Unnaturally Green (6 page)

“I’m sure you were awesome. Can I walk you to rehearsal?”

I did that Seinfeld thing where Elaine shoves Jerry.

“You remembered my skedge? What the—!”

Marshall grinned, his dimples revealing themselves, like commas in the run-on sentence of his cuteness.

“I’m always looking for excuses to see you,” he said.

What was he selling!  I mean, c’mon.

To better understand my skepticism about the entire male race, perhaps we should pause here and take a quick stroll through my Dating History Museum.

This vast, temperature-controlled space, curated by yours truly, houses tributes to the long lineage of questionable men to whom I’ve offered my pulsing, wound-weary heart. 

Please place your umbrella in the bin, help yourself to an information pamphlet, and follow me inside (donation optional).

Beginning in the foyer, you’ll see our Early Years Collection, when dysfunction first reared its head. As these posters and magazine cutouts reveal (fashioned to replicate my childhood bedroom), during my youth I retreated into elaborate fantasy worlds of celebrity romance. At five, I wrote Hulk Hogan a love letter (yes, the wrestler). At eight, I went steady with John Travolta (his chin butt made me swoon). At twelve, I was torn between Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Rzeznik from the Goo Goo Dolls (who could resist such messy coifs?). Later I had a mind fling with Richard Chamberlain (who didn’t look a day older than 65), before becoming obsessed with Alan Cumming and the lead singer of
The Darkness
(Picasso had a Blue Period; I had an Androgynous Men Period). Most enduring was personal favorite Douglas Sills, star of Broadway’s
The Scarlet Pimpernel
, whom I stalked outside the Minskoff Theater stage door on many occasions, aided and abetted by my musical theater-loving father.

As you’ll note in the information pamphlet, through each torrid, make-believe affair, I mastered the art of projecting wonderful qualities onto men who did nothing at all to deserve it—which is pretty harmless in fantasy.

In real life, it can get dicey.

Wrapping around to the High School Collection, you’ll see that my foray into the dating world proved less than ideal. Take a moment to examine the following busts: the Devout Jewish Kid Who Swore Off Shiksas After Me, the Possibly Bisexual Buddhist Whose Catch Phrase Was “Bros Before Hos,” the Aspiring White Rapper Who Made Me His Secret Girlfriend, and, around the corner, a sculpture series I like to call the Four Gays. (As the information pamphlet confirms, yes, I did have four gay boyfriends.)

Finishing our tour, I invite you to the College Wing of the Museum, where I present another sculpture series known as the Three Matts, which represent the time in college when I dated three men named Matt consecutively. First we have Matt 1.0, who has earned a figurine, as opposed to a commemorative bust, since ours was a brief fling. He orchestrated my very first college hookup, a make-out session that began while we were studying Italian verbs.

(“I’m not going to tell you the correct past participle,” Matt 1.0 said, “unless you kiss me.”)

Next you’ll see a bust of Matt 2.0, the small bespectacled individual I dated on and off for two years. (You might remember him from our first scene, seeing
Wicked
on Broadway with my family.) As the pamphlet describes, our time together was pretty bizarre. On our first Valentine’s Day Matt 2.0 took three drunk photos of me, made posters of them, and labeled them
Paradiso
,
Purgatorio
, and
Inferno
. Instead of going on dates we played Subjective Guess Who, a board game we invented that was exactly like Guess Who except you asked questions like, “Is your person a Democrat?” or, “Does your person recycle?”  Appealing to each other’s totally weird sides was fun for a while, but not sustainable. In our case, I cut things off with Matt 2.0 just in time for Matt 3.0.

You’ll find him all the way across the room.

As the ex-boyfriend responsible for my greatest heartbreak, Matt 3.0 has earned not a bust but a mini mausoleum, engraved with year and title (Breaker of Fel’s Heart, 2006-2009). We dated through my junior and senior years then tentatively broke up, got back together, broke up, and got back together while he spent a year abroad in Paris.

Together we were destroying each other in the service of making things work. Because, you see, I had thought Matt 3.0 to be The One. You know, the person with whom I would spend the rest of my life, have babies, yada yada, blah blah.

(And as you’ll note, the Museum room reserved for The One remains conspicuously empty.)

Why was I so foolish? Maybe it had something to do with end-of-college timing, or the fact that Matt 3.0 spun a fine “I love you forever and ever” yarn, or the fact that, in my Early Years, I’d been great at fabricating relationships.

But 56 tear-filled phone calls, 27 pints of Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie, four and a half years, and three long, drawn-out breakups after I met Matt 3.0, I had a bracing reality check.

LL101:
Love hurts
.

I’d endured disappointments, rejections, and resentments, but I’d never
really
been hurt. No, not in a lasting way. Stunned into solitude, I vowed never to let it happen again.

So, given this tour of my dating history, I hope you can understand why I was reluctant to fall for this Marshall Roy character. This too-good-to-be-true, cookie-wielding hunk of a man.

But here I was, on a street corner in Manhattan, munching oatmeal and raisins, fawning over somebody who could very easily, with one swift chop, cleave my heart in two.

“Is it okay you’re not at work?” I asked.

Marshall made a
pshaw
noise and batted an imaginary fly.

“I just told them I had to run an important errand. Which is true: it’s important that I get a recap and give you a cookie.”

“Well, then, lead the way,” I said, doing an about-face toward the intersection.

We crossed the street together and began walking up 8th Avenue, holding hands through the cold.

3. GROUNDHOG DAY

W
icked
’s
casting process is kind of like rolling admissions to a university—if that university accepted only one student, and didn’t tell most applicants whether or not they got in. You “apply” on no real schedule, just whenever they happen to be casting, and hear back at any point in the future.

Or never.

Example: A friend of mine auditioned for
Wicked
many times, but it was almost a year before she finally heard that she’d landed the part of Glinda on the national tour. Another friend was offered the supporting role of Boq, the overlooked munchkin, but
Wicked
couldn’t yet tell him where, or when, he would be needed. That’s the university being like, “We want you at our school, we know what your major is going to be, but we don’t know your campus or the year you’ll graduate.”

The week after my audition I practically chained myself to my phone, and not just because Marshall and I were texting about 1,000 times a day.

I was waiting. For it. You know!

The call.

In the meantime, I was rehearsing for my strange and inexplicable Chanukah musical which, despite being mind-numbing, at least gave me something to keep me occupied. The days crawled by until it was Friday—weekend two of
Hee-Haw
performances. Another distraction from the waiting.

The old “don’t call us, we’ll call you” Hollywood cliché is more or less true of New York theater, although I’ve never heard anybody actually say it while smoking a cigar or slamming a door in my face. But the sentiment is alive and well. As an actor, you have to be ready for everything—and nothing. After an audition, there’s no promise of hearing back, of getting feedback, or of finding closure. And this is absolutely true of
Wicked
—it being such a massive, multi-pronged operation, with productions running all over the world. They’re busy, and they have a lot going on. You’re spending your days pretending to be a babushka bubbe making latkes and applesauce. They’re thousands strong, with millions of fans.

You’re one person, and you live alone.

See the difference?

On Friday, Marshall and I rendezvoused an hour before my
Hee-Haw
call time. I spotted a small café near the theater and proposed we duck in for tea and cake, mostly because this required that Marshall carry me over a huge pile of snow. As we ordered a plate of sweets, the cashier told us, in a French accent, that she saw Marshall’s snow-bank heroics and found us romantic. It reminded her, she said, of the couple seated by the window, a pair of regulars who were celebrating their fifty-year anniversary.

“How wonderful, at once, to see the bud of love and love in full bloom.”

It was so sweet, I almost vomited. French café? A prediction of lifelong love? The cliché gods were smiling down on us—just as they had for weeks, ever since our
serendipitous
(groan) meeting.

Only now—as the weirdly prophetic French lady had reminded us—we were inching closer to that scary L-word.

You know. The one that rhymes with “shove”—and is equally jarring.

We seated ourselves in front of a window, across from the fifty-year couple, at which point Marshall made quick work of a massive mound of chocolate cake, while I stared at him, remembering the boxer-brief-striped-scarf-omelet incident.

“Hey,” I said, “I like you.”

“I like you, too,” he said, his mouth smeared with chocolate.

“If I don’t get
Wicked
, it won’t be so bad,” I said. I didn’t know what possessed me.

“But you’re going to get it,” said Marshall.

“Nah. I think I would have heard by now.”

I scooped up a lemon square and began chomping, upholding the tradition that our every exchange should involve mouthfuls of saturated fats and/or sugary carbohydrates.

Then, as if sensing I wasn’t on my guard, the phone rang.

Callbacks are the ultimate déjà vu experience, but without any humor or Bill Murray charm.

My Monday
Wicked
callback began exactly like the prior week’s audition, with only minor revisions: shower warm-up, with different, less exfoliating body wash, followed by ritual banana consumption, followed by the donning of an outfit that was distinctly not burgundy satin, but cotton and black (a pit-stain shield!).

Soon I was back in the neon airport terminal. No Lipstick Loop, no fierce bald men, only a bunch of new girls eyeing each other. I wondered how many there were of them, total. Not just in the room, but in the world, going about their days, stacking the odds against me.

The extent of my guppyhood in an expanding sea of fish suddenly hit me.

Still, I’d do my best. If likelihood of getting cast was proportional to time and effort spent preparing, honestly? Maybe I did have a shot in hell. I’d worked and worked and worked some more. If I didn’t get it, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying.

Soon Craig appeared, leading me back to the same room as before, where this time there was no Faux Hawk (and no finger guns). In his place were a bunch of new faces: a tiny girl wearing roman sandals, even though it was winter; a man behind the piano with wet curls, named either Lombardo or Dominick; a man with a shaved head and piercing blue eyes, named Paul, Alan, or Nick (I have a strange deficit for recalling names; it’s one of two reasons I could never be in politics—the other is I hate wearing pantsuits).