Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences (5 page)

ME (
dressed as “Brooke Shields,” with a scary
Valley of the Dolls
sixties wig and cigarettes sticking out of my nostrils and
ears
): “Hey, guys! Welcome to
Remote Control
!”

GROSS GUY IN SWEATS AND BACKWARD BASEBALL CAP, EATING COOL RANCH DORITOS: “Hey, where’s the
babe
?”

ME: “Heh, well, you’re looking at her! Isn’t this a lovely getup? I got it—”

GROSS GUY ALONG WITH HIS GREASY-FACED, SIMILARLY UNIFORMED FRIENDS: “BABE, BABE, BABE, BABE, BAAAAAABE!”

Then they hurled the Cool Ranch Doritos at me until an usher threatened to eject them. Meanwhile, one of the other comics
came out to save me from my death by Frito-Lay.

Remote Control
was a very funny show with enormously talented people performing on it, writing it, and producing it, and I felt lucky to
be on it, but miserable about the fact that none of that was because of me. I wanted to thrive there, but I didn’t; the atmosphere
made me feel unusually shy and intimidated and so far off from what I was naturally suited for that I bombed over and over.
How I wished that I could feel supported or nurtured there, as I so resentfully surmised the boys were, but I also knew that
as much as I pitched material, jokes, and ideas, I could never bring myself to go all out, to clear the unidentifiable hurdles
that made me meek and listless.

“They’re just being sexist,” the Jazz Musician would always remind me, but I knew it wasn’t that simple, and I refused to
wallow in the familiar trope that it was my vag that made me a victim. I could see over the fence; I could see that what were
required were brazen acts of will, refusals to listen to “no,” and shrugs at the venomous shouts. I wasn’t a killer; I wasn’t
aggressive like a comic, and I was used to being subtle—even coy—about my wants, needs, and desires when it came to my work
and also my personal life. This, combined with my usual hesitations about what I really wanted, in the end snuffed out my
enthusiasm.

Ultimately, I lasted only a season and what amounted to little more than a handful of performances on
Remote Control
; a season after that, the show was canceled. But before that happened, while I was still trying to get material on the air,
be funny, and not have fun-size snack items tossed at my head, I woke up one morning to find the Jazz Musician crouched over
the edge of the bed, sobbing into his hands.

“I can’t do it, Nance. I’m sorry. I just can’t be in a thing . . .”

I sat silently beside him, rubbing his back, my heart thumping as emphatically as one of his bass solos.

You have to let me go
, he told me finally.
Of course,
I replied—how could I keep him beyond his will, even if I wanted to? But since this moment had arrived not after a fight or
even a tense discussion, but rather, after a fun night out followed by extensive lovemaking and entwined slumber, I insisted
he tell me
why.

It was then that I learned that the person I knew best and loved more than anyone I had ever known—I didn’t really know at
all. He divulged various duplicities with groupies on the road, an old girlfriend, even some woman in New Jersey, with whom
his only previous encounter, a year before we’d met, had been a quick screw on her futon followed by a sad little omelet heavily
loaded with dill.

As the information tumbled out of his mouth, he packed up his belongings and pulled my cat from the curve in his bass where
he lay sleeping. I could not speak, but inside I was screaming, “STOP HIM!!!!! DON’T LET HIM GOOOOOO!!!” He rolled his bass
toward the door, the sun starting to rise and splatter across the parquet where we had lain each day and night listening to
his heroes. All I could get out of my mouth, the only pathetic words that would come, were: “But . . . you
hate
dill . . .”

He nodded mournfully, then quietly slipped away.

What ensued for me was a near-suicidal breakdown the likes of which I had never experienced before—even amid despair over
my acting career—and wouldn’t again until three years later, when part two of our romance ended in an almost exact replay
of this scene. For weeks, I wandered around my apartment and the surrounding blocks in a haze of self-pity, existential panic,
and cigarette smoke. One blustery afternoon, I was trudging along Houston Street when I ran into Cary, an old director friend
from school. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and after a brief hug, I immediately launched into the one subject that occupied
my mind: the blow-by-blow of my relationship’s demise. Was it, I wondered aloud for the umpteenth time, due to my suffocating
neediness, the Jazz Musician’s incessant side-fuckery, or both? Cary, who was about to begin directing another of his experimental
“pieces” about the nature of love and relationships, was positively enthralled. He insisted I join the cast.

“You’re in a perfect place to do this kind of work,” he enthused. “Lots of material to mine.”

“I dunno,” I groaned. “I’m sort of not able to be around actual people without crying or throwing up.”

“Transmute it!” Cary cried. “Turn your throw-up into art!”

Now there was an appealing idea. Experimental theater had been all the rage while I was at NYU. There were always avant-garde
luminaries passing through, creating new work with the students in classes and Mainstage productions. Some of it was brilliant,
some of it shit, but it was always interesting.

When I ran into Cary, however, I was feeling rather dubious about anything billed as performance art, having spent one too
many evenings dragging myself up five rickety flights to bear witness to half-baked exercises in mental masturbation—the downside
to any revolution. I rarely knew what the hell was going on in these “happenings” and spent most of the time watching other
audience members willfully pretending to “get it,” then smugly looking around in the dark to make sure other people had witnessed
them “getting it,” while the players strutted about the stage, conveying what could only be described as a telegraphed, finger-wagging
“Fuck you.” Eventually, all these performances blurred together in my mind, like an angry Mummenschanz skit, with lots of
screechy music and always,
always
, dry ice.

But even if the prospect of being part of a team that created one of these things from scratch left me cold, I really liked
Cary. He had a great sense of humor, which, along with intelligence and sweetness, he brought to all of his work, so I knew
that whatever it was, it would at least be funny. Most of Cary’s cast also happened to be friends of mine—either from NYU
or from cater-waitering and cocktail waitressing—including my best friend, Bridget, so, there was that. I hadn’t seen any
of them in ages. I had dropped nearly everyone in my life in order to fully devote my energy to my relationship with the Jazz
Musician, tagging along on the road with him at times, and when I wasn’t doing that, I was trying to hustle auditions and
working on
Remote Control
.

Standing on that windy stretch of Houston, dusk folding into night, cars whizzing by, I listened as Cary ticked off the details:
the piece was to be part of some illustrious downtown theater festival in SoHo and something-something about Debbie Harry
being involved.
Debbie Harry.
The hottest bottle blond ever, aside from Jean Harlow; the High Priestess of Cool; a woman unabashed about everything—her
beauty, her glamour, her ambition—and whose every limp-lidded stare seemed to say, “Yeah. I’m fronting this band of boys,
so put that in your pipe and smoke it.” I worshipped and adored her. Suddenly, for the first time in months, I imagined myself
having fun again: not being rudely heckled, but respected, admired, listened to with rapt attention, because this would be
thea-tah, dahling
! I knew, standing there in the dim light of day’s end, that I would run, as I had done before and would continue to for many
years, without a second thought back into the open embrace of that bitch goddess, Theater. Other jobs, men, friends, and family
would come and go, continue to vex and disappoint, but fleeing to the squalor of some dark dump in a sketchy area of downtown
would forever be my salvation, redeeming my folly, delivering me from the tedium of myself. The “Rapture” video flashed into
my mind, only in this version, I was there too, kicking it with Blondie and the Man from Mars, eating Cadillacs, Lincolns
too, Mercurys and Subarus.

“Count me in, Cary . . .”

Rehearsals for the piece, titled
Ball and Chain
, began the following week. We were given no script, only a conundrum: Why do we yearn for committed relationships, only to
feel trapped when we’re finally in them? Each rehearsal, Cary had us explore the paradoxical, often uneasy relationship of
love and sex through a series of exercises and theater games, and he gave us take-home written assignments each night. The
group, most of whom had worked with Cary on his other projects, consisted of five men and five women, including a hilarious
girl from Queens named Donna, who, down to the accent, was a dead ringer for Cyndi Lauper. Twice a week, Donna had to miss
rehearsals to tend to her very profitable business, Lauper-Grams, which involved, for a fee, showing up at someone’s office
party or birth-day dressed as Cyndi and singing raunchy, made-up lyrics to the tunes “She-Bop” or “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
The men were fairly standard overenunciating artsy types, goateed and gluten free. One of them, a chubby, coal-eyed Canadian,
was so sensitive to women’s plights and issues that he would often get choked up during our group meetings, or “energy circles,”
talking about the innumerable injustices we all endured because “ERA was never passed,” or about how “beautiful” an experience
it was to make love to his girlfriend under the stars near the Lincoln Memorial after the last pro-choice rally. He was very
sweet, but that didn’t stop me and Bridget from naming him Touch My Heart with Your Foot after Diane Keaton’s weird actor
boyfriend in
Annie Hall
.

We did all kinds of zany exercises at rehearsal to loosen up: We would write sex fantasies and give them out to another cast
member to read aloud while still others acted it out in the background; we would walk around on “diagonals” until Cary shouted
for us to freeze, whereupon we were directed to look into the eyes of whoever was closest to us and share a secret with that
person, first only with our eyes, then later actually whispering into each other’s ear. We would sit either in small groups
or en masse discussing our breakups, fuckups, cheating and lying experiences, feuds, fancies, and best-sex/worst-sex-ever
anecdotes. I was so utterly transformed by these experiences, I felt like Natalie Wood in
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
after she and Robert Culp come back from the Esalen Institute so “actualized” and wholly evolved that they can’t wait to share
their every single thought and feeling with not just each other but also their horrified best friends. I longed for rehearsal
every day, desperate to be with them all again, honing what would end up as a series of mini-scenes of romantic circumstances
and portions of relationships viewed at different stages of development. Although the piece wasn’t linear, the individual
scenes, clipping by at a lightning pace, suggested a single narrative about how we love and why, when it’s something we all
want, it’s such a struggle.

Ball and Chain
also aimed to explore power and gender and the ways in which the sexes feel empowered or not. During one conversation about
strippers, Touch My Heart with Your Foot said that he felt bad for them, that surely they must feel nothing but shame and
despair. This led to a sweeping discussion of breasts and how we felt about them as women and men, what they symbolized, what
they stimulated, and why our culture was so weirdly obsessed with them. I myself had gone in circles about my own, never sure
whether I loved them or hated them or should simply ignore that they were even there at all. Growing up, I felt at a disadvantage
because they were small. Then, when I started having sex, I began to love and appreciate them because they gave me pleasure
and because the men in my bed told me they were nice. My love affair with my own body came to an abrupt end when I started
auditioning professionally and once again was at war with my body for being wrong and not enough. I saw how much power the
Chick in the Body Glove Clothes wielded over the audience at
Remote
, the comics, the writers, and the producers, and I knew that my membership in the Itty Bitty Titty Committee kept me from
being her. All the good-natured artsy dudes in the
Ball and Chain
company pooh-poohed the idea that men are, at their most essential, just look-ists who grow weak at the vision of boobage,
sheep who are so visually dominated that they lose all ability to reason, etc., etc. Of course, they insisted that this was
a sexist and retro way of viewing males; that they were not just “dirty dogs”; and that they were sophisticated and mature
and had such profound respect for women and their bodies that, even though admittedly they thought we were luscious, they
were beyond such horse shit.

“Let’s see,” I said, pulling my leotard down to my hips while everyone in the company’s mouths flew open. I was just trying
to be provocative, make them giggle with my smart-assedness. We laughed it off and moved on. But sitting in our group circle
at the end of the day, we discussed how fun it would be to build such a moment into the show.

“It’d be a great ‘objectification beat,’ ” Cary said animatedly. “In one pithy move, Nancy strides alone to stage center,
surrounded by couples being couples, ritualistically tending to each other. She pulls out a cigarette, the top of her dress
happens to fall, exposing her breasts, and all the men literally leap away from their inamoratas to flick her a Bic.”

It was a manipulative stunt, silly, forced—this I knew—and yet oddly, I felt none of the recalcitrance that was part of my
routine over at
Remote
, where I pouted and complained about skimpy costumes, whining that I was being taken advantage of as “a tool of The Patriarchy.”
Instead, I was intrigued by the cheekiness, and I suppose I wanted to know what it would feel like to be topless under all
those lights, in front of a group of strangers and Debbie Harry. Besides, it was for a per formance, and for free. Taking
my shirt off for money—that would have been seamy. Doing it gratis, on the other hand, was an
artistic
sacrifice
; I was like the Joan of Arc of the fringe theater scene.