Spur of the Moment

by Theresa Alan

  “I don’t think so,” Scott said quietly. “Why don’t we get something to eat?”

  Ana nodded gloomily, and followed him downstairs to the kitchen.

  The phone rang again. Ana picked up the extension in the kitchen.

  “Hello?”

  “I got it.”

  “What?”

  “I got the part!”

  “Oh my God!” Ana and Marin shrieked. “Ohmygodohmy-godohmygod !”

  Jason and Ramiro came running when they heard the commotion.

  “Did somebody die?” Scott asked.

  “I take it Marin got the part,” Jason said calmly.

  “She got the part! Shegotthepartshegotthepartshegotthe-part!!! So tell me everything,” Ana said to Marin.

  “Today I read with the other actors. There are three guys—Alex, Conrad, and Bennett—and two girls, Devin and Jessica.”

  “Do you like them?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Devin is this cute black girl, and Jessica has this glorious—totally fake, but glorious nonetheless—red hair halfway down her back. They are both actually pretty funny. Devin is thirty! And she plays a twenty-one-year-old. Isn’t that funny? Conrad is your typical WASPy guy who is arrogant and looks like some Aryan-Nation Ken doll. Alex is very hot, I hope there’s a romance written in our future. And Bennett seems, I don’t know, really quiet for an actor. Kind of reserved. Maybe he’s just one of those types you need to ply with alcohol or have to get to know them for a while before they’ll open up.”

  “So, where are you staying? How much money will you make? When do you start shooting?”

  “I’ll be out here till just after Christmas. If the series turns out to be successful, I’ll have to get an apartment out here.”

  “No! You can’t move!”

  “We’ll see what happens. For now we’re all just staying in a hotel. They’ll run the pilot at the end of January.”

  “Oh my god, are you so unbelievably excited? You don’t sound like you’re jumping up and down.”

  “This whole thing is just so surreal. I mean it’s happening so fast. It hasn’t had time to sink in yet. But get this. They’re paying me $60,000.”

  Ana hadn’t been expecting that. She’d been expecting slave wages. “Wow, that’s a lot more money than I would have thought.”

  “They have to pay me a certain amount because to be able to perform, I need to belong to AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Actors. It’s a union. I had to be offered the contract from a TV show to be able to join, but then to actually act, I have to sign up.”

  Sixty thousand dollars. It was significantly more money than Ana made in an entire year, and Marin was raking it in for just eight weeks of work. “Wow,” she mumbled in a hoarse whisper.

  “Listen, you guys were the first people I called. I have to call Chelsey and Mom and Dad and everybody from high school and college and anybody else I can brag to.”

  “Congrats, Marin. I’m really happy for you.”

  “Love ya.”

  “Love you.” Ana hung up the phone.

  “So? Tell us everything!” Scott said.

  Ana repeated what Marin had said, then, while the three of them were talking, she sneaked upstairs to her bedroom, closed the door, and burst into tears.

  She fell on her bed and pressed a pillow to her face to mask the sound of her sobs.

  Ana awoke the next morning in a dark fog of depression. It took everything she had to get out of bed and into the shower.

  She stood in the shower and let the hot water beat down on her for several minutes. She had no idea how long she’d been just standing there, until there was a knock on the door and Scott’s voice calling out, asking if she was okay.

  “What? Oh, I’m fine.”

  “It’s almost eight. You’re going to be late to work.”

  “I’ll hurry.” Eight o’clock? What time had she woken up? How could it possibly be so late?

  She quickly washed her body and shampooed her hair, skipping the conditioner today. She got dressed in a daze and when she went downstairs, Scott pointed out that she was wearing one black shoe and one brown one. They were completely different styles.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I just . . . I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

  “I made you some coffee.”

  “Thanks.”

  This was all backwards. Ana was the mom of the house. She was the one who made the coffee in the morning and asked everyone if they’d slept well and worried and fretted if they hadn’t. She was the one who looked out for everybody, not the one who needed looking after. But she was too tired to think about it right now.

  At work, Ana was completely unable to focus. Every email she was sent seemed to be written in ancient hieroglyphics; some weird language that she had to battle to translate. Everything took so much effort. It exhausted her.

  She stared at her computer screen until it faded into a blue haze. She was a failure. She was kidding herself thinking she had any talent. This was a brutally tough business, and the talentless could not survive. Unless, of course, their father was Aaron Spelling. All these years, she’d just been embarrassing herself, getting on that stage and pretending she could act. She needed to accept that she would not be an Academy Award-winning actress whose face graced the pages of People and Vanity Fair. She was a marketing manager, and she had to accept that all she’d ever be in her life was a woman who marketed software.

  Lots of people were happy with a life mired in the morass of middle management. Why wasn’t that good enough for Ana?

  So few people succeeded as actors. What were the chances that all six of them would make it? Marin was the beauty, the natural talent. Of course she’d be the one to make it. Ana should stop embarrassing herself by pretending she had a chance.

  For the next several days, depression tightened its grip on Ana.

  She cried in the car at stoplights, she cried herself to sleep, she cried at the office in the bathroom stall. She cried because she was jealous and because she hated herself for being such a horrible person. She’d always said that you could tell who your friends were not just by whether they were there for you if things were tough, but if they could be genuinely happy for you when you succeeded. And now here she was: She was happy her friend was succeeding, but she was also painfully envious.

  Ana believed that there were five areas in life that people had to work on to be happy: Love, Friendship, Work, Health, and Finance. She hated her job and she didn’t have any money or a boyfriend. Except for friendship, she was bombing big time in everything. And she was depressed because, on top of everything else, she deeply, deeply missed her friend.

  She tried to keep her workouts up, but she didn’t have the concentration to lift weights. The only thing she could manage was to mindlessly jog on the elliptical rider. Going for miles and miles and never getting anywhere, that was all she could do.

  31

  The Plight of the Modern Male

  One of the nice things about having three gorgeous women as best friends, Scott thought, was that he had all the commitment of a serious relationship with the added bonus of relentless sexual frustration.

  After shows at Spur, flocks of men would gather around the women. These were the kind of men that could handle bitter rejection, glowering looks, and pointed comments without notice. They simply went on to the next kill and took what they could get.

  Scott was not one of these kind of men.

  Women would coo and purr at Jason and even—and this broke Scott’s heart—Ramiro, but something about Scott’s goofiness and his total inability to put the moves on a woman kept him forever classified as “Buddy.” His three brothers and sisters were all married, some were even having kids, and he feared he would forever be the only single person in his family. He’d eternally be the weird artistic outsider who didn’t grow up and get married as he had been fervently trained to do. To his nephews and nieces he was incredibly popular. A
s an uncle he reigned supreme. As a lover, he expected Elmer Fudd fared better.

  Scott was more the kind of guy that, at dance clubs, would first try to get noticed as the funny guy by dancing goofily and going all out while doing so. At his height, it was hard not to notice. But once he found a woman he thought looked intriguing, he suddenly tried his best to become invisible, dancing sort of behind her to her side, hoping that she would turn, become instantly smitten, and thus begin a sincere and fulfilling long-term relationship.

  He feared, though, that the smoky, drunken atmosphere of a bar was perhaps not the ideal setting to form a meaningful, long-lasting commitment. But what other choice did he have?

  Scott put the finishing touches on a painting he was working on. Art was the one area of his life where he’d always felt confident. He was in grade school when he realized he was talented. His class was asked to draw pictures for Valentine’s Day cards. He’d drawn, naturally, several hearts, and when his teacher came behind him to inspect his progress, her mouth fell agape.

  “Your hearts are perfectly equal on either side!”

  Yeah, so?

  “You are an artist,” she declared. She patted him on the shoulder, shook her head in disbelief, then moved on.

  Scott inspected the work of his classmates nearby, and his teacher was right, everybody drew asymmetrical hearts. They would be curvy on one side and then too angular on the other. Or one side would be bigger than the other. Maybe he did have an artist’s eye; the ability to translate what he saw in his mind through his fingers onto the page.

  Scott became an ardent sketcher-in-the-notebooks kind of guy. He adored comics—they were proof he could draw and then sell what he created. He could actually make a living at this! He managed to do well in his classes despite his endless doodling. So well that his math teacher encouraged him to apply to colleges. His parents had wanted all their kids to go to college. Some of his siblings had gone to community colleges for a while before dropping out, but none earned their degree. Scott would be the first to graduate from a university.

  As he researched schools, he came across the major “graphic design.” He’d never heard of it before. Certainly in his small town, nobody worked as a graphic designer. When he learned what graphic designers were paid, he abandoned his plans to become a comic strip creator (his passion for the medium was waning as he grew older anyway) and decided to be a graphic designer. He liked his job (except, of course, for The Big Weasel), his friends, his life. He just wished he had someone to share it all with.

  32

  Acting on Instinct

  Saturday morning Ana awoke to a head-splintering hangover. Despite her vow never to drink again and the fact that alcohol was strictly forbidden from her weight-loss plan, she’d been drinking like crazy over the last week. She parted the curtains, hoping the sunny sky would rejuvenate her and give her the will to do something productive. Instead, it was gray and snowing. It looked as bleak as she felt. Winter had finally made its way to Denver.

  Ana spent the next couple of hours in bed staring at the ceiling and feeling sorry for herself. She thought of various things she should do to further her career: Work on a stand-up routine and work the open mike night at Comedy Works. Refine the sketches she wrote for the show, tightening them up and making the parts the audience didn’t find funny, funny.

  She might have stayed there all day except for a phone call she got from Ram, asking her if she could pick him up from work since Nick was in L.A. for business and he just couldn’t face riding the bus in this weather.

  She thought of having to scrape the ice and snow off her car, navigate the slippery roads, face the brutal cold. It had all the appeal of surgery without anesthesia, but at least it would get her out of bed. Maybe that was all she needed to start feeling better. “Sure, I’ll be there. When do you get off?”

  “Two-thirty.”

  That gave her an hour to take a shower and down a pot of coffee, several pain relievers, and a cup of detoxifying tea. “See ya then.”

  Ana went through her post-drunken-debauchery rituals and still felt like crap.

  She got to the bookstore a few minutes early, and since she was able to find a parking space near the door, she decided to wait for Ramiro inside.

  Ana knew she should never go anyplace where money could be spent when she was hungover. She had no willpower or restraint in this state. So when she passed by the book about the history of Saturday Night Live called Live from New York, she picked it up and read about half of the first sentence of the jacket flap copy and decided she simply must have it, even though it was a hardcover and she never let herself splurge on hardcover books. In the point-eight seconds it took her to give herself permission to buy it, she reasoned that it would help her with her career. It would inspire her, give her tips on the biz, and surely help her reach her goals that much faster. Anyway, you were supposed to spend money to make money. That was all she was doing: Investing in her future.

  She paid for it and, as she waited for Ram by the door to the employee lounge, she started the book. She’d only gotten a few pages by the time Ram grabbed her in a bear hug, lifted her off the ground, and yelled, “You are the best! You are my hero!” but she was already hooked.

  “Whatcha got there?” he asked.

  “It’s the book that promises to share all the dirty little secrets about the history of Saturday Night Live from the writers, producers, performers, execs, everybody.”

  “You know I could have bought the book at twenty-five percent off.”

  “I know, but I figured I’ll just read it and return it. I don’t know. I’m crazy hungover and not able to think straight.”

  “You’re not feeling well? You should take the night off. The four of us can handle a show without you.”

  “Really? You think?”

  “I do.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  At home, Ana changed back into her PJs, crawled back into bed, and delved into her 600-page book.

  Once she started, she couldn’t put it down. She’d always admired performers from SNL and Second City. (You’ll remember that she cracked a joke about how SNL wasn’t funny on the poster for Primordial Stew. Her rationale was that it was sometimes true, and damn it, it was a joke, get over it already.) She was particularly in awe of Tina Fey, who was the first female head writer in SNL’s twenty-five-year history. Marin had gone to Upright Citizen’s Brigade theater in New York over the summer when she’d visited her family. SNL member Amy Pohler was one of the founding members of UCB, and both she and Tina could be found there some Sunday nights.

  Ana read until midnight, mostly because, even though she was exhausted, her heart was racing like crazy from all the alcohol she’d consumed the night before. She was at the part in which Lorne Michaels flies out to The Groundlings theater in Los Angeles to decide whether to hire Julia Sweeney or Lisa Kudrow. Each of them performed three sketches. Julia got it. Lisa said she didn’t let it get her down, she just thought about how she didn’t get it because she was supposed to get something else. And boy did she ever.

  Ana would have been devastated if she hadn’t gotten a job on the show that catapulted the likes of Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, Joe Piscapo, Jon Lovitz, Phil Hartman, Chris Rock, and Adam Sandler to fame and fortune. But look how Lisa Kudrow turned out. She was making something like a million bucks an episode on one of the most popular shows in recent history. Not bad.

  Maybe the same thing applied to her and Marin. Marin got the job in L.A. because Ana was supposed to get something else, something better suited to her personality.

  Throughout the book, performer after performer and writer after writer kept repeating that doing the show was absolutely exhausting. They always stayed up all Tuesday night and worked crazy hours the rest of the time as well. They repeatedly mentioned how competitive it was, with all these performers battling to get airtime to show what they could do and all the writers struggling to get thei
r scenes picked to be on the show. Larry David, who would later become the co-producer of Seinfeld, only got one or two sketches on the entire year he worked there. Ana thought it was bad when she had to rewrite brochure copy twelve times before going to print; she couldn’t even imagine how frustrating it must be to go without sleep for twenty-two weeks only to have her sketches scrapped or cut at the last minute every single time.

  Maybe Ana just wasn’t tough enough for this business. Maybe she was just someone for whom comedy and performing would be a hobby, something she could talk about at dinner parties when she was married and had left all her lofty ambitions of fame and fortune behind.

  Ana shook her head when she got to a part in the book where it said that some of the performers had been “failures” because they hadn’t gone on to make zillions of dollars in the movies after leaving the show. Hello, they’d managed to get on Saturday Night Live, probably only something like .00000000000000000002 percent of the population could say that. It was no easy feat. You had to have serious talent to get there. That was the thing, though. If you’re a little fish working at Spur of the Moment in Denver, Colorado, and you don’t make a movie or the movie you make stinks, you don’t have every journalist in the world declaring you a talentless has-been. But if you achieve enough success to get on the popular-culture radar, you opened yourself up to public ridicule for the slightest infraction.

  Ana put the book down at last, turned off the lights, and wondered if she had what it took to get on SNL. And if she did achieve some degree of fame, would she be able to handle the inevitable hate mail and scathing articles about her that would follow? Or would she do what John Belushi did after reading a negative review of himself for his work in Continental Divide, abusing drugs and alcohol after two years of abstinence until he died at the age of 33?

  Ana felt suddenly very old, like the window of opportunity for her to make it was closing. She needed to move to New York and take classes at Upright Citizen’s Brigade—get her face known with the powers that be in New York comedy. She needed to be prepared for anything, whether it was to have a store of characters she could draw on if Lorne Michaels decided to stop by at the last minute to see her perform, or to be able to whip out one hilarious sketch after another, week after week. She needed to improve her acting skills. She needed to get stand-up experience. She needed to learn how to sing and play the guitar and write funny songs. She needed to know how to write movie scripts like Adam Sandler. She needed to . . .