Acting

“At least when we’re acting, we know we’re lying.” Sean Penn

I was raised to go to heaven. That was the main thing. Life was just a means to an end, and that end was death, which sent you to heaven, where you really belonged. But to get to heaven you had to die sin-free, or at least free of any sin greater than could be shriven in purgatory, which was short-term hell. Confession erased all sins on earth, but unconfessed sins on the soul at death were punished in afterlife. Venial sins could be burned off in purgatory, but mortal sins sent you to hell. If you went to hell, your life was a failure, no matter what you’d done with it while you were alive.

This truth, and a myriad of others, I learned from The Baltimore Catechism, the American Roman Catholic child’s question-and-answer guide to the universe. I memorized it in grammar school, reciting its rote wisdom into the concealed ears of nuns, who pressed my lips against their chalk-dusted veils to mute my answers from eavesdropping classmates who might be tempted to copy. Copying was a sin. In upper grades, I answered loud and proud for priests testing my doctrinal mettle, or wrote answers word-perfect on purple-and-white religion quizzes brought to the classroom so wet from the nuns’ mimeograph machine that the chemical smell made me high.

I accepted the catechisms’ truths with terror and relief. They provided a life-long shield against existential angst and produced lifelong guilts in varieties to peculiar that my psyche is largely impenetrable to the unindoctrinated. But by far the most radical legacy of The Baltimore Catechism to me was that it – more than movie magazines, or sheer adventurousness—was responsible for my acting career.

The training in memorization alone equipped me. After conquering the catechism, I never had trouble “Learning all those lines,” a feat apparently so daunting to the numbers of people who asked me about it that it seems to be keeping a sizable portion of them out of the acting profession. But the catechism’s most forceful push to the stage came from its unmistakable depiction of life as a dangerous trap. Living was so obviously full of pitfalls by which even the most fervent soul stumbled and slid down sin’s slippery slope to hell that I concluded heaven could only be won by avoiding real life as much as possible.

The stage, when I found it, was a blessed relief. It was a haven, a place where I could fake life without incurring consequences. Emotion was real onstage, passion was real, but taking action caused nothing more real to happen than the delightful effect of applause. In other words, The Baltimore Catechism made an acting career seem spiritually safe.

I had a lot to learn about show business
“Taken to the Stage: The Education of an Actress” Excerpt from Chapter 3