The Actor:

I was in a one-act play that my father-in-law, Roy, wrote.  It was a comedy where I play a pickpocket at a train station who tries to rob an old lady—it ends with her turning the tables on me, conning me out of all my loot, and scaring me away from her territory.

It wasn’t the smoothest run as the old lady in the play, Shannon—who has been acting since she was eight-years-old—couldn’t remember her lines.  It’s a problem she says she’s never had.  But she had a lot of lines—some of them monologues—and not a lot of rehearsal, so I understood her trouble.  At one point on the stage while fumbling for her lines, she ad-libbed, “Well, I’m just going to sit here,” and folded her arms while I struggled to find my way out of it.  Not easy.  But it was a great lesson in improvisation, and after that, no matter how often Shannon forgot her lines, she never threw me under the bus again.  She just kept moving.  And she knows how to command a stage.  I felt sorry for her that she was so frustrated and hard on herself.  She wondered if age had something to do with her forgetfulness—if at 88, she could no longer do any plays because her memory wasn’t what it used to be.  And then she came in to the theater one night and said, “I figured it out.  I spoke with a therapist friend and he explained it to me.  I’m having anxiety.”  So instead of hanging up her acting hat, she's decided to work on her anxiety.  And it’s a good thing, because we were voted the best out of our group, and I’d like to use her in something one day.  That is, if I can afford her. 

A widower for seven years, she has two kids—one’s an actor and the other’s a veterinarian.  She went to the University of Texas for undergraduate school, and then got a graduate degree from Yale.  She met her husband in New York, and then they moved out to California together.  Although it’s hard to be a widow, she keeps herself extremely busy.  She was in the movie, Inception, and the TV shows, True Blood and Mad Men—and that’s just a few of the things she’s done in the last year.  Jay Leno uses her repeatedly in his sketches—in fact, she was a little late to one of our rehearsals because she was busy working on The Tonight Show. 

She’s a really great actor, and I’m glad I got the chance to work with her.  I’m also glad—though I wasn’t at the time—that I got to see her when she was struggling.  I’m sorry she went through it, but she’d be happy to know I learned something while watching her.  I learned how anxiety builds on itself and how sometimes, no matter how hard we prepare—and Shannon really works hard on her craft—you need to toss it away and just go with the flow.  Shannon forgot something, which luckily she figured out on our very last show.  She learned to trust herself.

Shannon, age 88.