by Mamrie Hart
“What if the pilot got the news wrong?” I said, with a glimmer of hope in my leaking eyes. “I mean, what if someone told him that as a joke and he took it seriously? Captains are known for kooky high jinks, right, guys?!” Ahh, there it was. The first stage of grief: Denial.
The three of us held hands as the plane started to land, which was the first time I had ever wanted a plane’s wheels to hit the tarmac and take right back off again. Because once we landed, we were going to be reconnected with the world and have the nightmare confirmed.
We got off the plane as quickly as we could. Mainly because there was one old lady in our section who clapped during the Trump announcement and I didn’t want to be responsible for accidentally pushing my carry-on near her and breaking the old broad’s hip. How quickly I had moved on to stage 2: Anger.
I stormed through the terminal and out of the adult Disneyland that is Duty Free. My anger was bubbling inside me so furiously that I didn’t even smile at the double cartons of Marlboros that they arranged to look like one giant box of cigarettes, normally an ace in the hole to make me cheer up. It took all I had not to just grab a three-foot-long Toblerone and go all Beyoncé in the “Hold Up” video to work out some anger. But there was no time. I had to get checked into the hotel and shellac my face before heading to my panel. The thought of sitting and talking about something as trivial as “The Legacy of Social Media” was unfathomable to me.
I took this photo as soon as I caught my breath from bawling; in case you wanted to see what a woman looks like after zero sleep, one emotional sucker punch to the gut, and two bottles of wine. It was a low.
After we checked into our rooms, I took the world’s fastest shower and hopped into an Uber to head straight to my panel. The driver had the radio playing, and I understood nothing except the word “Trump” being said every thirty seconds. It was driving me crazy not to know every little detail. But I blocked it out and took the twenty-minute ride to scribble down some questions in my little notebook. Sure, they were the same generic drivel you’d hear at any other panel, but I was planning on putting my own unique flair on them.*
“I cannot go any closer; I have to drop you off here,” the driver said as we approached the bustling convention center. I hopped out of the car, immediately regretting wearing new shoes. Ten yards of walking and I could tell the sides of my ankle boots were scraping against my skin. Twenty yards and I already needed a Band-Aid. After checking into the center, I was guided to the room I would be speaking in by an adorable Portuguese man, Alberte, who looked all of eighteen years and was four-foot-nothing.
“This convention is a lot bigger than I thought it would be,” I said, out of breath and hobbling a few feet behind.
“Yes, it’s the biggest of its kind in Europe,” he called back, bobbing and weaving between patrons in lanyards and barkers trying to get you over to their booth. I swear to God, at one point I ducked down to not be hit in the face with a drone. Three inches closer and it would’ve given me one hell of a mullet. Alberte cleared it by a foot.
We finally burst through doors to the outside only to reenter into a another massive expo hall . . . then another . . . and another . . . until Alberte flashed his badge to a giant security dude and dropped me off in a green room. Just in time, too, because I’m pretty sure at any moment my cute new tan Steve Maddens were going to be soaked crimson from blood.
“There’s food, drinks, whatever you need. When you’re twenty minutes out from your panel, someone will come brief you. And if there’s nothing else you need, I’ll be going. Enjoy Lisbon!”
“Wait, Alberte! Do you know how big the room I’m speaking to is? Like, how many people will be in there?”
He cleared his throat. “Ah, yes, of course. The room is a thousand,” he said. A thousand?! I didn’t have the brain capacity to sound eloquent in front of a room of quadruple digits. Surely I had misheard.
“For a second there, I thought you said a thousand.”
“Oh no,” he said, as I started to maniacally laugh.
“Good, because my brain is way too crazy right now to get up in front of that many—”
“I said, fifteen thousand.”
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
That space represents my blacking out for the next few minutes. I only came to with the use of smelling salts. Aka beelining it to the food and stuffing my face with anxiety fries.
No, no, no, no. This can’t be happening, I thought to myself. I had done a million of these panels, and the largest room I had ever seen was six hundred. FIFTEEN THOUSAND PEOPLE?! That was like a goddamn AC/DC arena show! I surveyed the room as I continued putting fries in my mouth like they’d just announced a potato famine and these were the last ones I was going to see for a while. The stage was massive, and the screens for close-ups were even bigger. I imagined my jet-lagged, puffy eyes from crying all morning projected thirty feet wide and shuddered at the thought.
When my debriefer came to meet me, I was already catapulting face-first into stage 3: Bargaining. “I just had no idea the room was going to be this big and I’m totally ill-prepared and obviously this is a traumatic morning to be an American and—” I kept rattling off reasons to try to get out of it to the nodding, patient woman who was leading me onstage. Could I bail? No. They flew me out here. Hell, they flew three of us out here. There was no way out. I had to pull myself up by my bloody bootstraps, block out the football arena worth of onlookers and the impending crumbling of America as a whole, and talk about the importance of Instagram, goddamnit! My name was announced, and I walked out onto the stage. Let me tell you guys, the only thing stranger than being cast out in front of an amphitheater full of people is being cast out in front of an amphitheater of silent people. There might have been thousands of bodies in that room, but you could’ve heard a mouse whisper a secret.
I pulled out my tiny notebook, saw my swollen face on the monitor, attempted a Trump joke to the silent faces of the audience, and dove in. Guys, I am not exaggerating when I say that I don’t remember one goddamn thing that happened for the next hour. I vaguely recall nodding and smiling while the two guys talked, all while I was having my own internal conversation that was a mix of fighting off a panic attack and internally screaming. Like, I could hear what they were saying, but I was having a completely different experience in my head.
By some grace of a God I don’t believe in, I looked down, and the countdown clock onstage to let us know how much time we had left was down to thirty seconds. I thanked the two vloggers for joining me, signed off to the up-snore-ious crowd, and hightailed it off the stage.
I was so relieved that I think the corners of my dehydrated fry mouth even upturned into a smile. “See, that wasn’t that bad,” the debriefer said as she led me back the green room. I had a fleeting moment where things were looking up—that is, until I looked up and saw a group of folks gathered around one of the monitors backstage.
I grabbed a white wine from the bar and edged my way closer to the screen. There she was. It was Hillary conceding. Enter Stage 4: Depression. I practically chugged my Vinho Verde as Hillary finished her eloquent and inspiring speech, making sure that little girls everywhere never gave up on their dreams. After the speech ended, I couldn’t watch the commentary anymore; the depression was too real. I needed to get the hell out of this massive clusterfuck, get to my girls, and finally have that delicious dinner. It was as if I had been digging a tunnel with a spoon à la Shawshank Redemption and that delicious dinner was the light at the end. I was going to finally get to it and use that spoon to dig into something delicious.
“Fifteen thousand people?!” Joselyn shouted at me as I joined them at a cute table on a classic Lisbon tiled sidewalk.
“Yep, and my fifteen-minute Uber took an hour and fifteen minutes to get there, so it pr
obably cost nine hundred dollars. Will you order me a double gin and tonic? I’m about to piss myself.” I headed to the bathroom, clunking along in the still-very-painful Steve Maddens. After taking a piss longer than Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, I attempted to leave the sliding-door bathroom and realized . . . I was stuck. I tried again. The door was still not moving. Of course. I banged on the door again and again, but no one could hear me in the bustling restaurant. I sat on the toilet, defeated. Tears started to well up in my eyes. All the previous stages of grief were taking a bonus lap through my body.
The Denial: This can’t be happening. I can’t be stuck in this bathroom.
The Anger: Why the fuck can I not catch a break today?!
The Bargaining: Please just let me out and I’ll never go to the bathroom again! Just let me have a drink!!
The Depression: Well, I live here now. This is my new home, this tiny bathroom in the back of a bar in Lisbon.
But rather than accept it, I grabbed on to the anger and beat on the door and screamed my head off until, eventually, someone heard me. Three big waiters had to use all their might to let me out.
I drank a record two double gin and tonics and a glass of red in under thirty minutes, and then we took off to walk the small, cobblestoned streets of the Bairro Alto neighborhood to find a spot to eat. Since leaving LA, I had only eaten that tiny plate of patatas bravas at JFK and the anxiety fries at the convention center. My body was begging for something that wasn’t a tater.
Eventually, we strolled up to a crowded alfresco place that looked appealing. Scanning the menu, I saw the three greatest words a girl can read. Nope, not “I love you” . . . I’m talking: “vegan vegetable sausage.” It was as if choirs of angels were singing from the heavens. Here we were in meat-central Lisbon, and we finally found a place where my dinner could be something other than carbs. Maybe my day was turning around.
We went hard on the wine and kept attempting to talk about anything but the election, but we always circled back to it. Even on this beautiful old street, with a bottle of delicious red, surrounded by friends . . . we couldn’t shake it off for a second. But my despair turned to hope as soon as that veggie brat hit the table. I was sleep deprived, and hungry, and mildly drunk, and ready to take it to the face.
“Fuck a knife and fork,” I said. I picked up that sucker and bit right into it . . . or at least I tried. Turns out that Lisbon’s idea of a veggie sausage was stuffing some ground-up vegetables into industrial-strength plastic. It was like trying to bite into a sleeve of saltines with the wrapper still on. My dreams of a delicious dinner clearly were dashed.
“I cannot believe this shitty wiener. What a disappointing, full of shit, piece of plastic wiener,” I said, the weight of the past thirty-six hours coming to a head.
“You talking about your meal . . . or our new president? Hey-yo!” Joselyn said, nudging me and refilling my wine. And I finally laughed, the first time since before we boarded in LA. There it was . . . Stage 5: Acceptance.
The acceptance wasn’t about the election results in any way, shape, or form, or being okay with what was happening back in the States. I don’t mean that type of acceptance. But accepting that this was my reality: that I had gone from the hope of Hillary to the reality of Donald Trump in one plane flight, that I spoke to a room of fifteen thousand people but somehow didn’t recall a single moment of it, that I got stuck in a bathroom for twenty minutes, and now I was eating this sorry excuse for a vegan meal. But I wasn’t going to let it ruin this trip. So I asked for a sharper knife and dug right into that heavy-duty condom filled with vegetables. And wouldn’t you know it, it tasted . . . terrible.
Fact is, it was a bad wiener. But twenty-four hours later, I would be in the presence of a different wiener. No, I didn’t hook up with anyone in Italy. I mean the most famous of wieners: Michelangelo’s David. I stood in front of that masterpiece, dwarfed by its wonder, in awe of its beauty. And then I positioned myself so it looked like I was cupping his junk for an Instagram post.
I didn’t know if this shit show was going to be for the next four years, or four months, or the world was changing and it would be forever. . . . But I know that in that moment I was happy with my friends. And I, we, everybody needs to take those little moments when they come and not let them be tainted by the greater problems. Fact is, sometimes you’re served a shitty wiener, but the only thing you can do is grab life by the balls, or David’s, and try to laugh your way through it.
The Irish Hello
IF YOU DON’T know who Grace Helbig is, then I am assuming that you haven’t logged on to the Internet since it was dial-up. Grace has been a major Web presence since 2008—she’s an OG YouTuber, a Godfather of Jump Cuts, a proverbial Pilgrim of Putting Shit on the Web. She’s also one of my closest friends.
“HOW CLOSE?” screams the audience reading this book.
So close we recently bought a vacation home together in Palm Springs and the cops came on the first night.*
Grace and I met at the Peoples Improv Theater in New York City in 2007. She was already performing on an improv team, but I had taken only one class there when we were put together on a house sketch team. On the night of our first show, I was nervous! But that all went away the second we got onstage, pretending to be a duo of party starters named Mitz and Fitz in our first sketch. I knew that if I went up on a line, it didn’t matter because Grace could just think of something hilarious off the top of her head to get the laugh. She had my back, I had hers, and it’s been like that onstage ever since.
I cannot tell you how many tours Grace and I have done together in the past decade. Along with Hannah Hart, we’ve performed our No Filter Show everywhere from basement rock clubs in Boston to gorgeous old theaters in Melbourne, Australia; and Grace and I have taken our two-person show, This Might Get Weird, Y’all, throughout the United States. I’ve watched her sing ballads about the French bulldogs she follows on Instagram and do interpretive dances about getting a toilet clogged at a party, but Grace’s most impressive performance is always offstage, in her seamless, utterly perfect execution of an Irish good-bye.
Okay, so we all know what the Irish good-bye is, right? If you don’t, congrats on being a person who has actual manners when leaving a social function. An Irish good-bye is when, instead of going around the room announcing that you are leaving a party or gathering, you just dip the fuck out without telling a soul.
Irish good-byes are great for getting out of the whole rigmarole of endlessly repeating “we have to get together soon” and hugging random people you had ten-second conversations with in line for the bathroom. They also come in handy when someone shows up that you want to avoid, or when you realize you are definitely the drunkest person at the party and you need to excuse yourself before you end up in unflattering Snapchats.
Now why is it called an Irish good-bye? No clue. I tried to officially research it and found no real results. In my experience, Irish people aren’t particularly known to leave in that manner. In fact, I used to frequent the hell out of a true Irish bar in Brooklyn called the Irish Haven. The owner was a cop, and after last call at four A.M., they would just lock the doors and continue drinking. There weren’t Irish good-byes at this bar. There weren’t good-byes, period, because no one ever left.
Grace has elevated this curtain call to new heights. You can be having a deep convo with her, turn around for one second to get another mini quiche and BLAM. Bitch is gone by the time you turn around. I’m genuinely surprised she hasn’t added elements like smoke bombs or lasers to jazz up her exits. But her illustrious career of Irish good-byes doesn’t have shit on the one time we got Irish hello’d.
Picture this. It’s November 2016. I had been back in the States after blocking out the election results for a week. As soon as my feet hit American soil from my Italian adventure, I was waist-deep in the depression of it all. I was watching the news nonstop, like that scene in A
Clockwork Orange where the guy’s eyes are strapped open and he’s forced to watch all those terrible images, except I was the one forcing my eyes open so as to not miss anything. It got to the point where I started waking up in the middle of the night and refreshing CNN on my phone. Simply put, I couldn’t handle it. Nothing felt funny. So, my antidote for not being able to laugh was to hopefully make someone else laugh. I needed to get onstage and ideally put another stamp in my passport.
Luckily, Grace felt the same way. “We can name the show Adopt Us! And frame the whole thing like we are trying to get adopted by our audience so we don’t have to come back to America!” Grace said as I told her over one of our midday vodka-soda catch-ups in my kitchen. “I’ll call the boys,” I said, meaning our joint managers we’ve had since Grace and I were whippersnappers in Brooklyn.
You could hear the hesitation in their voices when we told them the plan over speakerphone. It was as if we were their two teen daughters who had just turned eighteen. They knew we were going to do whatever we wanted, so they might as well grin through gritted teeth and say, “Sounds like a plan!” Within the week we had two shows booked, one on Thanksgiving Day in London and the other two days later in Dublin. It was ON.
It’s also worth mentioning that this was the first time in our nine-year friendship that Grace and I were both single. And let me tell you, there’s a whole new layer of friendship that is formed when neither of you is constantly texting with a boyfriend. You know that YouTube video of the two babies who are just laughing like hyenas in their diapers, trying to get to the bathroom but continuing to fall? That was us, but in our early thirties. Our managers had reason to be worried. But hell, they both had kids in private school and this was bizzznass, so they booked the shows. A few weeks of being glued to MSNBC later, and it was time to go.