Jenn Harris is an award-winning writer-director, actor and producer from a small cornfield town in Illinois who takes comedy very seriously 😉 She can currently be seen in the Oscar-winning film American Fiction. Her short film She’s Clean, which she wrote, directed and starred in, won Best Director at the Poppy Jasper Film Festival and Best Actress at The Los Angeles Short Film Festival. Her series New York is Dead premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, and won Best Comedy at the New York Television Festival and Best Actress at SeriesFest. Her short film Island Queen, starring Rachel Dratch and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, played several prestigious festivals in 2020, including the San Francisco Film Festival and Florida Film Festival. As an actor in New York, Jenn is known for originating the role of Clarice Starling in Silence! The Musical and won a Lortel and Theatre World Award for her performance in Modern Orthodox. Some film and television credits include: High Maintenance, Search Party, 30 Rock, Gayby, Difficult People, Younger, Bored to Death and Fits and Starts. Jenn is a Professor at USD where she teaches Acting for the Camera and Comedy for the MFA acting program. She is also a recent mentee of the Ryan Murphy Half Initiative Director Program.
“You’re much better in person,” my mom tells me. “See the whole thing is, you’re great, but in person, you’re the best!” I think I agree. If I can get an in-person meeting or make it to the room or connect with you through friends or yoga or trivia night instead of on an app, I have a way better chance. If we were hanging out at, say, our food co-op shift at 7 a.m. on Wednesday, you’d be more interested in me than you would from this article. I’m better at showing you in front of your face than trying to explain in a text or even over Marco Polo. I’m gonna need to be next to you for anything to count. I think my mom is correct – I have few boundaries and an injurious level of curiosity. If I could have been there, then maybe it would have turned out better for me: the application for the fellowship, the men on the apps who matched with me but I never met in person, the pilot episode auditions, the hearing for a restraining order (against someone else, not on me), the hearing to keep my apartment. That last one’s the worst, still. In 2018, a year after I filed a lawsuit trying to prove to these new, disgusting owners of my building in Park Slope, Brooklyn, that my apartment is rent-stabilized and that you buying it doesn’t change that, I lost. The Kings County “judge” said the case was too old to bother with. My lawyer said, “Heather did her best.” Who’s Heather?! I’d been talking to the two head lawyers for a year, but I was told Heather gave my case a solid once-over before heading in. Heather never met me in person.
My boyfriend and I had broken up one month before the hearing and the day after Heather’s hearing in court, I got an eviction notice. I’d lived in that apartment for 18 years, right out of college. Having roommates in that three bedroom apartment allowed me to be an actor and gave me close proximity to the Park Slope Food Co-op, where buying nuts in bulk didn’t have to be just a treat.
You can’t get on a lease once you have an eviction in New York City, and you can’t get on a lease unless you have the money, kinda all the money. I took a sublet up in Inwood when my doctor, after seeing me in person, said patches of hair loss and vertigo meant, STOP IT! Inwood is lovely, in that it’s still kind of Sesame Street, in the way where it seems like all the products in the grocery stores are just teaching you about what they sell in grocery stores. But Inwood wasn’t it.
I miss Brooklyn. Painfully. I felt normal there, and very basic bitch, which is honestly a lovely pastime compared to how much of a muppet I feel like out west. It’s quite impossible to get next to people out here and I like being right next to people. I heard the cashiers at the Park Slope Food Co-op no longer go into that little safe room downstairs to count the money. How sad. I loved standing dead-ass next to my co-cashier and fucking up our totals as fast as we could. It felt so ’80s, like a sporting event with doping.
Getting pushed out of Brooklyn has still left me utterly confused as to where I’m supposed to be. And starting over in a new city is fine, sure, whatever, but had you told me I’d start over in a new city (during a pandemic – I won’t go on about it) in my 40s, I would have broken down sobbing in front of your family. I didn’t want to do my curious life this way. I wanted to build upon and expand myself in New York City, forever. I pictured myself owning that apartment one day, damnit. And me and maybe my husband living there and each of us having our own office! Can you imagine, New York City?! Can you?
The most comforting and saving grace thing I have and always have had, besides my obnoxiously incredible friends, is my hustle. I’m very scared of one day losing my hustle before having some security in place. I know nothing is “secure” and all we have is ourselves, but honestly, shhhh.
What I don’t miss living out west is flooded subways, trashy streets, camping outside the DMV, and screaming.
And no matter where I am (except maybe Italy), I don’t miss dating. The rough part is, I’m still dating. I don’t miss the first blast back into dating – the Tinder and Bumble of it all. Though during that time, the initial feeling of a script came to me and I eventually made my short film She’s Clean, about a woman looking to marry her desire for sexual freedom with emotional intimacy by showering with her dates. The act of writing, directing and acting in She’s Clean was a kind of transition space that ushered me out of both my Brooklyn apartment I had lost and the dating blast into something more conscious, more direct, more mature and waaaay more sexy and fun. Not that I didn’t have some fun during that “What’s this? What’s this?” time. It was just ultimately so unsatisfying for me and making She’s Clean let me document my fascination with needs, be they romantic, career motivated or emotional. The shower was just a metaphor.
What I do look forward to missing, no matter where I live, is misdirected searching. And there has been something in making She’s Clean that has justified the need to search for what I am looking for. I do think I’ve been able to be the artist I’ve wanted to be because I’ve gone a lot of my life single and I don’t regret that. I think back to a few of my relationships and guys I’ve dated who never gave me a compliment or piece of encouragement and I’m telling you, standing or sitting right next to them, in person, I found that fascinating!
What’s next for me, I think, is gonna involve lots of vulnerability, rest, the threat of embarrassment, and going for exactly it is that I want. So more of the same, but add nuance. I am so deeply happy about certain things that I have gotten and done. I’m lucky. I love working hard. I love people. And I love “settled”. It’s the thing for me. Maybe because I trust myself to never be stuck. I will always run to attend the thing, watch it go down live, find you in person. If I’m dragging my immobile body across the globe to show up, I will, though whatever will be invented by then will probably be dope and I’ll just flash my retinas into an app and slam, I’m there. I know how easy certain things are and have been for me, being a single mother of myself. I just want to be in person. The curiosity feels more than FOMO. It’s like I want to believe more than 40 years of life experience, insatiable hustle and curiosity and my mom’s advice to “be there” is the thing.
Featured image shows Louis Cancelmi and Jenn Harris in She’s Clean; all images courtesy Jenn Harris.
