Journey down the road less traveled

Story by Ching Lee

Remember the first time anybody ever asked you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” What did you say? What was the picture that came to your mind? What kind of outfit were you wearing in that picture?

Whatever the answers, a more interesting question might be, did you stick to your answer? Did you say you were going to be a dancer, and you became a dancer? Or did you wander through the many fantasies and fingered all the different roles you wanted to play? Did you even have the opportunity to say what you wanted to be? Maybe no one ever asked you. What did you want to be when you grow up?

JOURNEY TO A FORIEGN LAND...

“Am I happy? Yeah I’m happy! I’m ecstatic!” Alex Finch shouted atop the mountain.

Actually, the 20-year-old starving actor is walking up and down the aisles of a theatre in New York City declaring his happiness while the theatre is shutting down for the night. All the patrons have gone home, and the last of the actors and crew are filing out as well. They’re wondering what he’s still doing in there. Well, he likes it in there—the theatre, his “home.”

“Great show! Great show!” he yells to the remaining few leaving the place. He then settles down to talk about his journey to New York and the bigger journey ahead—to become a working actor in New York.

He thinks it all started with Kirk Cameron, he says, laughing. You know, Kirk Cameron from that, 80s show. Legend has it that one day, when Finch was 9 years old, he sat on this father’s lap and said he wanted to be an actor, even though at the time he didn’t know what that meant.

His parents took him seriously though, and put him in classes with Ed Claudio, actor/teacher/director and co-founder of the Actor’s Workshop on Del Paso Boulevard. Through Claudio, he later met his mentor, Tim Busfield of Thirtysomething fame.

Finch wasn’t exactly old enough to remember watching his mentor in that ever-tortured ABC TV-melodrama about thirty-something yuppies, but he did learn much from him through working at the B Street Theatre in Sacramento, for which Busfield is co-founder.

“Since then every person I meet has put me a little farther into knowing that this is what I want to do,” Finch said.

He has known for a while that he wanted to go into acting. When he was about 12, he got involved in soccer and stopped going to acting classes for six months. During that time, he was miserable but didn’t know why. Then he figured out that the day he stopped acting was when he became miserable. So he quit soccer, went back to acting class and never left.

He continued working with Ed Claudio and the B Street Theatre throughout high school. After graduation, he landed a job at the Shadowbox Cabaret in Columbus, Ohio. This was his first career move away from home and his first paying gig. He ended up working there for only a couple of months before accepting an apprenticeship at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky.

The apprenticeship lasted nine months. After that, he went to Chicago to check out the scene, then later hitched a ride to New York City with a buddy from the apprenticeship. He stayed with his buddy for two weeks and knew then that he wanted to be in New York. A girl he knew from the apprenticeship had a great, cheap sublet apartment and said he could stay on the floor or the couch. He lives there now, but the girl has moved into another apartment.

Finch admits he has no backup plan in case this acting stint goes nowhere. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t even have a supplemental job for additional income.

“I’m a professional actor!” he insisted, scoffing at the idea of waiting tables, the traditional actor’s job. “I just think it lessens the possibilities. I think it messes up your head. That’s not what I want to do. I don’t want to wait tables. I’m an actor.”

It’s one thing to call yourself an actor, but it’s another to actually make it as a working actor, so Finch knows he has to be open to do just about anything, anywhere. He’s currently working at the Pantheon Theatre in Time Square doing anything that needs to be done—mop the stage, fix lights and equipment, build sets, organize things—anything but clean the bathroom. He’s also worked as an extra for NBC’s Ed, and currently in the pre-production stage of a low-budget film he’s doing with some folks he knew from the apprenticeship.

He resists answering whether his parents could still claim him as a dependent on their 1040, but modestly adds that he would not be able to do what he’s doing without the emotional and financial support of his parents.

“I mean, my parents aren’t rich,” he said. “They starve so I don’t have to starve. They eat beans and rice so I can eat beans and rice.”

He admits that he didn’t exactly see himself in New York City at the age of 20. He saw himself in regional theater in the Midwest.

“But when I was 9, I also promised myself I’d go to college,” he pointed out.

Plans change.

TESTING THE WATERS...

At 22, Sharissa Delgado admits she’s still not quite sure yet. Currently living with her parents and occupying the upstairs double-bedroom of a comfortably modest home in Greenhaven, Delgado says she’s always had a hard time coming out of her box, leaving her family and comfort zones. While many of her friends have graduated from college and are heading down the career path they chose a while ago, Delgado is still looking at her map, trying to figure out which way she wants to go.

It was actually a big relief for her to finally declare her major as “undecided” this year at Sacramento City College. Now the sky’s the limit. She can go and do anything, be anything. There is a certain Audrey-Hepburn-in-Paris look of wonderment in her eyes when she speaks about what she wants to be when she grows up.

Her sister, after all, said she wanted to be a dancer when she grew up, and she is now a professional dancer in San Francisco. Delgado sees her sister as a living example of someone pursuing her dream career, and she knows this is what she wants for herself, but she’s still having a hard time pinning down the exact dream.

Remnants of her sister are still all over the room, namely the one section of the wall with all the Marilyn Monroe pictures pinned up like a shrine. On the opposite corner of the room, Delgado has returned the gesture by decorating it with her own collage of Bjork. How appropriate it is, in a way, that the idols in her room happen to be Norma Jean, that little girl with the big dreams who made it big, and the ever daydreaming dancer in the dark, always caught in reveries of what she could be.

“My goal is to pursue anything that interests me and see where it takes me,” Delgado said.

Right now it is teaching piano for Simply Music, a company she has taken lessons from for more than five years. As a student, her instructor came to her one day and asked if she wanted to teach the program. She thought it would be fun, so she went through the training, and now teaches the program through a studio, where she works with people of all ages, people who are pursuing piano because they want to, not because they’re made to.

“So it’s exciting,” she said, “because going to work is always positive.”

Her own academic experience, on the other hand, wasn’t always so positive. Her parents put her in the all-girls St. Francis Catholic High School because they thought it would give her more confidence to harbor in a small classroom environment with high moral energy.

Since St. Francis is considered a college preparatory school, it came as quite a surprise to Delgado’s guidance counselors when she declared she didn’t plan on going to a four-year university after high school.

“I knew I didn’t know what I wanted to do right away,” Delgado explained, “and I knew my parents didn’t have the money to send me to a four-year college right away.” So she didn’t put as much effort into school as she should have. She also felt the school didn’t put as much effort into counseling her, and let her fall by the wayside once they realized she didn’t have any clear plans of her own.

Her grades weren’t exactly encouraging. They were mostly Cs, Delgado noted, and probably a D or two, most likely in math. She began hiding her grades from her parents, afraid of how her dad would react.

One day her dad was driving her to the library to catch up on her studies. It was the last night she had to do the research, and when they got there, the library was closed.

“So I sat there and just cried in my dad’s truck,” Delgado remembered. “I told him everything about my grades and about how it’s been, how stressed out it’s made me because I’m not one of those people.”

She said her dad told her he never meant for the experience to take such a toll on her, and he apologized for putting her in that position.

“He said, ‘When I put you in St. Francis, I wanted you to have the moral support, the family environment,’” Delgado said of her father. “’It was never my idea to get you into a university and have you necessarily be academically successful.’”

She now wishes that she hadn’t spent so much of her energy at the time worrying about insecurities and all the social aspects of high school. Had she known those issues would have worked themselves out anyway, she would have paid more attention to her studies, done better academically. She admits she initially had regrets about the way she dealt with high school. “I think it was part of that angst of not knowing where you’re going,” she said. “Your whole world is changing, and now you’re going to have to become responsible for yourself, and you’re going to have to make all these decisions that before were made for you.” Delgado remembers wishing she had been a little more prepared. If only she could go back, work harder in school, then maybe she’d have more options.

“But now being a little older and looking back,” she speculated, “I think if I had had those options, would I have taken them? I probably wouldn’t have.”

Today she’s decided to leave the regrets behind and not worry so much about the doom of being “Undecided” at 22. She realizes that, one of these days, she’s going to have to make some decisions and come out of her comfort zone. Living at home has preserved her sense of idealism. So far she’s had no disillusionment about the world because she has never had to make it on her own. She admits she’s never had to look for a job because all of her jobs have been pretty much handed to her.

She’s confident, however, that she will find her passion and her career path. She believes that even when you get off track, it’s really the direction you needed to go to get to where you need to be.

“Along the road I’ll try different things,” Delgado said. “And wherever I end up, it’s—whatever —because I’m always going to pursue the things that make me happy.”

SECOND CHANCES...

Sometimes it takes a while to figure out what you want. Sometimes it can take many years and several different careers before discovering that you’re heading down the wrong direction.

Georgette Jeppesen’s career path had always been dictated by what her parents wanted. Like Delgado, Jeppesen didn’t know what she wanted to do, but always trusted that her parents would know what was best for her. She remembers being interested in writing, but thought she was too shy and not aggressive enough to make it as a writer.

Her parents thought she would do well in medical technology—thought that it was a good, suitable career for a woman. Too timid to go against what her parents thought, Jeppesen went along with them. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point in 1973 with a degree in medical technology, and worked in the field right out of college for a couple of years.

Then she drifted.

Before she knew it, she ended up in claims processing, then moved her way into data processing and medical claims processing. With her medical background, she moved up the ladder financially and gained years of experience in the business. By 1992 she was making about $60,000 a year. At this time she was a business analyst writing business proposals for Foundation Health.

And one day she just quit.

“I had become increasingly unhappy,” Jeppesen said. “The pressure was really getting to me. And I just didn’t like what I was doing that much. And literally, one day I just decided to quit.”

She didn’t go in that morning thinking she was going to quit, although she and her husband had talked about it.

“Something triggered it,” she recalled. “I don’t remember what it was that triggered it, but I just quit.”

And she was relieved when she did. Although she and her husband knew they wouldn’t be too bad financially, it was still a lot of money to be walking away from. He was supportive of her finding her true calling. So she went to find it.

She worked different part-time jobs and started going to school at Sacramento City College. She remembered her passion for writing throughout high school and college, the passion she pushed aside in order to fulfill what her parents wanted. She decided to finally acknowledge this passion and see where it would take her.

Jeppenssen took one journalism class, and decided she liked it. So she took another. And another. Last December she graduated with a degree in journalism and is currently the editor of The Express, Sacramento City College’s newspaper.

At 50, Jeppenssen says she has regrets about the choices she has made in her career.

“In a way I do feel kind of sad that I’m just doing it now,” she lamented. “I’m kind of regretful about it, but what are you going to do? There’s nothing I can do about it, so you just have to go forward.”

Going forward means reveling in all that she has accomplished for herself today, being thankful that she’s finally found her passion and following it.

“Getting the degree was a goal in itself,” she said. “Whether I did anything with it afterwards was kind of irrelevant. I just wanted to get that degree and say I’ve accomplished that.”

When her 16-year-old son, a mere sophomore in high school, tells her that he doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up, she tells him not to worry about it. She believes that if you get good grades in high school, you can do anything you want. She tells her son he doesn’t have to decide—yet. She hopes that based on her own experience, he would learn to follow his heart and do something he really wants to do. By that same token, she also wants him to be thinking about being self-sufficient someday and not sponge off his parents forever.

“The idea is to follow your passion, but to be able to make money at it,” she laughed.