I also had a secret backup plan on the off chance there were no big-time Hollywood agents in the audience of the Lloyd Road Elementary School. I had learned from watching Madonna interviews that getting no attention is worse than negative attention. So, the next best thing to getting discovered as a musical prodigy would be to get caught publicly for stealing the song. A part of me secretly hoped my teacher would stand up and say, “Everyone hold your furious applause. The Jersey Girls have clearly ripped this song off from Wham! Call the police! And thank you, yes, I have lost weight. Sixty pounds to be exact.” Then I would be whisked off stage in handcuffs screaming “Get me a lawyer!” The options—record deal or arrest—seemed equally appealing to me. I’d end up forever labeled a bad girl or a genius. Either way, I’d come out on top.
The day of the assembly arrived. While Amanda and I waited in the wings of the auditorium, I peeked out to see who was in the audience. All I could see were my schoolmates and teachers, no recognizable showbiz types. No men in top hats or guys with big mustaches. No ladies in mink stoles holding clipboards to take notes on the talent of Central Jersey. I didn’t have much time to get nervous or think about the ramifications of getting caught stealing from Wham! There was barely any time before Mr. Fervor proudly said, “Please welcome the Jersey Girls!” and Amanda and I took the stage to moderate applause. Mr. Fervor began playing the piano with all the enthusiasm of a coked-up Elton John performing “Bennie and the Jets.” Amanda sang through her nose, and I faked that I could sing the best I could, wondering if any of these pimple-faced squirts would have the guts to point out that I was a fraud.
We finished the song and everyone clapped politely. No one seemed all that impressed. No one stopped in the hall to tell us we were child prodigies. No one offered us a recording career. No one even accused us of stealing the song from Wham! All we received was the same polite applause that the little boy who had done the recorder solo had gotten.
The school assembly was kid stuff, I reassured myself. We’d get our real shot at the parent/town assembly that night.
I warmed up all afternoon, doing vocal exercises in my bedroom I had learned from Miss Piggy. I stuck out my flat chest and squealed, “mee mee mee,” just as I had seen her do in the latest Muppet movie. Miss Piggy was also an exciting and glamorous woman like my grandmother, even though she was a pig and a puppet. And she tamed that big blonde mane of hers in a way I longed to master.
That night at the town assembly, once again Amanda and I waited in the wings. I knew this was a huge risk—it was highly likely someone out there would recognize the song. What had started as a simple few words on loose-leaf paper had now turned into a live concert event in front of every single person I had ever met. What’s worse, I had now copyrighted a Wham! song as my own and was taking innocent Mr. Fervor and my best friend Amanda down with me.
With the fear of the devil in me, Amanda and I hit the stage and rocked the night away. We did all the moves I carefully choreographed—step, touch, sway, repeat—with a precision unmatched in any of our tedious rehearsals. Amanda again sang through her nose while I tried to sing on key. I was extra careful not to let the step, touch, sway, repeat mess me up while I tried to remember the lyrics I had penned privately in my bedroom. The refrain was the easiest, as it was the most blatant rip-off of “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” Thankfully, we made it through disaster-free, and that stupid kid with the recorder didn’t steal too much of the spotlight. Amanda and I lingered a little too long bowing to the crowd, savoring the high of nailing it.
Then we looked out into the adoring crowd. Not so adoring. Once again no one seemed all that impressed. No one seemed to notice that the melody was stolen. I looked out at my mother, expecting to find her weeping with joy over the discovery of her daughter’s innate musical talent. There she was, head towering several inches over the other big-haired women, clapping politely, her eyes dryer than I had ever seen them in my life. Apparently Laverne’s sojourn to L.A. in season 6, episode 113 “Not Quite New York” was more moving than her daughter’s big solo in front of the whole town. I stared at her extra long to see if she was bragging to others, saying, “That’s my daughter, the tall gifted one.” Not a word. Meanwhile my father hadn’t gotten out of work in time to make it, and my brother hadn’t come. No one seemed to care about my big moment.
Amanda and I lingered a little longer on stage till the clapping faded into silence. Finally, we untriumphantly departed.
After the concert, we all went to Friendly’s, where I got my usual, the clown sundae with the cone on top made to look like a clown hat. I pushed my spoon into it thinking, This isn’t a clown, it’s just an upside-down ice-cream cone. The thrill is gone. Amanda and I ate our sundaes and didn’t speak of the George Michael–size elephant in the room—but I knew she knew I stole the song. That night, lying in bed smoking one of my Stallion brand candy cigarettes, I wondered if our usual Friendly’s waitress had ever wanted something more; she looked even more tired than usual.
A few days later I mailed a cassette copy of this potential #1 hit to the Kirk Cameron mailing address I had ripped out of Bop magazine. I’m still waiting for his reply.
CHAPTER 2:
A Very Tiny Grown-up
After the assembly turned into a nonstarter, Amanda and I spent the next year practicing our dance routine to Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You,” which consisted mostly of homoerotic grinding mixed with a few kick ball changes. By sixth grade, all our activities seemed to have developed a new undertone of sexuality. I believe one of our songs at that stage actually had the lyrics I want you inside of me. One day, when Chaka Khan was boring us, we caught a commercial for a phone-dating service and Amanda sweet-talked me into placing an ad. I pretty much did everything Amanda said, because her mom had the good snacks like Devil Dogs and Fruit Roll-Ups, and I didn’t want to be banished back to the land of cheese and raisins where I came from. But I instantly saw a second reason to get excited about our ad: Maybe I would meet an older man who would understand me and my giant-child predicament, the way Amanda never could, and possibly be able to look into my eyes without the assistance of a stepstool.
For this particular dating service, you had to first call and leave a voicemail version of your “profile” for potential suitors. Then you could listen to other people’s profiles and leave messages for them. After a while, if you really liked the person, you could leave your home phone number, and the potential mate would call, and then you’d go on a date and do dirty things that I had thus far practiced only on my Fred Savage poster.
I was pretty calm about the whole thing; it was only a voicemail, and I had about a dozen or so opportunities to get out if I wanted, considering all the steps until an actual date. So, first, we created my profile.
I used my interpretation of a “sexy” voice (based entirely on women I saw during an awkward viewing of the James Bond film Octopussy with my parents). I didn’t fully understand the plot of Octopussy—there was a lot of hullabaloo over a Fabergé egg. This seemed ridiculous, as my grandmother had fancy eggs like that lying all around her New York City high-rise and no one seemed to want to kill her over them. But Octopussy’s voice was sexy in a Kathleen Turner kind of way, and so I used her as inspiration and recorded this audio profile:
Hello. My name is Margot. I like to have fun. I’m five-foot-six, weigh about 115 pounds, and have blue eyes, blonde hair, and freckles. I’m an aspiring singer currently recording my demo with my writing partner. I love to dance, and right now my favorite song is Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You.” So if you feel for me, leave me a message.
It was sheer brilliance, and completely true. I didn’t lie about being twelve years old; I just left it out. Amanda was really impressed. She insisted we move right on to hearing the guys’ profiles and leaving messages for them. We probably gave the equivalent of a Match.com “wink” to about sixteen men, ranging from twenty-five to thirty-one.
A few called back and left replies. One guy
’s message stood out above the rest. He had a nerdy, nasal voice, but he sounded friendly:
Hi, my name is Paul; I’m a thirty-year-old bank teller who lives by the shore. I enjoy surfing or just lying on the beach. I’m five feet tall, so if you think good things come in small packages, leave me a message.
I felt an instant connection to him. Paul was a tiny grown-up and I was a giant child. I felt that we could meet in the middle somewhere, and for just one second I could feel normal. Perhaps if Paul and I got married, our children would have a good shot at being average height and avoid the bizarre woman/child phase I was going through. Paul would understand me the way only a thirty-year-old undersize man could. Plus he was really good at puns, which I appreciated.
Amanda related to my quest for fun—for her, this was a perfect diversion from watching her mother sprinkle glitter on Styrofoam for the Bat Mitzvah centerpiece business she ran out of their garage. But she couldn’t really understand how meaningful this could be for me—to meet a man of my own kind, weirdly heighted and treated differently for it.
In just two days, I went through all the appropriate steps with “good things come in small packages” Paul. I left him my profile; he liked it and then left me a personal message in my box. Apparently, Paul also had an affinity for Chaka Khan. I left him a message in my Octopussy voice and he left one in return. This went on for about a week (all charged to Amanda’s mom’s phone bill). Then Paul left me this message:
Hi, Margot, it’s Paul. I’ d love to talk to you one-on-one this week. I was wondering if I could get your phone number so we could talk beyond these voicemails. Hope to hear from you soon.
Amanda was psyched. “Margot, he’s totally rich. I mean, he’s a bank teller! Like, how many more opportunities are you going to get to go out with a rich guy? No one is rich here. Paul is rich. Rich, Margot! Just do it! Give him your phone number!”
Amanda was right; no one had big money in our town. My mom was a schoolteacher, my dad got home at 9:00 PM every night from a New York City commute just to make ends meet. A lot of locals ran landscaping businesses on the weekends, sold Avon or Amway or Mary Kay as a side business, and ran daycares out of their living rooms. I had seen how the other half lived on my weekend visits to my grandmother in New York City and wanted a piece of that taxi-riding, takeout-ordering, Duane Reade–shopping lifestyle. Linking up with Paul the tiny bank teller could be my ticket out. Maybe I wouldn’t end up working as a Friendly’s waitress (my hometown’s version of Shotz Brewery). Maybe this was my season 6 very special episode of Laverne & Shirley, or should I say Margot & Amanda episode 113 “Not Quite New Jersey.” And so, I wrote yet another script and proceeded to leave Paul this message:
Hi, Paul. It’s Margot. I’ d love to chat with you directly, so if you could give me a call tomorrow AFTER THREE, that would be great. Make sure it’s AFTER THREE; I will be at . . . uh . . . work. Until three. Recording my demo from eight to three. Anytime after that. But before nine. Actually before eight is good, because ALF is on tomorrow and I just love that show, and really would prefer not to miss an episode. Okay, give me a call. My number is—
And then I proceeded to give a thirty-year-old man my parents’ phone number so he could unknowingly call and try to date me, a gargantuan, gawky girl who hadn’t even gotten her braces on yet.
Amanda told me I did a great job on the message. I humbly agreed. I thought the ALF part really personalized it.
“Look, Margot, if it’s true love, he’ll wait. Paul will wait. Don’t tell him your real age,” Amanda warned.
The following day during school, however, I started to get nervous. I was in too deep—how quickly I had become a gold-digging hussy! I barely got through the day; every time I glanced over at Amanda, she nodded her head and gave me a generic hand signal, which I knew meant go for it. At lunch that afternoon Amada had all the good stuff—Lay’s potato chips, that fluorescent orange spreadable cheese with the red plastic spreader, and Ecto Cooler, the limited edition Ghostbusters Hi-C juice box. Only the coolest kids at Lloyd Road Elementary School had Ecto Cooler. I had a Thermos filled with skim milk or room-temperature tap water, depending on the day. Amanda even had a crazy straw. I couldn’t let her down.
When I finally got home from school I was in a full-blown panic and wanted to tell my mom everything. But instead I did what I always did when I went to my own house, instead of Amanda’s: I folded endless laundry, composed mostly of my father’s hole-filled socks and underwear. Laundry was the chore I minded least, as it held little opportunity for me to break something due to my clumsiness and, in my mother’s words, “lefty-Louie-ness.” Dusting was a high-risk chore for me, especially with my grandmother’s Cartier castaways all over. Washing dishes was also dangerous, as I lived in fear of ever nicking one of my mom’s bone china teacups (again).
I took my mind off the never-ending underwear by watching reruns of Moonlighting on Lifetime, hoping Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis would just do it already. I had heard from Amanda that there was one episode where they finally had sex, and I watched reruns religiously, hoping to catch it. She told me it was really dirty and really gross, which only made me want to see it more. Then, around five o’clock, the kitchen phone rang. My body froze, my legs felt like lead. I could not move. My mom answered, and in a surprisingly calm voice said, “Maaargot, phone call. It’s Paul!” No questions asked.
I grabbed the phone and pulled the cord as far away from my mother as I could get. Somehow I managed to get all the way into the laundry room and was even able to shut the door. I took a deep breath, a multitude of thoughts running through my head. I wanted to tell Paul I was having an identity crisis due to my unexpectedly large size. I wanted to tell Paul that Amanda made me do it and I just wanted her to think I was cool. I wanted to tell Paul that I fancied myself a “Laverne DeFazio” type, if only he could wait a few years. I wanted to tell Paul I, too, understood what it felt like to be weird. Instead I took the phone and in a shaky twelve-year-old voice said this:
“Hi, Paul. I’m twelve years old.”
Silence. Silence that lasted longer than that awkward viewing of Octopussy with my parents. Finally, in that nerdy, nasal voice I first fell in love with, Paul spoke.
“You’re twelve years old.”
“I’m twelve years old.”
Pause.
“You’re twelve years old.”
“I’m twelve years old.”
This phone call was rapidly becoming an exercise in the Meisner technique.
“Well. Good-bye then,” and Paul hung up on me.
I felt a hitch in my throat. There went my big chance. I blew it. Instead of running away with Paul to his jet-setting thirty-year-old bank-teller lifestyle a few towns away, I found myself dumped by an aging, undersize phone dater in my parents’ laundry room at age twelve. I stood there in shock until the irritating phone-off-the-hook noise snapped me right out of it.
I hung up, half wishing my mom would ask who Paul was, but she never did. I went back to folding the laundry and hoped that I hadn’t missed Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd doing the nasty. As Bruce and Cybill bickered on-camera, I wondered if Paul was okay. This was my first breakup, but being a thirty-year-old big-time bank teller, Paul had probably seen it all. Hopefully he wasn’t too heartbroken. I imagined him at work the next day, counting piles of fresh money and thinking about what could have been. I had a lifetime of dating in front of me, but Paul was thirty! How much more time could be possibly have to find his true love? Maybe a nice, five-foot-tall, age-appropriate girl would come to his window at the bank the next day and they’d look into each other’s eyes and just know it was meant to be. Maybe Paul would be able to get through this and come out a “bigger” person.
The next day at school I told Amanda he never even called. “That’s what men are like, Margot. Take it from me,” she said.
CHAPTER 3:
Oven Door of Sin
As sixth grade continued, my breakup with Pau
l the tiny bank teller was easier to get over than I thought it would be. I learned from a brief period of sneaking episodes of General Hospital on Amanda’s recommendation, before getting caught and grounded for it, that the best way to end your heartache over someone is to replace that special someone with another. Before my grounding I learned a lot about love through GH supercouple Felicia and Frisco’s tumultuous relationship. After Frisco presumably died working undercover for the WSB (World Security Bureau), Felicia quickly moved on to Colton Shore, the very man who tried to kill her beloved Frisco. I figured I should follow Felicia’s lead and move on from Paul the tiny bank teller, even though I had heard via Amanda after my grounding that Frisco had faked his own death and was back with Felicia after her brief bout with amnesia. I figured the odds of anything involving a faked death and amnesia happening to me and Paul were slim, so it was best to keep myself open for new options in love.
Before Paul, my interactions with boys had all been in my imagination. I wanted Growing Pains breakout star Kirk Cameron to be my boyfriend, so much so that I kept a diary of love letters to him. They were all addressed to “Pretend Kirk Cameron,” because even as a kid, I knew that I needed to get real. There was no way this quick-witted wavy-haired dreamboat would ever go for me. My love for Kirk was so true that I had a torn-out photo of him from Bop magazine proudly displayed on the back side of my school locker door. Every time I opened my locker, I was greeted by this nonthreatening sex symbol with sandy blond hair and a clean record.
I also wanted to make out under a maple tree with Fred Savage, just as he had with Winnie Cooper in the flawless pilot to The Wonder Years. I wanted to be someone’s Winnie Cooper. Instead, I was most people’s Becky Slater, the freckle-faced obnoxious tween whom Kevin Arnold only dated to make his real love, Winnie, jealous. Pretty, big-eyed brunettes like Winnie always got the guy, it seemed. Samantha Micelli, played by Alyssa Milano on Who’s the Boss?, was another pretty brunette who seemed to have skipped puberty and gone straight from cute kid to hot teen. Fair, pubescent girls like Becky Slater, Kimmy Gibbler, and me never seemed to get the guy. Kelly Kapowski got Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell, and even Uncle Jesse from Full House paired off with Becky (played by beautiful brunette Lori Loughlin). But the Becky Slaters of the world were limited to a four-episode story arc or at best were forced to wear horrible spandex camel-toed short sets like Kimmy Gibbler.
Gawky Page 3
