"It's pretty exciting to encounter somebody who's authentic." Jennifer Beals, star of Showtime's The L Word, is talking about Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher who specialized in angst. But her words apply to herself, the surprisingly thought-provoking Grand Marshal of the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade.
Reached by phone, the svelte brunette's on the set in Vancouver inside her Toyota Highlander. "I'm not much of a car person, but I just got sick of not having a hybrid. It's a large hybrid that accommodates two humungous dogs. They're mutts, but they're large mutts."
The Flashdance phenom who launched the off-the-shoulder sweatshirt and legwarmer crazes of 1983 graciously describes her current look. "It's very exciting," she drawls, deadpan. "I have the nastiest pair of Uggs on my feet because they are the set shoes for The L Word — the shoes we wear when we're being sensible and not wearing the five-inch heels we're allotted during the scene."
She moves up from "some jeans I bought in a mall in the suburbs here" to the "white ruffled shirt that I wore in the episode when Holland Taylor was first introduced. I have been bequeathed this shirt, and I am wearing it right now."
Her jewelry consists of "a really lovely necklace, just a little gold chain thing," made by a friend, who also made her wedding ring. Yep, the 42-year-old Chicago native is married to a man! Fortunately, the notoriously literal-minded lesbian market doesn't hold the high-strung, workaholic, bi-racial Bette's off-screen heterosexuality against her. Flashdance fans were not so sophisticated when they discovered someone else had done Beals' onscreen dancing for her, slamming the brakes on the then-19-year-old Yale undergrad's Travolta-esque rise.
Kierkegaard connection
Lest we forget, the art of acting consists in convincing an audience you're something you're not. As Beals puts it, "It's this sort of magical kind of transcendent feeling to be someone else, using all that I am to transform myself into that other person. It's not as if I'm erasing myself, but I'm informing myself into a different personality — using myself to inform myself about someone else."
Which is where Kierkegaard comes in. "The interesting transformation," she continues, "is where you and the character meet, and you then start becoming this other thing, that is also you, which is hopefully something that everyone else can relate to, because it is also them. To me, what's so beautiful and powerful about storytelling is, it's a constant I/Thou relationship in every moment."
I/Thou? What's that? "It's probably Kierkegaard," she says and confesses, "I have been a Kierkegaard fan." Rapid research reveals that "I" confronts "Thou" not as an "It" to be studied, measured, and manipulated (or interviewed), but as a unique presence. People don't operate according to abstract rules, but encounter and transform each other — like Jennifer and I are doing right now — and with any luck, dear reader, you.
"Knowing what you know — and then still requiring the leap of faith — I think that's pretty exciting and scary," says the bucket-seat philosopher. "I think it relates, frankly, to everybody's life, all the time. Just getting up in the morning and having faith that life can have some relevance."
Political personality
Despite her very public commitment to the cause of gay rights, Beals claims she's "not consciously, not overtly" political. "There's an implicit awareness of what the show can mean for people in the culture at large. Though when I first took the part, I had no idea. Any kind of political awareness has probably arisen from being part of the show."
Asked if she'd ever run for public office, the Grand Marshal laughs and says, "That sounds so exhausting to me." Yet she's undaunted by the prospect of being driven through the streets of San Francisco. "It'll be exciting. You have the energy of everybody around you that you are allowed to partake in and give back to."
Beals is not without parade experience. "I have been a marshal in a parade in Sparta, Georgia, celebrating the town. I played a woman called Amanda America Dixon [in the film A House Divided ] who was from that town, so they asked me to be the head of one of the brigades." However, San Francisco marks "my first time as a marshal in a convertible!"
Our 15 minutes together come to an abrupt halt. "I see the AD waving at me like I should get my butt out of the car and onto the set. I have to get off the phone."
Signing off, she says something even Kierkegaard might consider authentic: "Thank you for giving a crap."
Erin Blackwell bends gender as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Woman's Will's Twelfth Night, July 8-August 13, free, in Bay Area parks.