by Theresa Alan
After breakfast, they drove over to Chelsey’s side of town and walked along Broadway, going into the used books stores and art galleries and furniture stores, which ranged from gross-used, to cool-used, to super-expensive cool-new.
Chelsey sat on a lime green couch in one of the super swanky furniture stores and Rob sat next to her. The couch’s back and arms swooped in a wave. The store managers had decorated the area around the couch to give customers a feel for how they could arrange their own living rooms, so beside the couch was a purple divan, and on the floor was a carpet with shapes of circles, triangles, and squares in black, red, lime green, and purple. A funky glass coffee table was in the center of the rug.
“I would love this look for my house,” Chelsey said.
“It’s okay. I like classic stuff that never goes out of style.”
“I mean if I were rich.”
“If you were rich you’d blow $3,000 on a couch?”
“Yeah, wouldn’t you?”
“Nah. Do you know how under-funded schools on reservations are?”
“No. I thought the casinos were taking care of that stuff.”
He let out a laugh. “Yeah, casinos—the solution to all our problems.”
“They’re not?”
“Only a few casinos make any money. And yeah, those reservations are doing great now. Employment rates are up, all that good stuff. But most reservations are way off in the boonies and aren’t easy to get to. They’re not enough of a draw to get people out there. Most just barely break even.”
“Oh.” Chelsey felt like an idiot. “So you’d give all your money to reservations?”
“Absolutely. I’d love it if I could do that.”
“What, um, kind of Indian are you?”
“Oglala Lakota Sioux. Pine Ridge Reservation. You’ve heard of that, right?”
“It sounds familiar.” It didn’t.
“Wounded Knee?”
“Um, I can’t quite remember, but I’m going to take a wild guess and say a bunch of Indians got slaughtered.”
He laughed again. “Pretty good guess.”
“Hey, so how come your last name is Night instead of Walking Bear or Eagle Feather or something?”
“My dad’s white.”
“Your dad’s white?”
He nodded. “My parents separated a long time ago. I’m not close to my dad, but he did get me the job out here, so that was cool. I needed to get off the rez, so I’m grateful to him for that.”
It explained his lightish skin, but the way he talked and dressed (the long hair, the brightly beaded bracelet) he seemed very into being Indian and didn’t seem at all into being part white. Then again, how did one celebrate being a white male? Dressing in camouflage, buying truckloads of semi-automatic weapons, and hiding out in a compound in Montana? Having short hair and wearing suits and ties?
“Why did you need to get off the rez-er-vation?” She’d started to say “rez,” but then felt like she sounded like some poseur, pretending to be familiar with a world she knew nothing about.
“There’s nothing to do there but drink.”
“Oh.” This line of conversation was making her uncomfortable. “Do you want to come to my place and check out my digs?”
“Sure.”
They went back to her place and she showed him around. She saved her bedroom for last, which was good, because once they entered that room, they didn’t come out again for several hours.
10
The View from Cloud Nine
When Chelsey got to work the next day, she couldn’t stop smiling. She was beaming, and her happiness was contagious. People smiled at her like she was an old friend, like seeing her was the best part of their day. It wasn’t like she was grumpy ordinarily, but she couldn’t get over how positively people reacted to her now that she was giddy with happiness, with that heady, this-could-be-love sensation.
She didn’t even mind her hour with Mrs. Friedman. Mrs. Friedman had been coming regularly to her workouts, and she was getting in better shape, but she hadn’t lost much weight.
“How’s the diet going?” Chelsey asked.
“Oh, you know dear, I just get so hungry.”
For Chelsey, reading Mrs. Friedman’s nutritional diaries was like reading a script from a Wes Craven movie. Mrs. Friedman always started out with good bran-cereal-and-a-snack-of-fruit intentions, but by late afternoon she was shoveling in the most nutritionally bankrupt food, having a daily orgy of fat and cholesterol.
“Mrs. Friedman, you know the rules, your body is eighty percent what you eat, twenty percent how much you work out.”
“I know dear, there are just so many hours in a day.”
And Chelsey did know. That’s why she liked being an improv comedian. You could become absolutely anyone you wanted in a split second. A change of a wig and you had a new name, a new personality, new parents, and a completely different history. And all of the mistakes you’d made in your real life? Poof! They were gone. In real life, it wasn’t that change was impossible, but it was very, very hard. Maybe you’d lose weight or get sober or get out of a bad relationship, but there are a lot of hours in a day and a lot of days in a year, and maybe someday soon or well into the future you’d gain the weight back or fall off the wagon or get back with your ex or a new person who was even worse. People can change, but lessons are so much more easily learned in a half-hour TV show or two-hour movie than over the many years of a person’s life, in which lessons are learned and then, too often, forgotten.
“Okay, don’t worry about it. Just get right back on the diet plan. I know you can do it!”
To make up for the extravagant breakfast she had yesterday, Chelsey worked out for an extra hour after work, bringing her workout to two and a half hours. For dinner she had a plate of steamed vegetables with nothing on them. She talked on the phone with Rob for two hours and then went to bed with her stomach growling, feeling righteous and cleansed.
11
The Cluster Fuck, Part Two
On Monday, Ana called Steve to ask if they could borrow the theater one Sunday night. “We want to put on a sketch comedy show.”
“Why?”
“Ah, to get practice doing sketch. One more thing to add to the résumé, you know?”
“What day were you thinking of ?”
“Um,” Ana looked at her calendar. “October fifteenth maybe? I mean we’re flexible. Whatever works for you.”
Steve didn’t say anything, so Ana charged on. “It’ll be extra publicity for the club. I’ll do all the publicity for it, and maybe the paper will do a story on the actors from Spur and maybe people who’ve never been to the theater will come.”
“I don’t think it’ll be a problem. You can use the theater.”
“Really? Thank you!”
Ana hung up the phone and suddenly felt sheepish. She hoped her Spur of the Moment buddies wouldn’t be mad at her for deciding on a date without consulting them.
She sent a group email to the five of them.
To: [email protected];
[email protected];
[email protected];
[email protected];
[email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Oops, I did it again
Beloved compatriots in laughs, you’ve variously called me a drill sergeant, a dictator, and perchance a wee bit bossy. I know you say these things with love in your heart—and a good reason. Please don’t hate me, but I called Steve to see if he’d let us use the theater, and he asked what day we wanted it. I glanced at the calendar—the only thought in my mind was that we wanted to hold it before the holidays, and I pulled the date October fifteenth out of my ass. Does anyone have a problem with that? That gives us almost five weeks. Saturday Night Live puts on a show every week. We can do it!
I think we should practice three times a week. I’m thinking Sunday night, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I know Wednesdays we’re supposed to
practice improv, but Steve’s never there, and it’s only for a few weeks . . .
Let’s get together tomorrow night at seven and plan our strategy.
About eleven seconds later, she got a reply from Marin, who, rather than wasting her time working, spent her days hovering over her Hotmail account hitting “Refresh, refresh, refresh” over and over again.
To: [email protected]; [email protected];
[email protected];
[email protected];
[email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Oops, I did it again
Ana, I love how you apologize for being bossy and then plan all of our practices and demand that we meet tomorrow night. But you know we love you. How would we ever get anything done without you?
The fifteenth is fine with me. And I just happen to have nothing to do tomorrow night, so count me in.
In case any of you were wondering, I am very, very bored. I’m supposed to answer the phone, but it hardly ever rings. So I’m just sitting here, near the phone, so I could answer it if it ever did ring, staring at the engineers as they pass by. I have a question for you: Are engineers taught in school along with math to have no fashion sense? This guy who just walked by has this kind of mullet-ponytail deal (no, I’m not kidding, I only wish I were), a t-shirt advertising some software over a belly like a grain silo, and glasses straight from the 1950s. I ask you: Why? If Tommy or Vera or Ralph stopped by this office, they’d grab the nearest fire pokers and gouge their eyes out in horror.
Did I mention that I’m bored? Please send me lengthy missives to keep me entertained.
Smooch smooch, kids.
A few minutes after that, Ramiro chimed in.
To: [email protected]; [email protected];
[email protected];
[email protected]; [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Oops, I did it again
RE: Mullets. Here’s my question: do people with mullets not have access to the same media as the rest of us? Do they not see magazines adorning the grocery store check out lines? Do they not see that not Ben Affleck nor Brad Pitt nor Cindy Crawford nor Jennifer Aniston sport mullets? Do they not realize there is a reason for this? Because I’m here to tell you: THERE IS.
Ana laughed. Ramiro was the king of bitchy commentary. Not that he was a fashion maven himself—he clearly couldn’t be bothered—but, like Marin, he had a way of putting together jeans, t-shirt, shoes, and a belt and looking like a GQ do. It was probably that he had awesome hair that was sloppy in a sexy way and he exuded an air of I’ve-got-it-together confidence that made him look MTV VJ oh-so-hip.
Ana went on the ’net collecting the names of agents and reporters in the Denver area. There were exactly three agents, so that wasn’t hard, but there were an absolute ton of reporters. There were the three big papers, the Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News, and Westword—Denver’s Village Voice—but there were also papers for each suburb, plus two dailies in Boulder. For each paper, there were several journalists who wrote features, plus the editors for the entertainment sections, plus the peons that put together the calendar of events. Ana wanted to contact all of them, by every medium she was able to.
Many of the small papers didn’t have websites where she could get all the contact info easily, so she had to call them each individually and beg for fax numbers and email addresses.
By the time she’d compiled her list it was already eleven in the morning. She hadn’t ever enjoyed a morning at work more.
Ana, still sitting in her chair, wheeled/walked over to Scott.
“Busy?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Wanna work on ideas for the poster for the show?”
“We don’t have a name or theme for it yet.”
“What’s your point? We can still brainstorm.”
He nodded. “That does sound a lot better than work.”
They spent the next hour tossing around ideas. She sketched a few concepts, and Scott did rough layouts.
“We need to get pictures of everybody,” Scott said.
Ana knew they couldn’t just download their pictures from the Spur of the Moment web page because web pictures didn’t have a high enough resolution for printed pieces.
“I’ll have to scan all of our pictures in,” Ana said.
“It would be nice if we had a professional group shot. Maybe I could take the one from Spur and Photoshop Steve out of it.”
“He’s in the center of it. It will look completely unbalanced.”
“Yeah. Good point. But how am I going to make it look cool when we have separate mug shots? Maybe I could do a mural, with everybody’s face cut out and tilted at various angles.”
“Or maybe we could do something like the Brady Bunch, with all of us looking down or up or to the side at each other.”
“I like it! You think Nick will let us borrow his digital camera?”
“I’m sure he would.” They all would have loved Nick even without his finance guru’s salary, but it really was nice to have at least one friend who could afford things like digital cameras.
Ana hadn’t had so much fun at work since . . . Ana had never had this much fun at work. She loved this. She loved being creative. It wasn’t that she intrinsically hated marketing and advertising, it was that, when she created stuff for Abbott Technology, no matter what ideas she came up with, she was overruled. All her creativity and hard work were inevitably for nothing. Her boss just wanted something that he could tear up so he could feel important and managerly. Ana had thought about trying to save up enough to start her own agency, but she knew her clients would just do the same thing to her. It wasn’t that she couldn’t take criticism, it was that most of the time, her boss wasn’t making anything better—he’d made it worse or different, but rarely better.
Worse, it wasn’t just The Big Weasel she had to please. Weasel was the VP of marketing, but marketing’s main function was to create collateral to help the sales team sell Abbott software, which meant she also had to please Deb Myers, VP of sales.
Ana tried not to be hard on Deb, she being the only female exec at Abbott, but while Deb was nice, charming, cute, fun to talk to, and absolutely amazing at selling things, when it came to actually managing projects and people, she was as hopeless as The Weasel.
Ana had been trying to get The Weasel and Deb together to talk about what she needed to do in preparation for Deb’s meeting with Techtronic execs for weeks. Ana knew that weeks’ worth of work awaited her and she knew it would end up that she’d only have a day or two to do it, but since she hadn’t been assigned anything yet, she might as well work on publicizing the show. No reason to be idle, right?
12
The Word for Today, Kids, Is “Apathy!”
Marin swiveled in her chair, painfully bored. She was working as an operator at a phone message service for small businesses that couldn’t afford a full-time receptionist but wanted callers to think they could.
Marin’s boss for the day was not the brightest star in the sky. He had thick black glasses that fell down his nose constantly and he was the loudest breather she’d ever heard in her entire life. Saliva gathered at his lips in a manner that was both horrifying and compelling to study—like an animal cleaning its butt, it was oddly intriguing to watch.
Fortunately, he spent most of his time in the back office. But before he left her to answering the phones, he gave her a long list of companies and the corresponding codes that would pop up on her monitor. She was supposed to look at the code, see what company it was for, and answer the phone saying, “Hello, this is Company X, my name is Marin, how can I help you?”
Marin looked at the endless list and it was all she could do to keep from laughing out loud. Yeah right. But she simply nodded enthusiastically.
Boredom set in promptly after he left. The phone only rang a handful of times
an hour, leaving Marin a good fifty minutes out of sixty to stare at the wall.
I should use the time productively. Work on a script for the show.
She tapped her pen against the desk. Took a deep breath. Made a pensive, sucking noise with her tongue between her teeth.
The phone rang. She was almost jubilant to have something to do.
“Hello!”
“Is this the law firm of Ellis and Gray?”
“Yes!” She had no idea.
“May I speak to Mr. Ellis?”
“He’s out of the office right now, can I take a message?”
The woman left this endless message, spelling her name, repeating her number. Marin doodled a picture of her boss for the day, saying “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” all the while as if she were writing the number down.
She hung up the phone.
Bored. So bored.
Sketch, right, she should write a sketch. What should it be about? How about a bored receptionist who answers the phone in an amusing fashion? She smiled. She was brilliant.
The next time she answered, she said in her most seductive, breathy voice, “This is the Lovely Lady Escort Service, how may I please you?”
“Uh, I was just calling in to check my messages? I’m Morgan McKenna from McKenna Marketing?”
“Oh! I’m sorry Mr. McKenna, I’m new here. I must have gotten the numbers confused. Ah yes, here they are . . .”