Too Much Is Not Enough
Page 1
Copyright © 2019 by Andrew Rannells
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
“My Second Date with Brad” first appeared in a slightly different form in the New York Times Modern Love column on July 28, 2017.
Lyrics from “Wicked Little Town” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch provided courtesy of Stephen Trask.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 9780525574859
Ebook ISBN 9780525574873
Cover design by Zak Tebbal
Cover photograph courtesy of the National YoungArts Foundation
v5.4
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Baby, I’ll be tough
Too much is not enough…
—“Fame” by Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford (and originally belted out by Irene Cara)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
About Andrew Rannells (The Honest Version)
My Entrance
Be Loud
A New Me for New York
The 40-Year-Old and the Virgin
It’s Never the Priest You Want to Kiss
Boy Stuff
Taking Requests
Summer Stock (or Things You Can Learn in a Barn)
Young Artists Seeking…Art
Josephine
Broadway Adjacent
Imaginary Omaha Andy
I Don’t Want to Catch ’Em All
Party Monsters
My Second Date with Brad
Our Good-bye to Ron
The Wisdom of Hedwig…and Britney
Everything Is Rosie
Ivy League by Association
The Tallest Man I Ever Loved
“Hairspray, Wow!”
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About Andrew Rannells
(The Honest Version)
This is maybe not going to be what you think it’s going to be.
When I have to provide a bio for a Playbill or a television show announcement or the jacket of the book you’re holding in your hand, I’m always struck by how tidy it looks. Each sentence contains an achievement that I’m proud of, something that for years I had only dreamed could be possible. I’ve worked hard, and I’m happy to say that I have achieved much of what I set out to do when I first moved to New York in 1997. (I mean, I would still like to have a weekly brunch date with Stephen Sondheim, but it’s always good to have goals.)
But my biography is also deceiving. It’s all highs and no lows, with bullet points of good stuff and none of the details of the in-between, and it starts with me starring in my third Broadway show, when I was thirty-two. In reality, my bio should include sentences like:
Prior to being cast in The Book of Mormon, Andrew left his family in Omaha, Nebraska, missed them terribly, and often wondered if he had made the right choice to leave his home.
Or:
After starring in Hairspray on Broadway as the third Link Larkin, Andrew faced months of unemployment and thought he would never work again. During that time, he loved to stress eat, spiraled into regularly scheduled anxiety attacks, and had to take a job as a temp at Ernst & Young. He still couldn’t tell you what he was supposed to be doing at that job, because he mostly hid in either the men’s bathroom or the break room.
Or:
In his free time, Andrew likes to drink wine with friends, watch countless consecutive hours of HGTV, and manage panic about his personal life.
(Just a side note: You know how, at the end of Our Town, the Stage Manager lets Emily go back and pick one day in her life to visit? One of my greatest fears is that this will happen to me when I die and I will accidentally pick a day that I spent alone in my apartment eating large Domino’s pizzas and watching an entire season of Mad Men straight through. Like, all thirteen hours at once. Actually, maybe there’s nothing wrong with that day.)
What these official bios always leave out are the years I had in New York City before I was working on Broadway. Before I was in The Book of Mormon and Girls. Before people started stopping me on the subway to say, “Did we go to high school together?” (Unless you attended an all-boys Jesuit Catholic high school in Omaha, Nebraska,…no, we did not.) Or “I love you on Modern Family!” (Actually, that’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson.) Or my all-time favorite, “Tell me why I know you!” (Ma’am, that’s a question only you can answer.)
These missing years were messy and confusing and filled with questionable choices, and for a long time I was happy to omit them. But I realize now just how much happened during that period of my life—a time when I was excited, and terrified, on a daily basis about what the future held for me—and I wanted to tell some stories about experiences that have been just as important as all of those highlights in my bio.
Everyone who leaves home, with dreams of making it in the city, starts somewhere, and I’m pretty sure that my dream began at a young age, when my dad started showing me MGM and Warner Bros. musicals from the forties and fifties. Judy Garland, Betty Grable, Gene Kelly, Dick Haymes. I idolized all of them. My love of older movie musicals led to a love of newer movie musicals like Fame, Little Shop of Horrors, and Grease 2 (I prefer the sequel to the original; I know I’m not alone here).
Because of this love of musicals, my mom suggested I watch the Tony Awards one year. I was instantly hooked. It was so much better than the movies; it was live! I would watch the Tonys every year and dream about being one of those people on the stage performing. It was the 1993 Tony Awards that really sealed the deal. The casts of Kiss of the Spider Woman, Blood Brothers, The Goodbye Girl, and The Who’s Tommy all performed that night, and I fell madly in love with every minute of the telecast. That was the moment I knew that I didn’t want to be just a fan, I wanted to be one of them. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it, but I knew I had to figure it out. My family, while incredibly supportive, didn’t have the answers, either. I thought I would start with the most obvious first step and just go from there; I had to get myself to New York City.
I see the new kids arriving in the city every year, new faces ready to tackle their dreams, practically shouting, “God, I hope I get it! I hope I get it!” I want to welcome them and tell them what they can expect, what I wish I had known when I first arrived. At the top of that list: It might look like people are ahead of you, be it in money, looks, or opportunity, but here’s what—Eyes on your own paper, folks! Everyone has to do the work. People who just get handed opportunity without the effort usually fuck it up and end up much lower than when they started. Your career is something that starts with the first step, not with a promotion or a movie or an award. It begins the minute you say you are going to do it. So make it all count.
I can’t give you a shortcut, because there isn’t one, so the following pages are not a guide to making it in New York. Instead, they are stories of wins, big and small, of falling down but always getting up, and of experiencing everything you possibly can and making a life to be proud of along the way. That’s all a lofty way to say you are about to read about homesickness, bad auditions, good auditions, sex with the wrong person, occasionally se
x with the right person (who generally turns out to be the wrong person), some unfortunate but inescapable life events on the path to adulthood, and lots of wine with friends along the way.
If I could squeeze all of these stories into the bio on the jacket of this book, I would. But my editor won’t let me, so please consider this book the longer, more honest version of my bio—the one I’d share with a friend over a few drinks. I should also add that some names and personal details have been changed. I tried to be as accurate as possible, but, let’s be honest, we all know how memory works. For example, as I was writing many of these stories, I imagined myself as a young Leonardo DiCaprio in them, but after consulting some photo albums, I realized that simply wasn’t the case. I hope you enjoy my stories anyway.
My Entrance
It was August in New York, which I didn’t yet know is the lousiest month of the year here. The air is thick and damp, and you constantly have the feeling that you’re in a steam room fueled entirely by urine. The line for taxis at Newark Airport already seemed beaten down by the heat, and given that I wasn’t even in Manhattan yet, I couldn’t help but interpret the scene as some kind of warning about how hard the city was going to be. But I was here. I had taken the biggest step and I had moved to New York City. Though I had only visited a couple times in prior years, I knew this was where I belonged. I was falling in love like a kid falls in love at summer camp—quickly, completely, and with irrational passion. After nearly thirty painful minutes, my sweat-drenched parents and I piled into a cab like cattle, adding physical discomfort to the emotional awkwardness that had marked the trip so far.
I should mention here that three days before we’d left Omaha, the week I’d turned nineteen, I’d come out to my family. (I didn’t think there would be an issue, but just in case, I had an exit firmly planned.) My family was mostly, what’s the best way to say this? Not shocked. I knew all the words to Grease 2 by the time I was six. I played around the house as Miss Piggy. I watched T.J. Hooker hoping that Adrian Zmed would be shirtless at some point. He rarely disappointed. And then there was the telltale sign: I was obsessed with The Wizard of Oz. Even the black-and-white part. So here we were, my parents and I, three days out of the closet, jammed into the back of a cab that was swerving toward Manhattan, making us all carsick. The anxiety was thicker than the Nag Champa the cabdriver was burning on the dashboard. Neither one of my parents had come with me to look at colleges, and it was clear that they didn’t want to be on this trip, either.
My father, Ron, had never set foot in New York, and he didn’t seem excited about doing so now. We had never been close, and I already worried that coming out had created more of a distance between us. Now there would be a physical distance, too. I knew there would be no long phone calls sharing the drama of drama school with him, or hearing him tell me about the stresses of his advertising sales business. The chance for a relationship with him as a young adult was looking slimmer and slimmer.
My mother, Charlotte, a former teen model from Omaha, hadn’t been to New York since she was a high school student in 1964. She and some other local girls from her modeling agency had been taken to Manhattan to meet talent agents, and while she had been presented with the opportunity of staying in New York, city life had proved too hectic and she had returned to Nebraska. While she always spoke romantically about her visit—the excitement of staying at the Waldorf Astoria, going to the Russian Tea Room, seeing Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park—she had never returned, not until this trip.
No one in my family had gone away to college, and not only was I going away, I was going 1,249 miles away. My coming out, combined with my move, filled my mother with every fear imaginable: muggings, gay bashings, me being sex trafficked. The first time I’d gone to New York to look at schools, she had given me a roll of quarters and told me, “You can use them for vending machines or pay phones or hold them in your fist and punch someone if they try to attack you.” Beyond arming me with coins as a means of self-defense, my parents had made it clear that they wouldn’t be helping me with college costs or the expense of moving to New York. I can’t explain to you why my parents took this stance, but in my family, college was something you paid for yourself. I had watched my two older sisters and my brother do it. They studied hard for scholarships, they worked multiple jobs, and they managed. Now it was my turn. But no one was willing to say, or perhaps no one understood, just how different, and difficult, New York City was going to be.
I had started working at a young age, doing TV commercials and local modeling jobs, and had saved a few thousand dollars over the years—enough to get started, but not nearly enough for college. So when the time came to audition for drama departments, I had no choice but to base my choices on price. I was given a full ride to Marymount Manhattan College—and was grateful for the opportunity—but I knew instantly, somewhere in my heart, that it was not the best fit. Still, while it wasn’t the school of my dreams—that was NYU—it was putting me geographically closer to an even bigger dream of acting on Broadway, a dream that suddenly felt real for the first time as the lights of Times Square flashed in front of me. The cab ride through Manhattan had felt almost as long as the plane ride, but finally we pulled up at what would be my new home for this new stage of my life.
The dorm was an old building on 57th and Lexington. It’s a neighborhood I know now is soulless and sad, but on that first day, it seemed terribly glamorous. The building was called the Allerton Hotel. In my head it was going to be a normal dorm experience, with common rooms and dry erase boards on the doors and clove cigarettes in the quad. We walked into the lobby and my mother gasped. It wasn’t THAT bad, but it was…bad. It wasn’t so much a dorm as it was a welfare hotel with a handful of floors for Marymount students. If you live in New York or have ever visited, you know those old people you see on the street who are wearing all of their coats in summer and a Duane Reade bag as a hat? Who have a cat on a leash or a dirty dog in a stroller and are yelling to everyone and no one things like “It’s coming! I’m telling you it’s coming! When it happens you can remember I told you first! You fucking whore!”? Do you know the people I am talking about? They all lived in this building. And I was going to share a bathroom and a shower with some of them. In that moment I was so self-absorbed that I could only see these people as harbingers of my potential future—a Twilight Zone mirror of what New York City can do to people. Now I understand that the residents at the Allerton probably weren’t too pleased to have a bunch of drama students invading their home, blasting Chess at all hours and kick-ball-changing their way down the halls. It was not the best arrangement for anyone.
My parents were also processing our surroundings. I sensed their bodies slowing down the minute we walked into the lobby, like they were turning into stone. Or maybe they thought that if they stayed very still, we could all just pretend we weren’t where we were. I, on the other hand, pretended things were going great. I marched up to the Marymount representative, announced myself, and waited for him to welcome me with open arms. He barely made eye contact, muttered “Welcome,” and told me I’d be living on the twelfth floor and that the elevator was very slow, so we should probably take the stairs. Eleven flights. Two Midwestern parents. August in New York. No air-conditioning. We trudged up those stairs, stopping periodically to breathe and manage our panic. The hallways were narrow and dark, but there were several other cheerful freshmen and their parents running about. It seemed like everyone was having a better time than the Rannells family.
I was determined to turn this around. I started making jokes and talking about how exciting it all was. How much character the building had. My parents weren’t playing along. We got to my room, I opened the door, and we all attempted to walk inside. It was probably eight feet by ten feet, with a low twin bed, a tiny sink, a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, and one window that faced a darkened airshaft. My mother burst into tears.
“God damn it, Charlot
te,” my father said. “It’s not that bad.”
“Yeah, Mom, it’s going to be fine.”
But I knew better. All the Rebel Without a Cause movie posters and all the Bath & Body Works linen spray in the mall were not going to save this cell. (Since I had just come out of the closet, I hadn’t yet attained the Gay Decorating Wonder Powers that I have now.)
At the time I couldn’t suggest we all slam a couple drinks and then deal with what was in front of us, so I suggested we go eat instead. We walked back down the eleven flights of stairs, my mother trying not to cry, my father not speaking. “One of the best parts about New York is that no matter where you go, there are great restaurants,” I said, annoying myself with my own pluck.
As it turns out, there were no restaurants at 57th and Lexington. We walked around a bit, and I started to realize that this neighborhood was not the New York of my dreams. The last time I’d visited, I’d stayed on the Upper West Side and hung out in the West Village—places that looked like the set of Seinfeld or Friends. (I didn’t know at the time that both shows were filmed on studio lots in Los Angeles.) This neighborhood looked like the saddest office party on the planet. Eventually we found a diner that looked acceptable. The waiter shouted at us in a manner that made us all uncomfortable, and food eventually arrived. It wasn’t exactly what we ordered, but no one said anything. I worked overtime to assure my parents that this move was exactly what I’d been expecting and that I was excited and thrilled to be in New York. They seemed sad and doubtful, but they managed to smile.
After lunch we walked around a bit more, and then we found our way back to the Allerton. I asked my parents what they wanted to do that night. I imagined showing them how I could already navigate the TKTS booth or how easy it was to use the subway. My father instead said, “We are going to check into our hotel and let you get settled in. We should have breakfast tomorrow, if you have time.” My mom just stood there. It was 4:30 p.m. SETTLED IN?! I thought. They had seen the room; all I had to do was open my suitcase and I was “settled in.” What did they think I was going to do? “I heard one of the other parents talking about orientation, so you’ll probably have to do that tonight too,” my mother managed to say. “THAT IS TOMORROW AFTERNOON!” I wanted to scream. “I have nothing to do and I hate where I live and I am terrified, please do not leave me!” But instead I said, “Great. I will meet you at your hotel in the morning.” Then I put them in a cab and walked back into my new home, up those eleven flights of stairs, past all the other students and parents unpacking shower caddies and tiny microwave ovens, and into my cell. I shut the door and locked it behind me. And then I cried. I cried like I had never cried in my life. This was my dream, moving to New York and starting my life as an adult, and it was horrible.