Scrappy Little Nobody

by Anna Kendrick

  the mayor of squaresville

  I like to tell people that I’m a square. It’s a charming way to warn someone that I’m a finicky little brat without freaking them out. I got to work with Lisa Kudrow recently, and when she told me she thought she was probably an even bigger square, I maintained that couldn’t be true. We traded stories for a while, trying to out-straitlace each other.

  For example, I told her about the time my friend found out I’d never seen a movie without paying and he forced me to sneak in to Iron Man. I did not enjoy the film at all; I felt guilty the entire time. And when I found myself at dinner with Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. a year later, I confessed my crime and insisted on giving them cash or buying them something on the menu of commensurate value. Lisa knew she’d found an uptight, apple-polishing soul sister. We held a little election to see who would be the ruler of Squaresville, if such a miraculous place existed. I was elected mayor and she, my loyal deputy. To be fair, the thing was rigged in our favor since we were the only two people organized enough to bother voting.

  I happen to love rules. I love having a plan. I love a film set that’s run like a well-oiled machine. I thrive in structure; I drown in chaos. I love rules and I love following them. Unless that rule is stupid. And yes, I have felt qualified, no matter my age, to make that determination. Scrupulous people don’t enjoy causing trouble, but they can be defiant as hell.

  As an adult, being square is more or less an acceptable personality trait. The only time I desperately wanted to be rebellious was in adolescence. I wanted to be Rizzo, not Sandra Dee! I had to will myself to break rules when I could stomach it. While I’ll admit I enjoyed the thrill, I was not “the bad kid.” In fact, aside from the following stories, I was a painfully typical example of “the good kid.” During free period, even on the rare Maine sunny day, I’d stay in the cafeteria and do my Latin homework. Not because I was smart, but because I assumed the fabric of the universe would disintegrate if I didn’t. But the qualities that made me a square as a teenager—dedication, independence, maturity—led me to break the biggest rule of all. I committed systematic genocide. (Is she kidding? Let’s read on and find out!)

  My adolescent flirtations with rule-breaking were alternately facilitated and foiled by my brother, Mike. Mike was a genuine cool kid. Not a “popular” kid; a wiry, quick-witted, slightly dangerous, well-liked kid. He’d been bullied in middle school but at fifteen he shot past six feet, got into good music and minor drug use, and stalked around the school in baggy white tees and fitted baseball caps. He had that feral look about him that was specific to the early 2000s, like the actors in the movie Kids (a movie I should not have watched before puberty). Like me, he had a strict sense of justice, so he had no interest in being unkind or intimidating people who were perfectly harmless, but he once beat up a friend for trying crystal meth and promised it would happen again if he slipped up. He was like a sheriff or an angsty Robin Hood. He’d be the first to point out what a loser I was, but wouldn’t let anyone else say a word against me. He once made a kid apologize to me after making a crack about my size. (“I didn’t know you were Kendrick’s sister.”) When I got home, Mike asked, “Did Spencer apologize to you today?”

  “Yeah, he did! And do you know what I said back?”

  “Don’t tell me, dude. I know it’s gonna be something lame.”

  It was something lame, so I’ll spare him the embarrassment of putting it in this book.

  I got better grades than Mike, but only because, as every teacher said, he didn’t “apply himself.” He eschewed all extracurricular activities in favor of hanging out in a park downtown that a local paper described as being full of “undesirables.” That wasn’t a description of the unsavory types that my brother might find there, that was a description of my brother. He drove states away to go to raves, which he called “parties,” because only your parents and alarmed-looking blond ladies from the news said “raves.”

  When people would call the house and ask “Is Kendrick there?” I’d act irritated and say, “There are four Kendricks here, you’ll have to be more specific.” I always knew who they meant.

  I still idolized him. He still thought I was a liability at best and figured that dictating my social life was in everyone’s best interest.

  At thirteen, I was invited to drink for the first time. Mike tore tickets at a local movie theater, and he and the rest of the teenage staff stayed behind after hours one night to throw a party. They had beer, vodka, and coffee brandy, a sickly sweet liqueur that you mix with milk. It’s a staple of the low-income New England alcoholic, so naturally I started there. I wandered around the empty cinema, discovering what a buzz felt like and hearing, “Hey, loser, you still good?” at five-minute intervals.

  At fourteen, he let me smoke a bowl with him and his best friend, Evan, whom I’d known since childhood. We went to T.G.I. Friday’s and in a haze I said, “Do you guys feel like we’re in a movie?” They laughed at me.

  “Yeah, dude, that’s the kind of stupid shit you need to get out of your system while you’re just in front of us. Rookie.”

  That same year he took me to my first party (that’s “rave” for all the people out there as lame as me). It was fun and weird, and I liked trying to pick up the dance style—though I might not have if I’d known how stupid I looked. I kept going whenever he would invite me, but mostly for the bragging rights. Mike told me I wouldn’t be allowed to take Ecstasy until I was sixteen, which was fine with me since I found navigating new environments hard enough when I was sober.

  When I was fifteen, we went separately to a warehouse rave upstate. I was paying for entry when a large young woman burst through the doors of the main floor, out into the makeshift lobby. She was still about ten feet away when she pointed at me and said, “No. Go home,” and walked back inside. The guy who’d been taking my money shrugged and started to hand it back to me. If you’re confused, it’s because I mentioned that I was fifteen and you pictured a fifteen-year-old. But at this point, I looked about twelve. There weren’t official age limits for a party thrown in a warehouse—certainly fifteen was old enough—yet she’d decreed I was too young.

  This would not stand. It had taken hours to get there, and, more important, it was embarrassing. I paced away from the venue, wondering what to do, and scanned the small crowd of sweaty youths who had come outside for air. I spotted a friend of Mike’s. This wasn’t hard; he knew everyone.

  “Hey, Travis! Go find Mike! Tell him they won’t let me in!”

  Ten minutes later my brother was outside and dragging me by the arm across the main floor. He planted me in front of the party’s organizer.

  “Trish, this is my sister. She’s fifteen. We good?”

  Trish took another look at me. “The age limit is sixteen.”

  I’d never seen my brother’s powers of persuasion falter before.

  “No it isn’t, dude. There’s a ton of kids in here who are fifteen. I’ll bet you some are younger.”

  “Yeah, but Mike, look at her. She looks like a baby. If she ODs at my party, imagine how her picture’s gonna look in the paper. No one would ever rent a space to me again. Any fifteen-year-old that is in there at least had the decency to look like a degenerate.”

  It was weird, but I kind of got her logic.

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about that. She doesn’t do drugs. I told her she can’t try X until she’s sixteen. Let her in.”

  In your face, lady, I thought. I’d just been described as a goody two-shoes who left her drug-related decisions to her older brother, but I walked into the place looking like the smuggest little twelve-year-old there ever was.

  Outside of underage substance use, my only dalliance in teen rule-breaking was some light shoplifting. Jesus, it’s so trashy. It makes me cringe when I think of it.

  I visited a friend in New York the summer I turned fourteen and she taught me. Oh, the city kids corrupting us weak-willed country folk! She also tried teaching me to
flirt with guys, but soon found that was asking too much. Basically the trick to shoplifting was you went into a store, saw what you wanted, and took it without paying. Cute trick, right? Truthfully, the only thing she “showed” me was that it could be done. I think I would have gone my whole life without it occurring to me that normal people could just steal things. Pray I never witness a murder.

  The small mercy was that this phase was short-lived. I got a friend in my hometown to shoplift with me (you know, pay it forward and all that) and for a while no Claire’s or T.J. Maxx was safe. But, like a dying star, the desire burned brightly and disappeared quickly. A few years later I told my mother that I’d gone through a short thievery phase, and she was more surprised than angry. I suppose the statute of limitations for parental disapproval had passed.

  That weekend, as we wheeled our groceries out of the Hannaford, she realized we’d forgotten cereal. We went back in and I grabbed it while she started looking for the shortest checkout line.

  “Hey, Ma,” I whispered, “you want me to just take it?”

  I cocked my head down and opened my winter coat. She looked scandalized but kind of impressed, like I had a superpower, or we were on a date and I was the town bad boy. I put the cereal in the cart, but I swear, if I’d been serious she would have let me do it. Weak-willed country folk.

  I remained a square, though. I had gone through the motions of a bare-minimum teenage rebellion, but it was all very Olivia Newton-John learning to blow smoke rings. It was just a prelude to breaking the biggest rule of all.

  I started applying to colleges at the beginning of senior year. But I had this itch. I’d just come back from making Camp, and I already had more high school credits than I needed, which made going to class feel like I was in a holding pattern. I happen to love learning, but clawing through layers of disruptive students, overstretched teachers, and pointless extracurriculars to do it was discouraging. Deep down I knew I didn’t want to go to college.

  The idea of another four years of being chaperoned and dealing with immature classmates and putting off my real life made my chest tighten. But how could I not go?! Everyone in my family went to college; even my finally-got-his-act-together brother was in college. The value of education was ingrained in me from birth. In fact, I had thought college was mandatory until I was, like, thirteen and saw a commercial for the army. “I tried college; it wasn’t for me,” said the soldier. “Wasn’t for you”? What are you talking about? That’s like saying that paying your taxes “wasn’t for you”! It turns out that was not correct, yet once I’d learned college was optional, I knew the suburban gossip would be that the Kendrick girl wasn’t going because she was knocked up or criminally insane.

  The itch was not going away, and even though I sent out my applications, I jumped at the first opportunity to put college on hold and start paying my dues. Fuck convention. Sandra Dee was going to the Big Apple.

  a little night music

  I graduated high school early so that I could move to Manhattan and do A Little Night Music at New York City Opera, which is the braggiest sentence I will ever get to say. During this time, puberty finally hit me full force, which led to a number of horrifying incidents, including nearly passing out onstage because of the chest binder I had to wear to hide my new boobs.

  Renting an apartment on my own and going to work at Lincoln Center made me feel very grown-up. I was constantly congratulating myself for the smallest things. Yeah, I’m just riding the subway to work in New York City like it’s no big deal. Which of course meant that to me, at every moment, it was a HUGE deal. I wish I could say this masquerading-as-an-adult-and-getting-away-with-it feeling was exclusive to being seventeen, but so many things in my life are still like that. Yeah, I’m checking my email on a laptop I own like it’s no big deal.

  Night Music was the first real job I’d had since I was a kid, and I was desperate to do well. Also, Paul Gemignani, the musical director on High Society (who used to speed up that indulgent actress’s songs), had recommended me for the role, and I didn’t want to let him down. The cast was packed with impressive talents. My onstage grandmother and most frequent scene partner was played by none other than Claire Bloom, arguably the greatest living theater actress. Before I did the show, my dad found a VHS called Shakespeare’s Women & Claire Bloom, which was half documentary, half master class. Watching it raised her to a godlike level in my eyes.

  Working with someone with that kind of technique was beyond intimidating. I wish I could say that I shouldn’t have been nervous, but the woman did not mince words. During our first attempt to rehearse our most intimate scene in the show, Claire stopped me mid-sentence and said, “You’re not going to do it like that, are you?”

  Well, Claire, I thought, this was my audition scene, and that was how I did it in the audition . . . which got me this job. . . . So yeah, I thought I might. I never forgave the director for not defending me. Together they decided what changes I should make. The net result was that I had to do almost the entire scene in profile, facing her.

  If she saw me outside the rehearsal room, she would ask to run our scenes over and over. She once snapped her fingers while I was mid-line and said, “No, really do it; let’s start again.”

  As we got closer to the performance date, we started watching full run-throughs so we could see the pieces of the show come together. After watching me do a scene with another actor, Claire approached me and took hold of my arm.

  “That was really lovely work today, Anna,” she said. Her eyes were sparkling. “No, I mean really wonderful.”

  I was thrilled, but something about the surprise in her voice made me feel like a monkey who had composed a sonata. Still, it was enough to make me reframe her in my mind as a strict but fair mentor of sorts.

  We became almost friendly. We once walked to a Starbucks near Lincoln Center in the drizzling rain and didn’t talk about work at all. I told her about my friends, who were all still in high school back home, and how I missed them but never knew what to say when we talked. She talked a little bit about her ex-husband (who was Philip fucking Roth, by the way) and her daughter, and like a typical seventeen-year-old I retained none of it. We were getting along well in spite of my fear and she seemed to have a growing respect for my slightly superior musicianship. I could read music and follow the time signature changes, which was especially important now that we were expected to listen for our cues instead of watching the conductor. The irony was that we were in the company of five full-time members of the New York City Opera, but their skill level so exceeded ours that we could almost no longer understand it to be impressive. It was like being the smartest janitor at NASA.

  Claire had a rich voice and she acted the hell out of her songs, but she wasn’t a confident musician—and not for nothing, Sondheim music is a damn battlefield. Our version of the show began with the curtain rising on a frozen tableau of the full cast. Claire’s character sat before a wooden tray that was covered in playing cards and a brass handbell. I was seated on the floor by her feet, looking up at her. During the overture, Claire was meant to ring her bell to set all the characters in motion and begin the show. The cue had been a crapshoot during rehearsals, but in our final preview performance she missed it by enough that our conductor stopped the music entirely and went back to the start.

  At the note session before opening night, our choreographer tentatively inquired if I could reach Claire’s bell from where I was sitting in the opening tableau. I even more tentatively said yes. That settled that. We left the note session feeling a little awkward but relieved. I went up to the dressing room I shared with one of the NYCO members and started to get ready. Over the loudspeaker I heard the announcement, “Anna Kendrick to Claire Bloom’s dressing room, Anna Kendrick to Claire Bloom’s dressing room.” That phrase still haunts my dreams.

  I went down the four flights of stairs to her dressing room. She was set up in a solo room just off the stage and I inched to her door. She had her back turned when
I slithered in, but she looked up and saw me in her mirror. She did not turn around.

  “I told them I’m ringing the bell. I’m ringing the bell or I’m leaving the show.”

  If I hadn’t been terrified, I would have found this kind of fabulous.

  “When it’s time, you are going to cue me. Just give me a nod, and then I will ring the bell.”

  “Okay,” I squeaked.

  I don’t remember how I extricated myself or if she had me stay awhile and practice cueing her. But the image of her in that dressing-room mirror and her mannered phrasing are permanently burned into my brain. When I told my parents the story, my dad was shocked. “They just sent you to her dressing room? You’re a minor; why the hell would they have you settle a dispute with an adult actress on your own?” It was a fair point, in retrospect.

  I was happy to take all the criticism for even an ounce of praise, and if she ever reads this I hope my reverence for her is clear. But just in case it’s not: Claire, I worship you. If I saw you tomorrow and you hit me in the face, it would be the highlight of my year.

  She was the greatest living Shakespearean actress and I was a seventeen-year-old in a bad wig. I’m not just mitigating this because she happens to still scare the crap out of me, but because people being tough with you doesn’t mean they’re villains. Paul Gemignani kicked my ass on High Society, A Little Night Music, and Into the Woods, and that dude loves me. Right, Paul?

  Does this wig make me look out of my depth? Or is that just my face?

  moving to la

  I was told as a child that if I wanted to be in entertainment, I shouldn’t have a backup plan. That is terrible advice. If things hadn’t worked out for me, I’d be an Uber driver or the world’s most prudish porn star. (Which doesn’t mean I would be an unsuccessful porn star; there’s a fetish for everything, ladies!) However, I’m glad I followed that terrible advice.