Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (8 page)

W
ITH THE EXCEPTION
of Japanese businessmen, no one likes karaoke more than I do. When I graduated from college, my aunt Sreela and uncle Keith gave me the single best present I’ve ever received: a professional-level karaoke machine. I don’t know if they were aiming to become my favorite aunt and uncle for all eternity, but that was the result. When I arrived in Brooklyn with Bren and Jocelyn, we set that machine up to our TV before we had a bed or couch. We’d just take turns belting Whitney Houston in an empty room, while the others sat Indian-style, impatiently waiting their turn.

Because we were unemployed for so much of those first months, and also because we are cheesy crooning hambones, we did a lot of karaoke. Now, in L.A., all the best birthday parties I go to take place in a karaoke bar or, for the true karaoke experience, a dark windowless box in Koreatown that smells faintly of Korean-style chicken wings. What follows are some things I think really maximize the karaoke experience.

When I pick songs for karaoke, I have three concerns: (1) What will this song say about me? (2) How will I sound singing it? and (3) How will it make people feel?

The key is that the third one matters the most, by a factor of a hundred. When most people sing karaoke, they think of themselves as contestants on
American Idol,
and they sing and perform their hearts out. But I really think people should be thinking of themselves more as temporary DJs for the party. It’s kind of a responsibility. It’s up to you to sing a kick-ass upbeat song that sets the mood for your friends to have fun, drink, and pick up girls and guys.

And it kind of behooves you to pick a short song. I don’t care if Don freakin’ McLean shows up in a red-white-and-blue tuxedo, no one is allowed to sing “American Pie.” It’s actually kind of hostile to a group of partiers to pick a song longer than three minutes.

Stray observations I would like to add: I like when small people sing big brassy songs, like, say, if my friend Ellie Kemper sings “Big Spender” in a booming voice. I also like when guys sing girls’ songs, but not in a campy way. Like a guy earnestly singing “Something to Talk About” is wonderful. Guys sometimes do this thing where they sing a Britney or Rihanna song and do a campy impression of the singer, to be funny, and it’s painful. An amazing thing to do is to pick a song that has lyrics in another language. That’s why I tend to always sing Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” for karaoke. I would die if a guy sang a Gipsy Kings song. Die in a good way, obviously.

Day Jobs

I
N OTHER PLACES
in this book, you’ve seen the fruitless attempts I made while living in New York to pursue my goal of show business employment. This section is about my attempts to get day jobs. At first I called this chapter “Mama’s Gots to Pay da Bills,” but I thought that title made it sound like maybe I had been a stripper or had a brood of illegitimate children.

It was October 2001 and I lived in New York City. I was twenty-two. I, like many of my female friends, suffered from a strange combination of post-9/11 anxiety and height-of-
Sex-and-the-City
anxiety. They are distinct and unnerving anxieties. The questions that ran through my mind went something like this:

Should I keep a gas mask in my kitchen? Am I supposed to be able to afford Manolo Blahnik shoes? What is Barneys New York? You’re trying to tell me a place called “Barneys” is fancy? Where are the fabulous gay friends I was promised? Gay guys hate me! Is this anthrax or powdered sugar? Help! Help!

The greatest source of stress was that it had been three months since I’d moved to New York and I still didn’t have a job. You know those books called
From Homeless to Harvard
or
From Jail to Yale
or
From Skid Row to Skidmore
? They’re these inspirational memoirs about young people overcoming the bleakest of circumstances and going on to succeed in college. I was worried I would be the subject of a reverse kind of book: a pathetic tale of a girl with a great education who frittered it away watching syndicated
Law & Order
episodes on a sofa in Brooklyn.
From Dartmouth to Dickhead
it would be called. I needed a job.

CARING FOR THE YOUNG AND EATING THEIR FOOD

By placing hundreds of neon green flyers all over the wealthiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan, I finally got a job babysitting. I was paying my $600 portion of the rent taking care of two adorable girls named Dylan and Haley. Dylan and Haley were from a wealthy family in Brooklyn Heights. Not wealthy in a simply went-to-private-school way. Wealthy in a each-had-her-own-floor-of-a-historic-brownstone-in-Brooklyn-Heights-and-wore-all-organic-clothing way. I guess “crazy loaded” is the more accurate way to say it. Their dad invented the Internet, or something like that (not Al Gore), and whenever I walked into their mansion on Pineapple Street, I always whispered to myself,
This is the house that inventing the Internet built.
Dylan and Haley’s parents had divorced years before, and I never met Internet Inventor Dad. I only interacted with gorgeous Internet Inventor–Marrying Mom, who looked like a slightly older Alicia Keys. Internet Inventor–Marrying Mom hired me on nights when she went out on dates or had plans for a girls’ night with her all-black, all-glamorous friends. Later I read that Internet Inventor Dad was seriously dating an internationally famous supermodel. They rolled high. If my babysitting stint were taking place now, they would have a dynasty of reality shows on Bravo, and I’d be the pixilated chaperone in a cable-knit sweater escorting the girls to Knicks courtside seats.

Once Internet Inventor–Marrying Mom gave me an unopened bottle of Clinique
Happy
that someone had given her and she knew she’d never use. “It’s not fancy or anything,” she said sheepishly, as though she were handing me a bottle of
Lady Musk
by Walmart.

What is this world?
I thought.
Clinique isn’t fancy anymore?

I was a little worried about babysitting at first, because though I have the voice of an eleven-year-old girl, I have no natural rapport with children. I’m not one of those women who melts when a baby enters the room and immediately knows all the right age-specific questions to ask. I always assume the wrong things and offend someone. “Does he speak yet? Does what he says make sense, or is it still gurgle-babble?” Also, I’m always worried I’m going to accidentally scratch the kid with my fingernail or something. I’m the one who looks at the infant, smiles nervously, and as my contribution to small talk, robotically announces to the parent, “Your child looks healthy and well cared for.”

So it was surprising that I killed it as a babysitter. Er, maybe “killed it” is a wrong and potentially troubling way to express what I’m trying to say. The point is, I was an excellent babysitter. It helped that the kids thought I was a genius. It was so easy to seem like a genius to Dylan and Haley when helping them with their homework. For instance, one night, I explained that the mockingbird in the title of
To Kill a Mockingbird
was actually a symbol for the character Boo Radley. Dylan looked at me with wonder. “Why are you babysitting us?” she asked. “Why aren’t you teaching at a college?”

I also knew what little girls want to talk about, which is boy bands. Haley and I would talk for hours about which member of ’N Sync we’d want to marry. After long deliberation, the answer was always J. C. Chasez. Joey Fatone’s last name was going to be “Fat One” no matter how great he was, and even though they didn’t know at their age that Lance Bass was gay outright, they sensed he’d make a better good friend and confidante. As for Justin Timberlake, well, JT was the coolest and hottest, but too flashy, so we couldn’t trust him to be faithful. J. C. Chasez was the smart compromise. We would talk like this, in complete unironic seriousness, for hours. The reason I was better than other babysitters was that I would never rush them. In me they had an open-minded listener to every pro and con of spending the rest of their lives with each band member of ’N Sync. I may have gotten more out of it than they did.

When the kids went to bed, the real fun began: me turning on
Showtime at the Apollo
in their tricked-out den and going to town on all the kid-friendly snack food in the house. Kid-friendly food is the best, because kid-friendly simply means “total garbage.” I ate frozen chicken nuggets shaped like animals, fruit chews shaped like fruit, and fruits shaped like cubes in syrup. I discovered that kids hate for any food to resemble the form it originally was in nature. They are on to something because that processed garbage was insanely delicious. I spent some excellent Saturday nights watching Mo’Nique strutting onstage at the Apollo while I ate a handful of children’s chewable vitamins and wrapped myself up in my boss’s cashmere kimono. I did it so much that it became a problem. One evening after her bath, Haley pulled me aside, wracked with guilt: “Mommy wanted to know who ate all the turtle-shaped bagel pizzas, and I knew it was you, but I lied and said it was me.” She burst into tears. I hugged her and told her, “You can never tell her the truth.” And then I let her stay up an extra hour watching
Lizzie McGuire.
Bribes and boy bands. That’s all you need to be a babysitter.

Babysitting did not pay the bills or give me health insurance, which I guess is good, because otherwise I would probably be an au pair somewhere right now. I needed to get a real job.

NETWORK PAGE DREAMS

The page program at the network TBN is very prestigious, and famously harder to get into than Harvard. No, TBN is not the real name of the network, but there is an old saying, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” which applies here. The TBN page program turns ambitious, overeducated twentysomethings into friendly, uniformed butlers. I wasn’t sure it was really my style, but it seemed like the first rung on the ladder to somehow working in TV. Young television writers all aspire to be TBN pages, in the hope that a late-night talk show host like Craig Ferguson or David Letterman will eventually overhear them uttering something witty while leading a tour, and then say, “You’re brilliant! Why don’t you come work for me and be my best friend?” They hire only seventy or eighty pages a year, out of something like forty-two million applicants. I decided the odds were stacked against me, which strangely made me feel like I was going to get the job even more. Sports movies had brainwashed me into the belief that when the chips are down the most, that is when success is the most inevitable.

I’m the kind of person who would rather get my hopes up really high and watch them get dashed to pieces than wisely keep my expectations at bay and hope they are exceeded. This quality has made me a needy and theatrical friend, but has given me a spectacularly dramatic emotional life.

Anyway, I got called in for an interview with the program. I wore a pin-striped skirt suit I ordered from the clothing section of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. You know that section, where they can make a woman modeling a pair of overalls look slutty? Yeah, it’s amazing.

I thought I looked pretty awesome—like one of Ally McBeal’s friends in cheaper material.

I arrived fifteen minutes early for my interview, which was the first of my three mistakes. I was interviewed by a paunchy and balding man name Leon. He was one of the guys who managed the page program, and it was obvious that lunchtime was his thirty-minute respite from this hell job of interviewing an assembly line of ambitious, obnoxious liberal arts school grads. He didn’t have an assistant to tell me to wait outside. There was no “outside” to his tiny office. Or a waiting area, as I thought there would be. It wasn’t a posh enough job to have earned him all these extra rooms. My early arrival meant that either he would have to interview me or I would have to wander around Midtown for a while. Unfortunately, he chose the former. He reluctantly shoved his Quiznos sub aside and told me to have a seat. Strike one.

Life had been hard on Leon, his portliness and baldness obscuring his relative youth. Looking at a photo on his desk of him with two little kids, I asked, “Oh, are those your kids? They’re so cute.”

He looked aghast. “I’m twenty-five. Those are my nephews. You think I have kids?”

I was unable to conceal my surprise. “Oh! It’s just that, you don’t look, um, you seem more mature than that.”

Leon gestured to me. “We’re basically the same age.”

Without thinking, I immediately responded, “Well, I’m actually three years younger than you.” Why on earth did I correct him on his point? Oh, because I was a snotty little idiot.

Strike two.

Leon asked me, while eyeing his Quiznos sandwich longingly, why I wanted to be a TBN page. I answered honestly, saying that I would be honored to work for a terrific company that had been host to all my favorite shows growing up, and that the opportunities that came from the page program seemed amazing.

“Hold on.” Leon stopped me. “So you only want this job for the opportunities it
affords?
”

I was puzzled. “I mean, that’s part of why I’m applying, yes.”

“This job is more than just a stepping-stone.” Leon jotted down a short word on my résumé that could only have been
hate
or
yuck.
Strike three.

Leon was now openly disgusted. What had he wanted? For me to say that all I wanted to do into my twilight years was give people backstage tours of morning talk shows? Oh, yeah. Yes. That’s exactly what he wanted me say. I left knowing with certainty that I had not gotten the job. It was hard to be devastated, because it had been such a top-to-bottom disaster.

Now when I watch my friend Jack McBrayer excellently portray Kenneth, the career NBC page on
30 Rock,
I understand what kind of commitment Leon wanted from me. I wonder if Leon is a consultant for the show. Or still a page.

I WORK FOR A TV PSYCHIC

Still babysitting, with no health insurance, I began to become a germaphobe, because I could not afford to get sick and go to the hospital. From a friend of a friend, I landed an interview for an entry-level job as a production assistant on a show I’ll call
Bridging the Underworld with Mac Teegarden.
This was a cable program featuring the psychic Mac Teegarden, who relayed messages to members of the studio audience from their dead friends and relatives.