Member-only story
Love, Loss and The Yellow Brick Road
When the past collides with the present
The wax mannequin stood there, looming over my sister. The vampire had a grimace, a touch of red blood painted at the edge of its mouth. Brad Pitt never looked so good embalmed.
My sister was 11, I was 16, and it was a sunny day in Hollywood, but instead of being on a beach an hour away, we were in a dark hallway of Ripley’s Believe it Or Not, near the famed corner of Hollywood and Vine.
“Ohhh…awwww…” and we pantomimed excitement. The director told us to imagine how gleeful we were, urging us to remember what it felt like to be tourists only a few years ago. We weren’t doing our Hollywood manager/agent/father a favor, with me getting a used television out of it, and I have no recollection of what my sister got. It was a credit that would go nowhere, doing this infomercial for this famed museum. Neither of us wanted to be actors; our dad, whose small agency was less boutique than the fruit of a huckster, had actively discouraged us from pursuing life in the industry.
It’s a question I never got to ask him. Why did you allow us that one acting job? His death crept up on us – the feeding tube going into his stomach, the falls on the floor from his nursing home bed, the speech therapist feeding him ice cream. Those moments got in the way of…
