Queen of the Oddballs (14 page)

“Sank you,” I say in a thick French accent. “Sank you. In English, how you say
Thank you
.” The partygoers laugh. I’m off to a good start.

“My name is Fifi DeLune and I am looking for zee birthday boys, Jacques and Tony. Where are you?”

Liza Minnelli and Shelley Winters’s ex-husbands sheepishly raise their hands while their friends point them out. As I perform, the audience stays completely with me. For my finale, I reach into my basket and pull out the long loaf of French bread, the round of Edam cheese, and the apple. I juggle the feast and each time the apple passes my mouth in the pattern, I take bites of it. A real crowd-pleaser. As I finish my act, everyone hoots and hollers, claps and whistles.

The birthday boys approach me. “Great job,” Jack says. “That was really something,” Tony adds.

We’re interrupted by guests coming up to say good-night to their hosts. I wave good-bye and move quickly toward the front door. In the hallway, a voice stops me.

“Fifi!”

I turn and see Mark. “It was perfect,” he says as he hugs me again.

“Thanks,” I say, and I head outside to the valet. I can tell I was the party’s finale by the twelve people already standing in line for their cars. The valet in the matching pink vest, bow tie, and cap sees me and calls out, “Sorry, Mamacita, you took longer than fifteen minutes. I had to move your car.”

I look at the line in front of me and smile. “No problem,” I say. “I don’t mind waiting.”

• A decade after sweating on the picket line at anti-war demonstrations with Jane Fonda, I sweat with her in the aerobics classes she teaches at her Jane Fonda Workout studio.
  
 

• Danielle, my girlfriend of three years, moves in, and for the first time I consider a long-term, monogamous relationship. Meanwhile, in Arizona, a man has long-term, polygamous relationships with 105 wives.
  
 

• I go to AIDS marches while the CDC warns blood banks of a possible problem with the blood supply. There are 3,064 cases of AIDS reported in the United States this year, and President Reagan hasn’t yet mentioned the word “AIDS” in public; he will not do so for two more years, when there are 15,948 cases and the death toll exceeds 8,000.
  
 

• Several friends of mine are diagnosed as HIV-positive or have contracted AIDS.
  
 

• Tom Cruise dances around in his underwear in
  Risky Business
  while Jennifer Beals’s dance double dances around in her underwear in
  Flashdance
  .
  
 

• Jenny Craig launches and competes with other popular diets—Weight Watchers, Pritikin, the Beverly Hills Diet, and Herbalife (“Lose Weight Now, Ask Me How”)—while thirty-two-year-old Karen Carpenter dies of anorexia nervosa.
  
 

• Every Thursday night, I gather with six friends for “Knots Night,” where we all watch and comment on our fave show,
  Knots Landing
  .
  
 

• The Supreme Court reaffirms its
  Roe v. Wade
  right to abortion (even though the initial court decision was ten years ago), and Sally Ride becomes the first American woman sent into space (even though the Soviet Union sent a woman into space twenty years ago).
  
 

• While I am cast in several films in various “Punk Girl” roles, my parents throw a punk party, and all their suburban friends show up in costume. Dinner is served when a construction site Roach Coach rolls up my parents’ driveway and “caters” the event.
  
 

1. Begin by continually judging yourself, disliking particular qualities you possess or, more accurately, lack.
   
2. Pick a character—any persona—who is imbued with traits you desire.
   
3. Shrouded in anonymity—an alter ego who is tougher, wiser, more gregarious than you are—know you
   cannot
   fail. If you do, it is not you failing but someone with another name, another history, another style, another life.
   
4. Try on “Angel,” a tough-talking, gum-chomping ex-con who served time in the slammer for offenses you never reveal. Simply assure people, “It wasn’t murder or nuthin’.”
   
5. Create your new history—with details of your time served and how you found the light behind bars—not in Jesus or the Bible, but in
   TV reruns
   .
   
6. Spread the “good word” of a return to simpler, more innocent times through music. Write songs about reruns—“Beaver Cleaver Fever,” “Ode to Mrs. Kravitz,” and your most controversial, “Buffy Come Back,” a tribute to the sweet, freckled girl with blond pigtails from
   Family Affair
   . Anissa Jones, the actress who portrayed the precocious child who went everywhere with her best friend, Mrs. Beasley, the nearsighted doll with square-framed glasses, died at the age of eighteen of a massive drug overdose at a friend’s house in Oceanside, California. Write an anti-drug, cautionary tale with lyrics like:
   

 

Forget Buffy’s drugs that go on and kill us

Why not get high on Dobie Gillis?

There’s one other drug that won’t make you puke

You know I’m talking ’bout Patty Duke.

Buffy, Buffy come back to me, why’d you have to go and OD, who will watch over Mrs. Beasley?

Buffy, Buffy come back to me, why’d you have to go and OD, what about Uncle Bill, Jody, and Cissy?

 

1. Ask a brilliant musician friend who has been in bands like Oingo Boingo to help you write the music to your songs and put together an “all-girl, all ex-con band.”
   
2. Find a makeshift recording studio in Miracle Mile, above Ohrbach’s department store. Make sure it’s a small, windowless room painted cactus green, smelling of cigarettes and gardenia air freshener, and crammed with four-track recording equipment, which is almost as old as the saber-toothed tiger bones trapped in the La Brea Tar Pits one block east.
   
3. Meet your new band, some of the best female musicians and backup singers in town—one has played keyboards with Prince, another was in Fanny, one of the first seventies all-girl rock groups. Be impressed. Be grateful.
   
4. While the band sets up, rehearse with your new backup singers. Make it clear that you know your singing sucks, and you don’t begin to think you can sound like they do. Observe as they create elaborate harmonies that are so tightly blended, for the first time you viscerally understand the word
   harmonious
   . Instantly bond with your backup singers—joke, laugh, share stories, bare lives. Name them the Reruns. Feel like you belong.
   
5. Since you’ve never done anything like this before, as you’re about to record your vocals, take several deep breaths and try to exhale enormous self-doubt. Jump up and down in place and fling your hands, allowing the nerves to shoot out of your fingertips onto Wilshire Boulevard. Remind yourself
   it’s Angel singing. Not you.
   When you hear the band play the intro to the song, be so blown away that you forget your anxiety altogether.
   
6. Finish recording at 2:00 a.m. Shout, applaud, and laugh giddily with everyone as you all listen to both songs, “Buffy Come Back” and “Beaver Cleaver Fever.”
   
7. Say to the band and to your girls, the Reruns, “No matter what it takes, I’m gonna get these songs out into the world.”
   
8. Possessed with determination fueled by the safety net of your masquerade, spend the next six months learning and doing things you’ve never done before: (a) Go to the county recorder to establish a business for your record company; (b) Design graphics for the front and back of the record sleeve as well as the inside label, and get them printed; (c) Take your master tapes to a record plant and listen to countless test pressings on vinyl until the sound is perfectly captured on the black 45 rpm discs; (d) Pick up the finished singles packed in neat cardboard boxes, each stamped with blocky red letters: ANGEL AND THE RERUNS.
   
9. Do your research. Listen to KROQ, the number-one radio station in L.A., specifically to a show every Sunday night called “Rodney on the ROQ” that features new, alternative music. Find out everything you can about the host, Rodney Bingenheimer—how he was the first to interview and play songs by Blondie, Billy Idol, Duran Duran, the Sex Pistols, and countless other bands whose careers he’s helped launch. Imagine yourself, or more accurately Angel, as his next discovery.
   
10. Dress in a multicolored, bouncy tulle skirt with a brown leather biker vest, bold lines of silver studs on the back spelling out ANGEL. At all times wear Ray-Ban sunglasses, framed by your eighties punk haircut—short on the sides, tall spikes on top. Draw a tattoo on your left arm that says “DAD” in a heart, a halo on your right arm, and your look is complete. Dress your girls, the Reruns, in exotic, patterned fifties sheath dresses and tease their wigs into overdone bouffant hairdos.
    
11. Drive over to the KROQ studios in Pasadena. Inhale the chilly January air that still smells like roses. After parking ask the Reruns in your tough-girl voice, “All right, we all ready to kick some ass?” Have the Reruns answer in unison, “Ready, Angel.” Stick to your story that you all met in the slammer and continue your jailhouse dynamic out on the streets—you are their leader, their daddy; they acquiesce to you and do so in obedient synchronicity.
    
12. Knock on the back door of the studio. When a man with a blue mohawk answers, lie and say, “Rodney’s expecting us.” If you can convince Rodney to play “Buffy Come Back,” tonight could be a huge break. But first you have to get in to see him.
    
13. With Angel’s balls leading the way, push past the man at the door and, despite his protests, walk down the hall to the studio where a light flashes by a sign that reads “DO NOT ENTER WHEN RED LIGHT IS ON.” Boldly push open the door. Have the girls run up to Rodney and kiss him all over his face, leaving red lip prints as souvenirs. Notice why Rodney, thin and boyish though well into his forties, was Davy Jones’s stand-in on the TV show
    The Monkees
    . Observe his mop-top bowl haircut and tight, hip-hugging, pin-striped bell-bottoms with mod leather ankle boots. Watch as the girls’ lipstick prints fade into the color his face turns when he blushes.
    
14. Say, “Hey, Rodney, we’re Angel and the Reruns and we got some-thin’ for you” as you hand him your hot-off-the-presses record. Watch as Rodney puts on his large headphones, fades out the record that’s just ending, and talks into a microphone. “This is KROQ, Rodney on the ROQ, and some visitors just popped in that I want to introduce. What’s your name again?” Answer “Angel and the Reruns” as you chomp on a piece of chewing gum. Keep cool as Rodney takes your 45 out of its sleeve, puts it on a turntable, and says, “They’ve brought us a new song and, well, they just look so great I’m gonna do something I rarely do. I’m gonna play their record without even listening to it first. What’s the name of the song?” Lean into the microphone and say smoothly, “‘Buffy Come Back.’ Right girls?” “Right Angel.”
    
15. As your song plays on the radio, observe Rodney leaning back in his chair and listening. Notice how he laughs everywhere he should and taps his foot along with the beat. When it’s over and Rodney leans into the microphone to say, “That was fantastic. Angel and the Reruns in their radio debut. Great song. We’ll be right back,” wait until he hits a button and a commercial comes on before you and the girls shriek with excitement.
    
16. Don’t overstay your welcome. Thank Rodney and head to the door. Stop in your tracks when the man with the blue mohawk bursts in, saying, “The phones are lighting up, man. Looks like everyone digs ‘Buffy.’”
    
17. When Rodney asks you to stick around, shrug like you’re a rock star, and say, “Yeah, okay. I guess we could stay a bit longer.” When he then asks you to answer some phone calls on the air, keep up the ruse—especially when some of the callers are friends of yours, even your mother, pretending, as you previously planned, to be random listeners who freaked out over the song and are requesting to hear it again.
    
18. Three weeks later when “Buffy” has become the number-one requested song on KROQ, drive down Sunset Boulevard with your dog, Paisley, in the backseat. As you pass Laurel Canyon, where as a teenager you staked out Carole King, sing along with Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” on the radio. When you drive by the Source restaurant, where every time you go for watermelon juice or brown rice pancakes you see some famous musician, start to feel lightheaded as you hear a familiar keyboard riff. Pull over to the side of the road when you suddenly hear your voice.
    On the radio. In the middle of the day. On a station other than KROQ.
    Scream, “WHOOO HOOOO!” as Paisley joins in, howling. Finally feel good about yourself. Well, feel good about Angel.
    
19. Over the next several months, as “Buffy Come Back” spreads to local stations, then national, and then international, becoming, as the DJs call it, a “cult hit,” dive in even more deeply, taking the band to the next step: (a) Do a photo shoot, which results in a smoky black-and-white Avedon-like 8 x 10; (b) Write a press release, headline claiming: “JAILBIRDS TURN SONGBIRDS”; (c) Put together packets with the release, the photo, and the record; (d) Create another persona to be Angel’s assistant—use a fake name you’ve used in your past and, as Madelyn Evans, call newspapers and magazines to hype the story of the band; (e) Send out packets to media; (f) Answer the phone that rings endlessly; (g) Write more songs and rehearse with the band; (h) Drive from store to store distributing the records out of the trunk of your car.
    
20. Drink lots of coffee and find good under-eye concealer to hide the dark circles.
    
21. Do interviews with the newspapers and magazines who respond to your packets; then, once they are published, excitedly read the pieces that say things like:
    “Move over Go-Go’s. Los Angeles seems to be the perfect spawning ground for all-girl groups who have a tendency to bullet to the top…. As long as the group can stay on the good side of the law for a while, it looks like it’s hitsville for Angel and the Reruns, L.A.’s bad girls gone good.”
    
22. Book the band on television shows—Alan Thicke’s
    Thicke of the Night
    and a daytime show featuring Leslie Uggams called
    Fantasy.
    Perform twice on
    Dance Fever
    with guest judges from your favorite reruns, including Lumpy, June Cleaver, and the Beave himself from
    Leave It to Beaver
    , who are all appreciative of your exaltation.
    
23. Spend a month shooting the film
    Bachelor Party
    and hang out with the up-and-coming star of the film, Tom Hanks.
    
24. Get one of your songs into the movie
    Grandview, U.S.A.,
    starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Patrick Swayze.
    
25. Do
    everything
    on your own. Explaining to someone else how to do things rather than just doing them yourself takes too long, and you can’t be sure they will be done correctly. So as Angel and the Reruns get increasing attention and opportunities, discover your energy waning. Be careful not to careen toward total exhaustion and burnout.
    
26. Decide it’s time to perform live: (a) Look for a club; (b) Book the club; (c) Rehearse even more; (d) Design flyers; (e) Distribute flyers; (f) Do sound checks; (g) Have “Madelyn Evans” call local news stations and build up hype.
    
27. On opening night, do interviews with CBS, ABC, and NBC news, as well as several magazines and newspapers.
    
28. During the run, continue doing your best—not just for the sold-out audience, but also for the reviewers in the house.
    
29. Excitedly await a specific review in the important music magazine that could catapult your career. When the issue hits the stands, buy up all the copies.
    
30. Go home and sit on the couch with Paisley while you read the review. Smile with satisfaction when you read:
    “Refreshing concept…impressive chops…solid talent.”
    
31. Suddenly feel the loss of breath and sting of tears when you get to the end of the review.
    
32. Read it again, just to make sure you read it correctly the first time.
    “This group—minus Angel—can be charming. It seemed the only one who couldn’t sing (or act) was Angel herself.”
    
33. Sit very still, stunned. Try to figure out what to do with these devastating barbs. If the reviewer is saying Angel can’t sing that’s one thing. But to say she can’t
    act.
    …Angel’s not acting. You’re acting as Angel. It’s a direct slam to you, and that’s why you chose to hide behind Angel to begin with—to avoid the kind of harsh judgment from others that you already heap upon yourself.
    
34. Try to catch your breath, which is, indeed, eluding your chase. For days your lungs feel like a dirt-filled vacuum bag. When you finally go to the doctor and find out you have a serious respiratory infection and have to stay in bed for at least a week, you’re not sure whether you’re pissed off or grateful.
    
35. While confined to your bed, drinking teas of licorice root and eucalyptus, meditate, ponder, analyze, dissect. Look through old journals of yours as you try to discover/uncover what led you to this point. Reclaim your history.
    
36. Stumble upon a quote that moved you enough to include in your journal ten years earlier, though you have no memory of writing it there. Read the quote, by Joseph Chaiken from his book,
    The Presence of the Actor
    .
    “In former times acting meant simply putting on a disguise. When you took off the disguise, there was the old face under it. Now it’s clear that the wearing of the disguise changes the person. As he takes the disguise off, his face is changed from having worn it.”
    
37. Know that, thanks to Angel, your face has indeed changed and decide it’s time to take off your disguise.
    
38. As weeks and months pass and your deeply ingrained insecurities and judgments start to creep back to the surface, oil on water, realize it’s once again getting harder and harder to look at your own face in the mirror.
    
39. See #2.