Here's Austintatious Annie as she started out.
Tastes
change as you get older. That’s what my grandmother said to me
about stewed spinach as she was trying to make me eat it. Yeah right.
You aren’t going to like it for a while, possibly ever but you
might as well eat it anyway now and not complain, even though
grandmother probably had when she was a kid. She’s never been quiet
about her opinions.
It
is true, though. Things change as you get older. You get bigger,
stronger, more awkward or just have your hair darken in your teens. I
had all of these things happen to me from the time I turned twelve to
when I was about fifteen. I also learned how to look like other
people, anybody else. I like acting. I like pretending I’m stronger
or taller or more confident or even an entirely different person and
I really like theater.
Because I started being able to do this little
by little, I just thought I was a really good actor. I guess I am
since I have a built in way to change without makeup and since I can
be someone else in my head, even my awkwardness which leads me to
bump into sharp-edged things a lot, goes away while I’m pretending
to be someone else. I got a lot of parts. I live in Austin. There’s
a lot of theater. I played little kids, women, even men if the part
fit what I wanted to do well enough and the director would let me.
Because
plays don’t have an exact look for their actors, with some
exceptions, I never went much farther than changing my appearance a
bit and changing how I moved and walked. There might have been some
difference in shoulder width but nothing large enough to be too
noticeable. This changed when I had to play a character who was a
showgirl. It wasn’t my usual but by now I was pretty well known and
I was persuaded to do it since I didn’t tend to refuse roles that
were handed to me all tied up neatly with a bow.
The
character as the director imagined it was supposed to be big busted
and I am only endowed in the technical sense as my fun bags get lost
completely under a sweater. The solution was prosthetic boobs. I
hated the idea but I went with it, going home and spending the whole
night psyching myself up to have two miniature camel humps strapped
to my chest.
Oh the joy.
I woke up the next day exhausted and went
down to the theater to have my “boys” sized. When I stripped off
my shirt for the costume guy, he stared at me. I wondered what he’d
found to stare at and looked down. “I had a chest!” It wasn’t a
pair of bazoongas like the director wanted but it wasn’t “fun
size” anymore either. My boobs were way too big for my bra. Good
thing it was a sports bra or I would have keeled over from
asphyxiation. The director and the props man made a decision. I
didn’t have to wear the rig. All I had to do was wear a push up bra
and call it a day.
That’s
when I began to wonder what I could do.
