Joe openly chain-smoked unfiltered Camels from the back row of the theater while giving notes on our scene work. （This was viewed with some reverence by the handful of students who also smoked: “That’s the last stop, man. Unfiltered. When the nicotine from regular cigarettes just won’t do it for you. The laaaaast stop.”）
Yvonne snuck her cigarettes under a tree outside and seemed softly guilty about us knowing that she smoked in the first place. Every few days she’d pat her chest and proudly remind us, “You have to take care of your instrument,” before leading a group singing exercise of the gospel song “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” This was all designed to build camaraderie and confidence, and you know what? It felt friggin’ great.
The turning point of the summer came at its halfway mark, when I got to know the other kids well enough to realize they had missing math pieces of their brains too! What we didn’t possess in the form of cranial rote memorization lobes,11 we did possess in other areas. We all had the capacity to make up stories, create characters, and feel emotions. Our minds wandered all the time. I had become close with a kid named Nathan who wore Lennon glasses, had shoulder-length wavy hair and multicolored pants, and told me he also brought home report cards that said “is a conscientious student but daydreams a lot.” An older kid named Ben—six one, bright red hair, well-built, aspiring US Marine—proudly recounted his own failed version of preggers geometry Sandra. There were other people in the world like me!
I felt empowered. By the art. By being around people who were as curious as I was, had varied interests like I did, and also found joy in the magic of telling meaningful stories. I wasn’t as weird as I thought. At fifteen, I felt like I had found my people.
In fact, the only thing that seemed to be missing was a shared background. None of the Bens or Nathans were from immigrant communities. None of them grew up hearing “We don’t do that. We’re Indian.” So, while I grew to feel grounded in who I could be as an artist, I also began to feel a strange distance from our own Indian American community because they seemed to take issue with who I am. It was a separation that wouldn’t peak until college.
* * *
Toward the end of the Summer Arts Institute, Joe assigned me a scene from a play I can’t remember the name of. All I can recall is that toward the end of the scene my character had to kiss a girl passionately, and I was completely terrified because a） I had never kissed anyone in real life and b） my scene partner was my timorous friend Jessica, who had kissed even fewer people than I had.
Joe had to have been aware of this awkward dynamic, which is presumably why he assigned the scene in the first place. Two of his favorite sayings were “You need to get outside your comfort zone!” and “Artists grow and succeed when we take risks!” No matter how I approached the beats of the scene, I couldn’t crack how that kiss was supposed to go. I was too in my head about it. After about a week of excruciating rehearsal in which the class watches and critiques the dialogue and you don’t actually kiss, Joe pulled Jessica aside for a private five-minute conversation. When they returned, we began the scene again. There was a strange fire in Jess’s performance right out of the gate. Before I could get my first line out, she grabbed my face with both hands, pried my mouth open with her shockingly strong tongue, slithered it down my throat while filling my mouth with saliva, and banged her braces against my teeth. Oh, I thought to myself, I guess I’m having my first kiss.
After class, I described what the kiss felt like to Ben. I needed the expert counsel of an experienced friend who had witnessed it from the second row. “Oh man,” he said, “that is NOT what it’s supposed to feel like. She washed? Noooooo!” That phrase, she washed, was apparently in reference to her filling my mouth with saliva. He’s the only one I’ve ever heard use that phrase, and it popped into my head every time I thought I might be about to kiss somebody for, like, the next ten years—which is pretty much how long it took me to kiss anybody again. Contrary to Joe’s goal of teaching us that confidence comes from taking risks （a generally true and good lesson）， his execution of that lesson had the opposite effect and scarred me for a long, long time. I’m not implying that this experience had serious consequences beyond kissing, but it’s a good time to point out that my best-known on-screen love scene is with a gigantic anthropomorphic bag of weed, so there you go.
* * *
I came home from that summer program more interested in risk-taking, storytelling, and the arts, and much more confident in my own skin. I grew out my hair a bit, like Nathan. Tried to do some workouts Ben taught me （and failed miserably so I stopped that）。 I started dressing and acting cool: In the 1990s that meant I rocked jeans with holes in them, had a flannel tied around my waist, and said, “She’s all that and a bag of chips” a lot.
I started to bank some quick teenage successes. By eleventh grade I had joined my high school’s speech and debate team （Forensics） and consistently placed at the top of competitions, or meets, across the state. I auditioned for and got admitted to the Freehold Regional High School District’s two-year public magnet program for the arts. After my standard morning academic courses, the Fine and Performing Arts Center （FPAC, for short） was where I’d spend the second half of the day, in intensive acting and theater study.12 This was followed by the prestigious, publicly funded New Jersey Governor’s School for the Arts, a crazy-selective summer program for incoming seniors that accepted the top five boys and top five girls in each arts discipline statewide. If you got in, you attended a free monthlong intensive residency where you took classes with top professionals in your specialization; in our case, we studied with instructors from David Mamet’s highly esteemed Atlantic Theater Company. Governor’s School felt like all-state for sports, except way more competitive and creative.
I was fortunate to live in a community where these rare public programs existed. Getting into them was a big stepping-stone, showing me that this wasn’t just some random phase—my own state was saying I was actually good at acting. A hobby had become much more, and having these supportive signals of validation continued to offer me clarity: Turning my passion for the arts into a lifelong career was how I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
1?The uncles knew.
2?Okay, bad example.
3?The better part of my childhood summers was spent pooping in communal toilets and washing my tiny butt with bucket water.
4?“You mean A-plus!” —Mom
5?In brownface
6?In brown-voice
7?Piccolo doesn’t sound as folksy.
8?I had no lines.
9?“Did we mention that already? It is for premed. Early admission. He will be a neurosurgeon. Anyway, how is Kalpen?”
10?Spoiler: The opposite happened! And I am very thankful for their tacit support.
11?Not a real thing, I don’t think?
12?Modern, jazz, and tap dance classes instead of gym class. No more getting picked last!
CHAPTER THREE YOU CAN’T HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO
My high school guidance counselor was named Mrs. Cummings, which I found as amusing then as I do now. As was customary for all students early senior year, Mrs. Cummings1 called me down to her office to discuss my future. What were my goals? Where did I see myself in ten years? （Not kissing anyone yet, that’s where!）