Inheritance (written the week of May 21st, 2007)

Another of the posts I wrote during my absence...

I sat down to write some lame explanation for why I haven’t written here for a while. It’s not even that I haven’t been writing because I have been. I just haven’t been posting what I’ve written. Getting to the office (where the internet is) while it’s open was challenging (well, damn near impossible) because I was in full-time rehearsals for four weeks. I enjoyed myself. After a hiatus from acting, the passion burned brightly again. I learned so much, and I have so much more to learn – but instead of being overwhelming that thought simply makes me smile with anticipation.

But back to the lame explanation. As I sat down to write it I saw my new desktop. I like using photos for my desktop. My last two desktops were headshots of myself, which prompted my mother to say that only an actor could be egotistical enough to have their own face on their computer desktop. I am one of the few women who thinks she is beautiful, and both of those photos showed that wonderfully – they were beautiful pictures of a beautiful woman. However, when I decided to change my desktop yesterday my mother’s words whispered in my head. It helped that I was bored with my own image, so I turned away from the headshots and instead chose one of myself and my brothers, taken by one of my parents last Christmas. It is also a beautiful photo. My two much taller brothers are holding me so that it appears that we are all the same height, although in reality I am sitting on a cradle made out of their hands.

Anyone looking at the photo would see two young men and a young woman, all with the same blue eyes and soft pink gentle lips, all with the same definition to their cheekbones and jaw-lines. The two men have the same nose, the girl’s nose is similar but feminine, with one nostril slightly collapsed on itself. Their hair is different – a red-head and two brunettes, one in mid-tones and one dark, but even in that darkness the German ancestors leave their fair mark.

You don’t see how their personalities mesh and differentiate, as all sibling personalities do. You can’t see how they all have a creative bent. You can’t see how they all have completely different ways of showing that. Things like that aren’t really visible, but that’s okay. That’s why people get to know each other, after all.

Looking at this picture was the first time I saw that I do share facial features with my brothers. We’ve been told all our lives that we look like my father’s people. That is a definite fact – at the last family gathering I went to I saw our lips and bone structures on every side – although our faces hold evidence from my mother’s input too. I’ve never really seen a similarity between my brothers and myself until I chose that photo for my desktop.

It somehow roots me to see that my brothers and I look like our family. It reminds me that there is life outside of learning lines and blocking and finding the lights.

Which is a good thing to be reminded of, I think.