This Time for Me, a Memoir by Alexandra Billings with Joanne Gordon

I’ve never met Alexandra Billings but I have been to her home. Her wife, Chrisanne Blankenship-Billings was a member of a church I served for a few years. I know Ms. Billings only from her work on Transparent.

Alex was born in 1962, the same year I was born. Reading her memoir, I felt comfortable immediately knowing that her experience of cultural attitudes around LGBTQ issues would track my own. Of course our stories would be different, very different as it turned out, but the context of Stonewall, and gay clubs, and Harvey Milk, and AIDS, and “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” and marriage equality and so on, would be shared.

She was born in Inglewood as “Scott” to a middle-class family. She calls her mother, “Mimi”. Her father is a music teacher, from whom Alexandra gets her love of music. From her mother, “Scott” gets a closet full of clothes to try on and express her identity. Mimi is an alcoholic and Alex will also receive from her mother a struggle with addiction. Mimi comes off as generally kind in Alex’s story, but fails to understand or support her child. Several times as an adult long periods pass with the two not in contact.

Mimi and Alex’s father divorce while Alex is young leading to a stepdad and a move to Schaumburg, Illinois, in the Chicago area. She’s bullied mercilessly. The stories are painful to read. She starts drinking at age 12. She remembers taking her first drink to steady her nerves as she prepares to sing for her parent’s friends at one of their parties. Alex had turned to both drinking and music as tools to cope with her pain. She is attracted to both girls and boys: girls in a romantic way, modeled on the Hollywood movies she loves; boys in a more blatantly sexual way. And she begins to have sex, early, with both.

In high school she begins to find her people, in drama class, as so many misfit kids do. It’s here, on the first day of class, she meets Chrisanne, and the two begin a friendship that after many years becomes a committed partnership and a marriage.

Alex outlines her memoir as a fairy tale with hardship and magic leading eventually to a happy ending. More specifically, she maps her story on to the story and characters from The Wizard of Oz. She finds advice in the story, like the Scarecrow who gives directions and says, “Some people find it pleasant to go both ways.” She finds parallels to between the Oz characters and people in her life. The Lion, for instance, is identified with Joanne Gordon the acting teacher she meets later in life and who becomes the co-author of her book. This is a lovely way to stitch together her story and leads naturally to Alex’s role as Madame Morrible in Wicked on Broadway, where the book ends.

But the memoir can also be read as a life long love letter to Chrisanne. Chrisanne is absent for much of Alex’s early adulthood as Alex explores new worlds and works to find herself. But Chrisanne is never far away, physically when called upon, and emotionally in Alex’s thoughts when Alex needs comfort and security. When Alex and Chrisanne marry in 1996 and legally marry in 2008, Alex’s devotion for Chrisanne grows even more obvious and heartfelt. The relationship continues to have its challenges but the love is evident and touching.

Determined to make a career as an actor, Alex moves to Chicago after high school. She enters a bar’s talent show and becomes a regular performer as a female impersonator. She adopts the name “Shante” (there’s an accent on the “e”). She makes supportive friends who help her embrace her identity and teach her a new language: “Girl” “Miss Thing” “Okay?” One chapter gives a helpful glossary of drag phrases. But the hours, the pressure, the low-pay, the milieu, lead to sex work and drug use: cocaine and heroin. Alex is fearless in telling this part of her story, and shameless, good for her. She ends up homeless for a lost year.

I appreciate that Alex tells the truth of these episodes but also doesn’t dwell on it. The degradation of addiction and the trials of recovery aren’t the stories she wants to tell. It’s horrible, and we get it, but as a reader, like Alex, I was ready to move on. When she does at last choose sobriety, it’s a relief.

Her acting break comes when she’s cast in Charles Busch’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. This was in Chicago. I saw it in New York. For the premiere she changes her name. Shante feels like a hooker name, she decides, so she becomes Alexandra Scott Billings, her great-grandmother’s name paired to her childhood name hidden within the adult she has become.

The 80s bring the devastation of AIDS. Alex cares for sick friends and mourns their deaths. She develops as a person and as an actor. In 1996, she works with Larry Kramer on the Chicago premiere of his 1988 play Just Say No. The title of the memoir, This Time for Me, comes from a line in “Rose’s Turn” from Gypsy, which Alex does in Chicago with David Zak at Bailiwick theater. Chrisanne, too, is involved in Chicago theater. They develop their own company and work together on Alex’s one woman show called Before I Disappear, mentioned only in passing. I would have liked to know more.

The later third of the book brings Alex and Chrisanne to Hollywood. Alex is cast in the movie Transamerica then loses the role when the production team feels the movie needs a star. I can hardly imagine Alex’s anguish as she then has to watch the movie become a success and Felicity Huffman receive an Oscar nomination for the role. Ms. Billings is gracious, as always.

Alex finds television work in episodes of ER and Grey’s Anatomy and the like, constantly playing some version of a trans woman in “Terrible, Fucking Trouble!” the only story Hollywood knew how to tell about trans persons at the time. Meanwhile she earns a Masters degree in theater from Cal State University Long Beach, and then gets hired to the faculty. Teaching is more satisfying than the television work and when her agent calls her to offer her one more part of a trans woman in terrible, fucking trouble (this time the poor woman is in jail), Alex says, no, she can’t do it, she’s done. The part went to Laverne Cox on Orange is the New Black.

But television wasn’t completely done with Alexandra Billings. Having known Joey Soloway from Chicago, Alex’s involvement in Transparent actually begins before the show does. Joey sends Alex a facebook message, asking for counsel for their family as their 70 year-old father begins to transition. Later, when the Soloway siblings decide to turn their family story into a television show they invite Alex to audition. Alex and Jeffrey Tambor hit it off immediately as actors and Alex is cast.

As elsewhere throughout the book, Alex doesn’t elide the truth of her Transparent experience. She’s enthusiastic about Mr. Tambor’s acting and the gift he gave to the trans community when no trans actor (probably) could have carried the show to the success it became. But she also describes his angry outbursts and inappropriate behavior on set. She describes what she saw and admits that she choose to say nothing. Her humility and vulnerability throughout the memoir are so impressive. She describes the joy on the set initially, and her gratitude to the Soloway’s for creating the space. But she also grows frustrated by a story focused on the Pfefferman family in which trans people are present but not central. And then the catastrophe when the accusations against Tambor become public and the show ends prematurely.

The final act to her story, more of a curtain call actually, is Alex’s broadway debut playing a one-armed mobster in Richard Bean’s comedy, The Nap, and then her stint as Madame Morrible in Wicked. After a long memoir built around parallels to the Wizard of Oz and musings about the iconic characters and the lessons from that story, I expected a longer section about Wicked. She gets to the show only on page 417 of 429 with no description of how she was cast. Her Wicked experience ends with the COVID shutdown in 2020, which is also where her memoir concludes.

It’s a remarkable life, ultimately thrilling and admirable. She has been places and gone through experiences of hardship and cruelty and survived intact. My heart breaks in the earlier chapters at the abuse of a child, and the pain of a young adult trying to find their way when the culture didn’t allow many options for a human like her. And my spirit lifted with her as she began to find her way, or rather, because she was a pioneer in so much of what she did: make her way.

And, because I know Chrisanne, I felt constantly moved by the thread of their relationship pulling Alex through her life, and pulling the reader through the memoir. I suspect that Alex and Chrisanne had long talks about the writing of this memoir, including how much and in what way Chrisanne would appear. It really is a love story. In the end, I feel that Chrisanne comes off as brave and honest and vulnerable as Alex does. I’m proud of them both. And happy for them.