by Tina Fey
and the other girl’s “look” was “more British.” A fat load of nonsense, but it worked. Dancer Girl was relegated to playing the title role in a Children’s Theater show called Guess Again. Yes, her character and the show were both called Guess Again. A harsh punishment.
Obviously, as an adult I realize this girl-on-girl sabotage is the third worst kind of female behavior, right behind saying “like” all the time and leaving your baby in a dumpster. I’m proud to say I would never sabotage a fellow female like that now. Not even if Christina Applegate and I were both up for the same part as Vince Vaughn’s mother in a big-budget comedy called Beer Guys.
Sean and I were Mentor and Mentee that summer. I was eighteen, he was twenty-seven. Sean taught me a lot about professional dignity. For example, this was when “call waiting” was new, and if you left Sean on the other line for more than ten seconds, he would hang up. And our show was a hit!
On both nights! The cast party was in a backyard with paper lanterns. The cast and crew mingled. It was very glamorous.
Summer Showtime alum Richard D’Attelis was there. My friend Vanessa had gone to her eighth-grade dance with Richard D’Attelis, and he had picked her up wearing a baseball shirt customized with an iron-on photo of Olivia Newton-John. It said “Olivia Newton-John” in puffy letters on the front and “Totally Hot!” on the back. Richard had been the first of the Showtime boys to quietly come out after his stint at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts, an exclusive state-run arts intensive that might as well have been called the Pennsylvania Governor’s Blow Job Academy. Imagine a bunch of seventeen-year-old theater boys away from home for the first time for six weeks. They were living in empty college dorms, for the love of Mike! Literally! Think of the joy and freedom they must have felt, like being on an all-gay space station. (I’m sure there were one or two straight boys there, too, and I imagine they did incredibly well with the one or two straight girls.) Sean was flirting with Richard. We were seated at a picnic table at the party, and I realized they were playing footsie under the table. I could not contain my judgment. “What are you doing?” I demanded, trying to be funny and controlling at the same time. They ignored me. Richard got up to get a soda. I turned to Sean. “He’s so cheesy and gross!” My power-of-suggestion technique had worked so well when I was screwing over that blond girl. I used any ammunition I could muster. “He smokes, you know.” As the night wore on, I didn’t get the hint. I stayed at the table with two people who were clearly going to hook up. I tried some sarcastic eye contact as Richard told Sean about his dream to turn Xanadu into a stage play. Like that would ever work.
In my mind, I was doing Sean a favor by trying to stop him from hooking up with someone regrettable. “Oh, my God. You know he’s only, like, twenty.” Sabotage and saying “like.” I was really in a bad place.
Sean shot me a look. I was out of bounds. It’s one thing to be a wisecracking precocious teen hanging out with twenty-seven year olds. It’s another thing to get in the way of a grown man trying to get laid.
I don’t know what happened between Richard and Sean that night, but the next day Sharon called me to say that Sean was very annoyed with the way I’d behaved. She said she had talked him down because “they all realized” that I had a crush on Sean. “It’s natural.” They all realized? They were all talking about what a baby I was and how I must have a crush on Sean? “I don’t.” I wept from sheer embarrassment. “I really don’t.” But the more I protested, the guiltier I seemed. And here, after twenty years, is the truth. I really didn’t have a crush on Sean. I had reacted that way because I viscerally felt that what they were about to do was icky. The stomachache I felt had nothing to do with a crush. I had to face the fact that I had been using my gay friends as props. They were always supposed to be funny and entertain me and praise me and listen to my problems, and their life was supposed to be a secret that no one wanted to hear about. I wanted them to stay in the “half closet.”
Equity Actor Sean Kenny did not live in the half closet. He had moved away to New York and was just back for a visit. He was a grown man. My reaction to his hooking up with Richard D’Attelis made me feel like Coach Garth. I stroked my thick blond mustache and thunk about what I had dawn.
It was a major and deeply embarrassing teenage revelation. It must be how straight teenage boys feel when they realize those boobs they like have heads attached to them.
I thought I knew everything after that first summer. “Being gay is not a choice. Gay people were made that way by God,” I’d lectured Mr. Garth proudly. But it took me another whole year to figure out the second part: “Gay people were made that way by God, but not solely for my entertainment.” We can’t expect our gay friends to always be single, celibate, and arriving early with the nacho fixin’s. And we really need to let these people get married, already.
Before the final performance of every summer, all the kids were invited onstage and together we sang “Fill the World with Love” from Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Everyone would cry their heads off. It felt like the end of camp, and I imagine some of those kids had more to dread about going back to school than just boredom and health class.
With his dream of a theater program for young people, Larry Wentzler had inadvertently done an amazing thing for all these squirrels. They had a place where they belonged, and, even if it was because he didn’t want to deal with their being different, he didn’t treat them any differently. Which I think is a pretty successful implementation of Christianity.
We should strive to make our society more like Summer Showtime: Mostly a meritocracy, despite some vicious backstabbing. Everyone gets a spot in the chorus. Bring white shorts from home.
That’s Don Fey
Let’s review the cost-free techniques that we’ve learned so far for raising an achievement-oriented, obedient, drug-free, virgin adult: Calamity, Praise, Local Theater, and flat feet.
Another key element is “Strong Father Figure / Fear Thereof.”
My dad looks like Clint Eastwood. His half-Scottish, half-German face in repose is handsome but terrifying. I searched the audience for him during the sixth-grade chorus concert and, seeing his stern expression, was convinced that he had seen me messing up the words to the Happy Days theme and that I was in big trouble. I spent the rest of the concert suppressing terror burps, only to be given a big hug and a kiss afterward. It took me years to realize, Oh, that’s just his face.
It’s my face, too, it turns out. The cheekbones later discovered there by a team of gay excavators are courtesy of my dad.
Don Fey dresses well. He has an artist’s eye for mixing colors and prints. He wears tweedy jackets over sweater vests in the winter and seersucker suits in the summer. His garnet college ring shows off his well-groomed hands. He can still rock a hat.
My dad looks like he’s “somebody.” One day when I was visiting him on his lunch hour he ran into a couple of old high school buddies in downtown Philadelphia. “Hey, Don Fey!” one of the guys
called from across the street. “Oh my God, Don Fey,” the other guy said excitedly. The two African American secretaries waiting at the light with my dad whispered knowingly to each other, “That’s Don Fey.”
Before I was born, my mother took my brother to Greece for the whole summer to visit family.
When they were finally coming back, my dad washed and waxed his Chevy convertible, put on his best sharkskin suit, and drove all the way from Philadelphia to New York International Airport to pick them up. (In those days, international travel meant dressing up, smoking on planes, wearing Pan Am slippers, and flying into New York.)
Their flight was due to arrive early in the morning, so Don Fey, who is never late for anything, got to the airport just before dawn. As he popped on his sweet lid and walked across the deserted parking lot toward the terminal, he saw two black gentlemen approaching from far away. He played it cool to hide his apprehension. He was in New York, after all, one of the world’s most dangerous cities if you’re f
rom any other city, and from far away in the dark he couldn’t tell if the guys were airport employees or loiterers.
As they got closer, he noticed they were staring him down. He continued to play it cool. Don Fey had grown up in West Philly, where he lived comfortably as a Caucasian minority. Of course these guys couldn’t know that. His heart was beating a little faster as they came within ten feet of each other.
The guys looked at him intently, then one turned to the other and said, “That is one boss, bold, bladed motherfucker.”
That’s Don Fey. He’s just a badass. He was a code breaker in Korea. He was a fireman in Philadelphia. He’s a skilled watercolorist. He’s written two mystery novels. He taught himself Greek so well that when he went to buy tickets to the Acropolis once, the docent told him, “
.” (It’s free for Greek citizens.)
Neighborhood kids would gather on our porch just to listen to him swear at the Phillies game.
(Andy Musser talked too goddamn much. Games were often “over” by the sixth inning. “This goddamn game is over. The sons of bitches choked.”)
When watching the Flyers, he would change the channel during commercials and he always knew exactly when to turn it back to catch the start of play. When my cousin marveled at this ability, my dad was matter-of-fact: “You just wait ninety seconds.” Isn’t everyone’s brain a Swiss watch?
Don Fey is a Goldwater Republican, which is his only option. If you’re Don Fey, you can’t look at Joe Biden and be like, yes, I want to be led by this gentleman with the capped teeth. You’re not going to listen to John Kerry pretending to empathize with you about the rising cost of your medications. You certainly aren’t interested in the “unresolved father issues” that rendered Bill Clinton unable to keep his fly closed. Don Fey is not going to put up with that. Don Fey is a grown-ass man! Black people find him stylish!
Don Fey has what I would describe as pre–Norman Lear racial attitudes. Once the Bunker family met the Jeffersons, every interaction between blacks and whites was somehow supposed to be a life-changing lesson, especially for the white people. My generation carries that with us, only to be constantly disappointed by Kanye West and Taylor Swift.
The twin house I grew up in was across the street from the border of West Philadelphia where Don Fey grew up. Don Fey certainly had friends of other races and religions. He has told me a couple times about the night he kissed Lionel Hampton. He was at a jazz concert as a teenager with an all-white audience. At one point in the show, Lionel Hampton would invite a woman from the audience to dance with him, but the white girls were all too scared to be seen dancing with a black man. To ease the tension, Don Fey jumped up and fast-danced with Mr. Hampton, at the end of which Lionel Hampton kissed him on the forehead to a round of applause.
Conversely, he would tell us things like “If you see two black kids riding around on one bike, put your bike in the garage.” This wasn’t racism; it was experience. Those kids were coming from West Philly to steal bikes. The social factors that caused their behavior were irrelevant to a Depression baby. When you grow up getting an orange for Christmas, you’re going to make sure the twenty-five-dollar bike you bought your kid doesn’t get ripped off.
Norman Lear might want us to take time to understand that those kids went to poorly funded schools and that their parents, while loving and dignified, were unable to supervise their children’s behavior because they were both at work doing minimum-wage jobs, but by then our bikes would be gone.
The late seventies were a dark time of “family meetings” about “tightening our belts.” The embarrassment of Watergate led right to the Iran hostage crisis. Three Mile Island was in our state. It was always “Day 27” of something in Beirut. There was an infestation of gypsy moths killing the trees in our neighborhood.
I can definitely remember a period of time when the gas crisis, the Carter administration, and
“Alan Alda’s bleeding-heart liberal propaganda” were starting to wear on Don Fey’s day-to-day dignity.
One Saturday my dad got it in his head that he was going to rent a rug shampooer at Pathmark and shampoo our carpets. He expressed this desire to my mother, who said nonchalantly, “Ugh, those things never work.” We still had a half-empty bottle of rug shampoo from the one other time he’d tried it. But Don Fey could not be deterred, and I, his faithful servant, went with him. We rented the shampooer, bought a new full bottle of soap, and loaded them into the back of the Catalina.
When we got home I was sent to play outside so my dad could shampoo the whole first floor. I barely had my Star Wars figures lined up in the patch of dirt by the basement steps also known as Tatooine when I heard a commotion inside. My dad was cursing. Objects were being rumbled around. I got an instant bellyache.
The screen door flew open. The two bottles of rug shampoo were slammed onto the back porch.
The rug shampooer came tumbling out the back door in a tangled mess.
“Your mother… is a witch!” my dad blurted as he came outside. He meant it literally. “She cursed me!” It would seem that the rented rug shampooer did not work. “The goddamn thing is defective.”
“Defective” was a big word in our house. Many things were labeled “defective” only to miraculously turn functional once the directions had been read more thoroughly. If I had to name the two words I most associate with my dad between 1970 and 1990, they would be “defective” and
“inexcusable.” Leaving your baseball glove in a neighbor’s car? Inexcusable. Not knowing that “a lot”
was two words? Inexcusable. The seltzer machine that we were going to use to make homemade soda?
Defective. The misspelled sign at the Beach Boys Fourth of July concert that read “From Sea to Shinning Sea”? Inexcusable. Richie Ashburn not being in the baseball hall of fame yet? Bullshit. (Don Fey had a large rubber stamp that said “bullshit,” which was and is awesome.) Was it too much to expect the rest of the world to care about grammar or pay attention to details? Shouldn’t someone at the Pathmark have to make sure that the goddamn rug shampooers are in working order?
He carried the defective shampooer down the back steps, the hose flopping around on purpose just to annoy him. There was sudsy water inside it, sloshing around, mocking his dream of an orderly house. “Son of a bitch!” As he backed our giant car up the fifty-degree incline of our driveway, scraping the bumper, he barked, “Get the bottle of soap. Come on.” I was going along for the ride back to Pathmark? Great. I looked at the two identical bottles of rug detergent on the back porch. One was new and returnable. One was six months old and half empty. But which was which? I couldn’t tell! They were opaque. I knew that word because I was in the Gifted Program, but it didn’t help me in that split second.
Why didn’t I pick them both up to see which one was heavier? Why didn’t I just bring both of them? I would never be placed in the Common Sense Program. My dad honked the horn for me to hurry up. I grabbed a bottle and dashed for the car.
We rode in tense silence to the Pathmark. And, by the way, I get it now. I’m a working parent and I understand that sometimes you want to have a very productive Saturday to feel that you are in control of your life, which of course you are not. Children and Jimmy Carter ruin all your best-laid plans.
And then your wife casts some sort of evil spell?! Inexcusable.
I followed my dad as he stormed into the Pathmark to explain to them what kind of a country America was supposed to be. He took the bottle from me to put it on the customer service counter, and his face went red at the weight of it. I had grabbed the half-empty one.
And here was the indignity of the 1979 economy—we couldn’t afford to waste the three dollars.
Sure, once the Internet boom came in the nineties we’d all be throwing out half-full mouthwash because we wanted to try the new cinnamint flavor. We’d buy chamomile tea at Starbucks and not finish it. But not Don Fey. Not in 1979. He was going to have to drive home again and get that other bottle to return it. “W
ait here,” he said in a strangled voice.
He left me at the end of the No Frills aisle. I stood there, fighting back tears, pretty sure that it was illegal to leave your nine year old at Pathmark. Unfortunately, I was wearing a red polo shirt and shorts. With my short haircut and doughy frame, no fewer than three old ladies mistook me for a stock boy. “Young man, where are the plums?”
I only hope that one day I can frighten my daughter this much. Right now, she’s not scared of my husband or me at all. I think it’s a problem. I was a freshman home from college the first time my dad said, “You’re going out at ten P.M.? I don’t think so,” and I just laughed and said, “It’s fine.” I feel like my daughter will be doing that to me by age six.
How can I give her what Don Fey gave me? The gift of anxiety. The fear of getting in trouble. The knowledge that while you are loved, you are not above the law. The Worldwide Parental Anxiety System is failing if this many of us have made sex tapes.
When I was a kid there was a TV interstitial during Saturday morning cartoons with a song that went like this: “The most important person in the whole wide world is you, and you hardly even know you. / You’re the most important person!” Is this not the absolute worst thing you could instill in a child?