Driving up the narrow, winding road that encircles Mount Adams in the heart of Cincinnati at dusk, one feels a bit like prey heading ominously to Count Dracula’s Transylvanian castle above. 

The black silhouettes of the barren trees that cling to the craggy hillside reach out hauntingly, as gothic church spires and a centuries-old clocktower stand in relief against the bluish-gray sky that is speckled with a hint of crimson in the wan, wispy clouds reflecting light from the recessed city below. 

But tonight, the actual destination is a much happier one — The Rouse Theatre — to watch the world premiere of a refreshing new production of Dracula.

The play features a handsome and talented 40-year-old actor named Adam Poss in the title role, who, with charismatic deftness and dexterity (and the help of some nifty stagecraft), charms, terrifies and sucks the life and sanity from the mostly X-chromosomed cast for one-hundred-and-twenty-five minutes before being killed during a brief moment of weakness by one of the female protagonists, with a stake through the heart.

To the upscale patrons seated stage-side, the monster appears vanquished. The world is once again safe. Or is it? The final moment of the play suggests that the infectious madness spewed by the titular villain will continue to live on and spread.

Little does the assembled audience know that on one of the evenings in which this story unfolds on stage, sitting in the darkened theatre while restraining the urge to scream out (with pride), is Dracula’s real-life younger sister, biggest supporter, and one of the best and most fearsome performers in her chosen field — professional bowling.

High Stakes
From the outside looking in, a PWBA tournament may not appear to resemble a high-end theatre, television or film production in any way. But upon closer inspection, we see that all the elements are indeed there. A stage and performers. Seating for the audience. Lights and cameras that beam the action throughout the world to an even larger audience of thousands on television or the internet. Dramatic tension and changes of fortune. A pushing of the limits of physical and mental acuity. Applause and flowers for the performers at the end of the show. And the inevitable critics’ reviews either praising or disparaging the performances.

The stakes at play during a PWBA event are also as deadly serious as the dark themes of an iconic work of art, as each and every competitor is carrying around with them the ethereal hope that they will become a champion at the highest level of the sport — either again or for the first time. Only one of those shiny dreams will materialize when the week is done — the rest will be swept into the graveyard of past losses that may continue to haunt the respective dreamer for untold days, weeks, months, or years to come.

When the lights come on and the competition begins, the action is intense. All of the best in the world are there, each ruthlessly chasing down the prize by knocking down as many pins in as short a period of time as possible. Many have been doing it at the highest level since they were children, and their ability to sense and avoid danger, or to knock off younger, less savvy, or physically inferior competitors is palpable to everyone — especially the combatants. 

Lioness of the Lanes
At the 2023 Professional Women’s Bowling Association Northern Colorado Regional, a silver-haired man lurking in the shadows of the concourse at Highland Park Lanes in Greeley, Colorado, whistles with admiration after watching a bright, multi-colored bowling ball fiercely destroy a rack of pins during the final game of qualifying.

“Man, that pretty little girl can sure throw the ball. What I wouldn’t give to have a tenth of her power.” 

After separating the problematic nature of referring to a world-class female athlete who is also an honors graduate of one of America’s finest universities and now successfully employed by the world’s biggest social media company — as well as a cultured, voracious reader and bona fide intellectual — as a “little girl,” the essence of the intended compliment remains. 

Giselle Poss, 28, is the deliverer of the aforementioned death stroke, and she is in the midst of completing a jaw-dropping 279-268 finish (on conditions where a 190 per game average was enough to place among the top third of the field who earned a paycheck) to easily secure the apex position for the tournament’s stepladder finals.

To observe her while not in the act of throwing a bowling ball, she is vernal and lithe, with excellent posture and a look of poised, focused intensity. Her name helps to reinforce this observation, conjuring images of a majestic, yet somewhat vulnerable, ethereal creature. But when she throws a bowling ball, this image is violently flipped on its head, as her five quick steps, impeccable balance, and powerful release impart an almost supernatural speed and spin on the ball — animating it with a white-hot, animalistic energy. When it takes down 10 pins at the end of the lane, the spectacle is reminiscent of a lioness hunting down and devouring a helpless gazelle. 

There is ample data to support the notion that Giselle is one of the best bowlers in the world. When presented with this data, however, she is briefly flattered but ultimately disagrees, rapidly citing data to support a counterargument. When considered objectively, that argument is also quite compelling. Giselle loves numbers and data. In fact, it is the main component of her current job at Meta, the parent company for Facebook, Instagram, and a portfolio of other social media giants.

Giselle is a self-described wallflower, and while her default demeanor is pleasant, she does not give her smiles away freely or easily, and they are usually reserved for the moment after she makes a wry or mischievous comment that she knows probably wasn’t socially polite. When she discusses a topic, you can almost see her brain examining every possible angle simultaneously, then briskly and systematically eliminating all but the best option and eloquently communicating her chosen answer. This talent can be useful out on the lanes, although she says the sheer number of options her brain generates sometimes causes her to do nothing, a choice she also recognizes as a decision that often leads to a less successful outcome, over which she will later agonize and regret. 

In some cases, the pressure of needing to make a fast, correct decision from dozens of options can cause her great anxiety. She says her best remedy for dealing with this is to focus on her breathing, which grounds her in the present and momentarily liberates her mind from its relentless crunching of the data. 

A competitive person by nature, when she was very young, she noticed her brother’s high school speech and debate trophies and wondered what she could do to get her own collection. Her mom, Eileen, introduced her to a number of sports including gymnastics, ballet, soccer, tennis, baseball, and golf, before she fell in love with bowling at the age of six. Her father, Jim, also a bowler, was the one who took Giselle to her practices and tournaments. Before long, she was winning.

At one point, Adam took notice: “Suddenly, the family library bookshelves were starting to be filled with more bowling awards than I had speech-team awards. For me, bowling was going out with friends to have drinks and wear cool shoes, and embarrass ourselves in front of each other, and then I got to see her up there, and it was with such poise and laser focus and skill that I truly gained a newfound respect for it.”

Sides of the Same Coin
“Come! On to the theatre! Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee, an actor’s life for me!” — “Honest” John, Walt Disney’s Pinocchio

At some point in the evening after one of his performances as Dracula (although not necessarily at the exact stroke of midnight), the man who embodies evil incarnate onstage will transform back into Adam Poss, mild-mannered working actor who loves wine, horror movies and laughing until his stomach hurts. 

On assessing his own performances, Adam said, “I try to leave it at the theatre and shake it off by the time I’ve gotten home. The older I’ve gotten, the better I’ve gotten at being able to leave it in my dressing room. When I was younger, I thought that living in it constantly was the way to reach new depths but realized that that’s also a way to make yourself truly mentally unwell.”

His name is plucked straight from the Book of Genesis and comes from the ancient Hebrew word for “ground, earth or rock.” The name would later evolve into the root of a word used to describe an unbreakable substance: “adamantine,” which aptly describes the disposition required to withstand the endless string of rejection and criticism that goes with being a professional actor. 

Adam graduated from The Theatre School at DePaul University in the mid-aughts, and has since consistently worked on well-known stage, film, and TV productions like Chicago Med (NBC), Empire (FOX), Paper Girls (Amazon) and many more. He’s performed in some of the top regional professional theatre productions in the country, but has not yet performed on Broadway, the pinnacle for all stage actors.

After being mesmerized by a traveling theatre troupe who picked him out of the audience to come onstage to participate in their show at the age of 10, he was hooked, and his mom soon enrolled him in acting classes. Before long, Adam was appearing in school plays and other local productions. 

Although fun and light-hearted by nature, he is a serious student of the craft, putting all his effort into preparing for any role he receives — no matter how big or small — with the knowledge that his next job or career opportunity may be his last. His role in Dracula, for instance, required weeks of 10-hour-a-day rehearsals that included intensive line memorization and refinement, table reads, scene-blocking, special effects staging, costuming, and technical testing.

On the nature of his craft, Adam said, “Observing and replicating human behavior in a way that’s amusing or dynamic, and learning how to best harness that behavior into the act of storytelling is the art. But it’s deceptively more of a science than one would think. There is math to the timing, particularly in comedy, and there is a science to technique, such as how you move onstage and what angles your head is turned towards an audience, or how you pitch your voice or position your body to communicate the story.”

One of Giselle’s earliest memories is of watching Adam play the lead in a high school production when she was just 4 years old. She had to be taken out of the auditorium by her dad because she kept screaming her brother’s name during the show. She says things haven’t changed much since then, just that she’s learned to better control the screaming. Scream also happens to be one of her favorite movies.

They both love Halloween and the horror genre, and Adam kept a large collection of classic horror films on VHS that the two of them watched religiously while growing up. Still very close despite their 12-year age gap and the geographical distance necessitated by their respective careers, they are there to support one another during the good times — like Giselle’s attendance at Adam’s Dracula show; and the bad — like the many rejections and disappointments that are part and parcel of any career in acting or athletics.  

Adam said, “We share the good and we’ll vent about the frustrations. We’re always up on how we’re doing. She comes to all of my shows, and I’ve been to some of her tournaments — there’s a lot that I’m not able to go to — but I’m usually following her scores and how she’s doing.”

Adam is also involved in an acting troupe called Erasing the Distance, which exists for the purpose of using theatre and storytelling to erase the stigmas that surround mental health.

“It’s rare to get to do art that you can see has real-world, real-time impact, and what this organization provides is so unique and so necessary. It started out as just an acting job, but once I continued doing it, I realized how much good it was bringing to the community and truly opening the door for conversation and storytelling — and most importantly listening,” Adam said, putting extra emphasis on “listening.”

Adam hopes to continue acting for as long as he can, for while it is a profession that inherently comes with a high degree of angst, uncertainty, and anxiety, it is in his blood and is something that deeply nourishes his soul.

“To me, acting is understanding human behavior, learning to explore what it is that makes people act and react in every imaginable situation, and finding out how to wear that behavior in your own body. It’s observation, it’s noticing all the million little intricacies that make every person you pass by, different than the next.”

Slaying Monsters
“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.” – Stephen King

A fear of monsters is something that likely evolved in the human brain very early on, during times when predators were a real threat — helping to ensure the long-term survival of our species. 

As humans became more sophisticated and climbed to the top of the food chain, the monsters transformed into angry and capricious gods, demons, and witches, who, sadly and horrifyingly, were real women who were often hunted down and burned at the stake. They then transformed into fascist authority figures like Hitler and Stalin, who caused the death and suffering of millions of innocent people. Now, with an even greater understanding of science and the universe, and our immense reliance on technology that has super-charged the pace at which life unfolds, the most prevalent monsters we face today are the mental demons created by our own minds — often helped along by the corrosive forces of social media. 

For Giselle, the reality of fighting mental demons is all too true, and it is not something that merely exists as an imaginary problem or metaphysical hindrance to achieving her goals. In her case, they trigger real, physical, pain-inducing consequences and, in her late teens, Giselle was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, which is a chronic, incurable condition that causes pain, inflammation and flare-ups of the digestive tract that are usually triggered by stress or anxiety. 

When it came time to decide on a major at Vanderbilt University (where she also starred for four years on the women’s bowling team), Giselle chose Psychology.

“I was very interested in people, but I felt like I didn’t know much about them because I’m extremely introverted and tended to be very polarizing, so it took a lot for people to get close to me. Psychology allowed me to see people less as a ‘unit,’ and better understand the nuances of where each person comes from and how each experience has shaped who they are.”

She graduated with honors in 2017 and, along with competing on the PWBA Tour, eventually landed a job as a Technical Sourcer for Meta. The work requires Giselle to sift through mountains of resumés and match the best candidates for specific technical positions at the company.

“The part I love most about my job is finding the perfect role for my candidates at their dream company,” she says, before adding with a laugh, “But I’m not sure I’d be doing it if bowling were a more lucrative profession.”

While she is thankful for her job at Meta (and judging by the comments on her LinkedIn account, she is quite good at it), the pressures of working — and sending people to work — in the boiling cauldron of the world’s biggest social media company can be draining and stressful.

Giselle attends therapy sessions to help cope, and recently experienced a breakthrough known as “Ego Death,” which mental health professionals describe as “a complete loss of an individual’s subjective self-identity.” It sounds dark and scary, but for Giselle, it was a pivotal, liberating moment in her life and spiritual journey.

“It’s the hardest, most gut-wrenching, horrific experience but I came out of it feeling triumphant like I had just won a fight for the world. I realized all the divinity and power I hold in myself all the time and that all things are connected.”

And, when things get really dark, she knows her brother is just a phone call away.

Of Dreams and Nightmares
Back in 2017, just four events into her PWBA career, Giselle made her TV debut at the PWBA St. Petersburg-Clearwater Open, and her opponents were some of the best — a Mount Rushmore of modern women’s professional bowling. As the show’s No. 2 seed, Giselle stood midway up the mountain, awaiting the winner of a match between Danielle McEwan and Clara Guerrero, with the formidable Shannon O’Keefe, a bowler Giselle idolized, and one who has utterly dominated the women’s professional tour since 2015, looming at the top.

In the opening match, Guerrero, who once qualified for a televised finals on the Professional Bowlers Association tour (against the top men in the world), vanquished McEwan, setting up a duel with Giselle.

After waiting agonizingly for the moment to be here (the finals took place nearly a month after she qualified, due to the PWBA’s since-changed TV-taping schedule), Giselle’s opening frame was wobbly, and she started the match with a big split and an open frame. But Guerrero let her off the hook with an open frame of her own, and by Frame 3 Giselle had found her footing and started banging out strike after strike. In the fifth frame, she connected on her third straight, giving herself some emphatic encouragement as she confidently strode back to the bench. 

Her next time up, with a chance to take control of the match, she erred slightly inside of target, but the ball — seemingly by magic — found its way to the 1-3 pocket and crushed all 10 pins. Walking back from the foul line, it was as if the entire world stopped as she glanced down, flashed a smile that could have lit an entire city, and her face morphed into a look that people only get when they realize they are doing the thing they are meant to be doing, and loving every moment of it.

The feeling would last less than a minute, however, for, after leaving a shaky 7-pin on her next shot, she missed sparing it by the thinnest margin, and suddenly Guerrero was right there, breathing down her neck.

When she got up for her next frame, still riding a bit too much adrenaline, she added a tiny, extra burst of speed to her delivery and was left with another split and an open frame. Guerrero took full advantage and, just like that, the dream of winning her first professional title had vanished.

After the match, sideline reporter and PWBA Hall of Famer Carolyn Dorin-Ballard asked Giselle about the keys to her early career success. She said, “I need to be aggressive … I need to have confidence in every shot that I throw, and I have to believe in myself.”

Rob Gotchall, current Director of Bowling Operations for Storm, Inc., and overseer of the company’s professional athlete staff (of which Giselle is a member), was the tour rep for Giselle during the broadcast, and said, “She is without a doubt one of the most talented bowlers I’ve ever worked with. The only thing missing is a little more faith in her own ability. If she gets that, she will be a monster out there on the PWBA Tour.”

Incidentally, in the final frame of the championship match of the tournament, Guerrero would succumb to the same kind of brief mental mistake that cost Giselle, leaving O’Keefe a narrow opening to take the trophy, which she did. It should also be mentioned that six years later, on the cusp of winning the one title O’Keefe covets most — the U.S. Women’s Open — she shockingly withdrew on the tournament’s final day, a victim of mental demons that knocked her off the tour for the remainder of the 2023 season. It turns out, even the mightiest among us are not immune to the internal and external tortures of high expectation — that can sometimes transform our dreams into nightmares.

Going Forward
“ ‘Cause I haven’t the strength to hold out too long, but if we both hold on together we can make each other strong. After all, we’re flesh and blood.” — Oingo Boingo, Flesh and Blood

On the weekend after Giselle made the four-hour drive to watch her brother perform in Dracula, Adam was forced to leave the cast of the show. 

His reason for leaving was that he accepted a role in a Broadway production of Patriots, a modern-day political monster tale that had a successful run on The West End (London’s version of Broadway) and was written by Peter Morgan, who created and wrote the critically acclaimed TV show, The Crown. The show opens in mid-spring and will run for sixteen weeks at The Barrymore Theatre. One of the first people Adam called was Giselle, and they celebrated.

Around the same time Adam’s show opens, Giselle will depart for Rockford, Illinois, site of the first PWBA stop she plans to bowl in the 2024 season. After competing for the majority of the last six seasons, often showing signs of brilliance, Giselle is still looking for that elusive first climb to the peak of the PWBA mountain, but she refuses to give herself a time limit on when she will stop trying.

“Bowling is one of the few things in my life that can dramatically change my mood from good to great or bad to scary. But bowling is ingrained in my bones, and I can’t see myself without it.”

She wants more than anything to experience the infinite feeling of winning on the PWBA Tour, and it is one of her biggest goals in life.

“I want to win multiple titles, including a major, but I’ve got to win the first one, first. In life, my ultimate goal is to look back and not have any regrets with respect to pursuing my dreams and how I treat the people I love.” 

Like machines ceaselessly setting up pins, the demons will keep coming, daring to be knocked down, forever.

In the case of Giselle and Adam, sometimes they will fail, and that will make them sad. But armed with a little reason, a little faith, and a caring sibling who helps breathe a little life back into them from time to time, they intend to march on, taking on the darkness as it comes and leaving a trail of light and beauty in their wake.