by Jessica Pan
✽ ✽ ✽
At our final class, Kate gives some advice about performing.
“Look, guys, if you see your friends before your show, don’t fucking cry. OK? No one wants to see that,” she says.
I glance at the floor. I’m barely not crying now, Kate.
“You can have one drink before you go on, but that’s it. You have to be smarter than the audience.” That’s how Kate has always talked about the audience: we are going to war, and they are the enemy. We have to control them. And if they defy us, we must subdue them.
Kate stands up in front of us and starts clapping her hands together in a slow beat. “Come on guys, put your hands together!” she says.
My classmates and I join in.
Kate stops clapping but gestures at us to keep going.
“Once you’re onstage, you have the power. You can tell the audience to do something, practically anything, and if you say it with confidence . . . they’ll just do it. They won’t question why.” She looks at us pointedly, as our clapping slowly ceases.
As we are leaving our final class, Toni glances at me and comes across to put a hand on my shoulder.
“Hey,” she says. “Remember—this is fun!” She studies my face. “Or at least it’s supposed to be fun.”
This honestly had not occurred to me.
✽ ✽ ✽
I practice my material on Sam, a lot. I know now that the true test of a strong relationship is yelling into your partner’s face, “I DON’T THINK YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT A JOKE IS!” and them yelling back, “I KNOW WHAT JOKES ARE; I’M JUST NOT HEARING ANY!” and managing to stay together.
He has a lot of feedback on my delivery.
“You need to commit harder. You say some jokes like you’re scared of the joke.”
“I am scared of the joke,” I say.
“You need to commit so hard. You need the audience to believe you.”
“But I don’t really believe in this joke,” I say.
“Then don’t say the ones that you don’t believe in. And you need to act it out more. If you can’t do that, then don’t do it.”
I cut any jokes I feel iffy about. I practice and record myself, making sure I hit five minutes.
I cannot fall asleep.
✽ ✽ ✽
It’s showcase day, and I have exactly half an hour to lie in bed screaming into my pillow, and then I have to get ready and head to the Comedy Pub in Leicester Square.
After the screaming is done, I get in the shower and realize I’ve invited no one to come see me except for Sam, because I don’t want to humiliate myself in front of people I actually know. I text Lily and Vivian; it turns out they are bringing lots of friends. I frantically text all of my new friends at the last minute, but none of them can come. This is 100 percent my fault for inviting them less than twenty-four hours in advance, but it stings nonetheless. Though maybe a secret part of me didn’t want to have that added pressure of my new friends in the audience.
While I’m drying my hair and my tears, I text Sam’s friend Shaun. He’s done stand-up comedy before, and I know he’ll enjoy it a lot whether I die onstage or succeed. He replies in seconds telling me he’s game. I have come to love spontaneous people.
I get lost on the way and finally arrive at the Comedy Pub, sweaty and disheveled, an hour before showtime. I fly up the three flights of stairs to find Kate talking with the rest of my class onstage.
Kate goes through the order list. Vivian volunteers to go first. And then there’s silence. Kate studies the rest of us.
“I need the people who brought a lot of friends to perform last so that their friends stay the entire time. Who has no friends? I want you to go in the first half.”
I put my hand up.
“Great, Jess will go second,” Kate says.
Great. “No Friends Jess” has the second slot!
The next hour goes by fast. I stand in the bathroom and do a quick set of the breathing lessons that Alice taught me. I do a little sniffy mother-in-law just for good measure. I make my body big, like I’m attacking a bear, as Phil had recommended. I feel ridiculous but also agile and loose and powerful. Huh.
I put my hair half up and then go into a stall and silently say the entire comedy routine to the wall. It’s imprinted in my brain.
For a moment, I look at myself and realize what I’m about to do. I feel frozen in terror. I’d read somewhere that you can gain perspective by imagining yourself talking to yourself on your own deathbed. You’re supposed to imagine what Deathbed You would say to Present You in this moment. For me, Deathbed Jess always looks suspiciously like my Chinese grandmother, and when I lean closer to her as she beckons me, she always whispers, “Go . . . to . . . medical school.”
But now I really try to picture my own frail hands. Am I eighty-five? I look eighty-five. My hair is gray and curly. I should have someone dye my hair for me when I’m in my eighties. Maybe my unborn children. Did I ever get rich? I can’t tell. I see my small hips. I’m wiry and have the perfect physique for hipster overalls—finally!! Good to know. Eighty-five-year-old me is sleeping. But. Still. I really try to visualize lying there, near death. That woman doesn’t know why I care at all about what these people think of me when I have four working limbs. I lean over to her. She says, “You go up there, and you tell that crude joke about Asian fetish and yellow fever. YOU DO IT FOR ME.”
Somehow, I’m ready.
On the way back to the room, I pass some of my classmates who are involved in a small kerfuffle on the stairs. They’re surrounding Tim, a blond guy from class. Tim has just announced that he’s decided not to go on after all.
“I’m not ready,” he says to us, holding his beer. “I’ll do it some other time.”
We try to coax him to go onstage to just tell one joke. Perhaps the true story about how he lost his virginity (the girl had kept yelling, “Pump! Pump!” which he thought meant go faster and faster, when she was really asking for her asthma inhaler), but Tim won’t budge.
I have been Tim so many times in my life. I was always Tim before this year started. Going so far and then refusing to actually go through with it.
Tonight, I’m not giving myself the option to quit.
Suddenly, people from outside start pouring in. It’s only friends and family, but soon the place is packed. I count roughly sixty people.
My classmates and I are instructed to sit together in the back corner. Vivian asks me whether she should put on the red lipstick she brought.
“Always,” I say. War paint.
She shows me her hand. It’s trembling. She passes me her handwritten notes. “Yell these at me if I forget my jokes,” she says.
The lights dim. Anthony is frantically applying “confidence oil” to everyone’s wrists. I offer mine, and he rolls it on. It smells like lemons.
The room is buzzing, everyone is seated, and I see Kate heading toward the stage. The lights are going down. Oh god, this is really happening.
Kate tells a few jokes and lets the audience know that we are all beginners.
“I want you treat this like a one-year-old’s birthday party. If you see anything remotely competent, you clap and cheer,” she says.
And then she introduces Vivian to the stage. I’m nervous for her, but when I see that she’s found her flow, I start to feel scared for myself. I know my time is coming. Am I starting to lose my voice? Is that a tickle I feel coming on at the back of my throat?
I can hear Vivian wrapping up her act. My heart is racing, but I feel ready. I have practiced. I believe in the jokes. I know that I have to speak slowly and deliver the lines the right way to get a laugh. If they can’t understand me, then they aren’t going to get the jokes, and then I’ll have no hope. And I must commit to delivery. Commit hard. Try.
“Please welcome to the stage the fantastic Jess Pa
n!” Kate calls out.
And I’m up.
I don’t remember walking to the stage, but I know I must have. I do remember fidgeting with the mic, trying to get it out of the stand, and moving it to the side for what feels like ages. My brain screaming: Get the mic out. Get the mic out.
OK. Mic is out. Now talk to the audience. You’re onstage! Act like it! Sixty people are staring at you. Say hi to them. Act like they are a good friend you’ve just seen at a party.
“Hello,” I say.
“HELLO!” they shout back. I can hear my classmates all the way from the back. “How are you guys doing?” I ask.
Ambiguous din is the only response. Keep going.
“So, I’m from Texas. . . . I’m from this place called . . . Amarillo.”
My classmates whoop in response.
And this is the moment: I have the power, and I am going to get a room of sixty people to sing “(Is This the Way to) Amarillo?” with me. I’m going to do it. Yes, I am. I am going to sing in public.
I’m about to start the song when I see a man in the audience waving his arm at me. “I’VE BEEN THERE!” he yells and then points to himself.
Omigod. My first heckler. I haven’t been onstage for thirty seconds yet.
“Me, too!” I yell back. “I’ve been there, too! Because I was born there.” Zing!
Now shush, heckler! Just let me settle into the routine. This horse is likely to bolt. Settle in. Settle in. Wait, now I’m supposed to be singing.
“Guys, should we just sing a bit of the song? Yeah?” I ask, trying to sound casual and natural. As if I’ve ever led a sing-along in my entire life or even participated in one. But the audience doesn’t know that! They just know what they see: a short Asian woman dressed like Sharon Horgan, telling them to sing this Tony Christie song.
“Yes!” they yell back, obligingly. Just like Kate had said they would.
And then I have to do it. I have to commit. Which means singing. I start alone. A nightmare in every way possible.
“Is this the way to Amarillo . . .” I start to croon tentatively, partially in hell, partially blacking out.
Mercifully, the audience takes over.
“Every night I’ve been hugging my pillow . . . !” they sing along with me.
“OK, that’s enough,” I say to the audience, firmly. I make the “cutoff” gesture under my throat. They obediently stop singing. Here we go now. Now it’s all me.
Onstage, under the lights, it’s like an out-of-body experience: I settle into the routine. It flows, perfectly formed, as if separate from me.
I feel hyperaware of my body, I can feel the tips of my fingers gripped tightly around the microphone, and yet it’s like I’m not there. I look at the audience and see nothing, as if I’m in my own universe. My voice is strong but not too fast. The anxiety is there, but it’s not spinning out of control.
As soon as my act is over, I fumble with the mic and tell my legs, “Don’t you dare fall off the stage now,” and I look up and Kate is there to take the mic from me and then I’m scurrying back to my seat, to sit next to the rest of my classmates. I hear clapping. I hear cheers. I feel my soul being returned to my body.
I sit safely in the darkness. I can feel my classmates patting my back and whispering, “Well done,” and my face is hot, which means it is also bright red. But I did it. I said everything. I hadn’t rushed. I hadn’t faked being sick.
When I performed at Union Chapel, in that darkness, I’d felt something shift within me. But this, making people laugh out loud at my dumb jokes—this is making my whole body tingle. I can’t help but put my hand over my mouth in disbelief—I’d just summited Everest! EVEREST! My cheeks are still burning, but not in an ashamed way. More of a “Can you believe we pulled that off?” red glow.
Still buzzing, I sit in the audience, watching my classmates also take the stage for the first time and nail it. We’d helped each other get through this, and everyone is so on tonight. Soon, I forget myself because I am laughing so hard as Anthony dances onstage as part of his routine. But when the lights come up, I look around and feel dazed.
Honestly, I didn’t know whether I was going to get through my set. But, somehow, I had made the crowd laugh. A man comes up to me, points, and says, “YOU. You made me laugh,” and then he laughs again and walks away. What?
I realize that I did not recognize myself from who I was a few months ago. I’m a little unnerved but elated because now I know: things that seem impossible can suddenly become possible. A big part of this year was the desire to be brave enough to do something that felt so contradictory to the kind of person I thought I was.
Sam hugs me tightly and says, “You were so good.”
Shaun pats me on the back and says, “That was better than coke.” I’m bowled over by this astonishingly high praise from someone who works in advertising in London.
My classmates and I stay out, celebrating.
That night, a star is born.
That star is Anthony.
Seriously, though, that guy was amazing.
✽ ✽ ✽
When I finally get home that night, I remember that I had Sam record me on his phone. I don’t want to watch. I don’t want to. But I do.
I half close my eyes and then hit play while shoveling ramen into my mouth. Jesus Christ, I am singing in public. I am moving my hands in a way I do not remember. I am swaying side to side, like I’m on a boat, riding these waves out, desperately trying to find my sea legs. I didn’t even know I was doing it.
I . . . I look like I’m having fun. And I sound . . . confident. It doesn’t feel like it’s really me onstage. Afterward, Lily had said, “You seemed so comfortable. Where did that confidence come from?”
I’d always imagined that tonight, right before I got onstage, if I did enough prep and work and rehearsal and bear postures, I’d be filled with the supreme confidence to perform my routine perfectly. But self-confidence doesn’t find us: we have to push ourselves to do something hard and live through it, and then confidence will eventually follow. I’d faked confidence and, by doing so, created it. It really did feel like a feat of wizardry.
ten
Talking to Men,
A Real-Life Interlude
One night, Sam and I are at a group dinner with some of his old friends and their partners. The men and women end up self-segregating. Sam and I are sitting in the middle of the table, at the cutoff point. I turn my head to my right to face the women, and he turns to the left to talk to the other men.
In less than ten minutes, the women have plunged straight into Deep Talk. Two women, who just met this evening, discover that both of their mothers have Parkinson’s disease.
I say “discover,” but the word I really mean is “share.” They decide to open up to each other. When Laura tells us about what a difficult time she is having watching her mother suffer from the disease, the woman next to her confides that she is experiencing the exact same thing with her mother. I can see the relief on Laura’s face. Someone understands me. A total stranger understands this particular awful pain more than most of my close friends.
It changes the temperature of the evening. Everyone on the right side of the table becomes more open, more honest, more willing to share and listen.
Later, when Sam and I are taking the Tube back home, I ask him for an update on his friends whom I hadn’t found a chance to talk to. He tells me that two of his friends had switched jobs, so his end of the table only talked about work.
“I wish I’d been in your conversation,” he says.
In almost every interaction I have, I find myself thinking back to that one particular lesson from my very first challenge in the classroom when Mark told me that we needed to engage in Deep Talk to form real connections with other people. I’ve been trying to practice going deeper in conversations, sidling straigh
t on past the easy stuff and asking the questions that really open up space for something more meaningful.
The dinner with Sam and his friends hadn’t felt atypical to me because, well, let’s make no bones about it: over the course of the year, I’d simply found that it was easy to get into Deep Talk with other women. Maybe it was because we usually had more in common, maybe it was because we’re generally encouraged to talk more openly about our feelings—I don’t know why, but it just seemed like every time I took that leap into the uncomfortable unknown, women would leap right in after me.
By contrast, when I tried the same tactic with men, they would, more often than not, shut me out. One of Sam’s friends I’ve known a long time is going through a breakup. He seemed different when we met up recently. Slightly wounded. I tried, gently, to ask what went wrong, and he blocked my efforts by getting up to grab another drink. I tried again. He blocked me again, this time pulling out his phone. Another male friend simply ignored my questions, feigning momentary deafness, and changed the conversation. I’m no expert on social conditioning, toxic masculinity, or gender studies, but it was striking how differently these conversations tended to go with men.
I can’t help but think back to my encounter with Chris, my vulnerability tennis partner whom I met all those months ago in the School of Life classroom. How he was lonely and had trouble making friends, how he wanted new ones, and how it felt like he was only able to admit this to me because I was a total stranger. He couldn’t tell his wife that he felt this way.
I don’t think Chris is an outlier. Research suggests that men are significantly lonelier than women. That one-third of men feel lonely regularly. When I discover that one in eight men report that they have no one to discuss serious topics with, my encounters make a lot more sense.
A few days after that dinner, I catch up with my new friend Paul over coffee. He is telling me about a time when he cycled from the Netherlands to Spain—a many-months-long endeavor that he completed solo. I try to imagine myself in this scenario.
“Were you lonely?” I ask.
