Fame or Famine

A little Krissy history

I was thinking to myself last night that anyone looking for information on the world of Performing Arts is bound to wonder who I am to be reporting. After all, I gave it up. Why should anyone bother reading what I have to say about anything PA?

It has occurred to me that maybe I should report a bit more on where I am in my life and the choices that I made, as well as how I got to them. I feel I owe you an explanation. The problem is, I’m not entirely sure what that explanation is. I promise to try and make as much sense as possible.The Beginning: I was a weird kid. A seriously strange kid. I grew up as an only child in a household with a lawyer and an aspiring author, and as a result I had a vocabulary and social instincts far above my years. In addition to that, we moved house almost every year of my life, which meant that long-term friends my age were rarely possible.

Essentially, it was impossible for me to be a normal kid. I had no idea what normal kids did. I knew them when I saw them, but couldn’t have been them if I’d tried. Eventually I stopped trying.

Once, when I was young, my mother came back from a meeting with my teacher and said, “Your teacher says that you could be getting straight As. Why aren’t you?” and I replied,

“Mom, the other kids already don’t talk to me. Why would I want straight As?”

And it was true.

However, while I was a miserable failure at being a normal child, my grasp of vocab and intense empathy set me up as an outstanding actor. Even in the early days. When I was about seven years old my mother took me to see her college’s performance of Endgame and by the end of it all I was hysterical. I remember it vividly. The actors. The trash can. The pills. And that one last lonely, crippled human being waiting to die.

As we left and I sobbed, the director told my mother that I was the only one in the audience who understood the play.

Then, one day when I was nine years old, my parents entered a period we shall call The Messy Divorce period. TMD was a bad time for me. I was isolated and didn’t understand what was happening to my family. On top of everything else, my father left for the coast and I insisted we follow. As a result I wound up leaving school in the middle of the year and going somewhere completely isolated.

It was a severe shock to my system to go from a place where 6th grade was Jr. High. I had been used to a locker, gym every day with calisthenics, changing classes and moving about. Suddenly I was back in elementary school: sitting in the same desk all day; recess… I can’t describe the horror and shame I felt. Watching my family die and having nobody to turn to.

I think if I had been older I would have been in danger of committing suicide, but I was too young to really grok that there was a way out. So I survived. I survived day-to-day and moment-to-moment.

Eventually I started bouncing back, as kids do, and I entered the 6th grade talent show with two girls I had a loose friendship with. We were doing a little montage to the song Please Mr. Custer, and I was Custer. Joanna was lip synching, pleading to be left behind, and I made a stern, puckered face and slowly looked at her, dripping disdain, while on my stick horse.

The audience died.

I remember being shocked. I remember being elated. I remember howling laughter every time I turned my head. And I remember Joanna being so. pissed. off. It was her choreography, her song. She was the star and I was getting all the laughs.

Scene-stealing from the first. Thank you.

The Next Installment

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