A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  New American Library

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014

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  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  First Printing, June 2015

  Copyright © Alexandra Petri, 2015

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  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Petri, Alexandra.

  A field guide to awkward silences/Alexandra Petri.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-15552-7

  1. Petri, Alexandra. 2. Journalists—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN4874.P455A3 2015

  070.92—dc23 2015001217

  [B]

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  For Mom and Dad and all those times you turned to me and whispered, “That would make good material.”

  I hope you weren’t kidding.

  Names and identifying characteristics of most of the individuals featured throughout this book have been changed to protect their privacy. Any resemblance to other persons, living or dead, is unintentional.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Disclaimer

  1. How Not to Be Awkward

  2. Flopper

  3. Five Uneasy Pieces

  4. Ten General Rules

  5. How to Talk to People

  6. Tuesdays with Hitler

  7. Go Whistle for It

  8. How to Join a Cult, by Mistake, on a Tuesday, in Fifty-Seven Easy Steps

  9. Teen Jesus

  10. Your Prize Came

  11. The Naked Pun

  12. Unreconstructed

  13. Trivial Pursuit

  14. Grab Life by the Debutante Balls

  15. Time Traveler’s Yelp

  16. We Are Not a Muse

  17. Tall Tales

  18. It’s a Trap!

  19. Dietary Restrictions

  20. Under the Dome

  21. Self-Defense Tips for Fairy-Tale Girls

  22. Internet Bitch

  23. The Dog in the Manger

  24. So Far, So Good

  Acknowledgments

  How Not to Be Awkward

  I have no idea.

  Well, how about this? Don’t do any of the following.

  Flopper

  I am afraid of many things. Drowning, fire, the disapproval of strangers on the Internet, that I’ll be hit by a bus without having had a chance to clear my browser history, that one day everyone else on the subway will suddenly be able to hear what I am thinking and turn on me. You know, the usuals.

  One thing I’m not afraid of? Looking like an idiot.

  See, I knew I was a writer. That was protection. No matter where I went, no matter what I did, I could turn it into a story. Fall through a hole in the sidewalk? Story. Make the worst Final Jeopardy! wager of all time? Story. Anger the lord of the ocean, stab a one-eyed guy, and get very, very lost on my way home to Ithaca? Epic story.

  Those were the two things I knew about myself: that I was a writer, and that I didn’t mind looking stupid. Growing up, you figure out pretty quickly which of your friends is the person who doesn’t mind looking like an idiot, and that was me, hands down. I was the one going over to strangers and asking if the mothership had landed. I was the one standing in an airport with a giant foam cow hat on my head, accordion open, ready to greet friends as they landed, and not even because I’d lost a bet. Mortification was a poison to which I had built up immunity after years of exposure. Besides, it was much less embarrassing to be me than to have to stand next to me and admit you were with me.

  And the writer in me had noticed that the bigger of an idiot you appeared to be, the better the story was. Nobody wants to hear, “And everything went smoothly, just exactly according to plan.” Something had to go wrong. You had to trip up. That was where the excitement lay.

  I collected experiences the way some people collect old coins or commemorative stamps.

  One year, for fun, I called the ExtenZe male enhancement hotline every day for a month, with different voices, just to see what would happen. (What happened, if you want to know, was that Phoebe, who worked the dinner shift, got annoyed when I identified myself as Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a fun fact about the ExtenZe male enhancement hotline is that they make you identify yourself before you start your call) and threatened to transfer me to the police.)

  All of this seemed to be leading to some kind of grand adventure. I sat there, glumly, waiting for a wizard to drop by the house and invite me to steal dragon-gold, or a wise old man in a brown hoodie to offer to teach me the ways of the Force. But no one showed. I would have to strike out on my own.

  What was a field in which a willingness to look foolish might come in handy?

  Of course! Reality television.

  Like anyone growing up after 1980, I always had the dim, nagging sense that I was supposed to be famous for something. A certain measure of fame just seems like our birthright these days, next to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Food, shelter, Wi-Fi, and the sense that someone’s watching; these are the modern requirements for survival. The only thing more terrifying than the feeling you’re being watched is the feeling that you’re not. Privacy is just an uncomfortable reminder that you’re not a celebrity.

  My portion of fame, I knew, was waiting somewhere, neatly labeled in a holding facility. To claim it, all I’d have to do would be to fill out some sort of form and show up in the designated audition city. And until that moment it was my right, as an American, to stare at the television and mutter, “I could do that.”

  • • •

  If I were being really honest with myself, these people I saw competing on television all possessed skills that I lacked—whether on American Idol or America’s Got Talent or even America’s Most Wanted. I could hold a tune, but only the way you hold a stranger’s cat: not closely and not long (not to mention the strange yowling noises). I Got some talents, all right—excellent grammar, for one—but they weren’t the kind of thing that would exactly sing on the national stage. Whenever I tried to “smize,” model-style, people asked if I’d been possessed by an ancient and evil spirit. I had never murdered anyone, to the best of my knowledge, and if I did I would certainly not elude capture for long.

  But there are always two ways of making it on the air: to be spectacular, and to be spectacularly bad. The second group was more fun to watch anyway. Why be Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood or that one ventriloquist guy whose puppets all seemed oddly racist (get new dummies, Terry
Fator! Then you won’t have to sit there with a pained expression while they rant about the people taking our jobs), when you could be short, sweatshirted William Hung, wrangling his painfully earnest way through “She Bangs!” or Leonid the Magnificent, dropping his equipment as the big red X’s buzzed above him, weeping profusely and promising that “next time, I will be perfect”? Sure, on one path lay Kelly’s international fame and Terry’s bucket-loads of gold, but on the other lay William’s Christmas album, Hung for the Holidays. Now that was what I called a career trajectory. That was a story!

  And that was going to be my way in.

  I was going to seek failure out—on the national stage, with a glowing neon X attached.

  The plan was simple. I just had to become dramatically, unquestionably, horrifically bad at something. I had to get myself in front of the judges and flop like no one they’d seen before.

  Maybe, if I worked hard, I could become just as earth-shatteringly terrible as my idols and wind up on the air. It certainly seemed like my best shot.

  • • •

  My trouble was that I’d had little practice failing. I came up during a very specific era of child-rearing in which everyone seemed to believe that if Little Sally ever failed at anything, ever, she was going to be completely wrecked for life. Dutifully they set about sanding off the sharp edges of existence and childproofing all possible scenarios against hazards of choking under pressure. Trophies for everyone! A part for everyone in the school play. No failure. No rejection. You are a golden snowflake. Have a sticker.

  For someone who hoped to make a career of rejection, this was a considerable setback.

  I had no opportunity to pursue failure in high school either, where, distressingly, I kept succeeding at things. By senior year, I had been appointed president of four clubs and had mysteriously become captain of the volleyball team, even though I never left the bench. As a flop, I was a failure.

  College was a different story. With a clean slate and thousands of people who didn’t know that I was doing it on purpose, I could begin my training for the big bomb.

  I began collecting rejections.

  There is an art, as I quickly learned, to flopping. You can’t just be bad. Half the art is knowing how to go too far. You must keep a straight face. If you’re auditioning, you must sing badly, but feelingly. You must put the emphasis on the wrong syllable, read comedy as tragedy and tragedy as comedy. Overact, overgesture, pause for no reason midsentence and open and close your mouth like a bewildered carp. You must, in a word, turn in a whole performance.

  I began my training in my freshman year, auditioning for plays under a false name. You could be more convincingly terrible, I discovered, when you had a backstory, so I crafted a character. Her name was Gloria Nichols. She had recently lost a lot of weight, loved to make bold gestures where no bold gestures were called for, and was polite to excess, striving to please an unseen vocal teacher who told her she had great promise.

  “Any talents?” the student directors asked.

  “I have heart!” I wrote. “And kidneys!”

  • • •

  Gradually, I broadened my scope. I auditioned for the Women in Science Players Ensemble. It was the first audition I’d seen listed that was on campus but involved no one I could conceivably ever have met. For my monologue, I recited Yoda’s death scene from Return of the Jedi in its entirety, doing all the voices. It was a natural choice; as a Star Wars fan, I already had the dialogue memorized.

  “Lu-uke,” I croaked. “There is another s—ky—wa—kk-errr.”

  When it was over, they looked at me. They seemed to be deciding whether to be angry or confused.

  “What possessed you to choose this as your monologue?” they asked.

  “Star Wars is science,” I said.

  It was a start.

  Later that fall, when I saw a Craigslist ad for Halloween Dancers, I knew it was directed at me . . . even though my dance experience was restricted to the five miserable years of ballet that gets foisted on every girl of a certain demographic too timid to play soccer.

  To give you an idea of how good I was at ballet, when we performed The Nutcracker, I played the Girl with the Butterfly Net. There is no such character in The Nutcracker. After each scene of the real ballet was finished, I ran across the stage holding a butterfly net.

  The Craigslist ad was for “Pussycat Doll–Style Dancers.” As far as I could tell, it did not require prior experience, and it paid.

  The audition was all the way out in Quincy, Massachusetts. I took the subway there from Cambridge, since I somehow had the naive idea that everything in Quincy was located conveniently on top of the T stop. This turned out not to be the case. Having decided to look the part, I found myself walking along Massachusetts State Highway 3A in leopard-print leggings and a tank top. Cars kept slowing. I waved them on.

  The ad listed the audition location as My House, which I assumed was a bar because of the capital letters. But bars usually don’t have doorbells.

  Another thing I realized when I finally arrived was that I had forgotten to choreograph the requested five minutes of dance. The only song on my iPod of more than four minutes was “Will You Be There” by Michael Jackson. That would have to do.

  Despite the doorbell, My House was, in fact, a bar. (I can tell you this definitely only because I Googled it later, but there were some clues on arriving.) The overall aesthetic inside was sort of like a gentrified barn, whose previous cow occupants had all been forced to become leather couches or leave. Everything was dark wood. The main room gave off a vaguely baffled vibe, like it didn’t quite know whether the party theme was Hip Happening Club Scene Place, Man Cave with Leather Chairs, or Old-Timey Stage Set, and was trying to split the difference.

  On getting inside, I discovered a large stage area cleared away. There were a few unenthusiastic colored spotlights on the ceiling that seemed to have been laid off from a job at a strip club to which their talents had been much better suited. Near the dance floor, at a table, sat two judges, a black man and woman who looked to be in their mid-thirties, both of whom seemed friendly and encouraging.

  “I’m here for the dance audition,” I told them. They gave me a still-friendly but mildly perplexed look, the kind of look I assume you would give someone if you crawled out of the desert starving on hands and knees and someone handed you a jar of pickles. It was the kind of look you get when that person unwraps your gift, and there’s a longish pause, and then the recipient starts to tell you that it was a Really Lovely Thought.

  “I brought my own music,” I added.

  Five minutes is a much longer time than you think it is. Having run through my entire repertoire of dance moves in the first minute, growing from a seed into a tree and then back, Flowers-for-Algernon-style, I decided that I would repeat each movement eight times while turning slowly counterclockwise.

  This was when the male judge burst into smothered laughter and darted from the room.

  When the music finished, the remaining judge suggested I try something “more upbeat.” I gyrated futilely to Justin Timberlake while she made notes. On my way out (“Don’t call us. We’ll call.”), I leaned over her notebook and glimpsed the phrase “Good enthusiasm.”

  They didn’t call.

  But that was perfect. I had flopped, big-time, with earnestness and a straight face!

  I was ready to move on to bigger pastures.

  That summer, I signed up to audition for America’s Next Top Model.

  It has always been my unwavering conviction that I would make a great After model. I’m okay looking, but if someone told you I had just lost sixty pounds, I would look incredible. This, I figured, would be my “in.”

  In order to appear on America’s Next Top Model, you have to fill out a thirteen-page form detailing such things as “Have you ever been so angry you threw something?” (“My ba
ck out, one time,” I ventured.) “What would bother you most about living in a house with nine to thirteen other people?” (“Not knowing more specifically the number of people in the house.”) “What in the past do you regret?” (“The Holocaust.”)

  The audition itself was brief, but the afternoon entailed a lot of waiting around in heels. I befriended one fellow auditioner who had also failed to print out her demo shots in time, and we commiserated at the Rite Aid as we tried to coax the digital printer into submission. I had had some friends take shots of me posing in what I hoped was a model-like fashion the night before, but when I tried to print them out on my parents’ printer, it did that thing that printers do where they insist that they Absolutely Physically Cannot Print Unless All the Colors Have Been Loaded, Because Black Just Doesn’t Feel It Would Be Right to Take This Big Step Without Cyan Present.

  It was unnerving to be waiting for my prints to come next to someone who actually wanted it. She kept talking about her strategy for winning, pointing out the flaws and weaknesses of the other girls in line. I couldn’t see any flaws or weaknesses, other than maybe that they were too skinny and attractive and might blow over in a high wind. I couldn’t tell her I was there to lose. Instead, I stood there smiling amiably and murmuring that everyone “looked like a model,” which seemed safe.

  When you got in front of the judges you had to walk your model walk, which, since I was in heels, was difficult. In heels, I always look like something that is walking on land for the first time—less Ariel than some kind of recently evolved amphibian. I teetered boldly from one end of the designated Walk space to the other, trying to be Fierce like Tyra said. I handed them my photos.

  They asked us to tell a video camera the craziest thing we’d ever done to win a contest. I told them about the time I had crashed a dog show and run the agility course myself. “It wasn’t really about winning the contest,” I admitted, “but it certainly seemed to unnerve the other dogs.” (This had occurred in Bermuda and had, I realized, been good practice for making an idiot of myself. As a general note, if you ever want to run a dog agility course, just tell the organizer that you need to do it in honor of your deceased dog, “Topanga.” This was what I did, and to my total surprise, they cleared the dogs off the course and let me run it. It may have helped that I was wearing a helmet at the time. I had recently gotten off a moped, but the organizer had no way of knowing that and it probably looked to her as though something ominous was the matter with me. P.S. Dog agility courses are hard, especially if you are not entirely sober.)