Let Me Be Your Star (3 page)

Beyond that, though, everything got a little more fraught
and, for lack of a better word, Brechtian. Debra Messing’s character had a
strange Chinese baby adoption subplot, which was rumored to be based on the
real life of Theresa Rebeck, the show’s notoriously tempestuous creator. The
hapless Ivy was given a round of prednisone, a mild steroid often prescribed
for minor ailments such as laryngitis or persistent skin rashes, which
immediately sent her into a hallucinogenic drug hell meant to mirror Marilyn’s
own. Katharine McPhee, a Japanese body pillow outfitted with its own AutoTune
processor, sang a lot of Rihanna songs, or at least, what I think were Rihanna
songs. The only thing I know about current pop music is that basically
everything is a Rihanna song.

All of these things would later bedevil and inspire the work
that lay before me. But in the beginning, my principal difficulty was figuring
out the characters’ names. It seemed to be a peculiar stylistic quirk of the
show that nobody ever addressed anyone directly by name. Even after repeated viewings,
I had no idea what a lot of the characters were supposed to be called.

“You could look up them on IMDB,” my friend Michael
suggested, when I explained my predicament to him.

“I could,” I said. “But I shouldn’t have to.”

So I gave them nicknames. Leo, the young, tearful,
fringe-laden son of Debra Messing’s character, became Carpet, and before long,
in my mind literally
became
a carpet. A supporting chorus member with a
penchant for sparkly eye shadow was Eyelid; a dark young man who seemed
constantly to be taking a long bubble bath in his own snide beauty was,
obviously, Gore Vidal. I owe a sincere apology to Brian D’Arcy James, a
brilliantly gifted performer who upon first impression appeared to be saddled
with the thankless role of playing one of those cheerful, partially defrosted
husband-like products one sees in commercials for breakfast cereal and laundry
detergent, and because I am incapable of uttering the word “unfrozen” without
thinking of the classic Phil Hartman
SNL
sketch, became Unfrozen Caveman
Husband, along with all it implied. Brian, it had nothing to do with you.

Debra Messing was another story. The name of her character,
at least, was clear. But here’s the thing about me and Debra Messing. I think a
lot of people have a secretly appointed celebrity family, right? The people who
you feel you may have been somehow separated from at birth. I don’t know much
about Fantasy Football, but I imagine it’s kind of the same thing (I was going
to make a joke here about a straight guy fantasizing about some football player
being his long-lost uncle or something, and then realized that I cannot name a
single football player.) Anyway, it all started when I was a child, and the
plot from
Soapdish
merged in my head with that episode of
The Golden
Girls
where Rose is convinced that Bob Hope is her biological father, but
he turns out actually to be a monk played by Don Ameche, and I began to quite
seriously pretend that I was actually the daughter of Sally Field and Kevin
Kline, but had been shunted off to an adoptive Omaha in the woefully misguided
hope that a “normal” childhood away from the spotlight might be “good” for me.
I know it sounds crazy, but I was very young then, and didn’t yet realize that
I should really be focusing my energy on figuring out if my real parents were
in fact Kevin Kline and
Patti LuPone,
which given their romantic history
was theoretically possible, even though it would make me approximately four to
eleven years older. There’s a conundrum for you. It’s like those studies when
they ask women if they would choose to have an extra 20 IQ points and 20 extra
pounds (which they could never lose) or 20 fewer IQ points and 20 fewer pounds,
and inevitably, they all choose to be stupid and skinny.

Over time (and by time, I mean 20 years or so), I’ve made
peace with the fact that my parents are actually my parents. But I still like to
pad out my extended family, and Debra Messing has always fit neatly into the
slot reserved for my cool older cousin. I could imagine our semi-shared
childhoods, of the thrill of being invited up to her peach-colored teenage
bedroom during a lull in the family seder. She would French braid my hair and
tease my bangs with a lot of hairspray, let me play with her collection of
North America Bear Company Very Important Bears (Lauren Bearcall, anyone?
Scarlett O’Beara?) and let me listen in on the cordless extension while she
talked to her boyfriend, so I could see how it was done. Then other times she
would turn into a total raging bitch and ignore me completely, and my aunt
would say, “It’s the age. They’re all moody at this age,” and my mother would
do her little passive-aggressive dachshund psychologist head tilt in response
and say, “Do
you
think so?” My aunt would pale. “Well, of course, it’s
the hormones, isn’t it? I mean,
isn’t
it?” And my mother would smile and
tilt her head the other direction and say, “Carol, you
know
I can’t ethically
diagnose family members.”

And might Debra Messing, as she is popularly perceived, not
occupy that place for all Americans? Might she not eternally be Debbie, the
crimping-iron adept, emotionally volatile big cousin that we all simultaneously
idolize and fear?

That’s Cousin Debbie, to you. And especially to me.

* * *

My first live recap, when I would have to watch the show
for the first time along with the rest of America, then drug myself with enough
over-the-counter and/or prescription stimulants to stay awake until dawn to write
what even at a parsimonious 2,500 words took a lot out of me, was to be for Episode
Five, “Let’s Be Bad.” It happened to air on a night when my friend Bob had
invited me as his plus one to the Public Theater’s annual benefit concert at
Joe’s Pub, which he was covering for
The New York Times.

“I’d love to,” I told him, “but I’m not sure if I should.
It’s my first live
Smash
recap. I have no idea exactly how long it’s
going to take, or what it’s going to do to me. I’m definitely going to be up
all night. I should probably just lay low.”

Bob said, “The press materials say that Stephen Sondheim is
going to be there.”

I was in a cocktail dress and out of the house in eight
minutes flat.

Let me explain. Insofar as I am a spiritual person, I adhere
to a kind of polytheism not unlike that of the ancient Greeks, except all the
deities have been replaced by famously verbose and opinionated gay men (and
some women, not necessarily gay). Sondheim, as the patriarch, occupies the
center throne in Zeus-like splendor — the divine throne room resembling,
basically, the set of
Hollywood Squares.
Tennessee Williams stokes the
coals of the eternal heart as a puckish Truman Capote looks on, trying to catch
the eye of Morrissey as he quips: “If you’re planning on roasting flesh, Tom, I
sure as hell hope it’s Gore Vidal’s.” (Somewhere, in his gorge deep in the
Earth’s crust, Arthur Laurents, the Hephaestus of the group, bangs out angry
letters on a glowing typewriter equipped with a ribbon of liquid magma.) I’ve
even invented a holiday (on Twitter, but how else is any kind of social
progress made anymore? If Moses were alive today he’d have to announce the Ten
Commandments on his Tumblr), called Sondheimas. Falling on March 22
^nd
,
it commemorates the Great One’s birth much in the matter of another perennially
single Jewish boy whose worldview was, let’s just say, a lot less
wry.
(Details
for its observance will be provided in the epilogue; believe me, nothing would
make me happier than to be invited to your Sondheimas party next year, like I
was the Joseph Smith of Jewish show queens.)

So I set the DVR, and there he was, standing around Joe’s
Pub just like — well, not exactly a regular person, but like someone who
actually inhabits a similar physical plane. I had never seen him in person. We
had never been in the same room before. He wore an oatmeal-colored sweater that
matched his beard. At one point, he was so close I could have touched his
sleeve with my hand.

“Do you want to meet him?” the event publicist asked Bob.
“I’ll see if I can get him over here after the show.”

Suddenly, I found myself thinking of Shakespeare in the
Park. Not Central Park, Elmwood Park, where they used to have it in Omaha was I
was a kid. There weren’t any seats or permanent structure, just a stage and some
scaffolding in front of which people would spread their lawn chairs and picnic
blankets, so far back and so far across that most nights, the actors were just
pinpricks unintelligibly and futilely screaming their lines into the vast
darkening sky — it was like
every
play was
King Lear.
The night
my parents took me to see
Hamlet
we somehow wound up right next to the
stage. For the first time, I could see everything, hear everything, understand
everything. I had never seen — never imagined — anything like it. It was like
being transported into another world.

My wonder was disrupted by the arrival on the scene of
Marilee, a rough-and-tumble little girl from the neighborhood who was my
occasional playmate, despite us having few interests in common; Marilee liked
to ride bikes and climb trees and catch fireflies in a jar, wait until they
exhausted themselves trying to escape, then smear their phosphorescent innards
across the grass like a grisly glow-stick; I liked staying inside and reading
Summer
and Smoke
out loud to my panda.

“This is boring,” she said. “Let’s go backstage at
intermission and see the actors in their underpants.”

I didn’t think you could do that, but Marilee insisted it
would be fine. And I guess she was right, because when we found the entrance to
the jury-rigged dressing tent behind the stage, nobody stopped us from ducking
inside. The actors didn’t seem particularly pleased to see us, but they didn’t
seem particularly surprised. I suppose we weren’t the first weirdly
unsupervised little kids to sneak backstage. I remember Gertrude and Ophelia as
being particularly kind, signing our Playbills and gamely answering my various
questions which were all really the same question (“How do I get to be you?”),
but the one person I really cared about was lurking alone in the shadows, pale
and thin as a rake, mumbling to himself in his customary suit of solemn black.

“Don’t bother him, honey,” Ophelia said kindly, as if she
could read my mind. “He’s really got to concentrate and think about what he’s
doing. He’s Hamlet. He’s not like us.”

And that’s exactly what I thought of when I saw him. He
can’t be bothered. He’s Stephen Sondheim. He’s not like us.

Deep down, I’m a shy person who has given a tremendous
performance over the years of convincing people — mainly myself — that I’m not
shy. I never would have asked to meet Sondheim, just as I never would have
dared venture into the actor’s tent that night without the nihilistic
determination of murderous Marilee, scourge of the fireflies. Maybe that’s why
I got so drunk that night — well, that and the fact that the servers at Joe’s
Pub generally like to make sure you’ve finished all your martini courses before
they bring you any solid food. By the time the show was over and the beaming
publicist approached our table to let us know whether the Master would see us
now, I was teetering precariously into that danger zone where you sort of stop
paying attention for a second and then sort of open your eyes and think, “Oh my
God, am I actually talking about rim jobs to Angela Lansbury” and then you
don’t know exactly how you got home or why you’re wearing a jacket with someone
else’s keys in it.

So I fled the moment that oatmeal-colored mock turtleneck
neared my peripheral vision. I put myself in a taxi, promptly passed out in my
couch, and woke up, panicked at 4 a.m., at which point I alternated writing my
recap with vomiting a strange and foul-smelling yellow bile into my bathroom
wastebasket. (A suggested title for this Single was
Smashed,
which I
rejected for sounding like a memoir about alcoholism.)

I filed on time, but first, I died.

From then on, I stuck to a strict schedule. Recapping
evenings — or more accurately, nights, since these were the olden, golden days
in which I couldn’t even begin to start writing until 11 p.m., when the episode
ended — were to be spent in a state of monastic silence, of total isolation
from the world, fueled by a sort of homemade energy cocktail of half Diet Coke,
half Red Bull — all the carbonation makes the methamphetamine-injected bull
semen (or whatever they put in that stuff that makes it taste like gummy bears)
into the bloodstream faster. I call it a “Sky Masterson,” after the insomniac
gentleman gambler from
Guys and Dolls.
My time of day was the dark time,
when the street might belong to the cop and the janitor with the mop, but all
the little lights of all the glowing laptops in all the windows of New York and
Los Angeles and Chicago and Austin and San Francisco and all the urban metropolises
belong to the scores of the overeducated and unemployed trying to scrape out a
living in this brave new Internet world. A world where attention has become a
kind of currency that feeds your career but is still not accepted by any major
grocery chain, eager to use the skills they spent countless hours and many tens
of thousands of dollars invested in honing their playwriting and creative
writing and comparative literature programs to make five cents a word analyzing
every minute detail of a television program most of them would sacrifice any
combination of their reproductive organs to write an episode of themselves.

But as I typed away furiously in the darkness, I wasn’t
thinking about any of that. I wasn’t thinking about how I hadn’t written a play
for two years, or how my agent never returned my phone calls, or that I was
probably never going to have health insurance while I was still capable of
natural reproduction. I didn’t think about it seemed like my apartment was
always filthy and my bank account was always empty and I was somehow unable to
crack four figures’ worth of Twitter followers. With such set parameters for
start and finish times, my natural tendency toward procrastination and
self-doubt melted away. Alone in my womblike night cave, I went into a kind of
trance state, accessing memories long forgotten, making bizarre connections I’m
not sure my neural synapses would have allowed me to make while under the
jurisdiction of the comparatively logical sun. In my private laptop reverie,
Anjelica Huston became an immortal sorceress and link to the spirit world; Ellis,
the loathsome, madras-clad assistant of Tom Leavitt, the composer played by
Borle, became a devious and unspecified forest creature occupying a space
somewhere between the lovable Sylvanian Family toys my sister and I had spent
many sun-dappled afternoons arranging among the tasteful green furniture in
their miniature woodland chalet, and the satanic Christmas Critters who
ritually sacrificed an infant in one of the most disturbing episodes of
South
Park
ever. It was like living in one of those dreams where you have those
amazing ideas that you can never quite remember when you wake up, except I was
awake. And at my keyboard. And writing. For eight hours. All about was Ellis
and his pine-needle stilts and anal beads made of juniper berries, and how
Beloved Dev’s ears turned pink like Fievel Mouskewitz’s when he felt thwarted,
and of course, the epistemological conundrum that baffles astrophysicists to
this day: In the world of
Smash, Into the Woods
exists,
Sunday in the
Park With George
exists, the 2003 Broadway revival of
Gypsy
exists.
Bernadette Peter’s 1999 Tony acceptance speech exists (hence, Tom Wopat exists)
but Bernadette Peters does not exist, because Bernadette Peters is a fictional
actress named Lee Conroy. Lee Conroy, however, played Reno Sweeney in a mid-’80s
revival of
Anything Goes,
so is Lee Conroy actually Patti LuPone? (Not in
the safeword sense, just keep reading.) And since Patti LuPone exists in
Smash
(they never managed to talk her into making a cameo, but she was
name-checked in the second season as a possible candidate for the role of
Marilyn’s mother in
Bombshell
), is Patti LuPone then Bernadette Peters?
Was Lee Conroy then Evita, and Patti LuPone the Witch? Did Glenn Close still
play Norma Desmond in
Sunset Boulevard?
Does Lee Conroy subsequently
have the “Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Swimming Pool” in her backyard in Connecticut?
Was Patti LuPone denied a Tony nomination for playing Sally in
Follies
and
given a commendation for her work with animals instead?