My mid-life Psychic Visit

I saw a psychic last Monday.

Even if you may not believe in seeing psychics, I would stick with me on this one because together, through my story, we can explore the perfection of randomness and making sense of what doesn’t feel sensical..

Two and a half hours into our session, in the backyard of her LA mid-city home, Christina the psychic and I had covered a series of topics that ranged from my professional life into the constellations and pyramids in Egypt and back to something my father said. She got up to check on her sleeping 2 year old, and asked me “What is it about 7 and 17? I want you to think about these ages.”

Then she put on some new age music and left me in the back patio to think. I honestly couldn’t come up with anything. I knew when I was 17 I was like, “Fuck this place,” and couldn’t wait to get out of Rhode Island to become an actress. But 7? I was a little blank.

I left with her telling me I needed to unblock my digestive system and feel into what it would look like if my third eye wasn’t always looking over its shoulder.

The week felt profound. I felt like something in me had been seen and shifted at a time in my life I was ready to look at all the parts with kindness, curiosity and compassion.

Then my partner and I found the James Dean suite at the Prospect Hollywood hotel.

We were looking for a fun local place to get away for the night with a hectic two month countdown to before we were going to get married. We asked Claude about rooms with a bathtub (since I desperately miss taking baths in our current place). We found this boutique hotel with a claw foot tub, and set off across the city for a getaway in Hollywood.

Having no idea, I was so tickled to see the names on the doors were of famous silver screen actors like Marilyn Monroe and Vivian Leigh. We stayed in the James Dean room, and as soon as I entered the bungalow (a place where James Dean himself had lived), I had psychic flashes of what 7 meant.

Old Hollywood.

As a 7 year old, I was lonely. I was an only child. I watched a lot of Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello. I also was completely enamored with Charlie Chaplin and old black and white films. Hollywood called to me with all its glitz and glamour. I got lost in all the fantasy of Hollywood, and a dream to be an actress was planted in me. I had an ideal of what Hollywood was based on how beautiful and successful Rita Hayworth was. When I was 8 and my sister was born, we took a family summer vacation to Ogunquit Maine and I fell madly in love with Norman Mailer’s book Marilyn at the hotel. The owner let me keep it. Known for tossing everything keepsake most of my life, it was one of the finest jewels of my literary collection and remains so to this day. I still have it, after a million moves.

When I was 17, I was determined to be an actress and make it to “Hollywood” and landed in acting school. But I didn’t have in me the ability to believe I could get there penniless and with low self-worth and confidence. I gave up and spent decades serving this person’s dreams or that person’s dreams. When I got to Hollywood in my 20’s, I saw a place that didn’t seem at all like my 7 year old fantasies. Actors living in bungalows and attending premieres, the glitz and greasepaint of the stage. The complete immersion of being an actor. So I became a movie producer and that career made me angry, hardened, broke and disillusioned.

I won’t bore you with the complete randomness and yet perfection of staying at this Hollywood gem, where the room was decorated in old Hollywood decor to perfection (see pictures) but it was the day before I started my first acting class in Los Angeles since I was that 17 year old girl.

Yes, I had signed up for a 6 week intensive Meisner acting class based on a whisper from an intuitive part of me that said, “You are going to leave LA soon. Finally do what you came here to do.”

I signed up with the heart and curiosity of a 7 year old, and the life lessons and smarts of a 56 year old. I no longer had the fantasies that Hollywood would be like the movies I saw on an old black and white TV in my living room in Warren, Rhode Island. I also knew about Hollywood inside and out from my two decades navigating as a producer and writer.

I was going into the essence of what I loved. Acting. Performing words, Being other people. Living and experiencing other people’s lives and words even if I found out I was good at it or mediocre at it.

My partner and I didn’t put these two things together until we woke up the next morning.

We had even gone to the Wax Museum in Hollywood Blvd and stood among the creepy waxworks of stars (see me and Jack)

When you let go of the fantasy within the idols or you are willing to look at your young dreams from a place that doesn’t have the severity of survival. the art can emerge. The timing can align. The teachers can arrive. The genesis and root of your joy emerges to then be curious with a more mature lens.

Where will these acting classes lead me? I have no idea. But what I do know is that when we are willing to walk away from old dead models of the way we have been living out lives, and we look for the signs, we can go incredibly unexpected and wild places unseen, unheard and unimagined.

The psychic told me when I accept my award that I would thank God. She said one day I would be expensive. I have no idea what any of that means. Maybe I can hold onto two parallel universes. The one where I act again, and the other where I continue my career speaking and motivating women to look outside all their obligations to others and follow those seemingly absurd dreams with Delicious Life. I can try both. I can be a hyphenate.

Where do you want to discover those old dreams again? Give yourself permission to lean in, let go, discard, and see what shows up for you, and just you.

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Anyone have any cool old Hollywood stories? I would love to hear them in the comments!