Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

by Dyan Sheldon

  MY YOUNG LIFE AND HARD TIMES

  It is a sad and shocking fact of my young life that my parents named me Mary Elizabeth Cep by mistake. I’ve known since I was five that my true name is Lola. I don’t remember where I first heard it, but I loved it immediately. Lola… Lola is romantic and mysterious. It’s evocative and resonant. It’s unusual – as I am. Mary Elizabeth sounds like the maid in an English drama. You know, “Mary Elizabeth,” smarms the Lady of the Manor, “please show Mr Smudgins into the parlour.” Having a generous nature I can forgive my parents this error, major though it is. I can see that it wasn’t really their fault. They both watch PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) a lot. But that doesn’t mean that I have to accept their mistake as final.

  When I become an actor I’m going to legally change my name to Lola Elspeth Cep. Or maybe Lola Elspeth Sep. I haven’t made up my mind about the spelling yet.

  My family, naturally, has always stubbornly refused to call me Lola.

  “Mary’s the name on your birth certificate,” says my mother, “and that’s the name we’re using.”

  My close relatives are astoundingly unimaginative, especially considering that we share a common gene pool. But then another of the more shocking truths of my young life is that no one in my family truly understands me. They seem to think I’m going through a stage, although even my mother admits that this stage has been lasting a pretty long time. Like since I was born. Whenever I announce what I’m going to do when I become an actor, my mother always laughs and says, “What do you mean when?”

  She calls me the Drama Queen, though not to my face. Sometimes I hear her on the phone to my dad or her parents. “Oh, the Drama Queen?” she’ll say. “This week she seems to be in an Edward Albee play.” The twins must hear her, too, because sometimes they do call me Drama Queen to my face. Not that I’m blaming my siblings for their limitations. Pam and Paula are only eight and, like our mother, they’re hopelessly ordinary. Since we have different fathers I can only assume that my uniqueness is due to some latent gene in the Ceps that skipped about twenty generations till it finally emerged in me. In my family I’m like a flamingo in a flock of pigeons. Expecting them to understand me would be like expecting a cat to understand Hamlet. I mean, really… Do tortilla chips fly? Is the moon made of cheese?

  Anyway, we used to live in New York City, in this great old building on the Upper West Side, but last year my mother moved us to a ranch house in the soporific suburb of Dellwood (or as I affectionately call it, Deadwood), New Jersey. New Jersey! At first I thought she must be joking. After I was forced to accept that my mother was grotesquely serious, I consoled myself with the fact that at least she wasn’t moving us to Nebraska. You can’t even visit New York from Nebraska.

  Like most truly creative people, I loathe the suburbs. Living in the suburbs is like being dead, only with cable TV and pizza delivery. In New York, you live with your finger on the cultural pulse of the universe. Plays, operas, dance, books, music, films, artists – everything’s there and happening. People in New York get excited when there’s a new exhibition at the Met or if Scorsese’s filming in Brooklyn. In the suburbs people get excited when they have their kitchens redone.

  And besides the constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation of the greatest city in the world, there are always a zillion things going on in New York, and tons of famous people around. You may not believe this, but I once bumped into Johnny Depp in the East Village. He was coming out of a restaurant, and I didn’t see him because I had these really sick sunglasses on and they more or less made me legally blind. Usually, though, if I wanted to meet an actor I’d find out where they were shooting a movie. I met Robert De Niro, Robin Williams, Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer like that. I got all their autographs.

  My mother says that living in the City is like living on a movie set, not like living in a real town. That’s one of the reasons we moved, so we could live in a real town – for the sake of the twins. The only things they ever shoot in Dellwood are home videos and the occasional rabbit. The only reason Johnny Depp would be coming out of a restaurant in Dellwood is if his car broke down while he was on his way somewhere else and he had a cup of coffee while he was waiting for it to be fixed. As far as living in Dellwood is concerned, I’m like a bird in a cage with a good school district.

  I understood my mother’s concern about Pam and Paula, of course – they were only seven at the time we moved, which is a very impressionable age – but I couldn’t see why my mother wouldn’t let me stay behind in the City. I could have lived with my dad, he has a spare room. And he lives in the East Village, which is the coolest place in Manhattan if not in the entire universe. I know I could have talked him into it – he’s a lot more malleable than his former wife – but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. She has custody, and she’s keeping it. Though that isn’t exactly how she put it. “Your father and I have our differences, but even he doesn’t deserve that,” was what she said.

  But I have a positive nature. I believe in making the best of even the worst situation. I mean, you have to, don’t you? There’s no point being negative about things you can’t change, you only make them worse. And anyway, as I always say, every cloud has a solid gold lining.

  The solid gold lining in the black thundercloud of moving to Deadwood was that it gave me a chance to re-create myself a little, as all great actors do. Back in the City at least half the kids I went to school with were kids I’d gone to school with most of my life. They called me Mary. They looked at me and saw the little girl who threw up at Edna Rimbaud’s seventh birthday party. They knew all the dull and embarrassing details of my existence. It was like playing Peter Pan for eleven years. To the audience you’re this little boy in a green leotard, and that’s it. You’ll still be Peter Pan when you’re fifty, while lesser actors get to play King Lear.

  Dellwood, however, was an empty stage as far as I was concerned. An empty stage to which I was allowed to bring my own script. I didn’t have to go gently into the good suburban night. I could choose whatever role I wanted – be whatever I wanted to be – and no one would know any better. No one who wasn’t related to me would ever call me Mary again.

  Looked at in that way, the move to Deadwood was almost exciting. It was definitely a challenge. The life without challenge is the life without depth.

  There was another way to look at it, too. Besides raging against the dying of the lights of the City from my life, I now had the opportunity to bring one of those lights with me into the wilderness. Myself. Lola Elspeth Cep (or Sep). I would be a beacon for all the confused youth of Dellwood who needed reassurance that there was more to living than beer parties and shopping. I would be a source of nourishment to those starving, embryonic souls who were looking for true passion and meaning in their humdrum lives. At last I could start to be the great actor Lola Cep.

  A legend was about to be born.

  I think it’s safe to say that no one at Deadwood High – student body and staff alike – had ever seen anyone quite like me. And this, of course, was to my advantage. They didn’t know what to expect. My first few weeks were devoted to showing them what to expect: the unexpected; the unusual; the individual; the unique. One week I’d dress only in black; the next my colours would be vibrant and bright. One week I’d be quiet and remote; the next I’d be gregarious and funny. It was a demanding part, but it took my mind off other things.

  Like how difficult it was to be a beacon in the subterranean, wind-swept and coal-black abyss that is Dellwood, New Jersey.

  I had no trouble getting everybody at school to call me Lola. I told my teachers that even though the register said my name was Mary, Lola was what I’d bee
n called at home since I was a squalling infant in my mother’s arms.

  Only Mrs Baggoli, my English teacher, put up a struggle.

  “Lola?” Mrs Baggoli stared at me with her gimlet eyes. “You want to be called Lola?”

  Ignoring the soft snickers around me, I nodded. “My parents fell in love watching Damn Yankees together,” I explained, inspired. “That’s why they call me Lola.” As far as I know, neither of my parents has ever seen Damn Yankees. I saw it by chance when I was home with the flu one winter. I would have turned it off if one of the characters wasn’t named Lola. One of the few signs that my parents are actually intelligent enough to be related to me is the fact that they both detest musicals. But Mrs Baggoli believed me.

  “‘Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets’?” queried Mrs Baggoli.

  I’d known she’d catch the reference. She was the drama coach as well.

  I smiled. It was a good-natured, self-mocking smile. Teachers hate any sign of arrogance.

  “I was two when they started using it,” I said. “You know what two-year-olds are like.”

  “Don’t I just,” said Mrs Baggoli, with what I took as a significant look at the rest of the class. “All right, Lola,” she went on, pencilling my real name in her register. “I’ll try to remember.”

  As I’ve already said, however, I was less successful in other areas. I’d pretty much thought that all I had to do was appear on campus like an incredible sunset after a grey, dreary day, and the starving young souls of Dellwood would immediately abandon their videos and glossy magazines, and flock to me, begging for shelter from the storm of meaningless trivia that made up their lives.

  But I was wrong. The youth of Dellwood probably wouldn’t have noticed a nuclear explosion, never mind a messenger of hope from the greater world. In my first year in the clean air and safe streets of Dellwood (two more of my mother’s reasons for moving), I’ve met only one truly kindred spirit. That’s my best friend, Ella Gerard.

  There was nothing about Ella to suggest that here was my spiritual kin the first time I saw her. She looked like most of the other girls in my homeroom – expensively if dully clothed, well fed, perfectly groomed, their teeth gleaming and their hair bouncing because they use the right toothpaste and shampoo. If New York is a kettle of soup, where tons of different spices and vegetables swim around together, all part of the whole but all different at the same time, then Deadwood is more like a glass of homogenized milk. Ella was wearing a nondescript pink A-line dress and white-and-pink sneakers. The kindest thing you could say about her hair – which was twisted into a tight ball at the back of her head – was that it existed. Although Ella shops in the same stores as most of her classmates she always goes for what Mrs Gerard calls “the classic look”, which means that everyone else dresses like the dedicated followers of fashion that they are, and Ella dresses like her mother.

  That first morning I sat at the front of the room in my genuine US Army combat trousers, dyed purple by my own fair hands, and the Ché Guevara T-shirt my dad brought me back from Mexico, listening to the other girls catch up on the summer gossip and sort out who was seeing whom and who was wearing what and when the first big party of the autumn was going to be, feeling like a visitor from Alpha Centauri. A visitor from Alpha Centauri who was wishing she’d stayed at home. I could tell that every morning I would sit there, ignored by the other girls, hearing practically the same conversations over and over again. And I could also tell that every morning I would sit there, and they would make a show of checking me out and then looking at each other, smirking at the way I was dressed because they themselves were walking billboards advertising whatever was in fashion that week, ignorant of true style and flair. The girls in Deadwood get their fashion ideas from Seventeen and television. They don’t wear clothes as a statement of their inner selves, as I do; they wear labels.

  Anyway, Ella sat near me in homeroom. The kids in Dellwood not only dress the same and talk the same; when they think, they pretty much think the same, too. But I sensed almost immediately that Ella was different in that last, crucial respect.

  Carla Santini (of whom more later…) was the centre of all meaningful homeroom conversation among the girls. Sophisticated, beautiful and radiating confidence the way a towering inferno radiates heat, she swept into the room in black trousers and a short black sweater as though she’d just stepped from the pages of Vogue. Although she’d checked me out the second her foot was through the door, it was a good five minutes before she finally deigned to talk to me.

  “Aren’t you the girl who just moved into the old Swenska house?” she asked. She was using the sickeningly charming voice I’ve come to know so well, but she still managed to emphasize the word “old” and make it sound as though it meant more than “no longer young”.

  Taking their cue from Carla Santini, her entourage all looked at me too. They were barely breathing.

  “Maybe,” I said, returning her sugar-overdose smile with one of my own. I’d checked her out, too, without even seeming to look her way. I’d known girls like Carla Santini before – there are lots of girls in New York who think the world wasn’t complete until they were born – and I’d never liked one of them. “I didn’t realize our house had a name.”

  The boy behind me, Sam Creek (more on him later, as well…), snorted. I saw Ella’s mouth tremble.

  Carla Santini’s laughter rang through the classroom like an alarm.

  “Is that supposed to be the famous New York sense of humour?” she asked. Loudly.

  That caught the attention of the few people who weren’t already riveted by the spectacle of Carla Santini putting me through my paces.

  “Are you from the city?” asked Carla Santini’s sidekick, Alma Vitters (more of her later, too…). She made it sound like she was saying, “You mean, you’re from Alpha Centauri?”

  Before I could say, proudly, that I certainly was from the City, Carla answered for me.

  “That’s right,” she said. “A real city slicker.” She gave me a phoney look of sympathy. “You must find it pretty dull in Dellwood, after New York,” purred Carla.

  “You won’t for long with her around,” whispered a voice in my ear. I glanced right. Sam Creek was leaning forward on his arms as though falling asleep.

  By then I’d figured out who Carla Santini was. Her mother was the real estate agent who sold my mother the old Swenska house. It was obvious that, despite Carla’s show of innocent curiosity, she already knew a lot about me and my family. Everything her mother knew: our income, our lack of a male parent, probably even the fact that I hadn’t wanted to move.

  “I don’t know yet.” I smiled that famous New York “choke-yourself” smile. “I only just got here.”

  Carla rang a few more alarms.

  “Seriously,” she said when she was finished being incredibly amused, “Dellwood must be a big change. I mean, New York…”

  It was at this point that other people began to join the conversation. Someone told a story about her aunt being mugged not five minutes after she got off the train at Penn Station. One of the boys claimed to know the statistics of violent deaths in the City for the last five years. One of the girls told a story about her friend’s friend who was abducted off the street in New York in broad daylight, in front of dozens of people, and no one tried to help her. Someone else said he’d seen a documentary about gangs that made him turn down free tickets to Madison Square Garden.

  “Well, my parents took me to New York for my birthday last year,” said Ella, “and I thought it was beautiful.” She smiled. It wasn’t a big smile, but it was a sincere one. Which made a nice change. “You know,” she continued, “the lights at night and everything? I felt like I was visiting Oz.”

  That was when I knew that despite her straight and rather uninspired appearance, inside Ella Gerard was a free spirit waiting – no, begging – to be released. I recognized her as the sister of my soul, who, unlike Pam and Paula, the sisters of my flesh, had everything impor
tant in common with me.

  “You should see it at Christmas,” I said. “Fifth Avenue at Christmas is better than Oz. It’s like walking through the Milky Way.”

  Carla Santini’s laugh this time was less like an alarm and more like a flak attack.

  “Except that nobody’s going to rape or murder you in the Milky Way,” said Carla.

  The cackling only stopped because Mr Finbar, our homeroom teacher, stumbled in just then and told us all to shut up.

  Ella is shy and she’s quiet, but she’s kind and has a good sense of humour. We were in all the same classes except maths (Ella was in the advanced maths class, but the creative mind can have a difficult time with mathematics, so I wasn’t), and when she discovered that we had almost identical schedules, she dedicated herself to showing me around. I knew that, subconsciously, Ella wanted to be friends because she was attracted to my style and originality, but I acted like she was the one who was doing me the favour.

  We had bonded forever by the end of the day.

  It took longer than I’d anticipated, but I finally made Deadwood High recognize my true potential. There are people – like my parents and Mrs Baggoli – who look at what happened another way, of course, as doubters and scoffers always will. My mother said I was lucky. My father said I was lucky. The cops said I was lucky, but also brave. Mrs Baggoli said that I never cease to amaze her.

  It was Mrs Baggoli’s idea that I write about what happened in my own “inimitable style” for my final English project.

  “Perhaps if you put it down in black and white, you’ll see things a little more objectively,” Mrs Baggoli suggested. She sighed. “Try very hard to stick to the facts, Lola. Don’t embellish too much.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I always try to be as objective as a person can be.”

  Mrs Baggoli sighed again. “Well, try a little harder.”

  So I’m trying really hard to make sure that the real truth is told. And this is the real truth. Everything I’m about to tell you occurred exactly as I say. And I don’t mean just the everyday, boring things about school, and my family, and stuff like that. I mean everything. Even the things that seem so incredible, so totally out of this solar system, that you think I must have made them up, they’re true too. And nothing’s been exaggerated. Not the teensiest, tiniest, most subatomic bit. It all happened exactly as I’m telling it.