I hadn’t told many people that we’d broken up. I don’t always like to talk about stuff right away. I find it easier to keep shit to myself so that I can control when difficult subjects surface. When you tell people you’re going through something, they tend to follow up by asking how you’re dealing with that something. If you were having a good day on said subject, then their question just ruined it. The words “How are you?” can pack a mean punch.
Being newly single can quickly go from the feeling of “Fuck yeah” to “Oh, fuck” after a handful of drinks. Suddenly I was finding myself not having the fun I usually had at a party. If anybody kissed or held hands I wanted to drown them in the sad, dirty pool. If anybody wanted to know where Ira was, I found myself breaking my own rules and spilling my guts about our breakup, which was a buzzkill for them and screwed up any future party invites for me. When the speakers started blaring “Girls, Girls, Girls” my emotions took over.
I stumbled to the street, not sober, to find my car. I should probably go talk to Ira, I thought. I was wearing a bikini and a wrap around my waist, and it was 9 P.M., but I didn’t have enough time to change my clothes and fix my life at the same time.
I ran into this guy Zack, who I worked with at Mirabelle. He was a cute Southern guy who I always liked flirting with.
“Where you goin’ darlin’?” he asked.
I mumbled something along the lines of “Do you think I’m pretty?” then we made out. I’ve always been a sucker for a guy with a Southern accent.
I realized what I was doing about the same time his hand was headed down my pants. Getting fingered by a co-worker on the street while wearing a bikini was probably not going to make me feel better. I wiggled out of his grasp and managed to get in my car without further groping.
“Are you sure you should be driving?” Zack yelled through the window.
“I should definitely not be,” I slurred, and then I got out and called a taxi, which I still have on speed dial.
There was no time to sober up. All I could think was: I have to find Ira, he’s my soul mate. Oh my God, how didn’t I see that before? It was meant to be. I figured he was at his apartment working on a script—it was the Fourth of July, after all.
On the way to his place, I had a really good idea: Flowers. Who doesn’t love flowers? I marveled at my own genius. I asked the taxi driver, who had already suggested to me that I just go home rather than to my ex-boyfriend’s house, to make a quick stop at a Ralph’s grocery store. He reluctantly obliged. I was dead set on getting some roses to take with me. I would explain to Ira that I was silly to think I needed to be single, and that a relationship with him, no matter how stagnant, was exactly what I wanted. After all, he wasn’t boring; I just needed to settle down. I’m fucking twenty-five, I reminded myself. It’s time to get my shit together.
I walked into Ralph’s in my bikini. My eyes were red and blurry with tears, so I asked someone where the flowers were. I was standing right next to them.
“Great, thanks. Now just show me where the checkout lane is and I’ll be on my way.”
When the cab pulled up to Ira’s apartment I noticed that all the lights were off. I asked the driver to wait for me. He rolled his eyes and said, “Okay, but I can’t watch.” Then he looked away. That should have been my first hint.
I hoped Ira wasn’t in bed. I had practiced my speech on the way over, and I’d hate for the only person ever to hear it to be Akim, the taxi driver. Several knocks on the door and I started to panic. Shit, he was asleep. I looked at my cellphone to check the time. Ten o’clock. Why was he in bed so early?
Oh, maybe he’s out, I realized. He’d probably decided to have some fun on the Fourth and let his writing take a day off. Good for him! Maybe if he’d done that with me we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Ira was so adult that he actually had a nice apartment. It was one of the fancy ones with a front and back door, something I couldn’t afford yet. I decided that since he wasn’t home, his back porch was a good location to leave the roses. I didn’t have a pen but I figured, No need for a note, he’ll know who they’re from.
I played out the whole scenario in my head. Ira was at a disappointing party. He would have seen couples, just like I had. He’d be feeling sad and missing me, just like I had him. He would decide “fuck it” and have two apple martinis instead of one. Feeling pretty buzzed, he wouldn’t be able to take the party anymore so he’d call a cab and go home. He’d go in through the back door—he never did—but in this case he would because that’s where my roses were. He’ll just know.
Akim drove me home, pretending the whole time to agree I had handled this whole thing perfectly. He was polite enough to realize the damage was done, so why make me feel worse? I also had given him a huge tip.
The next morning I woke up and my head hurt. I don’t know if it hurt from the alcohol, the crying, or both. I walked into the bathroom to get some aspirin and noticed I was still in my bikini. I had a quick flashback to leaving the roses. I grabbed my phone to make sure I hadn’t missed a call. I had not.
Thoughts of what he might have done the night before flooded my head. Did he hook up with a girl? Did he stay out late and he’s still asleep? Did he find my roses and now he and his roommate are laughing at me for being so pathetic?
Humiliation washed over me. I don’t care how many people say, “Men like flowers too!” There’s no excuse for a girl leaving a guy roses. A simple phone call would have been sufficient if I had wanted to talk.
I rolled out of bed and drove in a panic to his apartment, still wearing the bikini. That could not have been good. It was still damp from the pool. I definitely remembered reading something in health class about that causing female issues. But I didn’t have time to change once again. I realized that Ira might not have come home the night before, or maybe he used the front door. My roses might still be on the back step. I could go get them, take them away without his ever knowing I had left them, and call him that night like a reasonable human being.
I pulled up to the street behind Ira’s place because from there I could get a clear shot of his back porch. I had figured that out at a different low point in our relationship. I peered through my window and saw that the roses were gone. Fuck me in the face.
He’d come home. He’d gotten the roses. And he hadn’t called.
The responsible girl who thought Ira might be the right guy tried to get through to the irresponsible girl who thought he was boring, but she had shown up a little too late.
I looked down at my bikini bottom and figured the damage was already done. I picked up my phone and called Zack. He answered. I drove right over to his house to finish what we had started on the street the night before.
Forget growing up. I was right where I belonged.
REALLY BAD HAIR DAY
I decided that since I was single I could finally get laser-focused on my career. I entered a stand-up competition that was sponsored by Comedy Central. After passing the first level I had to perform a five-minute set at the Hollywood Improv. I didn’t end up winning the competition, but Comedy Central still put me on Premium Blend, a stand-up show featuring a few comics at a time. I felt like I was finally getting a real break. I wondered if Ira had heard that things were going so great for me.
The competition led to me getting my first big agent at one of the best agencies in town and up to that point I had only auditioned for commercials. I was ecstatic at the idea that now I had an agent who could get me auditions for real television shows.
I was still thinking about Ira a lot but this new development made me feel stronger. I was convinced these things wouldn’t be happening if I was still with him. It was when I was alone that I succeeded the most. I needed to remember to do things opposite of the “traditional” way. Get my career settled. Make a life for myself. Depend on nobody. Stand on my own two feet and don’t even think about having a relationship until that is all set in stone. I had a plan.
My agent set up a sh
owcase (audition) for me for the Montreal comedy festival, Just for Laughs. That was where all the comics I knew wanted to go. It could help launch your career. He knew that I hadn’t been doing stand-up long but he was sure this was going to be a good move for me. I wasn’t sure I was ready, but I figured since he was an agent he knew more than I did.
The showcase was on a Thursday night at the Hollywood Improv. I was told I was supposed to do ten minutes of material, which was exactly what I had accumulated so far.
When I got to the club I saw a huge line outside. The sign was lit up with the name Drew Carey. I got butterflies. What a big night.
I was the last comedian to go up before Drew Carey. I walked up, nervous but confident.
“If you guys are drinking tonight, please don’t drive,” I started. The audience just looked at me, but that was okay since I hadn’t gotten to the punch line yet.
“They have this new device that they put on your ignition. You breathe into it, and if it detects alcohol on your breath, your car won’t start. Brutal, right? But wouldn’t it be awesome if they could put something like that on my cellphone?”
The sound of dead fucking silence resonated through my body. My knees felt weak. I didn’t understand what had happened; that exact same joke had killed when I did it before for the Comedy Central thing. Did they not hear the punch line?
I didn’t really know what the hell was going on at the time, but I do now. Those people were there to see Drew Carey. They didn’t give a shit about me in my light blue tank top with my big platform shoes rambling on about how I liked to drink and dial.
I was way too new at stand-up to have any idea how to handle the situation so I just plowed through my jokes, not that I needed to pause for laughter anyway, and said good night.
As I walked away from the microphone, down the steps, and off the stage, I noticed that the emcee wasn’t passing me from the other direction. He was nowhere to be seen and the stage was completely empty. Now I really didn’t know what to do, so I kept going. I certainly wasn’t going to walk back onstage to the packed crowd of annoyed Drew Carey fans. I felt like they wanted to hurt me.
After at least a minute of dead silence and a crowd of confused faces, the emcee blew past me near the doorway and muttered something that sounded angry. The reality of what a disaster this night had been started to sink in. I knew my agent would be looking for me so I ran and hid in the bathroom. I locked the stall and cried. It was a scene from one of those Lifetime movies I like so much.
After an hour I figured the coast was clear so I headed out of the bathroom and out of the club. I managed to avoid everybody except the emcee.
“What the fuck was that?” he asked.
“What?” I asked back, defensively.
“You had like three minutes left onstage. You don’t get offstage when the emcee isn’t even in the room,” he scolded me.
I didn’t bother to fight back. He was right. I felt defeated. I felt humiliated. I felt like I had no idea what the hell I was doing. “I’m really sorry,” I mumbled, then I left. Right as I got to my car, my platform wedge gave out and I went flying face-first to the pavement.
“That’s about right,” I said out loud.
I got in my car, picked the gravel out of my hands, and drove back to my apartment.
I wasn’t sure how much damage I’d done to my future, but my agent seemed to brush it off. “It was too early for you to be auditioning for the festival. No big deal …” That was pretty much his response.
Even though he seemed okay with what had happened, I was not. I had thought that things were taking off for me, but now it felt like none of the good things from the past couple of months had even happened. I wondered if it was over before it really started. I obviously didn’t know how to handle myself in the comedy world, plus the idea of doing stand-up again made me cringe. I thought that maybe the times before when I’d done really well were a fluke, and what happened at the Improv was the reality. Too bad the me then couldn’t talk to the me now, who knows one bad night is just that. It doesn’t wipe out all of your good ones.
A week later, I got my first audition for a TV show. I spent a ton of time working on my lines and preparing for the audition. I felt really confident going in. Keep in mind, I felt confident that night at the Improv, too.
The day of the audition it was pouring rain. I drove to Fox studios and proudly handed them my ID. The guard at the gate directed me to where I was to park, then showed me where my final destination was. The two looked really far away from each other, but I’ve never been good at reading maps. I parked as directed and headed to my audition in the rain. I had an umbrella but when the wind is blowing at forty miles an hour, they don’t help much.
I had read a map correctly for once; the building I was going to was really far from my parking spot. I noted that spots closer to the building were marked RESERVED and fantasized about the day I’d be the lead on a sitcom and would get to pull right up into one of those spots. It wouldn’t say RESERVED, though. It would say SARAH COLONNA.
When I finally got to where I was going I was relieved to see that the other girls were in the same shape that I was in: sopping wet. I signed in and waited anxiously to be called to see the casting director.
The audition was over in minutes. I read the scene twice and the casting director smiled and told me I did a great job. He shook my hand and thanked me for coming in. I remembered that my acting teacher said that you never know what it means if your audition goes quickly.
“It can be a good thing. If they give you some direction and you take it, then they’ve seen what they need to see.”
That casting director had given me direction, and I knew that I had taken it. I didn’t mind the rain or the walk back to my car because I felt great. Nobody is harder on me than I am, so if I felt I’d done a good job that meant that I had. I didn’t know how it all worked, but I sat in my car and prayed that I got the part. Maybe I sucked at the showcase the other night because I wasn’t supposed to go to Montreal.
I was supposed to be in town so I could get this job. Maybe stand-up wasn’t my thing as much as acting.
Later that day my phone rang and I saw that it was my agent’s number. This could be the call, I thought.
“Hello?” I answered excitedly.
“Hey, it’s Ron.”
“Hey! What’s up?”
“How’d it go today?” he asked.
He was messing with me. He wanted to drag out the good news!
“Good. Really good. I think he liked me.…”
“Hmmmm. All right. Well, we just got a call from him. I don’t want you to get upset, but he wasn’t quite as positive.”
Or he was trying to find a nice way to tell me to move back to Arkansas.
I was silent for a minute. “Well, okay then. What did he say?”
“He said you were kind of a mess. That you looked like the wind just blew you in. He was worried about your appearance.”
My appearance? I’m not always well put together, but I certainly am when I need to be and that day I needed to be.
“Well, the wind kind of did blow me in. It was pouring rain and I had to park seventeen miles from the building.”
“Calm down, I just wanted to ask you what happened.…”
“But everyone looked like that. I mean, my hair was wet but I wasn’t in rags. I didn’t have BO. I just had to walk there during a tornado, no big deal!”
“He just seemed upset about it. Look, it’s the first time he met you and we’ve really talked you up. Maybe he’s just being really hard on you or had weird expectations.”
“Did he say anything about my acting?” I asked.
“No, not a word. He just told us your hair was a mess. That was his feedback.”
I was silent.
“Don’t sweat this. It sounds like he’s got a stick up his ass today. I’ll touch base with you later,” Ron said. We hung up.
I immediately called my friend Liz. Sh
e and her husband, Brandon, were my college friends who had moved out to California. She was working at a talent agency and I thought maybe she knew something about this casting director.
“Oh my God, him?” she asked. “He’s just a bitchy queen. That has nothing to do with you. What did he say about your acting?”
“Not a word. I spent all of this time preparing for the audition and all he cared about was that my hair was messy,” I told her. “I guess I should have worn a cap.”
Even though I laughed the incident off, my ego took a huge beating. I wasn’t feeling very confident about my life decisions. And I wasn’t feeling very talented. The phone call I got from my agency a few weeks later didn’t help.
“Hello?” I answered.
“Hey, it’s Peter.”
“Oh, hey Peter.” I was confused. He worked with Ron but he never called me.
“Listen, I’ve been trying to get you in the door with casting directors and it’s just not working. Nobody has ever heard of you and you don’t have any credits to help me sell you. We’re just gonna part ways. Good luck down the road.” He said it all in one breath and with very little compassion.
“Hey, Peter? Just one thing …”
“What?” he sounded like he was being forced at gunpoint to listen to what I had to say.
“You guys knew I had no credits. You came to me. I just want that to be clear. Maybe it was a mistake, but please don’t talk to me like I’ve been a burden.”
Don’t be too impressed. I cried for about an hour after that. I went straight to my bedroom and curled up in a ball. The sports editor’s daughter in me felt like this was strike three, and I was out.
LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE
I spent the next year and a half dating somebody that I didn’t really like. I liked him as a friend, I liked him as a person, but as a boyfriend he kind of sucked. He was a comic, so knowing that Ira would hear about it and figure out that I had moved on and was doing great motivated me to keep things going with Marvin.
Life As I Blow It Page 15