Free Baby Steps by Elisabeth Rohm Page A

slut or even a bad person. You have to find out why the character does what she does, why she lives the way she lives. That’s the whole point of acting. That’s your job, to get in there and understand her. It doesn’t mean you become her. It just means you find empathy, and common ground.”
    I’d never really thought about any of this before, especially since I had no intention of becoming an actor. But her philosophic approach intrigued me. If acting really was about understanding people and analyzing human behavior, that sounded pretty interesting. It was an intellectual approach I could relate to. I’d even considered psychology as a profession, and I also wanted to be a more empathetic person, because empathy was a quality my mother had, and always valued in others. This acting thing might be good for me.
    I thought about the famous actors I knew about, and even my theater friends. Did I associate them with the roles they played? Sometimes, but not in a bad way. I admired the ones who could transform themselves and portray the humanity in any character. Unexpectedly, this sounded like something worth pursuing.
    This was the first time I began to conceptualize the idea of a rule or a law related to acting. Before, it had seemed like it was all fun and games and flirting and make-believe, without structure or purpose, but the fact that there were rules and techniques to this art form appealed to me. After my crazy hippie childhood so void of conventional boundaries, I liked the idea of an artistic life, but I also craved structure. With acting, I began to see, I could be free and wild and also safe. A play wasn’t real life. It had a finite ending. If I could love the dominatrix, if I could find common ground, maybe I could actually be good at playing her without having to be her, without being threatened by her. I began to change my mind about the character of Terri. She wasn’t dangerous after all. She was an exercise in empathy.
    I didn’t quit. I powered through the show, I got better, and then we opened, and I discovered something else unexpected and magical about the theater. Before I went on stage, I had the worst stage fright. I was terrified. I remember reminding myself to breathe, breathe, breathe!
    Then I went out there in my leather and my mask, brandishing my whip, and I did it. I performed the hell out of that part. It was like an out-of-body experience. All my pent-up emotion, all my unrealized passion, all my anxiety and doubt about myself and my life transformed into the passion, anxiety, and doubt in the character. I was standing up there in the dark in front of hundreds of people, powerful and vulnerable and overcoming all my fear. It was the most incredible feeling I’d ever had.
    I remember during one scene, I had my leg up on a block and I was wearing these patent-leather high-heeled boots and cracking the whip and I was thinking, This is exactly what I didn’t want to do, and here I am doing it. I could hardly believe it was me. I felt so courageous! At the end of the show, my character sits down and takes off her mask because she decides she needs love and she wants to have a real relationship with the man in the play. She’s through with role-playing. She wants him to know who she really is. This, I completely understood. When I took off that mask onstage on that night, it was me, taking off the mask of who I thought I should be and exposing who I really was to a room full of people I’d never even met.
    It was the highest I’d ever felt, and considering I was in college, I’d felt pretty high already on occasion. I became the dominatrix, and yet I was completely Lis. And then it was over, and I remember the applause and the energy from the audience rolling over me like a wave of love.
    I was hooked. It was such a rush, and I was addicted. Acting wasn’t just about getting attention (although I realized that I actually enjoyed that).