One week before I started eighth grade, my family moved from Southern to Northern California. While most kids are terribly shaken when uprooted from their seemingly secure surroundings, I viewed the move as a chance to distance myself from those who made my life particularly unpleasant. The move was a challenge -- a chance to reinvent myself.
Would I part my hair to the left? Maybe. Would I be soft spoken – a mysterious soul with a dark past and even darker brown eyes? What name would I go by? Philomena or Mena? It became abundantly clear that the old Mena needed to be left in Los Angeles.
Minor changes, you could say. Nothing that would be noticeable to a group of children I had never met before.
During the first couple weeks, however, I started to stand out in an odd way. I developed the peculiar habit of speaking with a southern accent. Usually it came out when I was nervous or had to deliver a presentation in front of a group of people. "Y'alls" dotted my conversations. I started pronouncing Mena as "May-na." People asked if I was really from Los Angeles. I started to worry that I was insane.
I once read in a magazine that there are actual documented cases of people suffering head traumas and developing foreign or regional accents. It's called Foreign Accent Syndrome.
Unless wearing high, hairspray-plastered, 1980s bangs constitutes a head trauma, I can safely say that physical brain damage wasn't the source of my new behavioral tic.
Because it's difficult to remember how my eighth-grade mind functioned, I can't recall the truth behind the accent. I know it wasn't forced, but I'm not sure that I didn't exaggerate the words that did come out naturally. In my warped mind, the accent was probably the easiest way to gain attention and make friends.
God knows how, but it worked.
A couple years passed and the accent faded from my speech and memory. During my senior year in high school, though, "May-na" came back.
Senior year was about reinvention, you'll recall.
I needed to find a way to stand out.
Performing in plays seemed like a pretty decent way to gain attention. Unfortunately, my acting abilities lack the certain charisma and naturalness that prevents an audience from wanting to gouge their eyes out with sharp pencils. In other words, I make Melanie Griffith look like a classically-trained thespian.
But because my school was small, Catholic and lacking in the arts department, anyone who enrolled in the drama class would be guaranteed a role in some sort of school-sponsored play.
At sixteen, I was reduced to a bit-part, character actor. In our production of M*A*S*H, I auditioned for the role of Hot Lips but was instead cast as Congresswoman Goldfarb. You don't remember a Congresswoman Goldfarb in M*A*S*H, you say? Exactly.
Whoever Goldfarb was, she became Southern when I took to the stage.
Every charcter became Southern when I took to the stage. I equated acting to speaking with a different voice.
During my "acting" period, I began socializing with the class misfits, outsiders who were lovingly referred to as freaks. None of us ever landed the good roles, and when it came time to audition for the big Christmas play, we decided enough was enough and convinced our teacher into letting us put on our own little three-act.
Honestly, our teacher didn't need much convincing. She wanted us out of her hair so she could focus on the real play. As the cheerleading director, she could never quite mask the contempt she felt toward us. And because we frowned when others perked, we were reduced to weirdoes who couldn't act.
Although we would be producing, adapting and acting in our own play, we would still be considered a drama-class sponsored production. This way we got the grade and she got the credit for putting on two different plays.
Teenagers should never be trusted. That's the moral of this story.
Burned by the fact we weren't good enough to perform in the "real" play and unable to control our teenage dislike of authority, we took an unknown play about the joys of family and the Christmas season and turned it into a disturbing performance piece.
Some highlights:
The play opened with the song "This Is Halloween" from A Nightmare Before Christmas. Why? No reason at all.
I played my character as an oversexed, alcoholic Southern woman who resented her husband and hated her kids. I think the description of my character in the original play was: Mother, early 40s.
The boy who played my husband decided he wanted his character to be an overzealous, card-carrying, shell-shocked member of the NRA. He carried an unloaded rifle throughout the entire play.
Santa was into bondage. He actually wore leather and carried a whip. And, he screamed all his lines.
At random times, we would just stop performing and stare.
Mid-way through our play, before even seeing our pain-loving Santa, the principal walked out in a huff. Coincidentally, half-way through the play, while on stage, I started to rethink the quality of our opus. Mortification set in soon after that.
I felt guilty. Dirty. I felt like I violated an innocent audience. I wasn't an actor. I wasn't even a good Catholic girl.
After it was all over, I tried to rush out of the gymnasium without anyone noticing, recognizing, or reprimanding me. As a parent blocked my exit, I realized that this night was never going to end.
I expected the worst.
I got something a little different.
Parent: So are you really from the South?
Me: Um... No.
Parent: Well, you're always playing Southern characters.
Me: I don't think they're supposed to be Southern. I'm just a horrible actor. I'm sorry.
Parent: Okay. Well. I've got to go.
Me: I'm sorry!
Needless to say, the accent doesn't surface anymore.
Thursday's 
