Scrappy Little Nobody (3 page)

“When I grow up, I’m going to be a poor doctor,” I announced. My mom asked me what I meant.

“I’m going to be a doctor for poor people,” I said. “They won’t need to pay, I’ll work for free.” My mom is a sucker for this kind of sweet-little-kid stuff, but she had to point out that I might face complications in adult life, even if it meant crushing my dream.

“That’s very nice, sweetheart, but if you work for free, what will you do for money?” My mom was an accountant and the breadwinner in the family. Teaching her children about money was the responsible thing to do. She may have even wondered if my brother or I would follow in her footsteps.

I thought about this for a while. I’d just been served a heavy dose of reality.

“Oh!” I said.
I can’t believe you didn’t think of this yourself, Mom.
“If I run out of money, I’ll just write a check.” She knew then that a career in finance was not for me.

Aside from becoming Martyr, MD, I didn’t have many career goals before I decided I wanted to perform. Sometimes this worries me. Am I like one of those Chinese gymnasts who’s known nothing but this life, never able to consider another option? Am I going to wake up in ten years and say, “Someone get me to a lab; I’ve got some shit to discover!” I would actually love that. Having zero education to back up the desire would be irritating, but going to college at forty with a background in the arts and
discovering the competitive world of science would be . . . a terrible movie! Terrible screenplay idea number one! (Terrible title ideas include but are not limited to:
The Science of Art
!
The Art of Science
!
Old Maid in a Lab Coat
!)

Still, performing is all I’ve cared about since the first time I can remember caring about anything. I don’t know how you pursue acting as an adult. It’s possible that the process would have subjected me to more discouraging situations than I could handle and I would have bailed and started a closet-organizing business . . . while letting my OWN life and home fall into chaos! Terrible screenplay idea number two! (Terrible title ideas include but are not limited to:
Closet Case
!
Organize This
!
Mothballs and Heartbreak
!
Love Hoarder
!
)
I’m glad I got started early.

There are plenty of early influences I could point to—
Newsies
,
Life with Mikey,
everything Bette Midler ever did—but my brother, Mike, claims I started performing because I wanted to copy him. Which is absolutely true.

My brother is my hero. I’ve idolized him since the day I was born, and I still do. He’s responsible for at least sixty percent of my personality, for better or worse. I’m told that if you’re an only child, you grow up thinking you’re the center of the universe, and if you have tons of siblings you grow up with a healthy perspective on how small you are in the grand scheme of things. I’d like to think that my brother told me I was a worthless brat often enough that I got the same effect.

Our dad had been an athlete in college and exposed the two of us to every team sport Maine had to offer. The poor man got so excited whenever we showed the slightest aptitude for sports, only to have his hopes dashed when we gave them up just as quickly. The summer I played T-ball, I got in trouble for blowing kisses to my friend Margaret Eddy, the first baseman for the other team. Soccer didn’t appeal to me at all. I stood still in the middle of the field for the entirety of the one game I played. The other kids had the ball, I’d wait my turn. Most important, my brother had no real interest in sports, and I wasn’t about to waste my time doing something where I couldn’t follow him around.

Not having it.

Mike’s main interests were watching
Star Wars
, playing Magic: The Gathering, and avoiding his annoying little sister. The only time he happily included me was when he wanted to play “Pro
Wrestling Champions,” as I was an ideal partner on whom to inflict moderate injury.

At a certain point he realized that I was sticking around (no matter how often he told me I was adopted and should run away). He reluctantly accepted that he would have to put up with my pestering questions and should probably try to ameliorate my lameness in the process. I asked him what Cypress Hill meant by “Tell Bill Clinton to go and inhale” and he rolled his eyes and made the international sign for “smoking weed” by pressing his thumb and forefinger to his lips. I nodded like I understood, which I did not. Two years later I asked him what Alanis Morissette meant by “go down on you in a theater.” He let out a sigh that communicated,
You’re such a loser wanting to know this stuff and you’re an even bigger loser for not knowing already
, and then made the international sign for “blow job” by pumping his fist in front of his mouth and pulling a slack-jawed, idiotic expression. You know, like all girls do when they’re giving a blow job. I nodded like I understood, which again I did not.

He protected me, too. When I was ten, our dentist needed to take impressions of my teeth. To do this, the bored dental hygienist stuck a mold in my mouth that felt like it was the size of a grapefruit and told me to stay still for about two minutes. I tried, using hand signals, to protest that I was about to choke and die. She rolled her eyes and told me to breathe through my nose. When I vomited all over the station she started screaming at me, but at least she took out the mold and I could draw enough breath to start crying. Mike was having his checkup in the next room and rushed over to me. Then my twelve-year-old
brother marched out and told our dentist that he was going to kill him.

Deep down, he loves me.

When we were really little Mike showed me a neat trick that he called “Drama.” He screamed as loud as he could and when our babysitter ran into the room in a panic, he said, “Just drama.” And thus, the seed was planted.

When he was seven I followed his lead again. Mike enrolled in dance classes because he wanted to learn to “rap dance,” which probably meant however Vanilla Ice was dancing. After his first lesson, he came home in a pair of baggy pants with a geometric neon pattern, knowing how to do the running man. For the first time, I knew the cold sting of being the biggest loser on the planet.

I cried to my parents that I wanted to take dance lessons, too. My parents were bona fide masters of letting us think we were in control, especially when it came to keeping the peace between my brother and me. They presented me with the option of taking tap and ballet, which meant prettier costumes, and I agreed that hip-hop class with a bunch of boys did not sound like the best fit for me. Had it not been for Mike and Vanilla Ice and those baggy neon pants, I might never have discovered my calling.

At five, I had a plump face and dirty-blond curls, and people would often tell my parents that I looked like Shirley Temple. I knew nothing about Shirley Temple, but she’s like me, you say?
Well, she must be marvelous! I adore Shirley Temple! My dance teacher said the same thing when I started classes with her, and once I revealed my secret power to grind dance class to a halt by randomly singing at the top of my lungs, she suggested that I sing the Shirley Temple classic “On the Good Ship Lollipop” at the recital. Tap, ballet, AND a solo performance?! I was stretched so thin, but my public demanded it.

(Incidentally, Shirley Temple made like seven movies at the age of six, which is straight-up child abuse, but kind of badass.)

The recital was just your run-of-the-mill clusterfuck—children screaming and running around backstage at a local high school auditorium. My big number was going brilliantly until halfway through the second verse, when I got to the bit about landing in a chocolate bar. It was my favorite part, and I gave
that mediocre piece of wordplay the kind of hammy treatment that would have made the overworked Ms. Temple proud. Lesson: if you start congratulating yourself mid-performance, you are about to screw up.

Moments before disaster.

I forgot the next lyrics. I stood onstage with my mouth open while the adults in the front row tried to get me back on track. I weighed my options, and while it didn’t occur to me to simply
leave the stage
, I devised this impromptu exit strategy: slowly slide my feet farther and farther apart, then let gravity take over until I eventually face-plant in slow motion on the stage. I hoped I would wake up in bed. I hoped someone would come scoop me up and take me to Dunkin’ Donuts. But that didn’t happen. The prerecorded accompaniment did not stop. After a while I sat back up, and when the chorus came back around, I started singing again, red-faced and with far less conviction. The song ended and I walked offstage to where my mom was waiting for me. I said, “Well, that was stupid.”

My mom tells this story with affection. I suppose that’s because I shook it off. I didn’t say I wanted to quit and I wasn’t afraid to show my face after messing up. She probably should have been a
little
worried about that reaction, though. What a little sociopath, right?

The following year, in spite of my disastrous debut performance, my dance teacher suggested that I audition for some local theater. Our community theater was run-down but very charming, and they were about to put on a production of
Annie
, which is going to come up a lot in my childhood. My apologies.

In preparation, I watched the 1982 film version of
Annie
with my family and my world exploded. These girls were dancing, singing, causing trouble, and playing with dogs—I needed this to be my life. I was too young to play Annie, but I wanted the part of Molly desperately. Molly is the young orphan whom Annie comforts with the song “Maybe.” It’s a pretty heartbreaking piece of music, and I wanted to get in there and chew some of that depressing scenery.

Alas, they went in a different direction for Molly, but I got to play Tessie. The internet informs me that Tessie is ten years old, while Molly is six, but in our version Tessie was “the littlest orphan.” Tacking on any superlative is a surefire way to get a kid excited about something, so it was a clever way to convince me that Tessie was a special character. However, Tessie
should
be the littlest orphan. What kind of ten-year-old has a catchphrase like “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness! They’re fightin’ and I won’t get no sleep all night!” Get your shit together, Tessie.

Doing the show was the best. I was in heaven. Being tiny was a good thing, being loud was a good thing. In everything else I’d done in my six years on earth, I’d been told I had too much energy, but here, I had somewhere to channel it all! We sang “It’s the Hard-Knock Life”! We did a dance with tin buckets and scrub brushes that was bursting with adorable scrappy rage! We got to embody the rollicking fun of being orphans! (Why are kids so obsessed with orphans?) We got to play with a dog!! At one point the director told the girls we were playing too rough with the dog and they should play with me instead, because it might tire me out a little. So maybe I still had too much energy—they’re adding a TAP number?! Let’s go learn it!

To this day, seeing a tattered brown cardigan or a pair of thin-soled lace-up boots makes my heart sing. In a costume context, not, like, on a person. I’m not some out-of-touch monster who sees real-world poverty and longs for the days of her musical-theater beginnings.

One review mentioned me. The reviewer said something nice but remarkably unspecific, yet my mother and father know that sentence verbatim to this day. I won’t bother pretending that I think that’s lame of them (I mean, it is, I just don’t
think
it is), because having my parents love and support me is a pretty sweet situation, as parent-child relationships go.

My next local gig was playing Baby June in a production of
Gypsy
a few towns away. The director was a woman with enormous black hair who seemed to bathe in knockoff Chanel No. 5 and tacky jewelry. I’d never met someone who was so unapologetic about how they looked. She sparkled like a Christmas disco ball at all times. If I’d known what a drag queen was, I would have thought,
That woman looks like a female drag queen
and chuckled to myself about my very first piece of lazy observational humor. Instead I thought
, That woman is all the colors of the rainbow and I want to roll around in her closet.