Let Me Be Your Star

by Rachel Shukert

  “Well? What did he say?”

  She sighed. “He said it really just came down to numbers. There were just a lot more girls that auditioned than boys. He also said that he thought about picking you, but there weren’t roles for the rest of us, and he hated to think of me spending my life in the car driving you back and forth from rehearsals for the next three months.”

  “Then call him back,” I hissed. “Call him back and tell him it’s not a problem.”

  Levelly, my mother met my gaze. “No. I’m not going to do that.”

  Here’s what I remember happening next: I let out a bloodcurdling scream that rattled everything in living room, from the pictures on the walls to the tiny crystal panda I had bought the faithless matriarch for her birthday with thirteen dollars I had saved up in change; then I ran onto the back patio, dug an enormous clump of rosemary out of the herb box with my bare hands and flung it, roots and all, to the flagstone pavement. I did the same thing with the Italian parsley, the lemon oregano, the garlic chives (lest you think I’m a total monster, it was my herb box, tended by me and paid for out of my allowance). Then I place my soil-smeared hands over my face and, wrenchingly, began to weep hot, muddy tears.

  I didn’t stop for the rest of the night.

  There are far worse motivations for a career in show business than vengeful fury. If it was good enough for Joan Crawford, it’s good enough for Rachel Shukert, which is why I have six heads in my shower and strap my husband into bed with a canvas harness every night. But you’re only as good as the people around you, and it was now clear to me that in this aspect, I was severely lacking. If I wanted get anywhere, I was going to have to be my own Baby June and Mama Rose.

  So began a merciless regime of monastic training. Every day after school, I holed up in my room, looking for audition notices in the local newspaper, poring over librettos and Broadway fake books, singing through scores until I was note and letter perfect: Camelot, Guys and Dolls, Sunday in the Park With George. I checked out the original cast recording of A Little Night Music from the public library so many times the librarian finally gave it to me. On weekends came the real work: an intensive seven-hour session during which I would move the furniture out of the living room and sing and dance my way through all four discs of the Smithsonian’s History of the American Musical Theater, beginning with Lillian Russell and ending, tragically enough, with “Sunrise, Sunset.” (Smash reference?) In my interpretation, each number had a different directorial vision, which often included major costume changes; obviously, one needed quite a different look to perform, say the moody interpretive dance to “Ol’ Man River” than to tongue-twist one’s way through “Tchaikovsky” the famously — and fiendishly — difficult Danny Kaye number from Lady in the Dark. Men’s parts, women’s parts, it didn’t matter, I did them all; hell, I could play Nicely-Nicely, Benny, and Rusty Charlie in “Fugue for Tinhorns” all at the same time, a feat that to this day has been matched only by the Tuvan throat singers of the Mongolian steppe.

  And it paid off. Mere months after I was rejected from playing a non-speaking Anatevkienne who got to make a cute little curtsy as she sang about being consigned by her father into a life of constant, religiously mandated drudgery, I was cast in my first-ever role as an angel — a goyische angel! — in a semi-professional production of The Snow Queen at the local children’s theater. A smattering of other small roles in local theater followed: an Annie here, an Oliver there. When I was twelve, no less esteemed a publication than the Omaha World-Herald deemed my portrayal of Brigitta von Trapp “personable” and commended my ability to stay in character when my sailor skirt fell down during a particularly militaristic bout of marching during “Do Re Mi.” By the time I was in high school, I was busting out the big guns: Ado Annie, Dolly Levi, and in a deliciously ironic twist, Golde in Fiddler. If you needed someone slutty, funny, bossy, or fabulous in a way that the boys that already knew how to put on their own eyeliner would appreciate, I was your girl.

  Then I got to college and realized there were a lot of other girls who could belt a comedy song and they could mostly do other things too, like dance. So then I got very pretentious and did experimental theater, but you mostly had to be able to dance for that too.

  So that’s when I started writing. And on good days, I could almost convince myself it was what I had wanted to do all along. Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t manage to put on outside clothes with enough regularity to teach, recap.

  * * *

  TV recapping is a peculiar discipline that has flourished in our disconnected, hyperconnected, insert-your-own-meaningless-Thomas-Friedman-byword-here age. It began in the early wilds of the Internet with seminal sites like the original Television Without Pity, whose gifted, pop-culture-obsessed stable of writers turned out, sometimes over a period of several days, erudite mini-dissertations on the latest episodes of a handful of buzzed-about shows. Now, when the virtual water cooler has by and large replaced the physical one for the vast majority of America’s underemployed creative class, there’s hardly an entertainment or pop cultural website from The New York Times down that doesn’t offer some sort of insta-summary of the shows that aired the night before. The endeavor presents an interesting meta-literary challenge. How to write a compelling narrative about another narrative, and for an audience divided among itself: the people so obsessed with a given episode they want to spend the next six hours reading about it on the Internet vs. the people who couldn’t be bothered to watch but want to know the salient plot points; the commenters with minute knowledge of every detail of a character vs. the ones whose idea of contributing to the conversation is to petulantly wonder “why should we care about any of these people.” Faced with such divergent needs and expectations, an individual recapper can choose (although maybe that’s not the best word; at that time of night, and on that kind of deadline, “choice” has about as much relevance to the words you’re banging into your computer as it does to the reproductive policy platform of the current Republican Party) to go a few different ways. She can stick to a basic reiteration of plot points, peppered with a few clever jokes or editorial asides. She can choose a single thematic thread for intense, scholarly critique, or she can bypass analysis altogether by means of a witty listicle or a series of gifs of Steve Buscemi cavorting with a harem of scantily clad prostitutes or Don Draper getting slapped by a prostitute or Tyrion Lannister sliding drunkenly off a chair and directly onto the oiled crotch of yet another prostitute.

  Or she can slide deep into the depths of her subconscious and dredge up anything she might find there, no matter how absurdist or tangential. It’s a risky proposition: you might produce a series of by turn fanciful and lacerating essays on art, love, and life itself, or you might wind up a big pile of absurdist, tangential bullshit.

  I’ll leave it up to you where mine wound up.

  “They’re good,” my staff editor said of my first Smash efforts. NBC had sent screeners for the first four episodes, so I was able to write the recaps in advance: Each one took three days to write and was about 4,000 words long. “But there’s a point where these things just become unreadable, you know what I mean?” That point, it was suggested to me, was at about 2,500 words of absurdist, tangential you-know-what.

  Other than this gentle suggestion, editorial input — particularly in the first season, before some routine staffing turnover resolved itself — was relatively minor. For better or worse, I was left to solve the peculiar problems of recapping this increasingly peculiar television program pretty much on my own.

  The initial premise of Smash was simple enough; it was a fairly standard backstage drama revolving around the creation of a Broadway musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Its cast of character included Debra Messing and theater veteran Christian Borle as the writing team; Jack Davenport as the womanizing, Fosse-esque director/choreographer; Anjelica Huston as the ex-husband-haunted, drink-tossing, tough-as-nails producer desperate to prove she could score a big hit
on her own. Megan Hilty, a peroxide blonde powerhouse who was unfamiliar to most of America, played Ivy Lynn, a chorus girl also-ran mysteriously unable to break out of the ensemble despite being a) incredibly talented and b) the daughter of a Broadway legend played by Bernadette Peters (we’ll get into that later); it also “introduced” us to her rival and our star, Katharine McPhee, who most of us has already been “introduced” to from her run on Season Five of American Idol, where she came in second to Newt Gingrich.

  Beyond that, though, everything got a little more fraught and, for lack of a better word, Brechtian. Debra Messing’s character had a strange Chinese baby adoption subplot, which was rumored to be based on the real life of Theresa Rebeck, the show’s notoriously tempestuous creator. The hapless Ivy was given a round of prednisone, a mild steroid often prescribed for minor ailments such as laryngitis or persistent skin rashes, which immediately sent her into a hallucinogenic drug hell meant to mirror Marilyn’s own. Katharine McPhee, a Japanese body pillow outfitted with its own AutoTune processor, sang a lot of Rihanna songs, or at least, what I think were Rihanna songs. The only thing I know about current pop music is that basically everything is a Rihanna song.

  All of these things would later bedevil and inspire the work that lay before me. But in the beginning, my principal difficulty was figuring out the characters’ names. It seemed to be a peculiar stylistic quirk of the show that nobody ever addressed anyone directly by name. Even after repeated viewings, I had no idea what a lot of the characters were supposed to be called.

  “You could look up them on IMDB,” my friend Michael suggested, when I explained my predicament to him.

  “I could,” I said. “But I shouldn’t have to.”

  So I gave them nicknames. Leo, the young, tearful, fringe-laden son of Debra Messing’s character, became Carpet, and before long, in my mind literally became a carpet. A supporting chorus member with a penchant for sparkly eye shadow was Eyelid; a dark young man who seemed constantly to be taking a long bubble bath in his own snide beauty was, obviously, Gore Vidal. I owe a sincere apology to Brian D’Arcy James, a brilliantly gifted performer who upon first impression appeared to be saddled with the thankless role of playing one of those cheerful, partially defrosted husband-like products one sees in commercials for breakfast cereal and laundry detergent, and because I am incapable of uttering the word “unfrozen” without thinking of the classic Phil Hartman SNL sketch, became Unfrozen Caveman Husband, along with all it implied. Brian, it had nothing to do with you.

  Debra Messing was another story. The name of her character, at least, was clear. But here’s the thing about me and Debra Messing. I think a lot of people have a secretly appointed celebrity family, right? The people who you feel you may have been somehow separated from at birth. I don’t know much about Fantasy Football, but I imagine it’s kind of the same thing (I was going to make a joke here about a straight guy fantasizing about some football player being his long-lost uncle or something, and then realized that I cannot name a single football player.) Anyway, it all started when I was a child, and the plot from Soapdish merged in my head with that episode of The Golden Girls where Rose is convinced that Bob Hope is her biological father, but he turns out actually to be a monk played by Don Ameche, and I began to quite seriously pretend that I was actually the daughter of Sally Field and Kevin Kline, but had been shunted off to an adoptive Omaha in the woefully misguided hope that a “normal” childhood away from the spotlight might be “good” for me. I know it sounds crazy, but I was very young then, and didn’t yet realize that I should really be focusing my energy on figuring out if my real parents were in fact Kevin Kline and Patti LuPone, which given their romantic history was theoretically possible, even though it would make me approximately four to eleven years older. There’s a conundrum for you. It’s like those studies when they ask women if they would choose to have an extra 20 IQ points and 20 extra pounds (which they could never lose) or 20 fewer IQ points and 20 fewer pounds, and inevitably, they all choose to be stupid and skinny.

  Over time (and by time, I mean 20 years or so), I’ve made peace with the fact that my parents are actually my parents. But I still like to pad out my extended family, and Debra Messing has always fit neatly into the slot reserved for my cool older cousin. I could imagine our semi-shared childhoods, of the thrill of being invited up to her peach-colored teenage bedroom during a lull in the family seder. She would French braid my hair and tease my bangs with a lot of hairspray, let me play with her collection of North America Bear Company Very Important Bears (Lauren Bearcall, anyone? Scarlett O’Beara?) and let me listen in on the cordless extension while she talked to her boyfriend, so I could see how it was done. Then other times she would turn into a total raging bitch and ignore me completely, and my aunt would say, “It’s the age. They’re all moody at this age,” and my mother would do her little passive-aggressive dachshund psychologist head tilt in response and say, “Do you think so?” My aunt would pale. “Well, of course, it’s the hormones, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t it?” And my mother would smile and tilt her head the other direction and say, “Carol, you know I can’t ethically diagnose family members.”

  And might Debra Messing, as she is popularly perceived, not occupy that place for all Americans? Might she not eternally be Debbie, the crimping-iron adept, emotionally volatile big cousin that we all simultaneously idolize and fear?

  That’s Cousin Debbie, to you. And especially to me.

  * * *

  My first live recap, when I would have to watch the show for the first time along with the rest of America, then drug myself with enough over-the-counter and/or prescription stimulants to stay awake until dawn to write what even at a parsimonious 2,500 words took a lot out of me, was to be for Episode Five, “Let’s Be Bad.” It happened to air on a night when my friend Bob had invited me as his plus one to the Public Theater’s annual benefit concert at Joe’s Pub, which he was covering for The New York Times.

  “I’d love to,” I told him, “but I’m not sure if I should. It’s my first live Smash recap. I have no idea exactly how long it’s going to take, or what it’s going to do to me. I’m definitely going to be up all night. I should probably just lay low.”

  Bob said, “The press materials say that Stephen Sondheim is going to be there.”

  I was in a cocktail dress and out of the house in eight minutes flat.

  Let me explain. Insofar as I am a spiritual person, I adhere to a kind of polytheism not unlike that of the ancient Greeks, except all the deities have been replaced by famously verbose and opinionated gay men (and some women, not necessarily gay). Sondheim, as the patriarch, occupies the center throne in Zeus-like splendor — the divine throne room resembling, basically, the set of Hollywood Squares. Tennessee Williams stokes the coals of the eternal heart as a puckish Truman Capote looks on, trying to catch the eye of Morrissey as he quips: “If you’re planning on roasting flesh, Tom, I sure as hell hope it’s Gore Vidal’s.” (Somewhere, in his gorge deep in the Earth’s crust, Arthur Laurents, the Hephaestus of the group, bangs out angry letters on a glowing typewriter equipped with a ribbon of liquid magma.) I’ve even invented a holiday (on Twitter, but how else is any kind of social progress made anymore? If Moses were alive today he’d have to announce the Ten Commandments on his Tumblr), called Sondheimas. Falling on March 22nd, it commemorates the Great One’s birth much in the matter of another perennially single Jewish boy whose worldview was, let’s just say, a lot less wry. (Details for its observance will be provided in the epilogue; believe me, nothing would make me happier than to be invited to your Sondheimas party next year, like I was the Joseph Smith of Jewish show queens.)

  So I set the DVR, and there he was, standing around Joe’s Pub just like — well, not exactly a regular person, but like someone who actually inhabits a similar physical plane. I had never seen him in person. We had never been in the same room before. He wore an oatmeal-colored sweater that matched his beard. At one point, he was so close I c
ould have touched his sleeve with my hand.

  “Do you want to meet him?” the event publicist asked Bob. “I’ll see if I can get him over here after the show.”

  Suddenly, I found myself thinking of Shakespeare in the Park. Not Central Park, Elmwood Park, where they used to have it in Omaha was I was a kid. There weren’t any seats or permanent structure, just a stage and some scaffolding in front of which people would spread their lawn chairs and picnic blankets, so far back and so far across that most nights, the actors were just pinpricks unintelligibly and futilely screaming their lines into the vast darkening sky — it was like every play was King Lear. The night my parents took me to see Hamlet we somehow wound up right next to the stage. For the first time, I could see everything, hear everything, understand everything. I had never seen — never imagined — anything like it. It was like being transported into another world.

  My wonder was disrupted by the arrival on the scene of Marilee, a rough-and-tumble little girl from the neighborhood who was my occasional playmate, despite us having few interests in common; Marilee liked to ride bikes and climb trees and catch fireflies in a jar, wait until they exhausted themselves trying to escape, then smear their phosphorescent innards across the grass like a grisly glow-stick; I liked staying inside and reading Summer and Smoke out loud to my panda.

  “This is boring,” she said. “Let’s go backstage at intermission and see the actors in their underpants.”

  I didn’t think you could do that, but Marilee insisted it would be fine. And I guess she was right, because when we found the entrance to the jury-rigged dressing tent behind the stage, nobody stopped us from ducking inside. The actors didn’t seem particularly pleased to see us, but they didn’t seem particularly surprised. I suppose we weren’t the first weirdly unsupervised little kids to sneak backstage. I remember Gertrude and Ophelia as being particularly kind, signing our Playbills and gamely answering my various questions which were all really the same question (“How do I get to be you?”), but the one person I really cared about was lurking alone in the shadows, pale and thin as a rake, mumbling to himself in his customary suit of solemn black.