Thicker than Water: A Memoir

Kerry started to audition professionally when she was 13 and attending the Spence School, an all-girls college preparatory school in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Her commute took an hour each day. She could feel the difference between her classmates’ lives and her own, and she was one of few Black students.

Her first audition occurred because Holly, the administrative assistant to the head of the Middle School, knew how much Kerry loved to act and Holly’s friend, a casting director, sought a young Black woman for a part in an upcoming film. Kerry auditioned, and while she didn’t get the part, the casting director wanted to help find her an agent. At the time, Kerry did not know how enormously helpful this was, but reflecting on it now, she knows she was lucky.

Kerry’s cousin Michael once advised her to make anyone interviewing her feel like she was also interviewing them by asking them a question that implies she is keeping her options open. When Kerry went to J. Michael Bloom, a talent agency representing many major child and young actors, she kept this in mind, asking the agents interviewing her several questions. She signed a three-year contract with them. On the way home, Valerie told Kerry that she had to be in charge of keeping track of when auditions where, getting to them, and preparing for them. Kerry took this as permission to become a professional actor.

In addition, she began to see acting as a path to financial success. She wanted to counter her parents’ concern over her chosen career field and thought she could help ease their financial burden. As her mother discovered this too, she began to put pressure on Kerry, once commenting in an offhand way that Kerry hadn’t had a gig in a while. This made her feel like she wasn’t good enough while also making her resent her parents and the auditions themselves.

Kerry describes how her involvement with the Serving Teens through Arts Resources (STAR) Program, which was housed at Mt. Sinai Hospital’s Adolescent Health Center, helped provide her with both spending money and a performance outlet. The performances were about educating people about safe sex and slowing down the spread of HIV. There, Kerry found a community where she could be herself. Even though teachers and counselors required audiences to attend the performances, Kerry embraced the challenge of a reluctant audience. She also enjoyed the “talkbacks” they would do with the audiences, continuing to act in character with the audience. It was like improv, and it showed Kerry the link between art and social change. She started to feel like an activist and attended conferences and rallies. In addition, she worked with organizations that performed shows aimed at helping end violence against women.

Through her work with STAR, Kerry eventually performed on ABC’s World News Tonight. A director at the all-boys school with whom Spence partnered complimented her performance on the show and noted that he could see her come back to herself after her monologue. Watching it back, Kerry saw exactly what he meant, realizing that she was good at giving herself over to the performance.

Kerry opens the chapter by noting, “It was my first crime” (111). She then continues on to reflect on how much her parents hoped to have her and how she wanted to be perfect. However, she also knew that they weren’t sharing everything about themselves with her.

After school one afternoon, she came across A New You: The Art of Good Grooming, an etiquette textbook, at the public library. She never returned the book, which was her crime. She thought the book would help her become perfect.

Her suspicion that her family had secrets affected her life in two ways. First, she felt that that she was on her own and could not fully share herself with anyone. Second, because her parents refused to share the truth, it must mean that they considered her unable to handle reality.

When she was 11, she and her friend Nicole walked to the grocery store. She was wearing a necklace with the Greek symbol for theatre: the mask of comedy and the mask of tragedy. Two boys came up to them and took her necklace and her friend’s earrings. Kerry didn’t wear a necklace after that.

One day, Kerry asked to have friends over, and her parents required that they come straight to their apartment. Instead, Kerry and her friends went to Nicole’s apartment, where there were no adults. Kerry’s mother caught her in a lie, and though Kerry knew that her parents kept secrets, she felt bad that her mother had discovered their lie. She promised herself to never get caught in a lie again.

By 15, she lied often about going out to parties, drinking, boyfriends, and drugs. Kerry explains that she saw lying as telling the truth in a way that others would accept. She felt like her parents were doing the same with her, and she skirted the truth about things like losing her virginity or dating a woman. Still, she wondered why she felt like she couldn’t tell the real truth.

One day, when riding the escalator with her parents, Kerry’s mother’s breath caught, and Kerry’s father looked at his wife. She said that someone named Worthbern had mailed a Christmas card. Kerry asked who that was but received no answer, and no one mentioned the name until years later. By then, Kerry was in college, and her dad asked to talk to her, revealing that he was still in trouble with the IRS and was pleading guilty. His lawyer, Worthbern, suggested that Kerry write to the judge, hoping that Earl would get a lighter sentence because she could describe the difficulties he had endured. Kerry, feeling like her parents were finally keeping her in the loop, agreed. When she called Worthbern, she learned that he knew a lot more about her than she did about him because he had been privy to her parents’ struggles for years. She hated that he asked how she was: The simple question made her panicky because she wasn’t sure how to answer.