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shouting. It’s hard and I’m still pretty shitty at it, but I work on it when I need to, and the theater school taught me how to do it.
    Luckily, I never got asked to leave acting school, and I never transferred. I just stayed. Maybe I was lazy, but I was having fun. I loved living with my roommates, I loved Chicago, I loved having a small group of people to work with every day, and after a few years I started to really love acting. I think what I’m really saying is I owe my career to my education, and I owe my education to Marci Urbaniak. OK, my parents paid, and my mom was the one who got me the last-minute audition, and I was the one who went to my classes (even on the day it was minus-eighty degrees outside and I cried walking to school and my tears froze on my face), but if it wasn’t for my first frenemy telling me I couldn’t hack it, I wouldn’t be where I am today, sitting in bed writing a book about myself.

Carey Christmas
    HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF CAREY, OHIO? IT ’ S IN THE middle of Ohio, or central Ohio, as I have heard my relatives call it. My mother grew up there, and a majority of her side of the family still lives there. My parents moved back several years ago. They bought a cute house on a farm. They didn’t buy
a
farm; they bought a house
on
a farm. It’s the best of both worlds if you ask me. They get to be surrounded by farm but without having to actually grow anything. We went to Carey all the time when I was a kid. It was a two-hour drive from where we lived in the suburbs of Detroit. It’s a rural town that had a population of about two thousand people, although it may be larger now. It’s filled with my family members, and we’re super fertile (my mom warned me of this when I left home for college). If you’ve ever seen the TV show
Friday Night Lights
, it’s that kind of town, where everything revolves around the high school. It’s very Norman Rockwell meets recession. There’s one main street, a few bars, a few restaurants, a drugstore, supermarket, library, Ford dealership, and some various lodges for Elks or Moose (not the animals), a giant famous Catholic church, and even a nine-hole golf course made out of an old cow pasture. Since my mom’s side of the family wasso giant, there was a special Greer family Christmas party every year, in mid-December, so that the whole Greer clan could celebrate together, like a mini family reunion but in my aunt’s house instead of a park. We called it the Carey Christmas, and it was a big deal when I was a kid. My aunt would hire a local guy to dress up in a Santa suit, and he would show up halfway through the day. Everyone would gather around with their cameras, and he would have a giant bag of toys, one for each grandkid with his or her name on it. As Santa pulled out each gift from his giant bag, he would call out the name on the present, and we would have to go up and sit on Santa’s lap and tell him that we were good little boys and girls and ask for what we wanted for real Christmas. A photo would be taken, Santa would give us our gift, and he would move on to the next grandkid.
    Even at a young age, sitting on this stranger’s lap bothered me a little. I don’t remember ever believing in Santa, so the idea that I had to do this every year felt false. I
wanted
to believe in Santa; I just didn’t. You can’t help what you believe and what you don’t. I blame my mother’s handwriting. Every time there was a gift under our Christmas tree from Santa, it was clearly my mother’s handwriting. I think my parents knew better than to have my dad do it; as an engineer, he basically used graphing equipment to handwrite anything, but my mom’s was just as recognizable, just in a beautiful schoolteacher kind of way. Maybe they didn’t want to have to buy so many different gifts, they kept it simple and just stuck to the main ones, none of the stocking stuffer bullshit. Or perhaps they didn’t want to give some fake dude all the credit for