by Theresa Alan
“Like a ‘you are here’ on a map, except . . . different.” Ana played dumb to Ramiro’s casual brilliance. She didn’t have a choice to play it any other way.
“Yeah, kind of the like that. Do you think they got carted off to jail? No way.” He paused, then launched in about the art of the art of the Bobo tribe of Burkina Faso, whatever that was. The crowd thought it was hilarious. Ana just “uh-huhed” and “you-go-girl”-ed. When he talked about Egypt, she mentioned that her cat I in her name was like her kohl-penciled Egyptian foresisters. Sixteen years of education, and all she remembered about Egypt was that they mummified their dead, built pyramids, outlined their eyes with kohl, and liked cats. Nice to see all those years of writing essays and cramming for exams turned out to be so useful.
The scene ended a few minutes later when Jason came in wearing a cop hat and thwapping a billy club against his open palm and attempting to arrest them. Both Ramiro and Ana covered him with spray paint and ran off.
They performed well that night. In a couple of scenes, they really killed. A couple weren’t quite as good as Ana might have hoped, but nothing that would make the audience fidgety with embarrassment or anything. That was how Ana gauged the success of a show: If they didn’t make the audience cringe, the show was a hit.
After the show, the actors went to the bar in the back of the theater to have a few drinks as they always did. Each and every one of them had vowed at one time or another to go straight home to bed after a performance. They vowed to drink less alcohol, get more sleep, cut down on their caffeine intake, and lead wholesome, healthy lives. No one, however, had actually ever done any of this. For one thing, they knew that if they went straight home after a show, they’d miss something hilarious that would be an inside joke to the other actors until the end of time. For another thing, performers got drinks for a dollar. (A dollar!) It was such a good deal that to forsake a few beers after the show was downright fiscally irresponsible.
Before Ana joined her friends, she went to talk with Guy from Qwest. He said he liked their work and he’d like them to perform at the company holiday party in December.
“How about corporate retreats, team-building sessions, things like that?” Ana asked.
“I’m sure you’ve read in the news that things are difficult in the telecom industry. We don’t have much of a budget for those things these days, though we hope things will pick up soon.”
“Well, I really appreciate you coming by. We’d love to perform at your holiday party and any other events that come up. Steve Cuddy is the one to call to schedule everything. Do you have his card?”
“Yep, he gave it to me earlier. Thanks for your time.”
“No, thank you.”
She shook his hand and smiled at him, but as soon as he walked away, her disappointment showed clearly in her expression. Why did he have to go and get her hopes up if he knew he didn’t have much of a budget? One lousy holiday party? They might make enough money to buy a few Christmas presents, but they’d hardly be able to quit their day jobs with one stinking holiday gig. Ana went to the table in the back where the other actors were sitting.
“Hey, look you guys!” It was Scott, who rode up to the table on a unicycle. With his long, gangly limbs and curly hair springing out all over the place, Ana thought he looked so cute and boyish, which made sense because he really was just a kid in a twenty-seven-year-old man’s body.
“Hey, give me a shot at that,” Ramiro said. As he, Scott, Jason, and Marin gathered around it with glee, Ana and Chelsey went to the bar to order a beer from Tony, the long-haired bartender. Ana had made out with him in the coatroom a few times before. Marin and Chelsey had both slept with him at one point or another, on and off when the alcohol-to-lust ratio tipped the scales. He was nobody’s idea of a good boyfriend, or, God forbid, husband, but his exquisite build and sexy smile made the occasional romp with him pretty much unavoidable.
The two women took their beers and sat down at a table near the back of the theater. “How are things going at the gym? Any new crazy characters to tell me about?” Ana asked.
“Can’t think of any. I guess the good news at work is that, what with this being America, there are always fat people who need to work their fat asses off.”
Ana nodded, agreeing that this was indeed good fortune.
“Do you ever think that someday we’re going to wake up and say to ourselves that we’re not actors with day jobs, we’re personal trainers and marketing managers and admin assistants who do comedy as a hobby?” Ana asked.
“No, no, of course not.”
“We have to go to New York. We’re never going to be able to make it big in Denver.”
“I know, I know.”
They all knew this. They’d had this exact same conversation approximately four million times. “But moving to New York would mean planning and saving money,” Ana said. “I mean you, me, and Jason could do that, but could you imagine Marin, Scott, and Ramiro? Planning? Saving money?”
Chelsey laughed. The planning and saving was one reason they hadn’t made the move yet, but it wasn’t the only one. The reason wasn’t something anybody discussed out loud. But the truth was that in Denver, they were big fish. Colorful, pretty fish that other people oohed and aahed over. In New York, they would be tadpoles. Not even tadpoles, plankton is what they’d be, food for tadpoles.
“I need to get a comedy routine together,” Ana said. “Doing the comedy circuits means you can rub elbows with a much larger group of comedians than the incestuous little pool of talent here at Spur. That’s how Eddie Murphy, Jimmy Fallon, Jerry Seinfeld—God, it’s how loads of people got their start.”
“So why don’t you?”
“ ’Cuz I’m terrified.”
“Why? You get up on stage every night without a script.”
“Yeah, but if a scene bombs in improv, there could be a ton of reasons—the mood wasn’t quite right or the players didn’t quite click or whatever. But if you bomb in stand-up, it’s because they don’t like you.”
“Chelsey?” It was Rob, the man Chelsey had spent the night with.
“Rob! Oh my god! It’s good to see you. Have a seat.”
“I hope you don’t think I’m a stalker, but I didn’t want to have to wait until Sunday to see you again, and I thought that since you had to perform tonight . . .”
“I’m glad to see you again. Very glad. This is my good friend Ana Jacobs. Ana, this is Rob . . .”
“Night. Nice to meet you.”
“Night as in night and day or as in my knight in shining armor?” Chelsey asked.
“As in I want to make love to you all night long.”
“Hmm, somehow I think we’ve already done that.”
“Okay then, I’m beginning to feel just a wee bit extraneous,” Ana said. “I’ll just go and slink off to a corner and talk to myself like a homeless person.” She waited for a moment, waiting for one of them to argue with her. No one did. She took her beer and went over to where Marin was taking her turn on the unicycle.
“My last name is McGuiness,” Chelsey told Rob.
“I know,” he said, fanning the program that had the bios of all the performers. “I’m hoping you’ll sign this so I can sell it for thousands of dollars someday when you’re rich and famous.”
“Absolutely.”
As she wrote, he said, “So will you go on a proper date with me on Sunday? With food and cocktails and all that?”
“Definitely. I’d like that.”
She handed him the program, and he read over what she’d written.
Rob, thanks for the wonderful evening. You are magnifique in bed. Also, your penis is huge. Sincerely, Chelsey McGuiness.
“It’s not that huge,” he said, with exaggerated false modesty.
“I know, but I’ve found that men like you more if you tell them it is. This has been my secret to success with guys all these years.”
“Oh nice. I see how it’s going to be. I’m just another in a long
line of poor saps who have fallen for your many charms.”
“Consider yourself warned. So, Rob, tell me about yourself. How do you spend your days and nights when not giving women you’ve just met multiple orgasms? How old are you? How many siblings do you have? Tell me every last detail.”
“Okay, let’s see. I’m twenty-seven—”
“Ooh, a younger man.”
“Why, how old are you?”
“Twenty-seven and a half, but I turn twenty-eight next month. Okay, finish answering the questions.”
“I have two younger sisters. I’m about twenty semester hours shy of a degree in computer animation from the Art Institute of Denver—at the current rate I’m going, it’ll be about fifteen more years before I finish my degree—and I work as a firefighter in Denver. I work twenty-four-hour shifts, then have twenty-four hours off, and I do that two more times and then have four days off. I’m just finishing up with my four-day-off rotation, so I’ll have to show up to work at seven tomorrow morning, but if you want a repeat of last night, complete with depriving me of sleep, I’m more than happy to make that sacrifice.”
“That’s a very generous offer.” Chelsey bit her lip to suppress her smile. She didn’t want him to know how happy she was that he was here. She didn’t want to scare him off. “So you’re a firefighter, huh? I wonder if last night counts as some kind of Oedipal experience even though I didn’t know you were a firefighter at the time I slept with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Both my dad and brother are firefighters. I’ve always thought it’s such a crazy way to make a living. I mean fire scares me to death. Why would anyone willingly go into a burning building? One time, my dad told me how when a firefighter walks through the door to a burning building, he has to very tentatively tap his foot to see if there is any floor there, because arsonists like to cut holes so firefighters fall down to some blazing death in a lighter-fluid-created fiery hell—I couldn’t sleep for weeks after he told me that. I was so scared my dad was going to die a horrible death.”
“There are a few times when I’ve been pretty scared, but most of the time, I really love the challenge. I really love being the nozzle man, the first guy in there. I feel powerful. I feel like I’m doing something worthwhile. So where do your dad and brother fight fires?”
“In a suburb of Chicago. That’s where I’m from.”
“Oh yeah, what brought you to Denver?”
“After I graduated from the University of Illinois, I knew I didn’t want to stay in Chicago—it’s a great city, but the winters are sooooo cold—so I went to the Greyhound bus station and looked to see how far I could get with one-hundred-and-fifty dollars, and of the possible choices, I liked Colorado the best—I mean, I’d never been to Colorado, but it sounded cool, and as the saying goes, ‘Go West, young woman,’ or whatever, something like that, so I did, and I ended up at Rocky Mountain National Park thinking it was so beautiful, and I decided this was where I wanted to spend the rest of my life. I wanted to live right in the mountains, but there weren’t a lot of openings for kinesiology majors there, so I decided on Denver.”
“What’s kinesiology?”
“It’s when you study how the human body moves, stuff like that. You take a bunch of nutrition and chemistry and human anatomy courses.”
“Cool. Wait. I don’t get it. What do you do for a living with a kinesiology degree?”
“I work as a personal trainer and fitness instructor.”
“Gotcha. So how did you become a comedian?”
“Well, over the years I’d come to shows here and at Second City when I went home to Chicago, and I thought what they were doing up there looked like a lot of fun. Also, for a long time I’ve had this secret fantasy of being a writer for a sitcom, some TV show or something, preferably anything Sarah Jessica Parker is involved in, so when I saw the ad for workshops teaching improv, I signed up. I thought it might help me with my writing and improve my ability to come up with funny lines quickly, you know, which sitcom writers have to do every week. The first level is an eight-week course. Some people are chosen to make it to the next level, and I was one of them. I was really lucky because soon after I got through the third course, there was an opening for the professional troupe, and Steve Cuddy, he’s the director and the one who runs the workshops, asked me to join them. One day I can go to New York or L.A. and become a teleplay writer.”
“I thought you wanted to live in Colorado for the rest of your life.”
“I’ll just go to New York or L.A. long enough to become wildly rich and famous and then I’d come back here to live.”
“Why not just work here at Spur for the rest of your life?”
“I’ve met some of the people who used to work here, and they told me it’s really unusual for somebody to stay here for more than a year or two, even though Ramiro and Scott have worked here for a little more than three years, Jason’s worked here about two and a half years, and Ana and Marin have been here for two. They’re apparently the exceptions to the rule. You get burned out working all these crazy late nights and giving up every weekend. It’s hard to be married and have kids and have a day job and do this too. We’ve talked about hiring more people so we could get more nights off, but we never get around to it. The other five used to be in an improv troupe when they were in college. They’ve been doing this for years. They can’t not do it. The only way they’ll stop working here is if they get their own television show like Kids in the Hall or something. Or maybe if they get married and have kids, but I don’t see it happening.”
“Why not?”
“Well, Jason I could maybe see getting married someday, if he ever gets over his crush on Marin. Maybe Scott could get married if he ever matured a little, but I don’t know. Ramiro is gay, and as for us women, we’ve been hit on by so many married men at the club here, it’s really hard to hold up marriage as this big goal, the answer to all our prayers. It’s so depressing. I cannot tell you how many times men with wedding rings on their fingers have come up to me after the show and bought me a few drinks and flirted like crazy with me. They always say stuff like, ‘Oh, my wife and I are like brother and sister, we sleep in separate beds, we’re going to get divorced,’ yada yada yada. I’m like, okay, so when you’re actually divorced, maybe you can give me a call then, but I’m not sleeping with a married man. There is just no way that kind of story can have a happy ending, you know? And maybe some of them really are getting a divorce, but I’m guessing that a lot of them aren’t, and it’s just so depressing to think about how many men cheat or would cheat on their wives if they had the opportunity.”
“Not all guys cheat. I’ve never cheated on a girlfriend.”
“Have you had the opportunity?”
“Sure. Plenty.”
“I don’t know. I believe in love. I’m just not sure I believe in marriage. Maybe I just haven’t met the right guy yet, and when I do, I won’t have any fears at all about tying the knot.”
“I bet that’s it. I bet the right guy will make you decide marriage is pretty great after all.”
The other five performers returned from their unicycle adventures to give more serious attention to their beers. After Chelsey introduced Rob to everyone and everyone to Rob, Ramiro asked, “So Ana, how did it go with the guy from Qwest? Can we quit our day jobs yet?”
“Not yet, sorry. He said their budget is really tight now, but he thinks he wants us for their holiday party in December.”
“That’s it?”
“Steve should really be marketing us heavily to the local business community,” Ana said, as she had about nine million times before. “I mean Second City not only has performances every night of the week, they have an entire traveling team going around the country. I know Denver isn’t as big as Chicago, but still, we should be able to do a lot better than we’re doing. I think we just need to market ourselves. We should put on that sketch comedy performance we’ve always been talking about, and really aggressivel
y market ourselves to agents and the local media and business community. Scott and I could create the posters and flyers, and I can write up the news releases and hound the press trying to get some publicity. I really think if we could show our sketch comedy skills, it would help us branch out. That’s what Second City does.”
“It would be fun. I think we should do it. Really do it and not just talk about it,” Jason said.
“I don’t know. It kind of sounds like a lot of work,” Marin said.
“It’ll be great. It’ll give Ramiro a chance to finish some of the sketches he’s been playing around with,” Ana said. “We’ll get Steve’s permission to perform here some Sunday night.”
“Just one night?” Chelsey asked.
“We can see how it goes and then repeat it. We’ll market it like, ‘back by popular demand,’ ” Ana said.
“I’m in. It’ll look great on my résumé for when I go to become a staff writer for a hit series on HBO,” Chelsey said.
“Okay, I’m in,” Marin said.
“Yeah, I guess. I’ve got three or four sketches you guys could help me finish up,” Ramiro said.
“I have some sketches, too, from when I took that sketch-writing class last year,” Chelsey said.
“You haven’t written anything since then?” Ana asked.
“No. What’s your point, that if I want to become a sitcom writer I actually have to do something about it?” Chelsey joked.
“I think we should do a celebrity boxing skit,” Ana said. “Marin could do Britney Spears and she could fight, I don’t know, some bad ass woman, a woman who can actually sing maybe.” Marin did a killer Britney Spears. She had the same dark eyes and blond hair that B.S. had, and she was a good dancer, but when Marin danced, her exaggerated facial expressions and hammy moves were hilarious. She acted all dumb and air headed, with big eyes and a high-pitched voice. “Ani DiFranco? k.d. lang?” Ana continued. “Oh, I know, Rosie O’Donnell! I’ll be Rosie. You and I will kind of argue, and then I’ll throw a single punch and knock you flat.”