Free Falling: My Adventurous Life and Days of Daisy

I have always loved free falling into the unknown. I don't know if that was because I was a water baby and my mom took me to the water baby class when I was 6 months old and basically I was taught to swim by being dropped in the water. The rush of the unknown has always been a lifestyle for me, and I think it started in a deep place of trust in my mother’s arms knowing that she would be there to catch me.

I chose a life of adventure by choosing the career I did. I moved to Los Angeles right out of college to find myself, the actress and leader, 22, pixie haircut and 3,000 dollars to my name. I met people from all over the world and wanted to date a man from each country because I was so curious about the land that they were from. Free falling into men, looking for my next adventure in their worlds, whether it was a German musician’s nightlife or a Jewish Russian heroin addict’s bedroom trying to rescue his hotter than hot ass from death. Or finding peace in the outdoors living for 3 years in the 2001 Jeep Cherokee Sport my family had bought me, with a surfer who had lost his identity while he was determined to help me find mine. I wanted to act for film and television but I was acting mostly everyday in front of the fancy people of LA as I served them tartare with a beach view or garlic noodles in a 3 story castle from a secret kitchen. But for the 8 or 9 years I was there,  I loved all of it, the unknown, the pain of it, I thrived in the struggle and the acting classes that brutalized me and the classes that taught me that I was enough. All of it was my kind of my free fall.

When I came home to Louisiana in 2008 I eventually met a man that gave me that same feeling. He was the adventure that I had been looking for, a man who gave me a feeling of rush of the unknown, my soulmate, my mirror and my advocate. He had everything, we understood each other spiritually, sexually, a match made in heaven. God had given me a photographer to capture my youth. The only thing we did not agree upon was he did not want to procreate. He did not see the need to parent and raise children nor focus on our own little nuclear world. He said he wanted to see the world and help children all over the world. Be a nurse to the hurting world, use our extra money for humanitarian work and change the world with our helping hands.

I come from a big family and had always dreamed of having kids but the idea of not having to give up any momentum in my career was exciting, and at 31 I thought, let’s do it. “I will give up having kids and you will take me on the ride of a lifetime”. This was by far the biggest free fall I have ever taken.  And boy did he deliver, the travels began and around the world we went to 12 countries and countless trips around the US. And we also started making short films and we found this new passion to be exhilarating. We were asked to collab with a friend on a feature our friend was producing, where I wore the hat of co-director and Aaron shot each frame of the 168-scene western in 2016. Also I started teaching acting class in our studio, Aaron taught photography, and I found that teaching was a way for me to love the green creatives in our community.  Not only were we making film, teaching acting and photography but we also went to Haiti to try our hand in humanitarian work, we ended up building a kitchen for some underprivileged children.

Then it happened, I turned 38. And all of the sudden my biology started triggering my desire to have a baby. I was dreaming about babies, seeing them everywhere. All of my friends were having their 3rd or 4th child. I was struggling and depression hit me like a bomb. And out of that pain I bullet pointed a script. A script I did not know at the time would change my life forever. And Days of Daisy was born.

Daisy, oh Daisy how I love you. After having produced over 8 or 9 shorts, directed many of them and had heard and felt that true stories were always so well received, I decided to then take the plunge. In 2017, I had just helped produce a biopic BLAZE in Louisiana directed by Ethan Hawke, written by Sybil Rosen, and I had seen them do it on a smaller budget, I thought maybe I can do it too. Also the biggest movie I had ever been in was called Dallas Buyers Club and it was also a biopic. I knew that my first feature had to come from a place of conviction and truth. They say “Take your pain and turn it into art,”  But I’m not a writer, I took my bullet points of a script and handed it over to a film-brother Alexander Jeffery and said hey do you want to write this, direct this? He said yes. And that day, my pain of not being a mother in the traditional sense was beginning to be soothed by the idea that maybe we could make a movie that inspired all the untraditional mothers out there. All the women who mothered through teaching, or leading at their churches or Al Anon - groups or through friendship.  There was a whole army of women who had mothered me over the years. Not only did I have an amazingly supportive biological mom who went above and beyond for me in all my creative endeavors, but I also had spiritual moms, creative moms, teachers who were catching me while I was busy jumping into water that was too deep for me.

So we set out to make a film loosely based on me and my husband’s life. We wanted it to be quirky, funny and truthful, like us. Days of Daisy is a story about Daisy Bea and as her 40th birthday draws near, Daisy feels societal pressure to settle down and start a family. In a spiral for meaning, she teams up with local photographer Jack Palmer to give West High School students the art program that they deserve.

In conception, Alexander Jeffery and Paul Peterson set out to write the script that would loosely be based on me and Aaron’s journey about choosing not to have children, but we also added a theme about saving the art program in a high school. We had my actual acting students from Love Acting (some of whom felt like my children) in the film as the art students.  In pre-production we worked hard to get meetings with potential investors and landed seed money from a few of our patrons. The money came together and we shot in January of 2020. We cast the film with mostly successful Louisiana actors, but we could not find the right guy to play Aaron/JACK. We searched and finally found the treasured JACK,  Bryan Langlitz in Los Angeles. We also invited Sybil Rosen, writer and actress from the film BLAZE I had done with Ethan and Ryan Hawke to play the art teacher.  The majority of our film was shot in 19 days, 2 weeks before Covid-19 broke out.  We know that the timing of shooting this sweet indie film was arranged in the heavens, because we know we could not have afforded the covid testing in the budget we had raised. After a few reshoots we finally had something, and it was ready to be pieced together.

After my husband Aaron saw the film in the final edit something happened. Aaron did not tell me, but after seeing his own words coming out of an actor playing himself, something pricked his heart. He thought , “wait I don’t know if I like that character, that JACK guy.”  He saw him as selfish— not that everyone that does not want kids is selfish. But he wanted to give me, his best friend and wife a chance to experience what I truly wanted. To quote the film: “Dream world is you and a kid”.

Aaron sat me down and let me know that he had had a heart change and said after seeing the film he did in fact want to give me my dream. After 11 years of saying no, now he was saying “YES” to having a baby with me. We were at a hotel, and I almost fell off the bed when he told me.  We are doing IVF and getting ready for whatever the heavens have for us now, in this free fall.  We will teach our kids how to free fall into the messy and delicious world. Where they too can turn their pain into art if they choose. We also know there will have to be a sequel to our Days of Daisy. More soon friends…