Flash in the Pan
I’m standing in a hall closet, barely wider than the span of my shoulders, facing a rack of outerwear. The space smells of wool and maybe boots. I take a deep breath and ask the coats what they’re doing there. I tell them I wasn’t expecting them but am happy to see them. I add that I just wish I’d known they were coming. I would’ve picked them up. They seem to care not a whit.
No, I’ve not once and for all lost it — at least not in this context. See, I’m not actually speaking to the coats. A boom microphone hovers over my head, and this closet is serving as a makeshift sound booth as I repeat these lines for subsequent dubbing. I am, in a word, acting.
The year 2025 brought with it some new horizons for me. January saw my return to print after a seven-year hiatus. I settled into a new home after several years of hiding out in the woods. And then, in December, I launched my film career.
OK, let’s not get too excited. It’s not like I’ve decamped to Hollywood and am writing this poolside while enjoying a tasting menu from the hotel’s oxygen bar. The movie was shot here in Maine, so I could continue to enjoy my quaffs without sticking nodules up my nose.
What happened is this: Last spring I was asked by my friend Kim if I would be willing to talk to her friend’s son about a movie he was shooting for his MFA thesis. Since I’m a sucker for dispensing pearls of writing wisdom to the next generation, whether I know anything about the topic or not, I told her to send him my way. “Oh,” she said. “He doesn’t want help with his script. He wants to cast you.” (Cue the canned laughter.)
When the director and I met via Zoom, I told him outright that I was not an actress. When he mentioned the one-woman show I wrote and toured for six years, I explained that wasn’t acting. When you act, you have to learn lines that another person wrote and then say them the way someone tells you to and, worse, you have to stand around and wait for other people to say their lines before you can say yours. When I did my show, I could say whatever I wanted any way I chose and flounce around without worrying about stepping on someone else’s lines — or toes.
Still, he persisted. He said my character was someone who had abandoned her writing career. That got my interest, since I do that two or three times a day. He also said he’d seen me interviewed on the WCSH show 207 and that I was perfect for this film role. OK, now he was playing dirty. Perfect? I might’ve cooed. Having come through a long stretch of saying No to everything, I determined 2025 was going to be my year of Yes.
But because I’m still me, it wasn’t an unconditional Yes. The first thing I did was critique the script. I had many suggestions — small tweaks — but they were important to my process. (Yes, I was already becoming insufferable.) My friend T accused me of pulling a Tootsie, the character who famously complained about the blocking in a commercial she/he was cast in: “A tomato doesn’t sit down.”
I thought the camera would be trained on my every move from head to toe, so as I prepared I studied actors’ gestures and facial expressions in the Nordic crime dramas I watch and then stood in front of the bathroom mirror and brooded. I was a natural. Wait, no. Perfect.
By the time the shoot rolled around, I was ready. When the slate snapped in front of my face, I didn’t flinch. I wore tight black jeans in case there would be shots from and of my behind. While the camera, yes, was sometimes in back of me, it was focused over my shoulder on the other players. When I poured myself a cup of coffee, lost in thought, the camera was trained solely on my hands. Hey, I wanted to shout, my face is acting up here! You’re missing it!
When I was instructed to stride out of a scene, I heard the director ask the camerawoman how the racking was. “What’s that mean?” I whispered to my “son,” who is actually a real actor. “It means the camera shifts focus away from one subject to another.” Wait. I put on makeup and combed my hair for this?
When I finish my lines in the closet, the director calls “Cut!” and thus ends the shoot and my movie career. The crew bursts into applause, but I don’t stick around to find out why. I sense my next big Yes is out there waiting, so I stride out into the December night, where I perfectly fade to black.
Elizabeth Peavey leans in for her closeup here monthly.
