Sounds Like Crazy

by Mahaffey, Shana

  I had to carry Charmin with me wherever I went. This was one of Betty Jane’s rules. Only Charmin. Nothing else. My options were to bring the toilet paper or never be able to use a bathroom that didn’t stock Charmin. This narrowed my choices to my apartment or my mother’s house.

  I felt a hand lightly touch my shoulder. “Hello, Holly.”

  I turned to see Mike’s smiling face. My eyes lit up and I smiled back at him.Walter appeared behind Mike. I extended my smile to him. He didn’t return it. The corners of my mouth dropped as fear nipped at the outer corners of my eyes.

  “Make sure our Little Waitress is ready for the suits,” Walter said to Mike. He walked away, tapping his watch.

  The suits?

  “How’ve you been? Did you enjoy the training?”

  “Yeah,” I said shyly.

  “I, for one, am not a fan of any formal acting lessons.Training on the job is enough for someone who has a natural talent,” said Mike.

  “Oh—”

  “Voice-over classes are good because you can learn technique, how to work on a mic, how to use your voice. But as soon as some teacher starts messing with your acting instincts, the next thing, you’re worrying about doing something wrong. I say the best and easiest way is to go strictly by instinct. Ad-lib a little bit if the spirit moves you. Don’t be tied totally to the script.”

  I nodded.

  Mike led me by the elbow to a door down the hall. Before he opened it, he said,“We’ve auditioned a good pool of talent, so the competition is stiff.”

  The room was stuffed with at least thirty people. Mike told me these were other actors, writers, plus a few interns and hangers-on. Walter and a couple of guys stood over by the wall talking. Judging by their attire, I guessed that these guys were the unexplained “suits.”

  All was quiet in my head. Though she wouldn’t admit it, I think even Betty Jane was a bit unnerved.

  “Those are the network guys,” whispered Mike, pointing over at Walter.“They wanted to see what they’ve been paying for, for the last thirty days; one of them has his heart set on a woman we auditioned yesterday.” His honesty made me understand why my mother spent her life avoiding the truth and taught me to do the same. I smiled but I wanted to scream, This is not helping me.

  “It’s always a little stressful when they’re here,” said Mike.

  “Uh?”

  “They have approval rights over who we choose for the lead.”

  “I thought Walter—”

  “Let’s get started, shall we?” said Walter.

  Mike led me into the sound booth and pointed at an empty music stand with an individual microphone in front of it. Then he introduced me and I waved at everyone. The console on the other side of the glass was crowded with Walter, the suits, Mike, the writers, and a whole bunch of other people with already forgotten names.

  “Are there always this many people at a recording?” I whispered to the guy next to me.

  “Not usually. But Walter has a lot riding on you, and everyone is here to see if his ‘Little Waitress’ . . . ” He paused, and I suppressed a facial expression. “Everyone wants to see if Walter’s ‘Little Waitress’ passes muster.”

  I nodded.

  “No pressure,” he said. I didn’t hear anything comforting in his voice. I scanned the other faces behind the mics and music stands and found nothing warm on any of them.

  “Let’s pick up at the beginning,” said Mike through the talkback.

  I closed my eyes and thought, Please don’t let me be humiliated, as I floated backward and Betty Jane took over.

  We read past line fourteen and it was finally time for Violet. I read the script through Betty Jane’s eyes.Violet had a good two pages’ worth of bantering with a couple of other characters.After the first few lines, it was clear Betty Jane was in the zone. Mike hadn’t indicated a stopping point, so the dialogue continued. My wandering thoughts wondered if he had done that to help me. Then I had a guilty thought about Peter. Betty Jane faltered a bit. Focus, Holly. Betty Jane found her rhythm again in time to do her last couple of lines.

  “Oh, agony!” exclaimed Betty Jane as she threw out my arms.

  What’s she doing? That’s not in the script.

  “Cut!”

  Walter, Mike, the writers, and the suits huddled outside the booth. One of the writers pointed at the paper in front of him. Oh, shit. Do we wait? Should we go out? I couldn’t ask any of these questions because Betty Jane was still in control. Mike motioned through the glass. I stood in the Committee’s living room and then felt the transition between me and Betty Jane. Once back in control, I blinked my eyes and squeezed my toes in my shoes. I had read somewhere that this brings an errant spirit back into the body. I didn’t feel any different.

  I pushed the door in front of me. It felt impossibly heavy, but I knew that under other circumstances it would probably be featherlight.

  “You changed the script,” accused one of the writers. Mike shushed him.

  “Oh,” I said pensively,“it just felt like how Violet would end a conversation.Was it okay that I did that?”

  “It was inspired,” said the suit who had his heart set on someone else. I’ll say it was inspired. Betty Jane ended every conversation she didn’t like with this phrase. As if she were Jesus on the cross. “Love it. Go with it. Write it in. Hire the waitress. Walter, lunch?”

  Walter nodded. “Get her a pop shield,” he said, and ushered the two suits out the door.

  { 5 }

  We have the contract. You start in a month,” said Brenda.

  I hung up the phone, switched on music, and danced around my apartment while everyone, including Betty Jane, did the same inside my head. I stopped when I noticed Cats One and Two crouching warily against the wall.

  Sarge granted a week’s liberty, and I called Sarah to tell her the news. Brenda called me the next day with a booking for the following day. So much for liberty, but I tell you it felt good to earn enough money to pay my bills while I waited to start work on The Neighborhood.

  The first Monday in March that same Town Car picked me up. This time, when we pulled into the Chelsea Piers, the guard said, “Well, all right, you got the part.”

  “Holly Miller for The Neighborhood,” I said to the receptionist.

  “Everyone’s in the conference room.” I didn’t move. Mike had called me the night before to tell me how the day would go. But his instructions didn’t include the location of the conference room.

  The receptionist looked up.“Are you the waitress?” I nodded. “They’ll never let you forget it,” she said.

  “Looks like you won’t either.” I froze. I couldn’t believe that had come out of my mouth.

  The receptionist’s face changed. Her new look wasn’t one of compassion. “Down the hall, make a right.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Yeah, good luck,” she said in a bored tone.

  Mike said it was customary to do a table reading to review the script before taping. This got everyone on the same page and saved time later.

  The table reading took place in a wood-paneled room with a window that looked out over the Hudson.The table itself was big enough to seat at least thirty people. Crowded around it were the same people who’d been at my audition. I scanned the room and saw Walter and the suits standing in the same spot they’d held four weeks ago. Did they sell tickets?

  Mike waved me to a chair. “No need for introductions.You all met Holly last month.”

  I sat down and pulled out my script and a packet of highlighters. I’d read that highlighting the script as the director read through it was a good way to give yourself visual cues. One of the writers smiled at me. Highlighter brownie points helped me relax. A little.

  Mike read through the lines that were planned for that day. He described the action, how the characters moved, where they were (sneaking around a corner . . . shouting from the third floor to someone below), so that in session, when we taped the action, we’d h
ave a good idea of the characters’ environment.

  After we read through the script, we moved into the sound booth. Betty Jane and I transitioned and she took her place in front of the music stand in the center. I watched the other voice actors spread out their scripts while Betty Jane neatly stacked hers so that the paper fell together in a tidy rectangle.The voice-over tutor had told me over and over again to spread out the script, because many good recordings were ruined by rustling paper. Betty Jane knew this.

  I stood up, ready to take over and fix the script.

  She didn’t cede control. Then I remembered what she had said to me in the car earlier.“Why, Holly, my place on the pedestal is a right. Not a privilege.” I sat back down on the Committee’s couch.

  We waited for the engineer to roll tape and slate. I’d learned that this helped him locate the proper takes when it came time to edit. Betty Jane didn’t have any lines on the take, but everyone still followed the other actors’ lines in the script.

  My hand turned the page at line eighteen.

  “Cut!” yelled Mike through the talkback.

  Everyone waited in the booth for me to adjust my script. They didn’t know that inside my head we were all praying that Betty Jane would do it. She smiled and adjusted her hair instead.

  “Someone get Holly’s script set up. I don’t want her turning pages during the recording.”

  Finally, the voice actor next to me reached over and spread out the papers while Betty Jane stood and watched.This was not how I wanted to start out my new life. Sarge brought a barf bucket over. Sometimes having your thoughts immediately known wasn’t so bad.

  “The Neighborhood, scene one, take two,” said the engineer through the talkback.

  “Action,” said Mike.

  We did twelve takes of that scene before Mike was happy.

  When Betty Jane finally got her turn, she nailed her lines on the first try.We still had to do four more takes to get exactly what Mike wanted from the other actors.

  “This is the last take for the day; make it a good one,” said Mike. I looked at my watch. Four hours had passed.

  When I first saw the schedule, I thought, Four hours, a breeze. I was used to being on my feet for a lot longer than that. At the end of the four hours, we’d done at least a hundred takes. My back hurt and my legs ached, and I wondered if this was all I’d ever remember about working as a voice-over artist, since I’d always be on the Committee’s couch while Betty Jane stood in front of the microphone.

  As I packed my stuff, one actor said begrudgingly, “Good work today.” The others just whispered to one another, and one actually pointed at me when I exited the booth.

  “Let’s use one through ten from the second take and thirty through fifty from take six, but I want to edit in the pickup of line thirty from take four,” said Mike.

  “Got it,” said the engineer.

  Mike turned and walked me out the door.

  “Not bad for your first day.We got through about six hours of work in four hours, thanks to you.”

  “How much did we actually do?” I said.

  “Fifteen minutes’ worth of dialogue, I’d say.”

  “That’s all?”

  Mike laughed. “You’ll get used to the pace.”

  What pace? After my first day, it felt like an exhausting crawl.

  “Hey, sorry about the script. I mean, uh, I knew, but, uh—”

  “Rookie mistake.” Mike held up his hand to stop my rambling apology.

  My cell phone rang. I opened my bag, exposing my rolls of Charmin. We both looked down and then at each other. Mike knitted his brow.The ringing stopped.Then it started again.

  “Someone wants to talk to you,” he said.

  “Probably Brenda.”

  I smiled. Mike winked at me. The chemistry between us buzzed. He pointed at my bag. I fished out my phone. Peter. It stopped ringing.

  “I have to go.”

  His smile dropped. “Okay, see you tomorrow.”

  I watched Mike return to the control room. My phone started ringing again. I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned.Walter stood in front of me. “Listen, Little Waitress, you’d better learn how to fix your script yourself or you won’t last long.”

  He turned and walked away.When he was halfway down the hall, he yelled, “And answer your goddamn phone.”

  Later, when I was safely behind the rolled-up glass in the Town Car, I said, “What the hell were you doing today?”

  Betty Jane’s answer? “Why, Holly.” She paused. “I was just exercising my rights.”

  One episode of The Neighborhood took six to eight months from start to finish. This included writing, rewriting, voice recording, storyboards, animatics, coloring, music scoring, and postproduction. Since the show was on the fall calendar, we juggled several episodes at the same time to meet the schedule.This meant we would be doing voice recording for one show, while one or two were in storyboards, another one or two in black-and-white animation, and others already in the coloring, scoring, or post-production phase.

  The schedule for the taping was intense. Betty Jane added fuel to the fire by finding numerous little ways to remind everyone in the studio, daily, about the ever rising height of her pedestal.At the end of June, Mike asked me to come in a little earlier than the rest of the cast and crew to discuss my unsportsmanlike behavior, as he called it.

  We sat in the large conference room sipping coffee.

  “Holly, what is going on with you?” said Mike.“You’re a different person when we’re taping. And not a very nice one.”

  I closed my eyes and sighed.

  “Listen, we are under a lot of pressure to get the fall episodes in the can.Your, uh, how shall I say it . . . sense of entitlement”—he paused and I smiled weakly—“will get less notice once we secure ratings. I believe in you and this show. We’re going to get those ratings.We just need to get there.”

  I looked down at my fingernails.

  “How can I help you?” Mike leaned forward. The concern in his eyes was so genuine, I wanted to spill all the beans right there on the spot. “How, Holly?”

  How indeed? Even if I told him about Betty Jane, it wouldn’t do anything to adjust her attitude. I sat arms akimbo and looked out the window at the thick humidity pulsating over the Hudson.

  “Okay, I have an idea,” said Mike. I turned and looked him in the eye. “Are you up for more work? I can tell Walter you might be a pain, but you’re doing your part to become more recognizable.” Inside my head, Betty Jane smiled.

  “Sure,” I said. “We can do that.”

  “I’ll talk to Brenda.” Even though Mike let the we pass, I knew he hadn’t missed it.

  Brenda used all her contacts to find me off-hours work using Betty Jane’s voice. But Betty Jane did not go willingly into that good night, as it were. When we were on our way to the first commercial booking, she said, “I will do this work on only one condition.”

  “Condition?” I said. “We are booked for this job, and negotiations have to take place with Milton.” I didn’t bother to hide the panic in my voice. The Committee had their hands on my pulse anyway.

  “Holly, dear, when will you ever learn?”

  I wanted to strangle her. I wanted to scream at her, Stop pushing the envelope. I wanted to remind her that we were racing to this booking and then the next because she couldn’t play well with others.

  “Holly?” Betty Jane smoothed her hair.

  “Yes, Betty Jane,” I said, “what is your condition?” I sat back and waited.

  “I would like a domicile improvement.”

  Oh.

  The Boy gasped. Sarge and Ruffles looked at each other, while the Silent One dropped to his knees to pray.

  The Committee had been living in cramped quarters ever since I’d moved from my parents’ home in Palo Alto. I’d have to move for them to get a bigger house.

  “Is that easy enough?” she said spitefully. The driver’s glance in the rearview mirror stalled m
y intended retort.

  Betty Jane, of course, wanted a change of neighborhood along with a new apartment. I wouldn’t leave the EastVillage, and the other four supported me.

  Two weeks after she made the request, we moved to a compromise large top-floor flat on Second Street and Avenue A with a view, more than enough space to allow the Committee’s matching apartment to include a separate room for Betty Jane, and, best of all, four closets and a storage locker in the basement for all the stuff Betty Jane made me buy.

  The next three months passed in a blur of taping The Neighborhood in the mornings, running from one recording studio to another on most afternoons, reviewing scripts at night, and, on the weekends in between, the occasional social obligation. By the time The Neighborhood aired in the fall, Betty Jane’s Southern lilt was recognizable to millions.

  At the studio Christmas party,Walter raised his glass in a toast and said, “Everyone, we’ve had the highest Nielsen rating each week since The Neighborhood aired. To the hottest new show on television and our Little Waitress as the voice of Violet Dupree.”

  “I told you that your antics would become annoying eccentricities if you did your part,” whispered Mike. I elbowed him lightly in response. He and I were sandwiched together next to our respective partners—Peter and what’s her name. Flirting was not an option.

  The best part of my new life was the crazy amounts of money I earned for letting Betty Jane speak. In addition to the regular pay for The Neighborhood, every time a commercial we did aired, we got paid. Flush with cash for the first time ever, Betty Jane helped me spend large sums of money on a lot of stupid things, like seventy-five-dollar lipstick, a five-hundred-dollar robot vacuum, and an eight-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Gucci yoga mat with a matching three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar leather carrying case. FYI, I’ve never set foot in a yoga class.