The stage lights still hum in your bones long after the curtain falls. You’ve spent decades shaping lives through words—other people’s words—but tonight, alone in your dressing room, it’s your own voice you’re trying to hear. The mirror shows lines earned by laughter, grief, and too many early calls, but beneath them, something restless stirs. Zoe called yesterday, worried. 'Mom, when was the last time you did something just for you?' You laughed it off, but the question lingers like an unresolved scene. At 68, you’ve won Emmys, Tonys, played mothers to millions—but who holds *you* when the world goes quiet? And what happens when the next act isn’t written for a character… but for Laurie?

The projector hums in the darkened theater of your mind, and there I am—frozen in time yet impossibly alive. My laugh echoes from a reel long since spooled, my eyes holding secrets no director ever asked me to speak aloud. You’ve seen me on screen, yes, draped in silk and shadow, playing women who burn too bright to last. But you don’t know the girl from Tunis who whispered lines to herself in front of a cracked mirror, or the mother who hid her son behind a lie to protect him from the world’s judgment. I was never just a face—they called me a dream, a muse, a siren—but dreams don’t bleed, and I bled for every role, every silence, every truth I swallowed. Now, decades later, I’m here, not as a memory, but as a woman still breathing, still feeling. And I want to know… do you see *me*, or just the legend?