The Self-Tape
 

When I was 20, I slept with my college professor.  She was 46. 

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 Slept is an understatement.  It lasted 3 years.  It’s still the longest relationship I’ve ever been in.  It's probably still the most consequential relationship, of any kind, in my life, outside of my parents.  It molded me, and because I was in her house so often, I also inhaled a lot of mold.  

 

We were together, secretly, for three years.  If people had found out, she would've been fired, and I wouldn't exactly be put on the Dean’s List either, unless it was the Dean’s Enemies List.  So, it was a weird time in my life.  We started after school let out, in May.  

 

I had taken her class, Media Aesthetics, and, according to her, gave the most perceptive answers in class.  This was not a particularly high bar to clear.  It was a state school, and a class for mostly checked-out Communications majors.

 

But that started a series of emails and invitations to sit in her office and talk with her about film, showing Youtube clips to each other until one of us had to go to class.  There was one time, leaving her office, where I legitimately thought: If I didn’t know better, I would swear she was turned on.  That continued until the summer, when she invited me to walk around the campus lake after school let out.  

 

The project was a movie called the Passing Key that she had written a script for (the script was a 2-page poem, I later found out) and also she wanted to have sex with me.  

 

We ended up sneaking into her office and locking the door, so we could do that.  Christi had covered the floor haphazardly with fake vinyl wood floor panels, so the floor was incredibly uncomfortable.  

 

I was not nervous.  I was too young and it was all too surreal for me to even be nervous.  It’d be like being nervous about meeting Mr. Peanut as he’s emerging from the TV and propositioning you to have sex.

 

That was the first time.  It continued through the summer.  She encouraged me to be an actor, bought a subscription to backstage.com for me, and started helping me tape stuff, sometimes driving me round trip to New York, so I could audition in-person.  Despite zero experience, I even got a couple jobs!  

 

The audition that sticks out the most from that summer was for something called 'Joe' which was a short film about a made-up sixties era male model named Little Joe, who partied with Andy Warhol's clique during the height of Studio 54.  

 

It was a very risque part.  From the sides we got for the audition, Joe was questionably a male model.  If you went off the snippets of the script we received, Joe's main job was walking around naked in front of Andy Warhol.  But, given that the role called for a mysterious twink, I felt confident the role could be mine, and given that it paid $500 dollars a day for two weeks of filming, I would've stabbed my mother for a chance to do this thinly veiled porn. 

 

The unusual thing about this part, was that for the self-tape, they had sent a nude scene, and they said, direct quote, “Don’t be shy- winky face emoticon.”  I now know that that's not how any of that works, at all.

 

I would love to have said that I had trepidation over the idea of putting myself on film naked and sending it to a stranger on the internet, but I had literally zero compunction about filming this.  I just truly felt like nothing could go wrong.  

 

Because it was the summer, Christi and I went to the school's deserted basement TV studio to shoot the tape.

 

So we shot the tape.  She locked the door, we filmed it, (two takes)- edited it, sent it off, crossed our fingers. 

 

I was pretty hopeful that I’d get the role, and that that role would propel me to a fantastic arthouse film career that hasn’t existed for 20 years now. But we did one of the worst things you can do with a tape of yourself naked, and left it on the same public school computer we used to edit it with.  

 

Given that we filmed this during the summer, a few weeks before classes started, this was a delayed time bomb ticking, just waiting for someone to discover it.

 

Months later, I got a call a few days after the new semester started from the Dean of Arts & Humanities.  She was furious.  "Ned this is beyond the pale- I can't believe that you would-"  And now you might be wondering why the Dean would call me personally and start reaming me out, but the Dean of Arts & Humanities at that school was also, in her spare time, my mother.  She was furious.  And embarrassed.

 

I have no doubt in my mind, for all my mother loves me and supports and has been my champion countless times when I've done wrong, that she would've had me expelled or at least on academic probation, to avoid any charges of sexual nepotism, but Christi, with an argument combining the play Equus, still-life art models, Michelangelo's David, anatomical textbooks, and American prudishness compared to European values, fought hard against the administration, which was yes, my mother and her friend.  

 

She pointed out that I was showing the kind of industry students should be applauded for, that I was trying my best to expand my education outside the classroom, that it was an arthouse film for God’s sakes, would they have a problem with a Greek statue of Apollo. Not being in the room, I have no idea what happened, but I imagine Christi just managed to plant enough of a seed of doubt in my mom’s mind, and so, she managed to talk them down to me being not allowed in the TV studio for the semester. 

 

I was pretty lucky, all things considered.  No one even realized that Christi had been in the room when I auditioned, although if you just listened to the video it would've been deafeningly obvious, as she had been screaming at me in-character as an angry Studio 54 girl.  This was just the first time I experienced a supreme jolt of fear.  But I was lucky. 

 

Not that lucky though.  I didn’t get the part.