  My story may not have paralleled that of others, but this was a positive and promising sign.  Everyone’s tale had to be unique.   If you were destined for stardom, as clearly I was, you knew.  That was what set you apart.  Other people figured it would never happen to them, but us burgeoning icons, we were aware from the early years.  We were confident our name would one day be in lights.

            My mother never bought into my bold ambitions.  When I told her I was going to be an actress, she looked at me the same way she did as when I said I’d only agree to folding laundry if there would be a recoupable effect on my allowance.

            “Are you living in a fog?”  She replied, with her hands on her hips. 

            I assumed this was rhetorical, though periodically felt the need to respond. 

            “Wake up!”  She went on.  “Come join the rest of us.”

            The “rest of us” however were leading horrible lives as nurses and accountants, living in boxed houses in small towns.  Forget it.  Bring me the glitz and the glamour.           

            “I am awake,” I replied.  “Look at my eyes.  Does it look like I’m sleeping?”

            After giving it more thought, nevertheless, it actually made sense.  Even now.  I began to notice that, in my world, imagination provided significantly more insight than cold, hard facts.  When I didn’t know, I dreamed; my margin of error slightly larger than most.  After much thought, I decided I was okay with being permanently stuck in a daze.  There were more possibilities that way.  Life remained brighter, more fantastic.  Your options were limitless.

            Once I lived in Hollywood however—once I worked in Hollywood—my perception of it all became significantly skewed.  The fog I was living in mixed with the smog I was smothered by, and it was a cloudy sight that lay before my eyes.  But the dreamers kept it real.  We knew that our ideas could change the world, and we believed that if only we could bypass this haze of doubt and fear and hopelessness and lack of faith, we would be able to tell our stories.  It would be worth it.  So we tried.  We kept on going, even when they said it wasn’t so.  That was how we got by each day.