by Marc Acito
This exchange warrants more applause. “Happy birthday!” the leader shouts.
“Happy birthday!” shouts the crowd, followed by an even bigger ovation. I swear, I haven’t seen this much unwarranted appreciation since the high school musical.
The leader quiets us again.
“Today is your birthday, the day you begin a new life. The day you become who you are truly meant to be.” He closes his eyes. “Let us begin.”
He leads us through a guided meditation in which we are to envision laying an egg. That’s right, an egg. Large enough to accommodate a human baby. He’s a little hazy on the anatomical details, telling us only that “it emanates from your kundalini,” wherever that is. All around me people grunt and puff, Lamaze-style, but I can’t get past the idea that I’m supposed to be shitting an oversize egg. I can see why Willow asked me if I needed to go to the bathroom. With all the pushing, now I really need to pee.
Still, I manage to pass my egg, which apparently contains my inner child, who must peck, peck, peck his way out until he finally gets fed up and punches a hole in his shell with a tiny, inner-child-sized fist.
“That is why you’re here,” the leader says, “to break out of your shells. Most of us go through life protected, held captive in prisons of our own making. Not us. Not here. Not now.” He pauses, as if he’s about to say something profound, or perhaps shit another egg. “Not. Ever.”
More rhythmic applause. My palms look like smoked salmon.
We’re then instructed to wander the room, letting everyone else see us for who we truly are, our “unshelled selves.” (Try saying that ten times fast.) “And when you see someone, truly see them,” the leader says. “Stop and tell them.” He demonstrates with an assistant, bearing down on her with a spotlight stare until he finally says, “I see you.”
Seems simple enough.
I stroll around the room, making eye contact with people, but they just glaze past as if I weren’t there. Finally a man stops in front of me, a cadaverous executive with gray hair and a gray face to match.
“I see you,” I say.
He stares into my eyes, like he’s looking for something he lost in there, then just shakes his head and skulks off.
I turn and there’s a leathery woman with skin like a topography map. Even her tan has a tan.
“I see you,” I say.
She breezes right past me. “Sorry.”
I begin to sweat. I’m trying too hard. I’m not capable of revealing myself, of making myself vulnerable. Once again I’m Morales in A Chorus Line, feeling nothing. Except the feeling that this bullshit is absurd.
I approach a tiny woman, no more than five feet tall, slender, but with hips like parentheses. Before I can say anything, she grabs me by the elbows.
“Can you see me?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
I take a moment to look at her. She wears the short, layered haircut of someone with neither the time nor the inclination to bother, a pair of round tortoiseshell glasses, and the kind of worried expression you see on child actors when they say, “Please, mister, don’t hurt my dog.” Her eyes have gray circles under them, like she’s been up since 1972, and her mouth is surrounded with those hairline fractures that smokers get.
“I see you,” I say.
“Oh, thank Gawd,” she squawks with the distinctive nasal whine of the outer boroughs. “I was beginning to lose it.”
“Can you see me?”
“Of course,” she says. “You’re right in fronta me.” She puts out her hand. “I’m Sandra Pecorino,” she says. “Like the nutty, flavorful cheese.”
“Edward Zanni.”
“No talking!” says one of the Growth Facilitators.
Sandra grabs me by the hands. “Don’t leave me,” she whispers. “I can’t take any more rejection.”
We stand there awkwardly, a pair of thirteen-year-olds at their first slow dance. Finally Sandra whispers, “I came here to work on my relationship issues. And because I thought there might be men who are triple-S.”
“Triple-S?”
“Sensitive, single, and straight.” She rolls her owl eyes at me. “Two outta three ain’t bad.”
Yikes. Does it show? I feel like gay bits of me are just slipping out every which way. I’m about to tell her that women are my second-favorite people to have sex with, that I’m not so much gay as gayish—Almost Gay—when she says:
“I don’t know what it is, Edwid. I’m a magnet for the gays. Like Barbra Streisand or Bette Midlah. Lemme guess. You’re an actor, too.”
“How’d you know?”
“Also a magnet. Hence my relationship issues.”
A gong sounds and once again we clap rhythmically. Then we’re informed that we’re to separate into two groups—those who have already done EGG’s three-day introductory course and those of us who have not. Willow takes her place with the Haves, while Sandra and I remain with the Have-nots, which are then split into smaller “Hatcheries.” As I follow Sandra into a meeting room, I ask one of the Growth Facilitators where the bathroom is.
“After,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“You can go after.”
“But—”
“Don’t say ‘but.’”
“Why?”
“It’s like your body. The only thing that comes from a but is shit.”
And an egg, I suppose, but I don’t want to argue. Instead I sit down, crossing my legs to keep from wetting myself. The chairs are arranged in pairs so that each one of us gets our own personal Growth Facilitator; mine is a guy with the wide-eyed look of someone who uses coffee-bean suppositories. His name tag reads Bruce. Or Bryce. I can’t tell.
“Why are you here?” he asks, his eyes like headlights.
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t say, ‘I don’t know.’ You do know. That’s an excuse you use to avoid taking responsibility for your shit.”
I’m a little miffed at his presumption. This guy doesn’t know me. Still, he’s got a point. So I tell him what’s been going on, how I need to figure out who I am, how I’m afraid to feel. And he listens, which I enjoy, even though it freaks me out a little that he doesn’t blink.
“You have to do this course, Edward,” he says.
“I’d like to, but—”
“Don’t say ‘but….’”
“…I don’t have the money.”
“Bullshit! You don’t have any money?”
“I mean, I don’t have enough money.”
“You don’t even know how much it costs.”
“How much does it cost?”
“Three hundred dollars.”
“I don’t have that kind of money.”
“You know what your problem is, Edward? You’re limited by your scarcity consciousness.”
At this moment a woman in the corner bursts into tears, thrusting her arms around her Growth Facilitator.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” she cries.
“See?” Bruce/Bryce says. “If she can do it, why can’t you?”
“I don’t even know who she is.”
“No, you don’t know who you are. Aren’t you tired of being unhappy?”
“I’m not unhappy.”
“Liar! You just told me you’re a miserable, unfeeling loser. Why do you lie so much?”
“I don’t—”
“Why are you a big fucking liar?”
From the ballroom next door I hear a chorus of people sing “Happy Birthday.”
“I just want to—”
“Don’t say ‘just.’”
“I’m trying to—”
“Don’t say ‘try.’”
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
“NO!” he shouts.
“But—”
“Don’t say—”
He’s interrupted by a voice that sounds like a duck getting a root canal. “STOP!”
I turn around as Sandra stalks across the room. “I swear to Ga
wd,” she says, pointing a chipped fingernail in my facilitator’s face, “if you say ‘don’t say but’ to this poor kid one more time, I will reach down your throat and rip out your lungs.”
Bruce/Bryce finally blinks.
Sandra and I sit on stools at someplace called Frozert, eating fat-free, sugar-free, taste-free frozen yogurts. Chemicals in a cup. She laughs, a sound like an upper respiratory infection. “They really said you were too ‘jazz hands’ for Juilliard?”
“Yeah. I guess deep down I’m very superficial.” Over the sound system, Cyndi Lauper sees my true colors shining through.
“Nah, you’re just like me,” Sandra says, gesturing with a plastic spoon. “You’re too nice.” (This from the woman who threatened to remove a vital organ.) “You’re a people pleazah, that’s what you are, a people pleazah. Am I right or am I right?”
I scrape the remaining frozen caulk out of my cup. “I guess so. I can’t really relax until everyone else is happy.”
“See, I knew it!” she says. “Edwid, today is your lucky day!”
Eight
The following weekend I venture out to Sandra’s studio on “Lawn Guyland” to begin my training as a party motivator.
According to Sandra, having a guy in a shiny shirt and tight pants encourage a roomful of thirteen-year-olds to dance is the latest thing at bar and bat mitzvahs so lavish she calls them “bash mitzvahs.” La Vie de la Fête Productions currently employs four male motivators: two older guys around twenty-five who also emcee and two younger ones who just dance. Sandra used to have one other, but he did a sweet sixteen where he did the sweet-sixteen-year-old, and now he’s doing sixteen months on Rikers Island.
Luckily, you don’t have to be a dancer-dancer. “Your job is to boogie with regulah people,” Sandra says. “Ya’ need to be a little sloppy.” In which case I’m eminently qualified.
Still, I learn how to do the Robot and the Moonwalk from Rex, her star motivator, a fledgling entertainment journalist who combines an effortless cool with the kind of canine conviviality that makes you want to be his best friend. Sandra says Rex strikes the perfect “bash mitzvah balance”: He’s hip enough that the boys want to be him, sexy enough that the girls want to do him, and professional enough that the parents want to pay him. At a hundred bucks a party, I definitely want to be him.
The rest of August passes with Xerox monotony, each day a photocopy of the one before as I wait until my first gig. The only thing I’m learning working for the Agent of Evil is that bitterness is a contagious disease, a virus spread by aural contact. I try to remain immune by embracing my alter ago, telling myself that it’s not Edward Zanni who has to deliver a cup of Irving’s pee to his urologist on a sweltering subway; it’s Alan, Lucifer’s piss boy.
It doesn’t work.
Even more dispiriting are the entreaties I get from former Juilliard students. Now that they’re enrolled in the School of Hard Knocks, they’ve apparently confused me with someone with clout. Graduates I’ve never met contact me like we’re long-lost friends, which is just embarrassing. The only one I don’t hear from is Marcus, because it turns out Irving was the ray of happy sunshine who made the crack about him looking like a sea sponge.
Meanwhile, Kelly breezes in and out on her days off after auditions. I can see why—you could easily picture her as a girl with slow-motion hair in a shampoo commercial, or as a doomed prom queen in a slasher flick. She even got an audition for Starlight Express, the latest assault on theater from Andrew Lloyd Webber, in which actors on roller skates portray trains. It’s a big hit in London, which Natie says just proves how the birthplace of Shakespeare has deteriorated since Margaret Thatcher took over.
The nadir, however, comes on one of those brutally hot New York days, the kind that cause neighbors to kill each other in Bensonhurst. The intercom on my phone beeps, and the receptionist tells me there’s a Ted Lucas out in the waiting room to see me.
Ted Lucas? I think as I step out of my office. Surely it can’t be…
Mr. Lucas.
My high school drama teacher releases one hand from the crutches that circle his wrists, deftly sliding it up his forearm so he can shake my hand. “Edwaaaard,” he says in a voice too theatrically sonorous for the space.
“It’s great to see you,” I say in a tone that unfortunately conveys the subtext of What the hell are you doing here? Hoping to make up for it, I add a chipper, “Come in my office.”
“Your office?” he says, raising his eyebrows. “My, my, my.” Mr. Lucas gives a Victorian tilt of his head to our receptionist. “Nice to meet you, Valli.”
I offer him some water, which he declines, though he looks like he could use it, his pale linen suit wilting around him as he sits. He unstraps the leather carrying bag we gave to him on the opening night of Godspell.
“You have a view,” he says. “Very impressive.” He strokes his beard, a gesture that used to intimidate me, but now seems like a nervous tic.
“I have to be next to Irving’s office,” I explain. “It makes me look more important than I really am.”
Through the wall I can hear my boss screaming at the Bucks County Playhouse about the color of Ann Miller’s dressing room.
“I hope you don’t mind me barging in like this,” Mr. Lucas says. “I chanced upon Fran Nudelman recently and she told me what you were up to, so I thought I’d stop in and see for myself.”
“I’m just taking a year off,” I say. “I’m definitely going back.”
Subtext: Please don’t think I’m a loser.
“Eggzelent,” he says. “A Wanderjahr will do you good. Give you a little seasoning.”
“Exactly.” It’s possible he’s just being kind, but I’ll take it.
“I’m making some changes myself,” he says.
“Really?”
“As you know, I haven’t acted in some time”—he makes a vague gesture at his legs—“but I’ve been encouraged by some colleagues to pursue voice-over work.”
He pronounces the last words slowly, as if they were foreign.
“Great,” I say. “You’d be terrific at that.”
“I’m glad you think so, Edward. Perhaps you won’t think it too presumptuous, then, if I ask you to pass along my demo tape to Mr. Fish.”
I get an itchy feeling across my back, like I’ve just gotten my hair cut. I mean, I’m a nobody. A failure. A dud. Anyone coming to me for help has got to be, well, less than that. And I don’t want Mr. Lucas to be less than anything.
“Happy to,” I say.
He reaches in his bag and hands me a cassette, as well as a head shot and a résumé.
“I know it isn’t necessary,” he says. “But you never know.”
I look at the picture. Judging from the mustache and the open shirt, it’s at least ten years old.
The intercom blares. “Alan,” Irving bleats. “My office.”
Mr. Lucas raises an eyebrow. “Alan?”
“Long story. Listen, I’ve got to go.”
“Of course,” Mr. Lucas says. “Well, it’s been—”
The intercom blares again. “Today.”
“Sorry,” I say, rushing out as he struggles to his feet. “Sorry.”
I round the corner into Irving’s office.
“What are you doing in there?” Irving snaps. “Carving the Rosetta stone?”
“Sorry, I—”
“What’s that in your hand?”
I glance down and see that I’m holding Mr. Lucas’s résumé and tape.
“Oh, this is, uh, a voice-over actor I thought you might be interested in,” I say, handing him the résumé. “As you can see, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and worked in a number of regional houses…”
Irving scans Mr. Lucas’s credits, then flips over the page to look at the head shot.
“…then he had a spinal cord injury and now he’s kind of, y’know, disabled…”
Irving picks up a Sharpie marker.
“…but he�
��s got this terrific voice. Really, uh, stentorian…”
My own voice trails off as Irving doodles a goatee and devil horns on Mr. Lucas’s face. Taking a moment to admire his handiwork, he crumples it up and tosses it in the trash can, along with any illusions I had about show business.
“Anything else?” he says.
Two words: I. Quit.
C’mon, Edward, say it.
Say it.
“No,” I say, “nothing else.”
The morning of my first La Vie de la Fête gig, I’m awoken by the phone. I squint at the digital clock, which appears to say LOSE, but, upon closer inspection, actually reads 10:58, Edward Standard Time, which means it’s…Oh, fuck, who can do math this early? I fumble for the phone while Natie makes sleepy piggy sounds in the futon below.
“Hlllluh?” I mutter.
“WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON?”
Since moving in with Natie, I’m used to people shouting on the phone. Just hearing Fran Nudelman say, “Hello,” is like removing ear wax with an electric drill. But this shouter is different. This shouter is pissed.
This shouter is my father.
“Uh, so solly,” I say. “This Kolean deli. You have long number.”
“Cut the crap, kid, I know it’s you. Why haven’t you answered my calls? I’ve left you a bunch of messages.”
“Really?” I can just picture Al, pacing the floor with gorilla menace while he jingles his pocket change. “Uh…Natie must’ve forgotten to give them to me.”
From below Natie mutters, “Sure, blame it on the Jew.”
“So,” Al says, “the reason I’m callin’…”
“That’s how it started in Germany, y’know.”
“Shut up!”
“Whah?”
“Not you, Pop. What did you say?”
“I sent your tuition check to Juilliard…”
Uh-oh.
“…and I got a letter sayin’ you’re not enrolled.”
Silence. Deadly, cavernous silence.
“You wanna explain?” he says.
No, I’d rather have a Strange Interlude:
(fearfully)…Explain? How can I explain?…All summer long I’ve hoped that you might suffer a freak head injury while golfing, rendering you temporarily feeble-minded so that I need not explain….