Eat the Damn Cake

Yeah, I’m not really an insider. This is a guest post.

Madeline Bertani is an actress living and working in Los Angeles. She used to write a vegan food blog called “Me and Chew,” and is currently working on developing a new lifestyle blog between acting work and assistant teaching. She needs to take more pictures of herself eating cake …

Greetings from the West Coast! First of all, thanks so much to Kate for letting me do a guest post on ETDC – love it!

Here’s a bit of my story:

In the fall of last year, I moved from the Midwest to Los Angeles to begin my professional acting career in a picturesque “bright-eyed girl moves to Hollywood to follow her dreams” fashion.

Once I’d arrived, a director I knew kindly recommended me to a “really, really powerful” manager to possibly represent me. Sweet.

Sitting down to a meeting with the aforementioned manager, she asked to look at my resume (where my hair and eye color, height, weight, age range, contact info, and previous work are listed). As she scanned and scrutinized, her face drew back in disapproval:

“I’d take your weight off here, honey. We’re in size zero land, and that height and weight doesn’t look like a size zero. Now maybe you’re all muscle, but I can’t really tell because you’re wearing a skirt.”

When I retold the story to my director-friend, she said:

“Well, she was probably gently trying to tell you to lose some weight.”

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I am a wimp. I am not resilient or strong-willed or strong anythinged. I hate pain. For six hours, on the plane, I couldn’t breathe. I was already sick, but getting better, and then suddenly it was terrible and I couldn’t breathe. And then my ears popped. There is no word for this, really. It’s “popped” when something inside swells up and threatens to explode. And then it’s “popped” when the same thing squeaks and deflates. So they bad-popped and then they refused to good-pop back. Forever. For a night. And then a day, and then a night.

I cried out of frustration. I couldn’t hear my own voice. Here I am, in California, ruining everything.

There is nothing wrong with me. I don’t have a chronic illness, like Bear. I am young.  When I go to the doctor, the doctor says, “Everything seems normal.”

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