“Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.”

—RAY BRADBURY

When I graduated from Rhode Island College, a voice somewhere far in the recesses of my psyche, which was always true, honest, and in hindsight, beautifully cognizant, that I didn’t have the courage to always listen to, but when I did, it served me perfectly, steered me to apply to a six-week summer program at Circle in the Square Theatre in New York City. I got accepted after the URTA Audition in New York.

I got a full-tuition grant to the six-week program, but I needed money to live in New York City for those six weeks. A great woman ran the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts at the time, Iona Dobbins. She was dedicated to artists and the arts. I cried in her office begging for money. She listened to my sob story, gave me a napkin, and said, “I’m going to get you the money.” And she did. She got me a $1,200 grant.

That incentivized me to earn the rest of the money I needed to go to New York and study at this great theater.

That summer, a month before the program started, I worked in a horrible factory. To actors who say, “Oh, I don’t care, I’m not going to compromise myself artistically, even if I have to live in poverty,” I say, “You’ve never lived in poverty. If you’ve ever been poor, as a child or adult, it’s no joke.”

I worked in factories where those in unemployment offices were sent. You signed up to work in whatever place needed laborers that day. At six o’clock in the morning, you crowded into a van and were driven to a factory. In Central Falls, I knew people who worked in factories—people I

grew up with, undocumented immigrants who came with no job skills whatsoever. Even my mother worked in factories.

I worked at a factory where you just made boxes. That’s all you did. You made boxes. All. Day. Long. I worked at another factory and then started working at P-PAC, which is the Providence Performing Arts Center, doing telemarketing work, which is horrific. People scream at you through phones: “Stop fucking calling me on the phone! I don’t want you calling me. Ba-ba-ba-ba.” It was great training for an actress because it’s the height of humiliation, the height of rejection. I had a technique where I would always ask for the man in the house if the woman answered. I would use my sexiest voice. Almost always, the woman would ask, “Who may I ask is calling?” or “Who is this?” Then I had them. I could keep them on the phone. That was all I had in my bag of tricks.

My life was topsy-turvy that summer as I earned enough money to supplement the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts grant so I could go to New York and just enjoy my time doing the work as an actor at Circle in the Square Theatre.

Once I got to New York, I also got a job passing out flyers in Times Square for Tamara: The Living Play. It was almost like dinner theater. You walked into a building on Fifth Avenue, where you stood and watched the play—a murder mystery—unfolding in the room, right there. Then each character veered off to a different room, and you had to choose which character to follow. At the end, the mystery culminated in the same room where it started. During intermission, you were served dinner.

A friend, who’d also been a student at Rhode Island College, was the head of publicity. “Viola, I will pay you $20 an hour in cash,” she said, “if you pass out flyers about the play in Times Square.” So that became one of my jobs during the six-week program at Circle in the Square. I only passed the flyers out and didn’t have an acting role because I was just out of school, didn’t have an agent, and newly arrived in New York from Podunk Rhode Island. I certainly wasn’t a professional yet.

I thrived at Circle in the Square. I loved, loved, loved New York! I lived in a loft apartment in Gramercy Park with two women I knew from Rhode Island College, Donna and Mary. New York kick-started the part of me that was always friggin’ scared. It catapulted me out of my comfort zone. New York was just a different vibe. The crowds, the smell, the noise, the buildings, the life. Men whistling at you as you walked to the subway. In

one day, I learned how to ride the train. I just did it. I sampled restaurants and delis owned by people from all over the world.

I received my best acting training, ever. I’ve had a lot of wonderful acting teachers. Ron Stetson, Dr. Hutchinson, Rob Dimmick, Elaine Perry, David Burr. But Alan Langdon, in that six-week program at Circle in the Square Theatre that summer of ’88, was the absolute greatest I’ve ever had. I came to life under the tutelage of teachers there, like Jacqueline Brooks. Great actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Felicity Huffman, Kevin Bacon were students. It was no-holds-barred, courageous scene study, acting study, voice, movement, everything. It was comprehensive, a training program where you couldn’t emotionally hide.

Alan himself was, well, a strange man. He was mysterious. Looking back, I think he was just quiet. As artists, we’re so used to the flamboyant personalities, and we’re almost offended when someone is not that way. Alan’s flamboyance was in his intense quiet observation.

There were close to thirty kids in my group, and more than a hundred students in total, and you would pair off to do scenes. Everyone was coming from a different part of the country and staying in apartments in different parts of the city. We would go to each other’s apartment or, sometimes, practice a scene on a stoop. We would come in, perform the scene, and Alan would just stare. Then he would get up and stand in the back of the room and then sit again. It was as if he was silently watching a football game and internally getting anxious because his team was close to winning. The scene would end and there was always deafening silence. He would either ask a series of questions or do something to wake you up.

One actor—Emily—who had a very, very soft voice and always looked nervous was a part of the group that summer. Emily always looked scared. She was enormously sweet and accommodating, almost too much so. She was a part of the program not because she wanted to be an actor but wanted to find herself. Or heal? From what I didn’t know. An actor brings their story with them in the work—past, present, fears, mess, humor, trauma.

Emily decided to do a scene from the play Agnes of God by John Pielmeier. The story is about a young nun who becomes pregnant inside the convent. She insisted she had no intercourse and says God impregnated her. There’s absolutely no evidence of anyone on the grounds of the monastery or in her room. At a certain point, she begins to bleed from her hands, a stigmata. It becomes apparent that the baby may be a case of immaculate

conception. The Mother Superior calls in a court-appointed psychiatrist to make an assessment. But the conflict in the scene Emily chose is between the insistent logic of the psychiatrist and the passionate insistence of the young nun whose faith in God is fervent.

The scene started with the actor playing the psychiatrist who had pinned Agnes, Emily, to the wall, screaming, “Agnes, whose baby is it? Tell me! Tell me?” She’s supposed to shout back, “It’s God’s!” Emily whispered, “It’s God’s,” barely audible.

I cringed knowing Alan would dig down deep to see what was blocking

her.

There was the usual silence after the scene. Alan looked at Emily and

finally said, “Where’s your voice?” Emily was shaking at this point. She said she didn’t know. Alan insisted, “You must know. Who took your voice?”

Emily and I were really close that summer. We were both painfully shy and awkward, and people like that usually find and cling to each other. We talked about life all the time and she just kept saying she wanted to get better. Better from what I didn’t know. But even I wanted to know where she lost her voice, and why she always looked scared, jittery.

Showing intense emotion, she finally said softly, “My father would hold me down on the bed when I was nine and beat and rape me. He would cover my mouth.”

The whole class fell silent. My heart raced.

Alan asked if she wanted to do the scene again. She wanted to. She was braving something and it wasn’t acting. This class was a tool to unlock a deep pain, to save that little nine-year-old girl. Her scream was the sound of an animal that’s about to be slaughtered by a pack of wolves and is calling on every strength left in its body to fight, to live. It was also a sound of loss. “It’s GOD’S! THIS BABY BELONGS TO GOD!” She fell to the ground in a heap. Alan held her. We were all in various stages of shock and tears.

Me? I was jealous. All my scenes were emotional, well explored, I thought. But this was next level. I was broken and my brokenness brought me here, to acting, to New York, to wanting to heal and live and feel alive!

Stanislavski, Sanford Meisner, Stella Adler, all teachers from the famed Actors Studio, said to study life. It’s those moments that you study in life that get injected into your work. You’re creating human beings. You’re not

just creating a different walk, a different manner of speech, and a different emotional life. Circle in the Square pulled that home for me and they did it with love. Alan Langdon is still teaching at Circle in the Square Theatre.

After the six-week summer program, they ask one student to join their theater. They asked me. I declined, saying, “Circle in the Square is a great training program, but I want a program where I can get a job afterward.” I wanted a training program where I knew that as soon as I finished, I would be working as an actor, that I would have an agent. Without an agent, you don’t get jobs. I wanted to be able to say that I trained as an actor, now I’m working as an actor. I wanted to be assured I’d have a paycheck to cover my bills, put food on the table. I didn’t want to go back to Central Falls.

I asked Mark, another good friend of mine who was in the program at the time, “What program can I get into where at the end of it we’re auditioning for people who can actually get you a job?”

“Well, those would be Juilliard, Yale, and NYU, Viola. Those are the programs, and maybe SUNY Purchase, where they have auditions in the fourth year,” he replied. “They called them league auditions back in the day because there was a league of thirteen schools. But now only these four invite agents and casting directors from all over, for your fourth-year auditions.”

Toward the end of my gap year, I applied to Juilliard, one of the four Mark named. I would have applied to all three schools, but I only had money for one application fee.

People have asked if I got connected at Circle in the Square, if I developed a network from being there. I suppose there was an acting network in New York, but I’ve realized there is no true network, no rhyme or reason or textbook way of getting into this business, except finally getting a job that leads to the next job and the next.

I decided my next move was to get training at one of the programs Mark told me about, but I had missed my boat to be accepted and enrolled for the coming year in any of them. I decided to take a gap year. I knew I needed to grow up. Circle in the Square Theatre is smack-dab in the middle of Manhattan. I was taking the subway on my own. I was living in an apartment in Gramercy Pack with two friends from Rhode Island College. I never had sex, never had a boyfriend, never lived on my own. Never traveled overseas. I just wanted to grow up. I wanted to experience life. I

wanted my life to be as expansive as I felt my mind was, my imagination was.

I remember praying. I was a nonchurchgoing person. But I had started praying when I was younger before bed every night in order to sleep, to calm my anxiety. I prayed harder when my father was beating MaMama, especially when it got bloody or brutal. I prayed when he slit her arm open. I prayed when he stabbed her in her leg or in the neck with a pencil. It’s all I could think to do. Now, at twenty-one, I prayed that my life would manifest in a way that made me worthy to become a professional actress, travel out of the country, and get a boyfriend.

In that year off, I became a professional actress. My first professional production was in Providence, Rhode Island, at Trinity Repertory Company in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. After I came back from those six weeks training at Circle in the Square Theatre in New York, I acted at Trinity Rep for a year. The artistic director was Adrian Hall. I had auditioned for him, knew him. He had seen my work. He retired during my gap year, but we did maybe three plays together. After he retired, director Susan Lawson, whose shitty apartment in New York I would later sublease when I went to Juilliard, took over for him.

I juggled a day job and a night job. I returned to work at Providence Performing Arts Center as a telemarketer during the day. The Trinity Rep performances were at night, so I had my days free. The acting training of humiliation/rejection at the Performing Arts Center by day; then actually performing professionally in a play at night.

Danielle, who was by then eleven, and I became even closer during my gap year. Although I had a roommate at the time, sometimes she would sleep over. Or I would sleep at my mom’s house on the floor with her, because MaMama and MaDaddy’s apartment was so small. That’s why I got my own apartment in Pawtucket. My roommate was a very nice friend of a friend and the apartment was beautiful. The landlord, however, was a raging racist. I haven’t met anyone like her since. She was Brazilian. Aghast when I moved in, she thought I was a prostitute because she saw me waiting for a bus.

When my roommate, who was the only one she would talk to, said I was an actress, she didn’t know what that meant. She said I wasn’t allowed to have visitors, even my little sister, because Black kids destroy property. She said she was terrified of being raped and killed by me or any Black man

I invited over. She kept a baseball bat near her door. Many years later, after I moved to Los Angeles, I came home to visit, and during a trip to the mall, I saw a woman selling jewelry at a pop-up shop. It was her. “Where are you from?” I asked and she replied, “Brazil, sweetheart.” She proceeded to be extraordinarily kind. I put her on the list of racists who like Blacks from a distance.

By then I understood that housing redlining was a part of our culture— North and South—affected by Jim Crow. Whether you have an education or not, the ugliness of racism comes down like a hammer. It enveloped my life when I was eight and at twenty-three, I was still bullied by it. When you have little to no money, there’s no way to combat it. Where could I live? My sister Deloris was living with her boyfriend-soon-to-be-husband in a one-bedroom apartment. My sister Dianne lived in Maryland, and my sister Anita had two children and was having her own challenges.

I wish I had had the power, resources at that time to tell that racist woman to shove her apartment up her ass but MY ass would’ve been on my parents’ floor. That was like being sentenced to live out my childhood again. I was still running.

In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone there’s a role for an eleven-year-old girl

—Zonia. Danielle auditioned for it and got the role. This was in a professional production directed by Israel Hicks, who was probably one of the greatest theater directors in the business. Terrific actors came in from New York. It was a great production. Danielle thrived in it and got great reviews from the Boston Globe, the Providence Journal, and several other newspapers. She was also getting straight As in school.

After school, she would take the bus from Central Falls to downtown Providence for rehearsals and once we were in production, she would take the bus to make it to the theater on time. Man, we were still running for buses all the time. I could easily make Danielle run by egging her on, “Danielle! The fastest runner in Central Falls.” At night, after the play and we were exhausted, I would take her back home on the bus and stay with her at my mom’s house, because it was too late to walk to my own apartment, which was close to Mom’s.

A lot of the fighting between my parents had subsided by this point although the alcoholism was still rampant.

While rehearsing Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at Trinity Rep, two big events happened. I auditioned for Juilliard and I met David, the man in my

life for the next seven years. David was in the play.

David played Jeremy and I played the role of Molly. He was a professional actor who came from Boston. To me, it was like meeting a Black Marlon Brando. He was a great actor. I saw him. He came to me. I thought I was completely, absolutely, without question in love. He was my first boyfriend.

David was older and blacker than Black. He had immersed himself in Black history and Black consciousness and Black literature. His favorite type of music was jazz. He was also a film enthusiast. He would start watching films early in the morning and wouldn’t stop until the next day. His harmonica or mouth harp skills were spectacular. It all made me feel so, so . . . grown. We would go out after the play to the bar next door. We bonded over Long Island Iced Tea. I liked Long Island Iced Tea because the drink actually tasted like iced tea. I would only have one. I was a twenty- three-year-old big girl now and a professional actress, using the lingo, doing what professional actors do, hanging out with experienced actors.

Once a play is running, you have your days free. That’s when I traveled to NYC to audition for Juilliard.

I wanted to be able to audition. An actor doesn’t just show up and say, “I want the job.” An agent is a conduit, the connection between talent and work. Not all agents are created equal. Some agents can’t get you an audition for one line on a TV show. My goal was to attend Juilliard and graduate with a top-notch agent.

I got my ass on that train in Providence to NYC, thinking I would knock out the audition and make it back for my 7:30 p.m. call for Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at Trinity Rep. In theater, 7:30 p.m. is your half-hour call. That means you have to be at the theater at 7:30 p.m. That’s when the stage manager does a roll call. That’s like marking your timesheet. You have to be in your dressing room at 7:30 p.m.

I had no idea that when you audition to get in Juilliard, the auditions take place over three days. I found that out much later after trading admissions stories with classmates. I didn’t even know Juilliard was a four- year program. Yale is three years. NYU is three years. I was simply intent on going to a school where I could get more training and then an agent . . . and I wanted to get better.

Ignorant of the three-day audition regime, when I received my audition slot, I allocated one day, thinking, Well, I’ll just go up for the day and tell

them, “You’re going to tell me now whether I’m in or I’m out. Because I have to get back. I have to get back on the train.” It took four and a half hours to get there, four and a half hours back, and a half hour from Penn Station to Juilliard, which is Midtown Manhattan, at Sixty-Sixth Street and Broadway. I had just forty-five minutes to devote to the audition.

I was pretty confident that I was going to get into Juilliard because I didn’t know better. I felt I had power in my acting. I had a feeling I was good. The longer I had been in theater settings, the more confident I became. And New York City was very easy for me to navigate, even coming from Central Falls, Rhode Island.

The day I went to my Juilliard audition, the clock was ticking. I got on the first train smoking and arrived early. I weighed about 165 pounds and was nervous, sitting in a room with dozens of skinny actors who had been in magnet schools since they were two years old, dance classes since they were toddlers, all warming up, doing their ballet techniques. I sat there, waiting my turn. I had no sense of what to wear so I had on poufy jeans, a huge red sweater, and a headwrap that had wide silver, purple, and gold sparkles. I was too inexperienced to understand that any of that could be a distraction from my performance.

My two audition pieces were lines of Celie in The Color Purple and something from The Learned Lady by Molière. You needed a contemporary and a classical piece. Usually, three and a half minutes at the most. That’s a true monologue. Sometimes you get a little longer. But that’s usually the standard. I was confident in my pieces.

At Juilliard you audition for three or four main teachers and if you’re good enough, you go on to the next level and do your audition again. Then you go to the next level, and you audition again until the entire faculty has seen you. Then there are interviews. Applicants stayed in hotels, allowing time for all of that. I only had forty-five minutes and no idea how unorthodox that was. I did my monologues, then said “Thank you” and returned to the room filled with actors who looked like they had been in training for this moment since they were two years old.

The atmosphere is staunch, authoritative hierarchy; the faculty are the boss and absolutely strict about classical training; you speak when you’re spoken to. I put my hair rag back on and said, “I just thought you should know, I’ve got forty-five minutes. I’m doing a play in Providence. My half-

hour call is at 7:30. It’s a four-and-a-half-hour train ride. You have to tell me whether I’m in or out.” I can’t believe I said that.

They looked shocked, as if I pimp-slapped them. But they said, “Okay.

Just stand by.”

I sat in that room, feeling out of place. Everybody’s doing their vocal training at the same time. Screaming, yelling, yelping. Doing their yoga moves. All that shit. I’m trying to sit quietly in the corner and look into the hallway as the teachers and the head of the school picked up their chairs. Later, I learned they carried their chairs into the biggest training room at Juilliard, room 103. I heard whispers, “What’s going on? What’s going on?” Then someone called me. The teachers had fast-tracked me. Instead of waiting three days, I was asked to do my audition again for all the teachers of all the departments in one room.

When they called me in—“Okay. Viola, in five minutes”—I knew I had undivided attention in that damn room with everybody. I did my audition for all of them. They interviewed me. The head of the department, who, by the way, was an asshole. Great director. Great interpreter of Shakespeare. . . . But an asshole. Michael Langham, director of Stratford Festival in Canada for many years, said, “There are things you have to work on. But we see your gift as an actor, your emotional wealth.”

“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,” I said. Looking back, I see I wanted to say, Hurry the fuck up, and just let me know if I got in, because I have to get on that train. I gotta go. But I knew I had gotten in. I ran for the train and made it back on time.

Getting into a school is usually a wonderful story that’s the equivalent of falling in love or being on the honeymoon. There’s a difference between falling in love and actually being in the marriage. By the time I received the acceptance letter, I already knew I had gotten in. By the time I got to Juilliard, I was already in the marriage. That magic and excitement of the audition was back-burnered, a long-forgotten dream. I wish I could’ve held on to the fact that my audition was badass.

Back in Providence, David loved Danielle. He loved kids in general. He already had one from a prior relationship. During breaks in rehearsal, we would all get the most magnificent sandwiches from Mark’s Deli. After the performance at night, I would take Danielle home and walk back to my apartment. Because Danielle was underage, eleven, another actress would

play the role of Zonia four performances a week. They would switch. On the nights Danielle didn’t perform, I would stay with David.

As much as I would love to romanticize that part of my life, I can’t. I was so unfinished. I asked God for a boyfriend, professional acting status, and the experience of traveling overseas. But I didn’t ask for wisdom. I didn’t ask for self-love. And it showed.

I was with a man who never loved me. My objective the entire seven years was earning his love. I would internally pray, convincing myself that THIS would be the day he’d profess that he couldn’t live without me. THIS would be the day he’d just look at me and tell me I’m beautiful. I practically gave him VIP access to relationships with other women. I felt lucky to have him. That’s how damaged I was. He never remembered my birthday, my favorite foods, Christmas, Valentine’s Day. I was into the outward marks of achievement rather than the inner sense of home with a man, a sense of belonging to oneself.

He wasn’t a great boyfriend but I didn’t demand anything from him. I didn’t create any boundaries. I didn’t teach him how to treat me, so I wasn’t the best girlfriend. I used to be secretly jealous of people who were even in bad relationships. I would hear women say, “Yeah, he was begging me to take him back after he cheated on me. He was crying, going on and on about how much he loved me and wanted me, so I took him back.” My thought was, He cried and said he wanted you and loved you? I never heard that in seven years. But it was not David. It was me.

Before I met David that gap year, I met someone else on the way to work. He became: “My First Boyfriend Who I Never Talk About.” His name was Carl and he was a wayward soul. Our connection started with him telling me I was beautiful at the bus stop and me smiling. I never knew where he was, what he was doing, where he worked, nothing. I remember very little about him because he didn’t stick around long. I slept with him four times. I’m ashamed because I have puritanical values that I was not admitting to. I’m ashamed also because the last time I was with him, I went to his house to tell him, “We’re done.” He wanted to have sex and I most definitely didn’t. I was on my period. We struggled. He kept pulling my pants down. I thought about punching him, but I didn’t. Maybe that would’ve been an acknowledgment that what was happening was rape. So I gave in and afterward left, ashamed. That’s how I felt, but what I showed was a young woman in control. I compartmentalized the trauma and filtered

it so that it would lie to me and keep me safe. Another dirty secret, another shame lashing.

Why didn’t I punch his ass in the face?! Why didn’t I fight the same way six-year-old Viola did when the boy next door tried to kiss and touch me in his house? Six-year-old me punched him as hard as I could. No apology. Hell! He kicked me hard afterward but I got back up, with tears, to kick his ass again!! Somehow along the way, I guess I felt she was wrong. That in my journey to “the top,” to being more “evolved,” I left the street fighter behind. I left my claws.

David was an out-of-town actor. Equity rules dictated that the theater had to provide him his own apartment for the duration of the play. I had another place to stay, to lay my head. I tapped into another part of my soul that identified me—my Blackness. David was bold and unapologetic about it. He once saw a poll on the PBS show Tony Brown’s Journal that said that 80 percent of whites felt Blacks were unpatriotic. It pissed him off so that he studied every war America has ever fought and researched African American involvement in them. Every single war we fought in. Even during Jim Crow when we were not nearly given the same rights as our white counterparts. That was patriotism! If that didn’t speak volumes about our love and commitment to this country, nothing did. He also studied music, Black history.

Just before I went to Juilliard, David went to LA to do the Shakespeare play Measure for Measure at The Old Globe theater in La Jolla. Then he moved back to Rhode Island to become a company member at Trinity Rep. During my years at Juilliard, every time I went home on the weekend or during holidays, I would stay with him in his apartment.

David was an actor who worked a lot. I was the newbie actor, then acting student. In that gap year, I was also working as a telemarketer at P- PAC, Providence Performing Arts Center, selling tickets over the phone, while doing play after play after play at Trinity Rep. I was finally a working actor, not making bank, but enough to get by, to live. Rhode Island didn’t have a high cost of living. I didn’t have a car, but I had my own apartment

—with a roommate. I could buy food. I could do all that I needed to get by. I was an overly busy working actor.

But I didn’t want to stay in Rhode Island. I wanted to grow, to travel. Toward the end of my gap year, I resigned from Trinity Rep and flew to Edinburgh, Scotland, where I performed three plays in the Fringe Festival.

One of my mentors, Dr. Bill Hutchinson, filled out the application for us to enter. I went to Boston to get my first passport and was amazed at how my dreams were manifesting. It’s the largest theater festival in the world.

Emily Baker, whom I met at a six-week acting program at Circle in the Square, loaned me the money to participate. She had written a play about her experience with her dad abusing her that she wanted me to perform. The other play I did was a comedy written by a theater teacher from Rhode Island College. I played Socrates’s wife who went into therapy because her husband never talked to her. He would just think all the time. The third was a play by another RIC teacher/director. I played the snake in a reinterpretation of Adam and Eve. I flew British Airways and stayed in an apartment on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Drive in Edinburgh.

We would walk to the theater from there, a long walk. During the day we would visit the Mary Queen of Scots Castle, explore the city, eat fish and chips with malt vinegar. At night, we performed or saw other performances. A performance from the Traverse Theatre in Scotland was about men in a South African prison. They were naked the whole time. Sometimes simulating sex. At one point they go to the bathroom in a bucket and later in the play, throw the contents at each other. There was either real poop on that stage or it was made of clay. I had to force myself to believe it was made of clay. No way could they time that out.

It was riveting, and the surprise was the elderly people in the audience who were completely into it. I saw a production of Salome by the famous auteur director Steven Berkoff. My favorite was the Festival de Spana out of Barcelona. It was a pagan fireworks extravaganza on the grounds of an all-boys school. The school looked like a castle. The performers dressed like half man, half beast with fire shooting out of their nostrils. Some had beast costumes on, pretending to hang clothes made of fire on clotheslines made of fire. Enormous phallic symbols shot fireworks out into the sky that exploded in the most magnificent display. My friend Doug Cooney and I looked at each other with gaping mouths. Doug was an acting student at Rhode Island College and he played Socrates in one of our plays. I actually think we ran through the streets in laughter, exhilaration, and in awe at what we had just seen. It’s the sheer supernatural power of artistry that is a life- giving, God-injected drug. When you are in the presence of it, you feel like you can fly!

Nighttime was my favorite. Amid all the actors in a large apartment, talking, sharing, laughing, drinking scotch, playing spades, talking about the process of acting, I slowly felt like a part of something. Usually, I clicked with one or two people in a group but this time, we were all together.

I flew to San Diego after the Fringe Festival for a week with David who was acting in the theater. Then, I took a bus from San Diego to Los Angeles, stayed at my friend Gary’s apartment, and planned to fly to New York to start my first day at Juilliard the next morning. I took a bus from San Diego to Los Angeles. Halfway through the trip the bus abruptly stopped and police came in and removed 80 percent of the people on the bus for not having proper identification. We got into LA and I saw my friend Gary waving frantically.

“Hey, Gary!”

“Get your bags and run!”

If I hadn’t experienced it, I would call myself a liar but a wave of displaced, homeless people started enclosing us and grabbing. They were trying to grab my arm, bags. Gary got into the car. I threw my bags in and jumped in almost at the same time the car was moving.

Someone should have told me, Viola, you don’t start your new life like that. Don’t squeeze in the start of your new life. But I decided I’d fly into New York, dump my stuff in Susan Lawson’s apartment—which I had sublet sight unseen—and go to my orientation.

I took a cab from the airport and when I arrived at the building, I thought, Oh. Okay, the outside looks like crap but it’s Susan Lawson’s apartment. I lugged all my suitcases to the fourth-floor walk-up. When I opened the door, I stood in that doorway for twenty minutes. I kid you not. It was a traumatic experience, like having dissociative disorder. I dumped my stuff in the apartment. Completely depressed, almost catatonic, I took the subway to Juilliard to start my orientation.

I was about to go into the belly of the beast. Juilliard was about to rip apart my world. I would come face-to-face not with God, but with me.