by Tina Fey
Larry didn’t set out to create a haven for gay teens, but you know how sometimes squirrels eat out of a bird feeder? Larry built a beautiful bird feeder, and the next thing you knew—full of squirrels.
I took a job as the night box office manager at Summer Showtime because my eleventh-grade boyfriend said we’d have fun there. He promptly broke up with me to date a hot blond dancer girl to whom he is now married, God bless us every one. I should have known he and I weren’t going to make it when for my seventeenth birthday he gave me a box of microwave popcorn and a used battery tester.
You know, to test batteries before I put them in my Walkman. Like you give someone when you’re in love.
Those first few nights of being freshly, brutally dumped and sitting alone in the box office were not so great. I was heartbroken and, because no one had central air back then, I had to cry myself to sleep on the floor under the air conditioner in my parents’ room. But then, like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz, my world went from black-and-white to color. Because, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I was embraced by the gays. They loved me and praised me. I was so funny and so mean and mature for my age! And with my large brown eyes I really did look like a young Judy Garland Lorna Luft.
Before my evening shift, I would hang out with my new friend Tim, who ran the costume department. Tim had the highest, loudest voice you’ve ever heard. I could sit there for hours listening to him screech along to “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” while hot-gluing Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat together because none of us could really sew. Parents of the world, this is where you want your seventeen-year-old daughter spending her summer—snorting her DQ Blizzard out her nose from laughing so hard. The only person funnier than Tim was his meaner, louder, higher-pitched brother Tristan. One family, two impressively gay brothers.
That summer I got to know four families in which half the children were gay. In case you’re interested from a sociological point of view, they were always Catholic and there were always four kids, two of whom were gay. What Wales is to crooners, my hometown may be to homosexuals—meaning there seems to be a disproportionate number of them and they are the best in the world!
Tristan would egg me on to trash-talk the little blondie who had “stolen” my boyfriend. Of course I know now that no one can “steal” boyfriends against their will, not even Angelina Jolie itself.
But I was filled with a poisonous, pointless teenage jealousy, which, when combined with gay cattiness, can be intoxicating. Like mean meth. And guess who played Joseph in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, by the way? You guessed it, old Battery-Tester Joe. I got to watch him in the show every night and then count my stubs in a four-foot room while he and the blonde left to get pizza.
He would’ve never given her a crappy battery tester. And if he had, she probably would have shoved it up her twat and tried to turn it on. (This is the kind of mean stuff Tristan and I bonded over. Clearly it’s very toxic.)
The unstated thing that Tim and I had in common was that we had crushes on all the same boys.
The only difference was, I was allowed to talk endlessly about my feelings and Tim was in the half closet.
Nobody thought he was straight, but he wasn’t “out” either. He certainly never made a move on anyone. His crushes would manifest themselves in other ways. Tim had a real job working at Macy’s, and sometimes he would use his disposable income to, you know, buy Rick McMenamin a baseball glove.
“You were saying the other night after rehearsal how you needed a new glove, so… anyhoo,” he’d trail off. The nice thing was, the straight boys didn’t freak out about this, and they definitely kept all the free stuff.
Lots of teenage girls have taken comfort under the wings of half-closeted gay boys, but how many of us can brag that her two best friends in high school were twenty-five-year-old lesbians? I met Karen and Sharon one day in the middle of our giant thousand-seat auditorium. The kid who ran the lighting booth, a roughneck girl named Rita who would only answer to “Reet,” was climbing from ladder to ladder hanging lights for The Jungle Book and cursing like a sailor with a corneal paper cut. Karen was the improv teacher and Sharon was the head scenic painter, and the three of us found ourselves spellbound by the spinning mobile of profanity that was hanging from the ceiling. It was like looking in the monkey cage but you can understand the monkey, and what the monkey is saying is “Fuck all these fucking zoo people.” We started laughing and were inseparable for the next six years.
Karen and Sharon had been a couple at some unspecified time in the past but were now just friends with asymmetrical haircuts. We spent days and weeks doing nothing, calling one another ten times a day to schedule our nothing-doing. An entire evening could consist of renting a movie, such as The Stepfather or that one where spiders come out of Martin Sheen’s face, and making nachos. Do you remember what a cultural phenomenon homemade nachos were? If you are under thirty, you probably don’t even realize there was a time when people didn’t have nachos. We just stood around eating crackers.
You know that game Celebrity that you and your friends invented in college? Well, first of all, you didn’t invent it. It was developed by NASA to keep girls virgins well into their twenties. And second of all, we played it better than you because we played it four nights a week. We wore it out. “Okay, this is Joan Collins’s character from Dynasty.” “Alexis!” “No, her full name.” “Alexis Carrington Colby Dexter!”
When we finally got tired of playing, around midnight, we would switch to a version called Celebrity Boff, in which you could only write down the names of celebrities you would sleep with.
Playing Celebrity Boff with two half-closeted gay guys, two lesbians, and one straight girl made for an easy game. Jodie Foster’s name was always in there four times. Antonio Banderas appealed to all sectors. “This is that same one we keep getting—” “Princess Stephanie of Monaco!”
It is a testament to my parents that they never reacted negatively to the four-year-long pride parade that marched through their house. They welcomed these weirdos (they were weirdos in other ways, not because of their sexual preference) with open arms and fed them all until they were sick. Only once did my mother say, “That Karen is a little butch, don’t you think?” I feigned ignorance badly, “I not know what you mean!” and slipped out for a night of same-sex nachos and name yelling.
I guess I should also state that Karen and Sharon never hit on me in the slightest and it was never weird between any of us. Gay people don’t actually try to convert people. That’s Jehovah’s Witnesses you’re thinking of.
No one was ever turned gay by being at Summer Showtime, because that’s not possible. If you could turn gay from being around gay people, wouldn’t Kathy Griffin be Rosie O’Donnell by now? The straight boys quickly learned to be accepting and easygoing, and the straight girls learned over the course of several years to stop falling in love with gay boys.
By August, I was coming out of my gloom. I took a free afternoon dance class where we basically just did jazz runs back and forth across the lobby. The teacher called me “Frankenstein Arms” because I would move my right arm in unison with my right leg, like a Frankenstein. Since I had been thrown over for a dancer, this stung. But I persevered.
I was the youngest person in our group of friends and I always had a curfew. I was notorious for freaking out when it was time to go. It didn’t matter if we were at local eatery the Critic’s Choice enjoying mozzarella sticks after a rehearsal or at Tim and Tristan’s house watching Sleepaway Camp—the one where the demonic little girl turns out to have a penis—when I had to go, I would shut a party down. “Hurry up. I don’t want to get in trouble.” Pleated eighties Bossypants.
When the summer was over, I had made about twenty-five new friends and was no longer weeping into my mom’s radiator cover. But most of the kids in Summer Showtime went to the Catholic schools down the road or were well into their twenties, so I didn’t see them as much once school started
.
After the Greatest Summer
I had to take eleventh-grade health in twelfth grade. I had postponed it the year before so I could take choir and Encore Singers—it was kind of a big deal to be in both, whatever. I was alto 1, but sometimes they had me sing second soprano. I had a solo in “O Holy Night” in a performance at the mall. In downtown Philadelphia. Enough! Stop asking about it!
The health teacher, Mr. Garth, had a thick blond mustache—the universal sign of intelligence—and a rural-Pennsylvania accent that made him say “dawn” instead of “down” and
“yuman” instead of “human.” One day, in what I hope was a departure from the state curriculum, Mr.
Garth devoted an entire period to teaching us “how to spot and avoid homosexuals.” I could not believe what I was hearing.
I don’t know what happened to this guy at the Teachers College of Anthraciteville, but he had some opinions. “These homosexuals, they’ll trick ya. They’ll fine out what kinda music ya like, what kinda candy ya like, then they’ll invite you dawn to their house.” As I listened, incredulous, I couldn’t help but picture a young Mr. Garth being lured into a van by Paul Lynde. “Hey there, sonny, my friends and I were just going into the woods to enjoy some Jethro Tull and a Mars bar. Interested?” Oh, the shame that must have washed over Mr. Garth as “Minstrel in the Gallery” came to an end and he realized that was no Mars bar! But there was no turning back. He had already eaten half of it.
My blood started to boil as he continued. “If you’re talking to someone and you think they might be a homosexual, just run. Just get out of there and tell the nearest adult.” I stayed after class to tell him that I thought he had misspoken. “I think what you meant to say was ‘child molesters,’ not
‘homosexuals.’ ” He just watched my hands move as I talked, not unlike a dog. It became clear that my school life and my Showtime life were separate.
The Greatest New Year’s Eve Party of All Time
The line between Showtime friends and school friends was breached on New Year’s Eve 1987.
My Summer Showtime friend Brendan had a New Year’s Eve party. Brendan was a very dramatic boy who would say things to me like “Did you ever think that maybe the man that did that to your face did it to mark you so he could find you later in life?” See what I mean about the question being a reflection of the asker? When Brendan lost himself in a long dramatic rant, you could always shut him up by saying, “I like that monologue. Is it from ’night, Mother?”
He had a beautiful face with pouty lips and that swoopy hair that was so popular during the second Reagan administration. He was the scenic artist under Sharon and he would do things like paint the entire floor of the stage an hour before a performance (ruining the white shorts the kids had been asked to bring in from home to be in the chorus of “Free to Be… You and Me”). Then he’d disappear for two days, emerging with a ten-page letter of apology. He was a mess, and his New Year’s party was expected to be awesome.
I was a teetotaler at the time, and none of my close friends were big drinkers. I went with Karen and Sharon, and the place was already packed when we got there. The kitchen and dining room were full of Brendan’s athletic Catholic school friends; the living room was packed with theater nerds.
Brendan’s mom had locked herself in her room upstairs. There was an unclaimed dog turd in the hall outside the bathroom.
People sat in small groups, talking about the other small groups that were just out of earshot.
My ex and the dancer made a brief appearance, but I held my head high. I was wearing my best Gap turtleneck and my dates were two adult lesbians, so yeah, I was pretty cool.
The Summer Showtime kids had to weave nervously through the jocks to get to the Doritos.
Brendan’s long-suffering Catholic school “girlfriend,” Patty, tried to bridge the gap between the two groups. A sweet, quiet girl with short curly hair and a face as Irish as a scone, Patty seemed to be the only person at the party who didn’t realize what Brendan’s deal was—even the family dog had registered his disapproval again on the kitchen floor.
Brendan and I ran into each other on the front lawn. He seemed to be in a particularly Oscar Wilde mood. “May I kiss you?” he asked. Sure, who cares. After a tender, playacted non-French kiss, Brendan suddenly “came out” to me. In my experience, the hardest thing about having someone “come out” to you is the “pretending to be surprised” part. You want him to feel like what he’s telling you is Big. It’s like, if somebody tells you they’re pregnant, you don’t say, “I did notice you’ve been eating like a hog lately.” Your gay friend has obviously made a big decision to say the words out loud. You don’t want him to realize that everybody’s known this since he was ten and he wanted to be Bert Lahr for Halloween. Not the Cowardly Lion, but Bert Lahr. “Oh, my gosh, no waaaay?” You stall, trying to think of something more substantial to say. “Is everyone, like, freaking out? What a… wow.”
Brendan had clearly decided to make this party his debut, and he wandered through the crowd, performing his one-man show in various locations.
Bored, I tried making out with Victor Anthony, a straight kid who was cute but kind of a wang.
He was the Cream of Wheat of making out. I would try it every now and then, thinking maybe I’d like it, but every time: no. He really was a stunningly bad kisser. It was as if he took a running start at your mouth. Brendan’s stage kiss was way more skilled.
I went back inside and parked it with Karen and Sharon in the theater living room, where Brendan was deep into Act II of “coming out.” The Monsignor Bonner football team was peering in from the dining area, hearing all of this. “Here’s a toast to being free of other people’s expectations,” Brendan monologued, “and loving whomever you choose.” In the background, scone-face Patty was quietly giving people coasters. Jesus, she was really not getting it.
This evening was actually turning out to be quite boring. But then it happened.
One of the drunk girls from the Archbishop Prendergast side of the party wandered into the Showtime room and started making out with Alexis Catalano. Everyone froze. Patty looked on, scone-faced. This was unprecedented. Brendan talked a good game, but these two were going at it—in public! This was years before every pop singer in the world started fake lezzing out at the VMAs. It simply was not done. What would happen next? Karen and Sharon went into protective adult mode and pulled the two wasted girls apart and took them upstairs to a more private location.
Just then Brendan’s mom—who was totally unaware of the proceedings—started screaming and throwing everyone’s coats down the stairs, which shall henceforth be known as An Irish Goodnight.
Brendan’s mom may have perfected my “party shutdown” move, but it didn’t stop me from working it at the amateur level. I followed the four women upstairs, ducking the flying parkas, because it was almost two A.M.: my special expanded New Year’s Eve curfew. Karen was my ride and we needed to get a move on. Alexis and jock girl were so drunk they could barely function. Karen and Sharon tried to convince them it was time to call it a night. They would give them a ride home. “Noooo, I loooooove herrrr,” jock girl sobbed as Karen helped her get her coat on. I said I’d be waiting in the car and they needed to hurry up.
Meanwhile, Brendan stormed out of the house and drove away, furious—probably because he had “lost the room” when two girls started going to town on each other.
After I’d been waiting in the car twenty minutes and missed my curfew, I couldn’t control my temper anymore. “Get the dykes in the car!” I screamed down Childs Avenue, banging my shoe on Karen’s dashboard and leaving a slight crack. My husband could tell you that I still get this wound up when I’m trying to leave the house on a Saturday morning and nobody in my family has their shoes on.
It’s not a great quality.
(And just in case you were wondering, yes—when he returned later that night, Brendan tried to run Patty and his mother over with the car. I beli
eve it earned him a Regional Theater Tony nomination.)
The Second Summer
My second year at Summer Showtime, I was promoted to be one of the Children’s Theater directors. I directed shows with a cast of sixty twelve-year-olds and, I’ll toot my own horn, I made some interesting directing choices. Such as pushing the Little Mermaid around on a rolling office chair papier-mâchéd to look like a large shell. Her hair only got caught in the wheels twice.
I knew everyone. I was fully immersed. “Immersed,” Brendan would say. “You’re so smart. Why don’t I know more people who use words like ‘immersed’?” And then he’d disappear for two days. He may have been a drunk.
Sharon’s brother Sean was our “visiting director” for the Mainstage musical. Everyone referred to him as Equity Actor Sean Kenny. He was a member of the stage actors union! He was living the dream in a basement-level studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with a rat problem. We were all in awe.
Sean was and is a skilled and confident director. I was excited to be his assistant director on a murder mystery musical called Something’s Afoot.
My first job as assistant director was to make sure he didn’t cast the talented blond dancer who had so easily stolen my boyfriend the summer before. I accomplished this with the persistent and skilled manipulation of a grade A bitch. I made articulate arguments as to why the other blond girl would be better. The Dancer Girl was “too overused.” It would be more exciting to “use someone unexpected,”
