Let Me Be Your Star

by Rachel Shukert

  “Don’t bother him, honey,” Ophelia said kindly, as if she could read my mind. “He’s really got to concentrate and think about what he’s doing. He’s Hamlet. He’s not like us.”

  And that’s exactly what I thought of when I saw him. He can’t be bothered. He’s Stephen Sondheim. He’s not like us.

  Deep down, I’m a shy person who has given a tremendous performance over the years of convincing people — mainly myself — that I’m not shy. I never would have asked to meet Sondheim, just as I never would have dared venture into the actor’s tent that night without the nihilistic determination of murderous Marilee, scourge of the fireflies. Maybe that’s why I got so drunk that night — well, that and the fact that the servers at Joe’s Pub generally like to make sure you’ve finished all your martini courses before they bring you any solid food. By the time the show was over and the beaming publicist approached our table to let us know whether the Master would see us now, I was teetering precariously into that danger zone where you sort of stop paying attention for a second and then sort of open your eyes and think, “Oh my God, am I actually talking about rim jobs to Angela Lansbury” and then you don’t know exactly how you got home or why you’re wearing a jacket with someone else’s keys in it.

  So I fled the moment that oatmeal-colored mock turtleneck neared my peripheral vision. I put myself in a taxi, promptly passed out in my couch, and woke up, panicked at 4 a.m., at which point I alternated writing my recap with vomiting a strange and foul-smelling yellow bile into my bathroom wastebasket. (A suggested title for this Single was Smashed, which I rejected for sounding like a memoir about alcoholism.)

  I filed on time, but first, I died.

  From then on, I stuck to a strict schedule. Recapping evenings — or more accurately, nights, since these were the olden, golden days in which I couldn’t even begin to start writing until 11 p.m., when the episode ended — were to be spent in a state of monastic silence, of total isolation from the world, fueled by a sort of homemade energy cocktail of half Diet Coke, half Red Bull — all the carbonation makes the methamphetamine-injected bull semen (or whatever they put in that stuff that makes it taste like gummy bears) into the bloodstream faster. I call it a “Sky Masterson,” after the insomniac gentleman gambler from Guys and Dolls. My time of day was the dark time, when the street might belong to the cop and the janitor with the mop, but all the little lights of all the glowing laptops in all the windows of New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and Austin and San Francisco and all the urban metropolises belong to the scores of the overeducated and unemployed trying to scrape out a living in this brave new Internet world. A world where attention has become a kind of currency that feeds your career but is still not accepted by any major grocery chain, eager to use the skills they spent countless hours and many tens of thousands of dollars invested in honing their playwriting and creative writing and comparative literature programs to make five cents a word analyzing every minute detail of a television program most of them would sacrifice any combination of their reproductive organs to write an episode of themselves.

  But as I typed away furiously in the darkness, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I wasn’t thinking about how I hadn’t written a play for two years, or how my agent never returned my phone calls, or that I was probably never going to have health insurance while I was still capable of natural reproduction. I didn’t think about it seemed like my apartment was always filthy and my bank account was always empty and I was somehow unable to crack four figures’ worth of Twitter followers. With such set parameters for start and finish times, my natural tendency toward procrastination and self-doubt melted away. Alone in my womblike night cave, I went into a kind of trance state, accessing memories long forgotten, making bizarre connections I’m not sure my neural synapses would have allowed me to make while under the jurisdiction of the comparatively logical sun. In my private laptop reverie, Anjelica Huston became an immortal sorceress and link to the spirit world; Ellis, the loathsome, madras-clad assistant of Tom Leavitt, the composer played by Borle, became a devious and unspecified forest creature occupying a space somewhere between the lovable Sylvanian Family toys my sister and I had spent many sun-dappled afternoons arranging among the tasteful green furniture in their miniature woodland chalet, and the satanic Christmas Critters who ritually sacrificed an infant in one of the most disturbing episodes of South Park ever. It was like living in one of those dreams where you have those amazing ideas that you can never quite remember when you wake up, except I was awake. And at my keyboard. And writing. For eight hours. All about was Ellis and his pine-needle stilts and anal beads made of juniper berries, and how Beloved Dev’s ears turned pink like Fievel Mouskewitz’s when he felt thwarted, and of course, the epistemological conundrum that baffles astrophysicists to this day: In the world of Smash, Into the Woods exists, Sunday in the Park With George exists, the 2003 Broadway revival of Gypsy exists. Bernadette Peter’s 1999 Tony acceptance speech exists (hence, Tom Wopat exists) but Bernadette Peters does not exist, because Bernadette Peters is a fictional actress named Lee Conroy. Lee Conroy, however, played Reno Sweeney in a mid-’80s revival of Anything Goes, so is Lee Conroy actually Patti LuPone? (Not in the safeword sense, just keep reading.) And since Patti LuPone exists in Smash (they never managed to talk her into making a cameo, but she was name-checked in the second season as a possible candidate for the role of Marilyn’s mother in Bombshell), is Patti LuPone then Bernadette Peters? Was Lee Conroy then Evita, and Patti LuPone the Witch? Did Glenn Close still play Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard? Does Lee Conroy subsequently have the “Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Swimming Pool” in her backyard in Connecticut? Was Patti LuPone denied a Tony nomination for playing Sally in Follies and given a commendation for her work with animals instead?

  If I could answer these questions definitively, it doesn’t matter that I need a calculator to figure out the tip on a restaurant check, I would have gotten into MIT, no questions asked, just like Will Smith.

  As soon as I finished the feverish typing and hit send, I would stagger off to bed for a few fitful hours of sleep. When I awoke, often I would have no memory of what I had written at all, until a smattering of “oh gurl” tweets and perhaps a Tumblr quote or two would start to trickle over the various feeds that let us know, Ed Koch-style, how we’re doing.

  But soon, a higher power than even social media sent two signs that it was in fact listening, and it was, in fact, extremely interested in drowsy speculation about Elaine Stritch’s possible bladder issues.

  The first came via certified mail. It was a letter, typed on creamy business stationery, from a fancy white shoe law firm. It advised me to cease and desist all publishing activity, past or present, on my upcoming book, Chicken Soup for the Immortal Anjelica Huston’s Soul. Failure to do so would result in immediate legal action on behalf of their client Chicken Soup, the little brother from Really Rosie.

  (No, I’m kidding. As I was writing this, it suddenly occurred to me that for my own protection, perhaps I’d better not mention their client exactly by name. But I bet you can hazard a guess.)

  Faced with such an intimidating threat, I did what anyone in my position would do: I took the letter and read it out loud at a stand-up comedy open mike night. A few days later, the lawyer sent me another, somehow more strongly worded, missive advising me in the strongest possible terms to respond “in writing” at my earliest possible convenience.

  I am a child of the future, so I emailed: “I have no fucking idea what you are talking about.” (Although this being a piece of business correspondence, the “fucking” was invisible.)

  He responded by directing me to my “New York Magazine blog of March 6, 2012” in which I had written the following offending paragraph:

  Anjelica Huston doesn’t need much from her assistants, as a rule. If immortality teaches you anything, it’s not to sweat the small stuff. Living through plagues and genocides, seeing the first flicker of wonder in the eyes of primeval man
as he realized this newfangled invention called “fire” could cook his meat, warm his heart, and consign into ashes those with whom he had religious or political disagreements makes you realize that it doesn’t matter what temperature your latte is, it’s that you have a latte at all. (My new book, Chicken Soup for the Immortal Anjelica Huston’s Soul, will be at print-on-demand kiosks in bookstores everywhere in April.)

  I replied that this was something called a “joke” and I had no intention of publishing any such book. He wrote back saying that even if this was true, my “joke” was still a violation of his client’s valuable franchise, and that the offending post would have to be removed immediately, or else, at which time I drafted an email reading, “You know what, I wasn’t planning to write a book with this title, but now that you’ve told me of the millions and millions of dollars your client had made peddling this crap, you’ve convinced me. Please find attached, for your approval, the entire text of my opus, Chicken Soup for the Immortal Anjelica Huston’s Soul.

  “1. Get a chicken.

  “2. Cut head off chicken.

  “3. Pour blood from chicken’s still-warm body into soup bowl.

  “4. Eat blood with soup spoon while gazing pensively into middle distance, thinking of those you have loved and lost but mostly loved as waves crash against the shore next to your Martha’s Vineyard beach cottage.”

  But then I opened my bank statement right before I pressed send and immediately came to my senses. Instead, I forward the entirety of our correspondence to my editor at New York Magazine and never heard about any of it again. Bitch don’t play that shit.

  So that was the first sign from the universe (even though I’m not really the kind of person who believes in cosmic signifiers, unless they’re the kind coming out of the young Linda Lavin’s mouth in Pythia Schwartzbaum, the infamous 1966 Broadway flop I just made up about the awkward daughter of an unassuming Jewish dry-cleaner who is unexpectedly chosen as the new Oracle of the fictional suburb of Delphi, New Jersey).

  The second was an email from Marc Shaiman.

  The Marc Shaiman. Emperor of the Oscar-night parody medley (something extremely dear to my heart); composer of my favorite movie score of all time (City Slickers); with his partner, Scott Wittman, the Tony-Award winning writer of Hairspray, and more pertinently, of Bombshell, Smash’s musical-within-a-musical about Marilyn Monroe. Oh, and a personal hero of mine, with seems to deserve better than a semicolon.

  Marc and Scott were enjoying my recaps. “Thanks for the laughs,” they said.

  Immediately, I emailed back to thank him, telling him I was insanely flattered, a huge fan, your humble servant, etc., etc., expecting that to be the end of it. To my surprise, Marc emailed me back again, so I emailed him back, and pretty soon, we were having a full-on virtual conversation about the fate of the crimping iron Barbra Streisand had used in preparation for the 1992 Academy Awards (Prince of Tides year). Now I am become Internet, destroyer of boundaries.

  I admit, I did wonder slightly if I was violating some sort of journalistic ethics by corresponding with Marc. But I wasn’t a critic, in a technical sense. We weren’t talking about the show. And I had been a member — albeit a peripheral one — of the theatrical community since before Karen Cartwright was a twinkle in Stephen Spielberg’s eye, a community that, to a chorus boy, Smash was keeping in paychecks and intermittent health insurance. It was the closest thing we much-maligned children of the Reagan era might ever have to the WPA. If I were supposed to uphold total isolation from it for the duration of my recapping, I would have to recuse myself from virtually everyone I knew, just as I actually had something to talk to them about again. And I’m sorry, but I don’t work for The New York Times.

  Besides, the circle of people I “knew” (or whatever that means in our social-media age, the constant maintenance of which sometimes feels like a vast conspiracy engineered by all the third-grade teachers in America as revenge for your failing to keep up with your pen-pal project) was growing every day. Marc’s email seemed to have opened the floodgates, and as it became clear that Smash was not exactly the awards-season juggernaut/restorative jewel in NBC’s tarnished crown that the network had intended to be, it seemed like everybody who had ever hoarded a few old Playbills wanted to talk to me about Ellis’s many-gendered make-out scenes or Debra Messing’s bizarre costuming choices that made her look like a Buddhist nun who had mistakenly wandered into a Renaissance Faire or the way the eating and/or preparation of salad always seemed to presage a terrible betrayal, much like the presence of oranges in the Godfather movies. I suddenly had twice as many Twitter followers and a whole slew of new Facebook friends, some of who eventually turned into real friends. Young, three-named musical theater luminaries — Lin-Manuel Miranda, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Jason Robert Brown — started hitting me up on Twitter. (If it sounds like I’m name-dropping, it’s because I am. Finally.) FunnyorDie.com asked me to write a Smash-themed video short for them to promote the second season (although sadly, we didn’t get to make it for reasons too complicated — and litigious — to list here; after all, I had just gotten the fucking chicken soup people off my back). Joanna Gleason, AKA the original Baker’s Wife in the original Into the Woods sent me a Facebook message asking if she could take me out to lunch, making me seriously wonder if I was dying and concerned friends had secretly enrolled me in some sort of adult Make-A-Wish program. Frank Rich had been sending my recaps around to people, I was told, and I heard more than one whisper that Sondheim himself was, if not reading them, vaguely aware of them. (I have since chosen to disbelieve this, for my own sanity.) Every day it seemed there was another little Facebook poke, another little mention from some name of names. The people I had dreamed of from afar suddenly knew who I was. It was a whole new world. I felt like the part of the movie where the newspapers start spinning and you see me, in clothing of increasing elegance, going from burlesque to vaudeville to the Ziegfeld Follies, and then at the end I’m famous and can finally live the ultimate show biz dream of drinking myself to death in a giant art deco penthouse high in the twinkling sky of the Manhattan night.

  Except that I was sobbing on the bathroom floor of a public restroom in Central Park, because Tony Kushner had spoken to me, and cementing forever my inescapable identity as the Elizabeth Gilbert of the Marie’s Crisis set. At least it’s a lot cleaner than it used to be. (The Central Park bathroom, that is. Not Marie’s Crisis. I’m trying to make it through another year hepatitis free.)

  I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and this why I think I was crying that night. Some of it was from being overwhelmed by the fact that a person I admired more than almost anyone else in the world thought I had done something good, or at least, something amusing. But it was also because my recognition had come from someone else’s misfortune. I was the figure skater that won the gold medal because someone else had fallen on her ass at the Olympics.

  * * *

  Here is a compilation of everything I called Karen Cartwright, the character who played everyone’s second-favorite McPhactress (the first is Jack MacFarlane, even though it’s spelled with an “F”) over the course of two seasons. Are you ready?

  Karen Cartwright.

  A Joseph Cornell box absent any hint of psychosexual tension. A “Looks 10, Dance 3” kind of situation… like she’s trying to do the Balanchine infinite line thing but just winds up looking like Charles Nelson Reilly. Incontrovertible proof that the know-nothings have at last succeeded in completely subverting the American empirical experiment. Dead below the waist. Mamie van Doren. Friends with your roommate freshman year, until she decided to transfer to the University of Colorado, where people were “real” instead of “fake” like you, you self-involved bitch. Inspector Javert of the Forever 21 set. Limp little Kleenex wad of a person. The human equivalent of an abandoned doggie chew toy you have to bribe your toddler with Mr. Softee to keep from putting in his mouth. Obnoxious and disliked, you know that, sir. Going to be America’s first post-racial
sweetheart (besides Michelle Obama, that is) if it kills you and me and every other person in North America who has ever so much as uttered the words “Laura Benanti.” A dried out little shred of fruit cocktail. That little puddle of soap scum that somehow always collects around the rim of the fancy decorative dispenser you started put the dish detergent in because that’s how far you’ve come and you don’t live like the girls in Girls anymore but it gets your hands sticky every time you touch it and how can soap make you feel dirty. One of those grocery store peaches that looks like a Cezanne but tastes like the inside of a mattress. A stupid, stupid, curdled little Dannon yogurt person. The least attentive waitress at Café Orlin. A wan little Lego person. Depressive Pixie Dream Girl. Damp Scrabble rack of only I and U’s. Crumpled little Duane Reade receipt you stuck your gum in and then forgot you stuffed back into your purse until it was too late. Not the reincarnation of Estelle Getty. The anthropomorphized cluster of hair follicles and air-conditioning condensation. Narcoleptic. Jimmy’s own flaccid penis wearing an ombré wig. A passive little fruit sticker. Sad little clump of acrylic yarn that someone has put a statement blouse on. Sad little half empty bag of dried out baby carrots that are technically still edible and there’s no other food in the fridge. An unfinished airline magazine crossword puzzle who is unconvincingly successfully masquerading as a human being. The semi-animate embodiment of a plastic container of fruit salad from which someone has already picked out all the grapes and pineapple, leaving only a few sodden cubes of honeydew melon. A crumpled Duane Reade bag that somehow got stuck to her shoe in Times Square, and who NBC is now building a Cagney and Lacey-style procedural around in a not at all doomed attempt to re-brand Katharine McPhee as a butt-kicking Michelle Monaghan-type action star, but don’t worry, McPhans, she’ll still sing. A limp sheet of already-popped bubble wrap that scientists at the University of Indiana have managed to fit with a partially working artificial larynx. Your American Idol.