Tall Tales

If you are someone who has started a creative endeavor and is questioning if you will ever finish, welcome to my club. 

Tall tales are what I tell myself as I write my memoir, Not Yet. If someone told me that a year and a half after I began this writing journey,  I would still be deleting, reshaping, honing, and having epiphanies while also feeling generally not that much closer to the finish line than when I began, I sometimes think I wouldn’t have started the damn thing.

This is not to say that I don’t love what I am doing. I do. I really do. Even the painful recognition of some of the stupid choices I made and the almost ridiculous lies I told, mostly to myself,  throughout my life. However, I celebrated my 90th birthday in October, and there’s a certain tick-tocking sounding off in my earballs that is giving me a headache. 

Accompanying that sound is the reality that a book by Sally-Jane, What’s Her Name, is not going to attract a publisher. Not in this market, anyway. I am not an illegitimate child of a major politician or box office star looking for legitimacy and my long lost father.  

I am in the middle of another edit of the manuscript, and sometimes, as I try to find the right word picture for a particular time in my life, a thought makes circles in my brain. Will anyone but me and a few of my nearest and dearest ever see an edited,  published book?

I think what has kept me alive through these 90 years is my Mel Brooks necklace of garlic that I wear to bed every night, warding off the Angel From Death. My necklace is also accompanied by my continued drive to be discovered.

What can I tell you?  I have always hungered for attention.

The seventh of eight children, my intentions were always obvious. A life filled with drama and dance classes, special schools, teachers, and mentors in service of discovery and stardom. Over the years, I was very fortunate to have good credits on and off Broadway, in movies, and on television. Alas,  no gold ring, aka fame. Little did I realize that writing this book, with or without publication, is the gift that keeps on giving.  

I have never felt more alive or more relevant. And for an irrelevant senior, that’s a pretty damn good feeling.

However, I don’t want to give up on my dream of discovery.  That is why I decided that if no publisher will print my book, I am capable of speaking my book.   

This 90-year-old big-mouth know-it-all actress is going to use my vocal cords to share the absurdities of my life story.  Poking, provoking, and stoking the human condition as I go.  

Is discovery and stardom just another unrealized dream?

NOT YET!

P.S. I’m not the only one who wants to be discovered…