4 Taking Beats
FOUR
Taking Beats
“This is… interesting,” Mom said a few hours after Jansen’s delivery, when she’d taken a good look at him. “Are you sure he’s mine?” Mom’s skin was smooth as silk, and even though her hair was naturally dark underneath her highlights, it had an auburn hue.
Dad was as baffled as Mom. “Look at those eyebrows,” he said. “They’re… huge.” It was like Mom and Dad had passed Jansen all the DNA I didn’t have, then thrown in a little hair just for fun.
The first time I saw Jansen in the hospital, I was skeptical at best. I thought I’d be getting a new doll, but this thing was more like a fuzzy stuffed animal—and not one of those expensive brand-name ones you get at Christmas.
With Mom lying in a bed holding him, it was also clear that she and Dad were no longer mine and mine alone.
We were a family of four now, and I knew that was just the way it was going to be.
Within a few days, though, all my jealousy faded away.
Despite Jansen’s weird monkey features, I was fascinated by him, and I felt drawn to him in an instinctive way.
I decided I’d been put on this earth to protect him, and as a responsible five-year-old, I could take care of him just fine.
So, I begged Mom and Dad to let me carry him, and when Jansen was a few months old, Mom relented.
“Hold him like this,” Mom said, placing him in my arms as we stood outside near our Volvo. “Good. Now, can you walk to the car and put him in his car seat?”
Mom opened the car door and motioned for me to place him inside. I tiptoed forward, gripping him tightly in my arms.
“How do I put him in?” I asked. “Oh no, Mom, he’s slipping… !”
Thud. Jansen slid out of my arms and landed on the ground.
“Oh my God!” Mom yelled. “You dropped him!”
Jansen started to scream, and I looked at Mom, my face white as a ghost. “I’m sorry!” I yelled. “But I only did it once!”
My brother wasn’t dead, but he sure had a serious set of pipes.
In 1994, all my television auditions paid off, and I landed a role on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live, playing a young girl named Sarah Roberts.
I was going to be a soap opera actress, just like Mom.
I didn’t really know what to make of soap operas except that Mom told me they were very dramatic and that only grown-ups watched them.
I vaguely recalled seeing one on TV and thinking how boring it looked.
It didn’t make sense that the characters dressed so nicely, with their hair and makeup done, even when they were just standing around their living rooms. Or why were the final scenes comically long, with the soundtrack’s organ stuck on the same endless note?
People were always finding their long-lost twins or discovering their father wasn’t actually their dad, and their emotions were always over-the-top.
It was all just weird, but now it was my world.
I had to get up to speed fast, so I did.
I learned that One Life to Live was a mainstay on ABC, and its most famous star was Erika Slezak, who played Victoria “Viki” Lord, the matriarch of the Lord family.
(Erika Slezak would go on to win six Daytime Emmy Awards and remain on the show for over forty years.
She is a legend.) The Lords were the rich family in town, and Sarah Roberts was one of them.
In fact, her mother was Tina, Viki Lord’s sister.
And while Sarah wouldn’t be in every episode, her birth had been a pivotal plot point a few seasons back because a pregnant Tina hadn’t been able to figure out who her baby’s father was, and then Viki shot one of the possible fathers in self-defense.
You know, the kind of thing that happens all the time in every small town.
I was so young I wouldn’t have many lines, but Mom warned me that I’d have to memorize all my scenes before shooting so I’d know exactly when and where I had to be.
That was because soap operas filmed one episode per day, not over the course of several days.
Trust me, an entire hour is a lot to store in your brain.
My call time was 6:00 a.m. at ABC Studio 17 on West Sixty-Sixth Street between Columbus and Central Park West. Mom and I had to leave the house just after 5:00 a.m., and, as I sat in the back seat and Mom sped along, I committed my scenes to memory.
The fact that Mom had highlighted them to activate my focus made the job a little easier.
At that age, my brain was a sponge. Every night, I could memorize more than the day before and recall them more quickly on the car ride to the set.
One Life to Live became a master class in cramming—a skill most people don’t learn until college, when they stay up all night studying for finals. I learned how to cram when I was five.
Mom claims that One Life to Live was the first place she began to take my acting seriously, like it was something I could do for the rest of my life. In the middle of one of my scenes, a lead actress approached Mom as she stood at the side of the set.
“You know, your daughter can really act,” my castmate said.
Mom smiled. “You don’t have to say that to me. She’s just a kid, and, besides, I’m not that kind of stage mom.”
“No, I mean it,” she said, putting her hand lightly on Mom’s arm.
“You trained as an actor, so you know what I mean. She’s five years old, and she’s taking beats.
” Beats are unwritten moments in a scene when a character has the opportunity to shift the tone or the emotional direction.
It’s up to an actor to find that beat, then adjust their acting accordingly.
Mom looked at me and took notice. I had absorbed all the acting directions she’d given me and was now processing my facial expressions, gestures, and lines rather than doing them by rote.
I wasn’t just reacting; I was actively thinking about my character, then progressing toward the objective of the scene.
“Oh, my God,” Mom said, “you’re right.”
I didn’t know it, but that moment was my beat, when I transitioned from an actor who was a child to a child actor. The tone and emotion behind my work shifted, and I matured in everyone’s eyes. Mom saw me differently. She knew the world would treat me differently from here on out.
I loved what I was doing, but none of us fully realized how not normal it was.
While most kids my age were in preschool learning the basics of reading, my mom was reading me lines.
And they weren’t happy-go-lucky, Barney-the-Purple-Dinosaur lines, either; I had to learn phrases like “Mommy! Don’t leave me!
” Mom signed me up for swim classes and gymnastics—I was compact and strong, so gymnastics was a natural fit for me—but even doing those “normal” activities, I suspected I was different from all the other kids in my town.
In first grade, someone finally called me out on my differences, and that acknowledgment broke my heart.
Starting in kindergarten I attended William O.
Schaefer Elementary School in Tappan, which is about twenty minutes south of the house we lived in in Congers.
I don’t remember exactly how the shaming started, or what words put me so firmly in the corner.
I only remember the silence of the classroom as I packed up my backpack to leave for yet another audition and the whispers of someone at my table, asking, “Why does she get to skip school?” Then I recall looking over at Mrs. Rogers, my teacher, and seeing her start to frown.
“Hayden has another audition,” she said, sighing. “I guess it’s more important than whatever we’re learning in school.”
I rushed out of class, glad to get away.
If I didn’t fit into the world I should fit into, maybe I was better off at this other, weird world that had taken center stage in my life.
But none of it truly sat right with me. I was a child in an adult world half the time and a little grown-up in a child’s world the other half.
Part of me just wanted to have friends, a place at a cafeteria table, teachers who were kind to me, and lots of fun at recess.
But another part of me loved the rush I got from acting and the fact that it made Mom so proud.
When you don’t really fit in anywhere, all you want to do is fit in somewhere. But in first grade, I didn’t know where that somewhere was.