Obviously Read online

  After a couple of minutes you leave and wait for them to call your number. This can be utterly devastating, as I’d learn a couple years later when I returned to Orlando after college and reauditioned. But that day they called my number! I couldn’t believe it! I had really wanted them to, but the criteria (look like a fairy from a movie that hasn’t been released yet) seemed too arbitrary for me to pass. But I did and I fit within the Disney height requirement (five-foot-four or less finally coming in handy) and everything!

  The rest of that morning was a blur. If I remember one thing clearly it was that everyone who had gotten a callback was white except for me, and they all seemed like more experienced actors. As I sat in a makeup chair and had a woman apply gold and orange eye shadow and lashes to my face, another man dropped a script in my hand.

  “You have to do a country accent. Can you do a country accent?” he asked.

  “I’m from Kentucky, is that country enough?”

  “Great! See you in ten.” And with that he was gone.

  “You should probably start reading it out loud?” the makeup lady suggested with the tonality of someone who could tell I was a total amateur.

  All the other girls chosen were pacing and loudly reading their scripts. Immediately confident. Not afraid of messing up a line since it was a cold read. I was shrinking into myself, scared that I’d go in and freeze, or stumble. Content in my makeup chair spiral, a costuming employee handed me a dress.

  I wriggled in, unsure how they knew my exact size but too timid to ask. As I exited the dressing room a woman was waiting for me.

  “Put your hands against the wall,” she said as if she were arresting me. Now truly scared, I obliged. It was then that she attached the twenty-pound wings to my back. So I wasn’t just nervously pacing and trying to read the script above a whisper without attracting too much attention, but I was also trying to have a natural posture with four-foot-tall wings attached to my back.

  I entered the dance studio again, three people sitting at a folding table with lots of paper on it. No warm welcome, just a nod to begin.

  “Oh, Tank!” I started, my country accent over the top.

  “Excuse me! Sorry, this character doesn’t have an accent. She’s just anxious,” they corrected. Same, I thought. “Try again.”

  And I did, but it clearly wasn’t good enough. I left my phone on vibrate as I changed and got ready to go back to my post in Tomorrowland. I bragged openly about the audition in the mouseketeeria. As I did, a very cute girl in those very same fairy wings walked in. And she looked good. And they’d clearly kept her there since the morning.

  Shit.

  I was bummed out, but this was also not my first time failing spectacularly. And it was still the closest any of my friends had come to becoming an entertainment cast member. I now knew it was possible. That it would really just come down to if I was confident in the room in the future. It’s completely reasonable that this adulthood brush with auditioning and rejection helped build that frosty exterior that can shake off rejection at the highest level and stay motivated to keep trying.

  After the audition didn’t pan out, I ended up working the Space Mountain arcade. It was a particularly slow time in the parks due to the recession, and so I mostly just used the arcade keys to bust open the machines and give myself a few free games to eat up some of the time left on my shift. I was in the middle of a pretty intense round of Tekken 5 when I was tapped on my shoulder by a woman I recognized immediately.

  “Hi, sorry, I was wondering where we go to check out? No one is at the counter . . .” she said, implying that she was trying to buy something.

  As I rang up her tub of cotton candy, she noticed my name tag and asked, “Your name is Akilah? From Kentucky . . . Are you Marilynn’s daughter???”

  “Yeah! Hey!” I said.

  It was my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Sheldon. It had been thirteen years, but I guess we both looked eerily the same. Behind her stood two adorable little girls, the same in every way.

  “It’s my girls’ birthday! They’re eight today! It’s August 8th, 2008, so we thought this would be the perfect time to make our way down here,” she explained. I dipped into the secret supply of “magical moment” goodies and gave them both the extremely limited-edition Tinkerbell pin that could only be acquired by befriending a cast member.

  It made their whole day.

  Twenty minutes later when I was back in the tunnels under the Magic Kingdom at my locker, I called my mom to tell her how wild it was running into her.

  “Yeah, it’s probably like New York in that way. They say that if you wait on a corner in New York, everyone in the world will eventually pass you,” my mom said. I don’t know if people say that about New York for real, but at the time it made me feel like I was somewhere super important, and that the universe was trying to tell me that this was more than coincidence—that I needed to be somewhere people wanted to be.

  The South

  WHAT’S BEAUTIFUL ABOUT IT?

  Biscuits.

  WHAT’S BAD ABOUT IT?

  Racism.

  College Years

  College wasn’t for me. I did it. I got a degree, and I’m better for it—but I wasn’t built for it.

  From the street view the campus looks like any other. Old and new brick buildings sit on a large plot of green. The sidewalks splinter into higher and lower paths leading from educational facilities to living quarters. The town is small, quaint, with seemingly no downtown or uptown. Its sheer inoffensiveness is remarkably unremarkable. This would be my home for five years.

  Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, was not top on my list of colleges to go to. In fact, though I’d spent my entire life in Kentucky, I didn’t hear of the city or the college until my AP English teacher told me about it senior year of high school. She wasn’t even specifically addressing me.

  “It’s my thirty-year college reunion this weekend,” she said. I was busy counting on my fingers to try to figure out how old that must make her, but other students seemed genuinely interested in her life.

  “What school did you go to?” Bob asked. I remember it was Bob because it seemed like a weird name for a seventeen-year-old. Still is.

  She launched into an eager rant about how great Berea College was. How the tuition was free for low-income students who all work on campus. How the education was top-notch and the school had many famous benefactors. She urged us all to apply there, too.

  Only one other girl and I took the time to do that. We both got in. I got into all of the schools I applied to, but only one of them had a price tag of “free,” so that basically sealed the deal. After all, I was only making like $150 a week at Fazoli’s. That’s not even enough for one textbook’s table of contents.

  * * *

  * * *

  During those first days I got to know my new roommate, Morgan. Morgan was a hipster before being a hipster was a thing (she owned several beanies, ironic tees, and a succulent), and I immediately just assumed she was homeschooled (she was). During the summer she had sent me a cat-shaped card saying she couldn’t wait to be my roommate, and we chatted briefly on AIM.

  Morgan brought a lot of books with her to college, which I thought was bizarre. High school had pretty much murdered my love of recreational reading with all the required reading we had to do. I didn’t know why she thought she’d have time to enjoy the written word outside all the classes, but she seemed adamant. She also had a ton of DVDs of shows that I had only heard of but never actually watched. Veronica Mars and others. CDs by Ani DiFranco, which were outside the realm of my pop culture upbringing. But considering it was a dry campus, I conceded that being outside my comfort zone would mean listening to indie music and seeing indie movies. It was also Kentucky, so going to a small, non-state school was already a weird choice. But I was committed to this new lifestyle.

  After meeting a few m
ore girls on my floor, we had a solid group of us to go to lunch or the mailbox with and explore the town together. Even though all of these changes seemed quick, what was most off about being a fish out of water was that I didn’t even really recognize myself. In high school I joined whatever clubs I could. I wanted to be part of it. If there was a sign-up sheet within a ten-mile radius, I was committed to signing.

  College was the first time I felt myself recoiling from the spotlight. I auditioned for the fall play, but after the first rehearsal I dropped out. I “ran” for house council in my dorm and became the first-floor representative, but I resented the meetings being two hours long and all about everyone’s problems with the showers, the laundry room, and the curfew hours. It wasn’t my class workload. I wasn’t too busy exactly, but I did feel like I was wasting time. I was just not interested in giving myself to another thing without seeing how it might benefit me in return.

  I even thought I’d lucked out with my on-campus job in public relations at the visitor’s center. Anyone who ended up in Berea, Kentucky, could watch an informative video and receive pamphlets and maps of the town from us. My job was literally to search all newspapers for any mention of the school, cut the blurb out with scissors, and glue (with a glue stick) the article to a piece of paper and file it. That was it. I was the human equivalent of “command F.” Oh, and I made $2.30 an hour.

  The wages were that low because they were paying us out of the school’s endowment and the rest of that money was funding our education. It’s a smart system because it keeps the campus running on a budget and always bringing in profit.

  Nothing felt like how I expected college to be. I thought I’d have more freedom, but having no money (so having very little to experiment with style, or buying music, or going out) and living in a town tinier than where I grew up made me feel like I was trapped in the smallness of it all. College was supposed to be acquiring a taste for cappuccino in smart blazers with elbow patches in Greenwich Village during the week and attending tailgating events on weekends. My school didn’t even have a football team. Instead of getting a free weekend for Labor Day, we’d have to wait a couple more months for the school’s “Mountain Day” celebration. It’s what it sounds like: we all go climb a mountain and eat granola and generally do the things that now seem like cool day trips on Instagram but back then were just what boring people did.

  In high school I felt like I could never have a “real” experience like in the movies, running around in school on a Saturday, trying to hide from the principal, or being the reluctant prom queen dating an unexpectedly nice hot guy—because I was black and two years younger and too much of a background character to ever have main character triumphs. In college I felt like all of that was possible for me, just at any other school. In hindsight, I know that I wasn’t completely right about that—all of my friends who went to big state schools attest that it was a little bit different than what I imagined—but I felt like what I needed was a larger pool to swim in. Would you rather be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish with the potential to get bigger in a big pond?

  I settled into my chill college routine in the four p.m. hour before dinner. Every day I’d find a free lounge in my dorm and turn the channel to ABC. There I’d be greeted by Oprah Winfrey. My obsession with the mogul began long before college (I mean, I was alive in the ’90s and I’m not an idiot), but here was where I realized that this, broadcasting to an audience of millions, was a goal worth chasing.

  Now, that seems vain as I reread it, but Oprah never ever seemed to be doing this for herself. Even on those episodes that were specifically about her struggles with her weight, the real meat of the show was that she was making it okay for women to have conversations out loud instead of thinking we were alone. It didn’t even matter the subject. Oprah cared so genuinely and deeply that even guests with whom I shared no common ground made me really examine my life. There was an episode with a blind teenager who used echolocation to get around. After he miraculously made it across the stage (a stage with multiple drop-offs into the audience), he demonstrated this clicking sound he’d developed that he’d make with his tongue and simply wait for the echo to bounce back to him from other objects. Based on how long it took for the sound to come back to his ears he’d know if he was close to or far away from objects.

  I suck at math. I can do basic shit, but I will do it slowly and use my fingers—and I just explained a mathematical method of survival for an ailment I’ve never had. That’s the power of Oprah.

  As the hour of television wrapped every day, I thought about how I could somehow become her. I’d taken her major (communications) and minor (theater) to heart when signing up for courses, and I’d read unofficial books about her front to back. I read all the books in her book club. I just had no idea how to turn all of that into a career as the next Oprah.

  Simultaneous to my newfound love of all things Winfrey was the Lonely Island’s grand debut on Saturday Night Live with their digital shorts. I’d spend almost all my evenings on Facebook and Myspace refreshing pages in hopes of discovering something worth talking about or reacting to. The weekend that “Lazy Sunday” dropped changed all of that.

  I woke up late that Sunday and missed breakfast. When my roommate returned she couldn’t shut up.

  “Have you heard that Chronicles of Narnia song?!” she asked.

  “A song about The Lion, the Witch and the—”

  “No!” she cut me off, and then pulled up a clip on YouTube.

  It was at that moment that I realized that (1) I needed to just go ahead and sign up for a YouTube account; I was spending an increasing amount of time searching through the collection of unregulated ’90s theme songs and weird animations, and (2) this is how I would become Oprah, or at least Oprah-adjacent enough that I could meet her one day; I would make comedy videos for the internet that were funny, thought-provoking, and, above all else, catchy. People would share them and I’d be the coolest kid on campus.

  By the following semester I was already casting sketches for YouTube. Did I have a “content strategy”? No! I just uploaded videos to the account belonging to whoever had the fastest Wi-Fi. The videos would sometimes take hours to upload. They took even longer to write and shoot. And though none of the college videos went viral in today’s sense, we made some campus-specific hits.

  One such video is called “Pass the Plate - Chicken a la Spinach.” You can probably still find it somewhere on a defunct YouTube channel. The premise was just a parody of a Disney Channel interstitial whereby a soccer ball is kicked from scene to scene, around the world, detailing how different cultures use ingredients. After noticing a distinct lack of diversity in these segments, we decided to make one about people in Atlanta and how they use spinach. Please don’t make me describe the video further: do yourself a favor and go watch it.

  The modicum of fame felt good. To be honest, at a school so small everyone was known for something, it felt good to be seen as a true original. No one else on my campus was making YouTube videos on purpose. It’s scary calling yourself a filmmaker or a writer, or anything that demands proof of skill. I was just a kid with a camera, but my classmates saw me as a storyteller. My roommate was a photographer, so I already had the best five pictures uploaded to Facebook. Now that I’d pivoted to video, I was unstoppable.

  Being back home for the summer, no one understood what the hell I was doing. As I set up a tripod and a camera in my room, my mom asked, “Are you making a porn?”

  And I had to explain that no, I was not. I was making videos where I talked about stuff that annoyed me, or playing ukulele, or doing a simple hair tutorial. No one was making money from videos back then, so having hobbies that I then filmed and edited and uploaded seemed like a lot of work to anyone who wasn’t in that world.

  But that was the best of that world. That feeling of just wanting to make something that was poignant, or different, or more artistic rathe
r than what would get the most views (though views always sort of mattered) was the purest the internet could be. Being a person “on the internet” was still kind of dorky. People would ask why I spent so much time on my computer. They had no idea that the internet world was still the world, but it had inside jokes and etiquette and style. There was a divide between those of us who had been there since Neopets, making a home for our voices and our images and our design, and those who used their computers for emails and word processing. To go viral meant more back then. It hardly means anything now.

  That’s what college was for me. I learned a lot of things I’ve since forgotten (including how to use Excel for math purposes, how to apply for financial aid, and how to write ten pages in a single night). I keep in touch with a few friends from college, but what I really got out of it was a passion. I learned to like making stuff, even after a long day. I learned to be funnier, punchier, and better at all the internet stuff. I learned to edit videos and photos and audio and crashed so many cheap crappy computers into dust. I figured out what the rest of my life (or at least my twenties) would be about, irrespective of my choice of major. So yeah, while college wasn’t for me, getting through it and finding my true passion was worth it.

  Getting Too Good at Your Plan B

  In every creative person’s life, there is a crossroads. It’s a moment when they realize that they’ve been doing their day job, well, for a sufficient span of time (be that months or years) and that they now have to decide:

  Will they continue pursuing what they love after hours or will they settle into their backup career and abandon their dreams on a neglected shelf of their own potential?

  This decision is usually thrust upon the dreamer by way of a promotion, or a relationship, or anything that would demand the attention of those imaginative brain cells to the detriment of pursuing that “road less traveled.” It’s a formative, vulnerable moment whereby an otherwise rational person thinks, Huh, but I’m pretty good at my job, and health insurance is a good enough reason to hate my life. And in that moment, you can cut and run from what always felt like a mediocre placeholder for what you actually want to do, or you can lean into the mundane and opt to have a small but comfortable life. For me, this ultimatum came at noon on a Monday surrounded by pie.