LISA: Funny about people you’ve grown up with. You ever get the feeling we’re still kids, pretending we’re grown up? You pretending to be a cop, Ron making-believe he’s a doctor…
PHIL: What about you Lisa?
LISA: Pretending to be a woman, I guess.
- Murder Once Removed, by Irving Gaynor Neiman

Yesterday, for the last time, I put on my gold heels, Helmut Lang blazer, pearl earrings and red lipstick, and strode around in the spotlight like I owned the town. It was my last day as Lisa Martin Manning, handsome and wealthy housewife and possible conspiracist to murder in the Coach House Theater Players production of Murder Once Removed.

Saying goodbye to Lisa feels hard because she has so much going for her. Poise, style, confidence, cunning, and the intense desire of every man around her. Putting aside the question of her involvement in her husband’s murder during the first half of the show, she has a lot to offer as a role model. Some people are born with extraordinary confidence and a sense of freedom to do and be however they want, whenever they want … but for the rest of us, it often takes some role modeling.

I guess this is the beauty of acting! You get to try on other people’s personalities and proclivities. Maybe some reflect parts of who you are … maybe some allow you to grow new layers of selfhood. As Lisa, I got to shamelessly flirt in one scene, manipulate in another, and interrogate in the next. Oooh, did she have some zingers.

It’s been eons since I did any acting or improv. I went to drama camp a bunch of summers in a row … but in those overcrowded musical-theater productions, kids like me with, shall we say, less impressive vocal talent were assigned smaller roles. My high school didn’t really have theater, and when I went to my first audition in college years later, I didn’t even get a call back. But several of my friends did. I never tried again.

Until last year, that is, when I was pushing my baby around in the stroller and walked by an old carriage house in my suburban-ish city neighborhood and saw a sign for upcoming auditions. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going on that cold winter night—I needed to see for myself what it would feel like in there before I heard anybody else’s opinions, let alone their hopes or fears for me.

I can’t thank my 2022 self enough for daring to go check it out. I was cast in a slapstick comedy about nuns — the Sisters of Perpetual Sewing — who were secretly making wine as a way to keep their convent solvent. I’d auditioned for the lead, a strong young journalist who drags her ex-fiancee-colleague into an undercover reporting assignment …. but I was cast as one of the nuns.

This hit a tender spot in me, an adolescent wound where I once believed everybody saw me as a kid, or at least as a cliche virginal nerd, rather than a woman. My casting as Sister Philomena seemed to confirm it.

When the same director offered me the part of Lisa this year, that wound felt a little more healed. But there was a feeling of pressure, too: Now I had to deliver as this woman.

But I’d become a person whose beauty routine was mostly tinted sunscreen and tinted chapstick, and mascara for fancy occasions. The only time I blow-dry my hair these days is when the weather was below freezing.

Truth was, I’d resented the girls I knew in high school who blew out their hair, or flat-ironed it, or whatever they were doing. (I remember we were all in a war against frizz.) I said it was vain and shallow … but the deeper truth? I’d definitely tried it once or twice and failed miserably. I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t within my capacity to perform this apparently essential feminine task. I wasn’t woman enough.

How would I be Lisa? In a frantic rush I went to Sephora and Ulta to build up my arsenal. I bought some big hair rollers and a round brush, illuminating serum and a new eyeliner, even though I can never get eyeliner to work right, with the perpetual hope of a credulous consumer.

Bringing my stash of goodies home, I felt more glamorous already. Now I had the secrets of the starlets! I watched a couple video tutorials from the brands whose products I’d gotten, and then it was time to put myself and them to the test.

I tried. Really hard. I arranged a seat in front of a mirror so I could sit comfortably for as long as my blowout would take. I sectioned my hair with clips to take things in an organized fashion, one at a time. I worked the brush with one hand and the dryer with the other, stretching my hair straight out from my scalp, twirling it around the brush, rolling it back toward my head, blasting it with heat, unrolling halfway, twisting and re-rolling, tugging the hair taut, and unfurling the whole section.

So help me Aphrodite, it actually worked. There fell the hair in a sleek, smooth, gently bouncy curtain about an inch wide. Over and over, round and round I went, getting each little handful perfectly dry. After half an hour, I’d done every section.

It was glorious! My hair curled in at the ends, slid over itself smooth as satin, straight but not flat, all ‘round my pretty little head. I had shampoo-commercial hair. I had popular-girl hair. I had done it. I could do capital-W contemporary western white Woman after all. I was fairly ecstatic, and extremely fixated with my hair, pulling out a little brush to re-smooth it, slicking the top and the ends with hair oil, checking the mirror every chance I got.

Lisa taught me this.

And now that I can go back to air-drying my hair … to serum-and-scrunch techniques .. to putting it all up with a claw clip … now I know that it’s a choice I’m making, rather than a fate I’m resigned to. I still don’t want to devote a half hour to blow-drying my hair every time I wash it. But the next time I have to put my fancy pants on, if someday I have to go ask a bank for a loan or give a TED Talk or accept a major award, I’ll know what to do. And hopefully I’ll have some muscle memory of Lisa, reminding me how I can be.

Apr 24 Pretending to be a woman

Jun 21 June has been the cruelest month (Pt 1)

Dec 5 8 Nights of Haiku: a Holiday Project