My father raised me differently.
He told my sister and I that we were born, “tabula rasa” -- a "blank slate" -- and it was up to us to figure out what we believed. This is quite a responsibility, especially when you’re 10.
This is why, contrary to what a character said in Woody Allen’s masterpiece "Annie Hall," I actually happen to embrace the cultural stereotypes I’m reduced to. Because there are so few.
Strong Irish grandmother? Check. Uptight Minnesotan? Check. A gloomy, Fitzgerald, Franzen-esque place ripe for deep literary inspiration? Check.
But the checks of "belonging" to something, including cultural stereotypes, stops there. Not only did my father tell me I was “tabula rasa” at a young age (he was a scientist, an aerospace engineer who was part of the top secret MOL Satellite Program) but due to a family rift, my deep Irish Catholic roots (my ancestors came over during the potato famine) were nearly lost when half the family converted to Methodist.
Who the heck has ever heard of an Irish Methodist?
My family also wasn’t the stereotypical Minnesotan: we didn’t own a black lab (the defacto Minnesota state dog), we didn’t hunt, we didn’t canoe. We were brunette in a sea of tall Scandinavian blondes. We read books, we were short, we argued at the dinner table. I grew up in the Minneapolis theater community. My name was Hebrew, my mom named me after a character in Steinbeck’s "East of Eden." On top of that, my parents were divorced, then got back together, but never remarried. Yikes.
Despite the fact that outsiders like to think of Minnesota as “folksy” and “nice,” let’s face it: Nice is not the same thing as repressed hostility. There is some serious repression going on there.
I did experience dreamy summers at my grandmother’s lake cabin, fishing for crappies (pronounced croppies), chasing fireflies and boating. It was Lake Wobegon idyllic. But Minnesotan literary icon Sinclair Lewis explored its darker side best in "Main Street": there is nothing more spirit-crushing than those “quaint” Midwesterners who are so resistant to change.
This “outsider” feeling is what drives, I think, the desire to be in the arts.
My passion for writing and the arts brought me from the Minneapolis theater world to NYU to being a screenwriter in Los Angeles. When I first began screenwriting, I pushed myself to write “high-concept” spec scripts. I felt that my story, my life, my drive, and insights were not good enough. Instead of writing my quirky original romcom "The Fitzgerald Complex" (about a young woman who wants to escape the Midwest) I mistakenly felt I needed to write "Die Hard" in a casino.
Instead of embracing my themes and issues, I ran from them. I approached screenwriting with that “tabula rasa” thinking in my head again: the blank page now substituted for the blank slate. I could make it whatever I wanted it to be.
This is not always a good thing.
