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Angela Featherstone is a Canadian actress. She is best known for playing Chloe in Friends, the maid on Seinfeld, and the fiancee (Linda) who left Adam Sandler’s character (Robbie) at the altar in The Wedding Singer. She mentored a foster child through Kidsave.
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Angela Featherstone’s beauty and talent took her far, but she couldn’t escape her childhood trauma. Here she writes on climbing out of the abyss.
As an unsuspecting but vinegary 17-year-old, I disembarked the dank Greyhound bus, which was held together by torn vinyl and rusting metal and had prattled its way from the bleakness of the predator-addled streets of Winnipeg to Toronto.
No one noticed when I arrived.
child picMonths before, my mother and adoptive father had legally abandoned me to the court. Following years of physical abuse and neglect, my parents and I parted ways when I fled home at age 16, preferring the risk of the streets to the certain, escalating abuse at home.
Within weeks of leaving my family’s brick high-rise across the street from the proverbial train tracks, I was arrested for stealing a pair of cowboy boots from a local mall. It wasn’t the only thing I’d ever stolen. It was simply the thing I got caught for.
After my arrest, to avoid having me back home, my parents surrendered their rights. The feeling, although painful, was mutual. Years before, when I was age seven, my birth father had also legally abandoned me. So, I was alone. The judge, my new authority, had recently freed me at my behest. I couldn’t tolerate a life in the foster care system so I got three jobs and convinced him that I was different from the thousands of other wards of the court who AWOL’d – that I wouldn’t be back.
“I’ve seen your type before,” the stout, ornery judge had said, his glasses perched on his nose tip. “You’ll be back all right, but next time you’ll be 18 and you’re going to prison.”
I knew that he was wrong. I was different. (Continued…)
