Seventy Eight Cents

Someone told me once, back when my bones were brighter than my headshots, when hunger wore lipstick and hope had a SAG card—

“As long as you’re getting residuals, kid, you’re still in the game.”

The game.

Capital G.

Bright lights, dark rooms, casting calls that smelled like coffee and compromise, and me—fresh from somewhere between “ingenue” and “leading ladies best friend” and “please God choose me”nodding like I’d just been handed the secret handshake to forever.

Residuals, they said.

Checks that arrive like postcards from a version of you that made it.

Proof of life.

Proof of work.

Proof you once stood under hot lights and didn’t melt.

Cut to now.

Sixty-three.

A different kind of casting—casting glances at the mirror like,

“Ah. You again. Still here. Good.”

And today the mailbox coughs up a relic.

A check.

From January 1998.

An episode called “Warriors.”

I played…something. Someone with a line, a look, a mark taped on the floor that I hit like it owed me money.

And now?

The envelope trembles like it knows it’s about to be judged.

I open it with all the ceremony of a coronation—and there's a check for--

Seventy.

Eight.

Cents.

Now listen—

I have stood on stages and made rooms rise like bread.

I have sung notes that held people by the throat and the memory.

I have bled metaphor, wept monologue, kissed cues and cursed curtain calls and somewhere in the grand accounting of art and time and whatever gods keep receipts on dreams…

I am worth

$0.78.

I took a look and then I laughed. Because what else do you do when the universe hands you less than a dollar and calls it legacy?

You laugh

I laughed like a woman who remembers being told that this—this—was the sign.

“You’re still in the game.”

Well. If this is the game it’s a long one.

The kind where the scoreboard’s broken, the rules are whispered, and the prize arrives in envelopes that barely cover the stamp.

But here’s the twist—

I am still in it.

Not because of the check.

Not because of 1998 or “Warriors” or a camera that blinked and moved on.

I’m in it because I’m still saying yes to the stage.

Because I still chase the laugh, the hush, the moment when a room leans in like it’s heard its own name.

I’m in it

Because my voice didn’t quit even when the industry both Hollywood and local did its best to ghost me politely.

So I hold up that check—that glorious, ridiculous relic—Seventy-eight cents of documented existence—and I think:

You know what?

I’ll cash it.

Not for the money—please. Let’s not get delusional.

But for the ritual. For the proof that once upon a time I stood in the frame and said the line and hit the mark. And I left a fingerprint so faint it took twenty-six years to distill into pocket change.

They said as long as the residuals come you’re still in the game. So here I am—older, louder, a little more dangerous with the truth—still playing.

Still collecting.

Still worth at least seventy-eight cents

and climbing.