admin It took a trip to IMDB to discover that my older son has actually seen Roberts onscreen—in Stephen Chbosky’s Wonder, annually watched by classes of sixth graders across the country. But both kids seem indifferent to the glamour people my age associate with actors. My boys’ screen idols are YouTubers opining about meals or books, or kids like themselves doing some shtick on TikTok. I think—sorry to generalize—that this is generational. Today’s teens and tweens are drawn to what they perceive as real, even if that’s Selena Gomez pretending to be just a girl you might know.
When we finally started rolling that day, Big was thrilled not by his proximity to the stars but by his prominence in the setup. My husband is a photographer who has thoroughly documented his kids’ lives; my boys understand how to work the camera. The background performers shot two scenes—first the principal family’s arrival at the beach, and then a more frenzied moment in which the whole crowd is departing. We were given more direction for the second scene—we were to seem rushed, even panicked (no spoilers re: why). Little stuck by my side, his hunger slowly ebbing into anger—but he was actually acting. Little improvised words to me, asking What is happening with persuasive conviction, probably ruining a take because kids don’t know how to whisper, let alone stage-talk.
It felt to me like we did close to a dozen takes, though I was on edge, feeling that rising sense of panic familiar to any parent. If I don’t feed this kid soon, there’s going to be a problem. I promised him that we’d go out for a delicious lunch as soon as we were wrapped. When Little was an infant, he would get so overwhelmed by hunger that he would shriek, choosing the comfort of rage over the bottle of formula. “Drink your juice, Shelby,” David would say, in such moments, as loving mom Sally Field urged her diabetic daughter in Steel Magnolias. All roads lead to Julia Roberts, I guess.
The real background actors were working all day, but my family knocked off early, our desire for stardom sated. We went to the first restaurant we could find: Applebee’s, where we ordered a starter of artichoke dip that was so hot it tasted of nothing. David joked that it was “forged in the fires of hell,” to the great amusement of even the crabby kids, who regularly use the phrase to this day. We talked about what we’d just experienced, and how funny it would be that, for the rest of their lives, Big and Little could tell people they’d once been on screen with Academy Award winner Julia Roberts. Neither of my children had or has any idea what an Oscar is, of course.
Time did what it does, our visit to daddy’s movie set supplanted by other adventures. But fantasy intrudes on reality, or work intrudes on life: when we went to Paris last fall, one of the first things we saw, on the trek to passport control, was a massive Chopard ad. “Look,” I told the kids. “It’s Julia Roberts!” Big nodded, pointing out that we’d once met her husband and children, mistaking the illusion that Roberts and Hawke were performing for fact. To prep for writing this essay, I asked both kids what they remember of our trip to the movie set; each mentioned the artichoke dip at Applebee’s.
This fall, David and I flew to Los Angeles to see Esmail’s movie at a film festival. Our kids were incensed that they weren’t invited. It wasn’t fair, the boys told me. “I’m the star of the movie,” Big lamented. That struck me as not just one of those darnedest things, but close to the truth. He is the star of his own life, as all our children are; whatever Julia Roberts and I are up to has nothing to do with anything that really matters.
