I Know What I'm Doing (22 page)

I have never had a fling on the road with someone who has come to see my show. First of all, I’d like him to remember me how he saw me onstage—funny and in control. I do not want to take a guy back to my hotel and have the fantasy dissipate as he watches me put on my three face creams and take pills for my adult acne before bed. Nor do I want to have to say, “Before we have hot sex, I need to shower because my butt cheeks tend to sweat onstage. And when I am in the bathroom, please don’t rifle through my daily affirmation journal.”

I was so shell-shocked by how my time with the Ab-Master went from fun to done so quickly that the last thing on my mind was a man. Some people in my life seemed to find my breakup with the Ab-Master and this trip to London a week later tragic timing. “So, Jen, you’re really not taking the Ab-Master with you?” “No. We broke up. And I was never planning on taking him to London because I am not his mother and my business trip isn’t his playdate.” But I was in London for my dream fulfillment and I couldn’t believe that only a small handful of people in my life understood that it was not a tragedy that one of my carry-ons wasn’t a man. Even the TSA agent who checked my passport looked beside me and said with a frown, “You’re traveling to Europe alone today?” Yes. I am traveling to Europe alone today. At least I’m fucking traveling to Europe! She handed back my passport and said, “Well, good for you. You go, girl.” (As in the supportive slang “You
go
, girl.” She wasn’t, like, instructing me to go.) Although I get that she was congratulating me—what was there to be congratulatory
about
exactly? The male comedians in my life never get asked if they’re traveling alone. Nobody ever says, “You’re not bringing a woman with you? How will you justify your self-worth without a gal by your side? Well, keep your head up. The right princess is out there for you. But in the meantime, it’s so strong of you to take this voyage alone. You go, boy.”

This attitude started to infect my psyche. As the plane hit its cruising altitude I caught myself thinking,
I’m lonely
.

I started to talk to myself inside my head.

Well, of course you’re lonely, Jen. You’re sitting alone.

I know.

Besides, do you really want to talk to anyone, Jen?

Fuck no!

I looked around at my immediate surroundings in Premium Economy on Air New Zealand, sitting in a fun little seat pod known as the “Spaceseat.” There were so many movies to choose from, including
Caddyshack
. I had four fashion magazines, and an iPod full of music. Most people have to be getting chemotherapy to get this kind of personal downtime.

I don’t mean to act like being single and wandering the planet by myself is some fabulous parade all of the goddamn time or that I’m constantly in “You go, girrrl” mode. I think—and again, this is just a thought; I said, “I think” not “I know for a fact”—but I
think
that having a man to travel the world with would be marvelous. I further think that if that man also had a similar type of life and career and our relationship had elements of creative collaboration—that would be miraculously marvelous. I’m okay with no man if I can’t have
that
man. And I’m not going to let the fact that I’m minus one man ruin any fun I might be having flying in metal tubes from state to state, country to country, continent to continent.

The most impactful episode of
The Brady Bunch
to me is an underrated gem from season three called “Jan’s Aunt Jenny,” with Imogene Coca playing Mrs. Brady’s eccentric aunt (technically Jan’s great-aunt, but let’s not get bogged down in the genealogy of a made-up family). In this installment of great American entertainment, middle daughter Jan finds an old picture of Aunt Jenny that’s her spitting image, but when she finds a more recent picture of Aunt Jenny Jan is afraid that she will grow up to be as peculiar-looking as her relative. Eccentric Aunt Jenny comes to visit and Jan learns that beauty comes from within and ends up idolizing Jenny.

What stuck with me as a young girl watching “Jan’s Aunt Jenny” was not the life lesson that looks don’t matter, but that this maxi-skirt-and-purple-turtleneck-wearing woman was unmarried, middle-aged, and had traveled the world alone multiple times and she seemed way cooler than Mrs. Brady despite Carol’s badass unique lady-mullet with the flipped-up ends that never caught on in beauty salons in America. Aunt Jenny arrived at the Bradys’ house in a limousine and when she exited the exotic-to-me-at-the-time car, she was wearing a giant Russian fur hat.

Aunt Jenny took the Brady family through a traditional Japanese “honorable tea” service in Mike and Carol’s living room. (Except for Alice. They kept that ol’ bitch slaving away clearing plates. Poor thing. She could have learned a thing or two about independence from AJ.) Aunt Jenny keeps getting phone calls from her secretary on the Bradys’ home phone. She’s just been invited to a birthday party on “Ari” Onassis’s yacht. Her response? “Is he kidding? I’m not canceling my Peace Corps assignment in Bolivia for any birthday party. I’ll cable Jackie, though. She’s a real trip.” She teaches the Brady kids how to eat rice with chopsticks. She tells a story about jamming with the king of Thailand on saxophone in a little nightclub in Bangkok. Another phone call from Aunt Jenny’s assistant brings news of a dozen long-stemmed roses delivered to her house with a marriage proposal from a US senator. Aunt Jenny is unfazed. “I get lots of proposals.”

“Well, why don’t you accept one of them?” asks Jan.

“Oh, I guess I’m too young to settle down yet.”

Aunt Jenny ends up cutting the visit short because she forgot that she had to catch a plane to Paris. I’m not sure if it was a calling or just an astute realization of the inevitable, but I remember thinking,
I’m going to grow up to be Aunt Jenny
. Sure, Aunt Jenny might seem lonely compared to the likes of Carol and Mike Brady, who had each other, six kids, a dog, and even a live-in maid, but Aunt Jenny had freedom. She could drop in on that giant family when she wanted to but also get right the hell out, leaving everyone wanting more. Maybe Aunt Jenny just had intimacy issues. Maybe I’m just projecting. Maybe it’s Maybelline.

Television people always seemed as legitimate to me as the people in my actual life, and Aunt Jenny was not only a role model to Jan Brady, a fake person, she was a role model to me, a real person. Somewhere in my DNA was the idea that there is nothing sad about exploring on your own—in fact, it’s the best way to meet even
more people
. And as Jan said, ending up like Aunt Jenny isn’t so bad at all.

•  •  •

It was nice to land in London with only my luggage to look after. After trying to check into the wrong hotel because I had gone by “memory” instead of the $800 computer in my pocket that makes phone calls and keeps information in a calendar, I got settled in my room. I had one night free to do whatever I wanted. My hotel was right smack in the middle of Leicester Square and I was tempted to go see the Liberace biopic
Behind the Candelabra
in the Square’s movie theater. In America it was only a made-for-TV movie but our friends in London gave Matt Damon in tighty-whities and gold rings his proper respect by showing it on the big screen.

But I decided to be a sophisticate and take in the West End. I purchased a last-minute ticket to the Ibsen play
A Doll’s House
. I remember loving reading this play in high school. I was
that
drama-geek/freak girl. Nobody assigned me that play to read. I read it on my own time, making sure everyone saw that I was reading prose that challenged nineteenth-century marriage norms, sitting deep in thought in a booth at Friendly’s. Twenty-plus years later I was at the Duke of York’s Theatre with a great aisle seat, happy that champagne was allowed inside of the auditorium. In America, ladies have to chug chardonnay and do white wine spritzer funnels during intermission in some of the lobbies on Broadway. Even though I slept for most of the eleven-hour flight to London, and I guess because of the fact that I took a drug that tells your nervous system that EVERYTHING IS GROOVY EVEN THOUGH THERE IS A LION CHARGING AT YOU and that technically I hadn’t been in a bed in twenty-four hours
and
there’s this thing called jet lag—I started to nod off. I passed out on the shoulder of the senior citizen woman to my right. The feel of her wool sweater on my bottom lip woke me. She nudged me back to my side right in the middle of Nora’s empowering monologue to her husband, Torvald. “I was your little skylark! Your doll!” I flopped not back into my seat but right over the other side of my chair where there was no old lady to catch me—only the aisle. I tumbled face-first into the carpet, my hand still clutching my champagne glass, the champagne spilling on my head. An usher rushed over, shining her penlight in my bloodshot eyes. She escorted me into the lobby to make sure I wasn’t injured. I was fine, except for the rug burn to my forehead.

The nice lady running the concession stand said that I could have a refill on my champagne for free, since I had spilled it on my face and all. London wasn’t judging. I chatted with the usher while sipping from my newly refilled flute. And then—my seat buddy came bounding through the doors into the lobby and approached my new best friend demanding that she usher me right into a different seat. “That woman is causing a stir, falling into the aisle! She’s bringing shame upon herself.” I said nothing but thought,
Okay, calm down, lady. ‘Bringing shame upon herself’ is a tad dramatic.
I wasn’t sneaking out of a castle to marry some vagrant from the underclass, I just fell asleep at a play. And might I say that play was
a lot
more humdrum than I remembered it from high school. I guess heavy plays were more engrossing when I was an angst-ridden fourteen-year-old whose only options for things to do were to write in my journal in my bedroom, listen to records in my bedroom, and just basically not leave my bedroom.

Despite that old crow’s grousing, I was still allowed to retake my aisle seat after intermission and once those lights went back down my body said,
“Hmmm. Time to go to sleep.”
I woke up in the aisle again. At least this time I must have fallen rather quietly—a graceful slide maybe. It went unnoticed by the usher. But I met eyes with my seat neighbor Mrs. Sourpuss Magoo and I knew that I had to leave. Don’t anyone remind me how
A Doll’s House
ends. Next time I’m in London I’ll sneak in during intermission and catch the second half.

I passed a kiosk on St. Martin’s Lane and ordered myself up some fish and chips “to take away” as the Brits say instead of “to go.” I walked back toward my hotel holding an entire piece of beer-battered cod in my hand, gnawing on it as though sitting at a table and using utensils had been outlawed. As I neared my hotel a fashionably punk rock guy clearly saddled with a heroin addiction told me, “You’re a beautiful woman. I’d love to take ya to fish and chips next time.” He was probably just attracted to me because my eyes were sleepy and at half mast, but no wonder Amy Winehouse fell into the wrong crowd if these are the only two hang options on a Saturday night in London—snooty old women or charming young drug addicts.

Back in my hotel room, I was still so hungry that I dipped everything I could find in the leftover tartar sauce—even the individually wrapped Q-tips in the bathroom. I was happy when I woke up twelve hours later in my bed even though I had fallen asleep with my shoes on. It beat sleeping on the floor of a theater. And I wasn’t sad waking up in a quaint London hotel room without a man. I was just disappointed that I passed out without getting under the covers and who knew what kind of rash I would get from having my face on the outside of the duvet. They never clean those things.

The next day I put on my badass platform-heeled rain boots and fingerless leather gloves. It wasn’t raining or cold but I brought these accessories five thousand three hundred and forty-seven miles and goddamn it they were getting worn. I walked up and down the street—here I am, world! An independent woman just strolling through London during the day before the opening night of her cabaret run! I hit Portobello Road and bought myself what I call a “fun coat”—a tradition that I started for myself in Paris the previous year when I bought a giant white faux fur coat that looked like a yeti. I decided that every country I visit my souvenir to myself will be a coat, something out of the ordinary that tells a story. Usually the story is just “I bought this coat,” but whatever.

•  •  •

While some Londonites had four o’clock tea, I decided to have four o’clock Cabernet and cheese at a wine bar. Sitting at the bar, I pontificated to no one that drinking at four p.m. with your date is foreplay but drinking alone at four p.m. is kind of just drinking alone . . .
unless
you’re talking a lot with the bartender, and then it’s called wine tasting.

The most ravishing man took a seat at the bar next to me—sort of a Hugh Grant/Hugh Jackman combo. Double Hugh made me rethink my no uncircumcised penises rule. I could picture myself just staring into his eyes or his hair and never having to see the thing if we were to make British love. He sat down, leaving an empty barstool between us, and coyly whispered, “I’m saving this seat.”

“Okay.” I decided to pull out a book. The romance was over.

He smiled. “Aren’t you going to ask who I’m saving it for?”

Oh? There’s more? Romance back on! I pictured us walking hand in hand through gardens in the rain (again, I packed those boots) and making out against brick walls in alleyways.

“Who are you saving it for?”

I shut my book to signal that he had my full attention.

He said, “I’m saving this seat for your fabulous Kate Spade bag. That can’t be on the floor.”

He’s the perfect man and, of course, gay. I didn’t think he was gay because he cared about purses but because the next thing he said was, “Don’t worry. I’m not hitting on you. I’m gay.” I do have a gross habit of just putting my purses on the floors of public places. Nothing I have ever looks like I’ve owned it less than twenty-four years or like I haven’t walked with it through napalm, Pearl Harbor, the beaches of Normandy, Hurricane Katrina, etc. Double Hugh picked up my black shoulder bag, supporting the bottom, and placed it gently on the stool between us.