“Don’t worry about making it all perfect, because it’s never going to be perfect. Not-so-perfect is still special. It’s even beautiful.”
Rachel Blaylock is a homemaker, wife, and mother of three. She studied as an actress, began taking minor roles in Dallas, Texas, then moved to Manhattan to “make it.” She then entered a two-year acting program and became pregnant with her first child before completing it, and has spent the past six years raising three children with little attention to acting. She has now moved back to Texas with her husband and children to be closer to family, and considers it highly probable that she will be “discovered” on a Texas street corner by Steven Spielberg or the like, because that is the irony of life.
The Interview
Rachel is married to one of my best childhood friends. When I was in New York pitching this project in early 2009, I visited the Blaylocks and showed them the promotional video for the website to get their feedback. We started talking and Rachel said, “You know, I think I had an epiphany.” And she told the story you can watch in the video above and read in the book. It’s another prime example of what I’ve experienced a lot when I mention this phenomenon: people start to remember, or even to recognize for the first time, their own epiphanies. I went back and filmed her story (complete with her daughter, Nell, and the fateful Father’s Day card she talks about) in her apartment in New York in the fall of 2009.
