Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Part 8

I CAN NEVER GO TO JAIL

It'd be great to be so famous that if I murder someone, I will never, ever, ever serve any jail time, even if it's totally obvious to everyone that I did it.

I HAVE TO HAVE A PSEUDONYM

I read that Michael Jackson used to have prescriptions for Demerol under the alias Jack London. So much about Michael Jackson's life was tragic and strange, but that detail is just so cool. I like thinking that Michael Jackson was like, "Let's see, let's see. Who do I want to commemorate in my request for drugs? You know what? I always did love White Fang. Jack London it is." My alias for hotels and stuff would be Gwendolyn Trundlebed, a nonsense name I've always loved that my friend Mike Schur came up with during the third season of The Office.

MY STAND-IN GETS PLASTIC SURGERY TO LOOK MORE LIKE ME

In movies, actors will sometimes have a stand-in. The stand-in is an actor who is hired to stand in the place of another actor for lighting purposes, so the first actor can take a nap or go do drugs in his trailer. I worked on a movie once where the lead actor (a very famous actor whom I'll call Tony Dash) traveled with his personal stand-in. They were best friends. It is already weird to be best friends with someone who looks like you, but the absolute weirdest part was that the stand-in had gotten extensive facial plastic surgery to look more like Tony. I think he did it so that Tony would never, ever think of hiring anyone else to be his stand-in, and he'd have job security for the rest of his life. He looked like the half-melted version of this famous actor. It was horrifying and t.i.tillating at the same time. It just showed so much power. I want there to be some slightly grotesque version of me following me around on sets all over the world, and we hang out and vacation together.

KENAN THOMPSON PLAYS ME ON SNL

I can't tell whether I would hate this or love this so much. There are arguments for both. I'll say love it, for now.

Karaoke Etiquette

WITH THE EXCEPTION of j.a.panese businessmen, no one likes karaoke more than I do. When I graduated from college, my aunt Sreela and uncle Keith gave me the single best present I've ever received: a professional-level karaoke machine. I don't know if they were aiming to become my favorite aunt and uncle for all eternity, but that was the result. When I arrived in Brooklyn with Bren and Jocelyn, we set that machine up to our TV before we had a bed or couch. We'd just take turns belting Whitney Houston in an empty room, while the others sat Indian-style, impatiently waiting their turn.

Because we were unemployed for so much of those first months, and also because we are cheesy crooning hambones, we did a lot of karaoke. Now, in L.A., all the best birthday parties I go to take place in a karaoke bar or, for the true karaoke experience, a dark windowless box in Koreatown that smells faintly of Korean-style chicken wings. What follows are some things I think really maximize the karaoke experience.

When I pick songs for karaoke, I have three concerns: (1) What will this song say about me? (2) How will I sound singing it? and (3) How will it make people feel?

The key is that the third one matters the most, by a factor of a hundred. When most people sing karaoke, they think of themselves as contestants on American Idol, and they sing and perform their hearts out. But I really think people should be thinking of themselves more as temporary DJs for the party. It's kind of a responsibility. It's up to you to sing a kick-a.s.s upbeat song that sets the mood for your friends to have fun, drink, and pick up girls and guys.

And it kind of behooves you to pick a short song. I don't care if Don freakin' McLean shows up in a red-white-and-blue tuxedo, no one is allowed to sing "American Pie." It's actually kind of hostile to a group of partiers to pick a song longer than three minutes.

Stray observations I would like to add: I like when small people sing big bra.s.sy songs, like, say, if my friend Ellie Kemper sings "Big Spender" in a booming voice. I also like when guys sing girls' songs, but not in a campy way. Like a guy earnestly singing "Something to Talk About" is wonderful. Guys sometimes do this thing where they sing a Britney or Rihanna song and do a campy impression of the singer, to be funny, and it's painful. An amazing thing to do is to pick a song that has lyrics in another language. That's why I tend to always sing Madonna's "La Isla Bonita" for karaoke. I would die if a guy sang a Gipsy Kings song. Die in a good way, obviously.

Day Jobs

IN OTHER PLACES in this book, you've seen the fruitless attempts I made while living in New York to pursue my goal of show business employment. This section is about my attempts to get day jobs. At first I called this chapter "Mama's Gots to Pay da Bills," but I thought that t.i.tle made it sound like maybe I had been a stripper or had a brood of illegitimate children.

It was October 2001 and I lived in New York City. I was twenty-two. I, like many of my female friends, suffered from a strange combination of post-9/11 anxiety and height-of-s.e.x-and-the-City anxiety. They are distinct and unnerving anxieties. The questions that ran through my mind went something like this:

Should I keep a gas mask in my kitchen? Am I supposed to be able to afford Manolo Blahnik shoes? What is Barneys New York? You're trying to tell me a place called "Barneys" is fancy? Where are the fabulous gay friends I was promised? Gay guys hate me! Is this anthrax or powdered sugar? Help! Help!

The greatest source of stress was that it had been three months since I'd moved to New York and I still didn't have a job. You know those books called From Homeless to Harvard or From Jail to Yale or From Skid Row to Skidmore? They're these inspirational memoirs about young people overcoming the bleakest of circ.u.mstances and going on to succeed in college. I was worried I would be the subject of a reverse kind of book: a pathetic tale of a girl with a great education who frittered it away watching syndicated Law & Order episodes on a sofa in Brooklyn. From Dartmouth to d.i.c.khead it would be called. I needed a job.

CARING FOR THE YOUNG AND EATING THEIR FOOD

By placing hundreds of neon green flyers all over the wealthiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan, I finally got a job babysitting. I was paying my $600 portion of the rent taking care of two adorable girls named Dylan and Haley. Dylan and Haley were from a wealthy family in Brooklyn Heights. Not wealthy in a simply went-to-private-school way. Wealthy in a each-had-her-own-floor-of-a-historic-brownstone-in-Brooklyn-Heights-and-wore-all-organic-clothing way. I guess "crazy loaded" is the more accurate way to say it. Their dad invented the Internet, or something like that (not Al Gore), and whenever I walked into their mansion on Pineapple Street, I always whispered to myself, This is the house that inventing the Internet built. Dylan and Haley's parents had divorced years before, and I never met Internet Inventor Dad. I only interacted with gorgeous Internet InventorMarrying Mom, who looked like a slightly older Alicia Keys. Internet InventorMarrying Mom hired me on nights when she went out on dates or had plans for a girls' night with her all-black, all-glamorous friends. Later I read that Internet Inventor Dad was seriously dating an internationally famous supermodel. They rolled high. If my babysitting stint were taking place now, they would have a dynasty of reality shows on Bravo, and I'd be the pixilated chaperone in a cable-knit sweater escorting the girls to Knicks courtside seats.

Once Internet InventorMarrying Mom gave me an unopened bottle of Clinique Happy that someone had given her and she knew she'd never use. "It's not fancy or anything," she said sheepishly, as though she were handing me a bottle of Lady Musk by Walmart.

What is this world? I thought. Clinique isn't fancy anymore?

I was a little worried about babysitting at first, because though I have the voice of an eleven-year-old girl, I have no natural rapport with children. I'm not one of those women who melts when a baby enters the room and immediately knows all the right age-specific questions to ask. I always a.s.sume the wrong things and offend someone. "Does he speak yet? Does what he says make sense, or is it still gurgle-babble?" Also, I'm always worried I'm going to accidentally scratch the kid with my fingernail or something. I'm the one who looks at the infant, smiles nervously, and as my contribution to small talk, robotically announces to the parent, "Your child looks healthy and well cared for."

So it was surprising that I killed it as a babysitter. Er, maybe "killed it" is a wrong and potentially troubling way to express what I'm trying to say. The point is, I was an excellent babysitter. It helped that the kids thought I was a genius. It was so easy to seem like a genius to Dylan and Haley when helping them with their homework. For instance, one night, I explained that the mockingbird in the t.i.tle of To Kill a Mockingbird was actually a symbol for the character Boo Radley. Dylan looked at me with wonder. "Why are you babysitting us?" she asked. "Why aren't you teaching at a college?"

I also knew what little girls want to talk about, which is boy bands. Haley and I would talk for hours about which member of 'N Sync we'd want to marry. After long deliberation, the answer was always J. C. Chasez. Joey Fatone's last name was going to be "Fat One" no matter how great he was, and even though they didn't know at their age that Lance Ba.s.s was gay outright, they sensed he'd make a better good friend and confidante. As for Justin Timberlake, well, JT was the coolest and hottest, but too flashy, so we couldn't trust him to be faithful. J. C. Chasez was the smart compromise. We would talk like this, in complete unironic seriousness, for hours. The reason I was better than other babysitters was that I would never rush them. In me they had an open-minded listener to every pro and con of spending the rest of their lives with each band member of 'N Sync. I may have gotten more out of it than they did.

When the kids went to bed, the real fun began: me turning on Showtime at the Apollo in their tricked-out den and going to town on all the kid-friendly snack food in the house. Kid-friendly food is the best, because kid-friendly simply means "total garbage." I ate frozen chicken nuggets shaped like animals, fruit chews shaped like fruit, and fruits shaped like cubes in syrup. I discovered that kids hate for any food to resemble the form it originally was in nature. They are on to something because that processed garbage was insanely delicious. I spent some excellent Sat.u.r.day nights watching Mo'Nique strutting onstage at the Apollo while I ate a handful of children's chewable vitamins and wrapped myself up in my boss's cashmere kimono. I did it so much that it became a problem. One evening after her bath, Haley pulled me aside, wracked with guilt: "Mommy wanted to know who ate all the turtle-shaped bagel pizzas, and I knew it was you, but I lied and said it was me." She burst into tears. I hugged her and told her, "You can never tell her the truth." And then I let her stay up an extra hour watching Lizzie McGuire. Bribes and boy bands. That's all you need to be a babysitter.

Babysitting did not pay the bills or give me health insurance, which I guess is good, because otherwise I would probably be an au pair somewhere right now. I needed to get a real job.

NETWORK PAGE DREAMS

The page program at the network TBN is very prestigious, and famously harder to get into than Harvard. No, TBN is not the real name of the network, but there is an old saying, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you," which applies here. The TBN page program turns ambitious, overeducated twentysomethings into friendly, uniformed butlers. I wasn't sure it was really my style, but it seemed like the first rung on the ladder to somehow working in TV. Young television writers all aspire to be TBN pages, in the hope that a late-night talk show host like Craig Ferguson or David Letterman will eventually overhear them uttering something witty while leading a tour, and then say, "You're brilliant! Why don't you come work for me and be my best friend?" They hire only seventy or eighty pages a year, out of something like forty-two million applicants. I decided the odds were stacked against me, which strangely made me feel like I was going to get the job even more. Sports movies had brainwashed me into the belief that when the chips are down the most, that is when success is the most inevitable.