Spur of the Moment (8 page)

10

The View from Cloud Nine

W
hen Chelsey got to work the next day, she couldn't stop smiling. She was beaming, and her happiness was contagious. People smiled at her like she was an old friend, like seeing her was the best part of their day. It wasn't like she was grumpy ordinarily, but she couldn't get over how positively people reacted to her now that she was giddy with happiness, with that heady, this-could-be-love sensation.

She didn't even mind her hour with Mrs. Friedman. Mrs. Friedman had been coming regularly to her workouts, and she was getting in better shape, but she hadn't lost much weight.

“How's the diet going?” Chelsey asked.

“Oh, you know dear, I just get so
hungry.”

For Chelsey, reading Mrs. Friedman's nutritional diaries was like reading a script from a Wes Craven movie. Mrs. Friedman always started out with good bran-cereal-and-a-snack-of-fruit intentions, but by late afternoon she was shoveling in the most nutritionally bankrupt food, having a daily orgy of fat and cholesterol.

“Mrs. Friedman, you know the rules, your body is eighty percent what you eat, twenty percent how much you work out.”

“I know dear, there are just so many hours in a day.”

And Chelsey did know. That's why she liked being an improv comedian. You could become absolutely anyone you wanted in a split second. A change of a wig and you had a new name, a new personality, new parents, and a completely different history. And all of the mistakes you'd made in your real life? Poof! They were gone. In real life, it wasn't that change was impossible, but it was very, very hard. Maybe you'd lose weight or get sober or get out of a bad relationship, but there are a lot of hours in a day and a lot of days in a year, and maybe someday soon or well into the future you'd gain the weight back or fall off the wagon or get back with your ex or a new person who was even worse. People can change, but lessons are so much more easily learned in a half-hour TV show or two-hour movie than over the many years of a person's life, in which lessons are learned and then, too often, forgotten.

“Okay, don't worry about it. Just get right back on the diet plan. I know you can do it!”

To make up for the extravagant breakfast she had yesterday, Chelsey worked out for an extra hour after work, bringing her workout to two and a half hours. For dinner she had a plate of steamed vegetables with nothing on them. She talked on the phone with Rob for two hours and then went to bed with her stomach growling, feeling righteous and cleansed.

11

The Cluster Fuck, Part Two

O
n Monday, Ana called Steve to ask if they could borrow the theater one Sunday night. “We want to put on a sketch comedy show.”

“Why?”

“Ah, to get practice doing sketch. One more thing to add to the résumé, you know?”

“What day were you thinking of ?”

“Um,” Ana looked at her calendar. “October fifteenth maybe? I mean we're flexible. Whatever works for you.”

Steve didn't say anything, so Ana charged on. “It'll be extra publicity for the club. I'll do all the publicity for it, and maybe the paper will do a story on the actors from Spur and maybe people who've never been to the theater will come.”

“I don't think it'll be a problem. You can use the theater.”

“Really? Thank you!”

Ana hung up the phone and suddenly felt sheepish. She hoped her Spur of the Moment buddies wouldn't be mad at her for deciding on a date without consulting them.

She sent a group email to the five of them.

About eleven seconds later, she got a reply from Marin, who, rather than wasting her time working, spent her days hovering over her Hotmail account hitting “Refresh, refresh, refresh” over and over again.

A few minutes after that, Ramiro chimed in.

Ana laughed. Ramiro was the king of bitchy commentary. Not that he was a fashion maven himself—he clearly couldn't be bothered—but, like Marin, he had a way of putting together jeans, t-shirt, shoes, and a belt and looking like a GQ do. It was probably that he had awesome hair that was sloppy in a sexy way and he exuded an air of I've-got-it-together confidence that made him look MTV VJ oh-so-hip.

Ana went on the 'net collecting the names of agents and reporters in the Denver area. There were exactly three agents, so that wasn't hard, but there were an absolute ton of reporters. There were the three big papers, the
Denver Post,
the
Rocky Mountain News,
and
Westword
—Denver's
Village Voice
—but there were also papers for each suburb, plus two dailies in Boulder. For each paper, there were several journalists who wrote features, plus the editors for the entertainment sections, plus the peons that put together the calendar of events. Ana wanted to contact all of them, by every medium she was able to.

Many of the small papers didn't have websites where she could get all the contact info easily, so she had to call them each individually and beg for fax numbers and email addresses.

By the time she'd compiled her list it was already eleven in the morning. She hadn't ever enjoyed a morning at work more.

Ana, still sitting in her chair, wheeled/walked over to Scott.

“Busy?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Wanna work on ideas for the poster for the show?”

“We don't have a name or theme for it yet.”

“What's your point? We can still brainstorm.”

He nodded. “That does sound a lot better than work.”

They spent the next hour tossing around ideas. She sketched a few concepts, and Scott did rough layouts.

“We need to get pictures of everybody,” Scott said.

Ana knew they couldn't just download their pictures from the Spur of the Moment web page because web pictures didn't have a high enough resolution for printed pieces.

“I'll have to scan all of our pictures in,” Ana said.

“It would be nice if we had a professional group shot. Maybe I could take the one from Spur and Photoshop Steve out of it.”

“He's in the center of it. It will look completely unbalanced.”

“Yeah. Good point. But how am I going to make it look cool when we have separate mug shots? Maybe I could do a mural, with everybody's face cut out and tilted at various angles.”

“Or maybe we could do something like the Brady Bunch, with all of us looking down or up or to the side at each other.”

“I like it! You think Nick will let us borrow his digital camera?”

“I'm sure he would.” They all would have loved Nick even without his finance guru's salary, but it really was nice to have at least one friend who could afford things like digital cameras.

Ana hadn't had so much fun at work since . . . Ana had never had this much fun at work. She loved this. She loved being creative. It wasn't that she intrinsically hated marketing and advertising, it was that, when she created stuff for Abbott Technology, no matter what ideas she came up with, she was overruled. All her creativity and hard work were inevitably for nothing. Her boss just wanted something that he could tear up so he could feel important and managerly. Ana had thought about trying to save up enough to start her own agency, but she knew her clients would just do the same thing to her. It wasn't that she couldn't take criticism, it was that most of the time, her boss wasn't making anything better—he'd made it worse or different, but rarely better.

Worse, it wasn't just The Big Weasel she had to please. Weasel was the VP of marketing, but marketing's main function was to create collateral to help the sales team sell Abbott software, which meant she also had to please Deb Myers, VP of sales.

Ana tried not to be hard on Deb, she being the only female exec at Abbott, but while Deb was nice, charming, cute, fun to talk to, and absolutely amazing at selling things, when it came to actually managing projects and people, she was as hopeless as The Weasel.

Ana had been trying to get The Weasel and Deb together to talk about what she needed to do in preparation for Deb's meeting with Techtronic execs for weeks. Ana knew that weeks' worth of work awaited her and she knew it would end up that she'd only have a day or two to do it, but since she hadn't been assigned anything yet, she might as well work on publicizing the show. No reason to be idle, right?

12

The Word for Today, Kids, Is “Apathy!”

M
arin swiveled in her chair, painfully bored. She was working as an operator at a phone message service for small businesses that couldn't afford a full-time receptionist but wanted callers to think they could.

Marin's boss for the day was not the brightest star in the sky. He had thick black glasses that fell down his nose constantly and he was the loudest breather she'd ever heard in her entire life. Saliva gathered at his lips in a manner that was both horrifying and compelling to study—like an animal cleaning its butt, it was oddly intriguing to watch.

Fortunately, he spent most of his time in the back office. But before he left her to answering the phones, he gave her a long list of companies and the corresponding codes that would pop up on her monitor. She was supposed to look at the code, see what company it was for, and answer the phone saying, “Hello, this is Company X, my name is Marin, how can I help you?”

Marin looked at the endless list and it was all she could do to keep from laughing out loud.
Yeah right.
But she simply nodded enthusiastically.

Boredom set in promptly after he left. The phone only rang a handful of times an hour, leaving Marin a good fifty minutes out of sixty to stare at the wall.

She tapped her pen against the desk. Took a deep breath. Made a pensive, sucking noise with her tongue between her teeth.

The phone rang. She was almost jubilant to have something to do.

“Hello!”

“Is this the law firm of Ellis and Gray?”

“Yes!” She had no idea.

“May I speak to Mr. Ellis?”

“He's out of the office right now, can I take a message?”

The woman left this endless message, spelling her name, repeating her number. Marin doodled a picture of her boss for the day, saying “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” all the while
as if
she were writing the number down.

She hung up the phone.

Bored. So bored.

Sketch, right, she should write a sketch. What should it be about? How about a bored receptionist who answers the phone in an amusing fashion? She smiled. She was brilliant.

The next time she answered, she said in her most seductive, breathy voice, “This is the Lovely Lady Escort Service, how may I please you?”

“Uh, I was just calling in to check my messages? I'm Morgan McKenna from McKenna Marketing?”

“Oh! I'm sorry Mr. McKenna, I'm new here. I must have gotten the numbers confused. Ah yes, here they are . . .”

She read off his messages, hung up the phone, and laughed hysterically.

Over the course of the day, she answered the phone as “911, what is your emergency?” and various escort, dancing, and massage services. And she wrote it all down, exaggerating the reactions of the people on the end of the line if it aided the comedy of the scene.

At the end of the script, the nerdy boss came in and said she had a great phone voice, would she come again?

In real life, however, her jig was up by 1:30, and she was told never to come back again. No matter, she'd spent the hours in an entirely useful and productive manner.