I Don't Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star Read Online Free PDF

point, but the practices were at 6:00 a.m., and that wasn’t a good time for me. Early and cold were both not options after failing at soccer. Clearly I was running out of time to find a thing and get good at it, so dance was sort of a last-ditch effort. I started ballet classes when I was nine years old, which in dancer years might as well be thirty-two. But I was really skinny, so I looked like a ballerina, and even if I wasn’t a great dancer, sometimes it’s all about looking the part. I liked dancing, I liked my dance friends (one of them had a pool), I liked all the different classes Miss Bunny offered, and it was located in a strip mall next door to a video rental store, so we usually rented a movie a few nights a week after class. This was before the days of Blockbuster. (I guess we are now in post-Blockbuster days. Weird.) So, dancing stuck and it seemed like I had finally found a thing.
    Now that I’m a stepparent, I can imagine the stress my lack of a thing caused my parents. I mean, when people ask you about your kids, what do you say if they don’t have a thing? “Sally is such a mellow girl; she is happy just lying on the sofa for hours.” Or, “Doug was so cute watching TV all night last night.” No parent really wants to say that. You want to say, “Abe hit a home run at Little League last weekend,” and “Gretchen got the violin solo in
Peter and the Wolf
in her school orchestra.” “Bob rescued all the hostages in
Call of Duty
last night” just doesn’t cut it at company holiday parties and family reunions.
    Anyway, moving dance studios to the Milligan School of Ballet was a big step for me. This was a serious ballet academy that focused on classical Russian ballet. No more modern, tap, or jazz (what is jazz dancing anyway?)—it was serious Russian ballet only from now on. It turned out I was
really
bad at classical Russian ballet, and serious classical ballerinas are (generally) total bitches. That didn’t stop me from torturing myself for several years while trying to get better at it (I never did) and trying to persuade those bitches to like me (they never would). The main problem was I
looked
like I would be really good at ballet because I was so skinny. I think even my instructor Miss Karen Milligan would agree the disparity between my look and my ability was frustrating. However, I credit the time I spent on stage dancing, no matter my skill level, with giving me the confidence to try out for the high school musical and the magnet acting program as well. Well, I got cast in the chorus of the musical and made it into the acting program, somehow. It was fun, more fun than the regular high school classes. Toward the end of high school I was getting cast in some real roles in the musicals and plays. Acting was starting to feel like something I liked doing; at least I liked it better than dancing. Maybe my “thing” was changing.
    Then it was time for the future, and the future comes fast in high school. One afternoon, I fell down on the concrete steps of my front porch and hurt my knee. It really wasn’t all that serious of an injury, but I used it as an excuse to quit dancing so seriously. I was too scared to just quit ballet—I had put so much time and energy into it, my parents had spent so much money, and my room and bathroom were covered in ballet tchotchkes. In addition to all the time that not dancing would free up, I would have to redecorate as well. So I seized the opportunity and began an injury-induced phaseout, which was the beginning of the end of me and the Milligan School of Ballet. I was starting to likehigh school, I had after-school activities that were located in the actual school, and I had started to make more friends, kind of. There was one girl in particular, Marci Urbaniak. The term “frenemy” hadn’t been coined yet, but the first time I heard it used, the face of Marci Urbaniak popped right into my head. Marci had already worked professionally as an