Free Happy Accidents by Jane Lynch Page A

tears.
    “Well,” he said, “you weren’t going to stay anyway. So who cares?”
    In my place, Chris sure wouldn’t have. He’d have just gone on his merry way, acting in the play and never giving the Opera House a second thought. But I couldn’t let things roll off my back like he could. I had halfheartedly surrendered to my mom’s idea of a backup plan, but I had failed. I couldn’t even get into the club I didn’t want to be a part of, and I took it as affirmative evidence of my uselessness. At that time in my life, if I had an opportunity to suffer, I seemed to have to take it.
    To get me to forget about it and move on, Chris took me out that night and we hit the bars from Rush Street all the way up to the Closet, a gay bar in Boys Town. We called this kind of night “drinking our way north.” Our “First today, badly needed” toast was usually “Cheers to queers,” but tonight, since it was clear we would be downing one Long Island iced tea after another, we simply clicked our glasses and said “Bye-bye.”
    The Comedy of Errors was staged outside, in Lincoln Park, with the sparkling waters of Lake Michigan as the backdrop. On opening night, the park was packed. Everybody came—my parents, sister, brother, cousins, friends. Nobody had seen me act since high school, so this was a big moment for me. And I had a big role: Adriana, the wife who fears her husband is cheating on her, only to find it was a “comedy of errors.”
    While at Cornell, I had accumulated a huge bag of acting techniques and methods, and I employed every one in my “process” of creating Adriana. So complete was the backstory I invented for her, I even gave her an astrological sun and moon sign. I could barely walk and talk at the same time for all my training.
    In spite of my meticulous overpreparation, I had a blast out there on that stage, performing the immortal words of the Bard under the stars. It was a beautiful night and I felt incredibly lucky to be there.
    Afterward, everyone was fawning over me: “Jane, you’re an actress! We didn’t know you had it in you!” I drank it all in, so happy to feel validated in the dream I’d been chasing for so long.
    And then my mother said, “You know, Jane, I still see you teaching.”
    I turned to her and said sternly, “Mom, you cannot ever say that to me again.”
    I knew she was only trying to protect me, but now, at age twenty-five, I just didn’t want to hear it anymore. I would not, and could not, pretend to want the life she wanted for me. To Mom’s credit, she finally got it. She just said, “Oh, okay,” and never mentioned it again.
    The combination of being in a Shakespeare company and having an MFA from Cornell turned me into an even bigger, more impossible pain in the ass than I’d been before. I was sure that I knew more than anybody else in the company, considering my “classical training.” I was displeased with my cast mates about 90 percent of the time and made a point of letting them know it. Some of my criticisms were valid, but I didn’t have to punish people for what, in my opinion, were their failings. But some of it was me still not knowing how to let things roll off my back. I couldn’t just focus on my own work and let people make their own mistakes.
    They would speak their lines, and I’d be certain they had no idea what they were talking about. “You have no respect for the language!” I would splutter. “Why bother doing Shakespeare at all?” To which people would respond by rolling their eyes. “Oh, Jane’s on her ‘why are we doing Shakespeare’ kick again.”
    I would criticize details that were in no way germane to my job as an actor in the company, even complaining about a paint color on the set. “Who chose this ?” I demanded, infuriated. As I child, I had thrashed on the floor to release my pent-up dissatisfaction. As a pissed-off adult, I made myself completely unappealing by spewing it at others.
    I could not seem to stop