Life As I Blow It (20 page)

The responsible girl who thought Ira might be the right guy tried to get through to the irresponsible girl who thought he was boring, but she had shown up a little too late.

I looked down at my bikini bottom and figured the damage was already done. I picked up my phone and called Zack. He answered. I drove right over to his house to finish what we had started on the street the night before.

Forget growing up. I was right where I belonged.

I
decided that since I was single I could finally get laser-focused on my career. I entered a stand-up competition that was sponsored by Comedy Central. After passing the first level I had to perform a five-minute set at the Hollywood Improv. I didn't end up winning the competition, but Comedy Central still put me on
Premium Blend
, a stand-up show featuring a few comics at a time. I felt like I was finally getting a real break. I wondered if Ira had heard that things were going so great for me.

The competition led to me getting my first big agent at one of the best agencies in town and up to that point I had only auditioned for commercials. I was ecstatic at the idea that now I had an agent who could get me auditions for real television shows.

I was still thinking about Ira a lot but this new development made me feel stronger. I was convinced these things wouldn't be happening if I was still with him. It was when I was alone that I succeeded the most. I needed to remember to do things opposite of the “traditional” way. Get my career settled. Make a life for myself. Depend on nobody. Stand on my own two feet and don't even think about having a relationship until that is all set in stone. I had a plan.

My agent set up a showcase (audition) for me for the Montreal comedy festival, Just for Laughs. That was where all the comics I knew wanted to go. It could help launch your career. He knew that I hadn't been doing stand-up long but he was sure this was going to be a good move for me. I wasn't sure I was ready, but I figured since he was an agent he knew more than I did.

The showcase was on a Thursday night at the Hollywood Improv. I was told I was supposed to do ten minutes of material, which was exactly what I had accumulated so far.

When I got to the club I saw a huge line outside. The sign was lit up with the name Drew Carey. I got butterflies.
What a big night
.

I was the last comedian to go up before Drew Carey. I walked up, nervous but confident.

“If you guys are drinking tonight, please don't drive,” I started. The audience just looked at me, but that was okay since I hadn't gotten to the punch line yet.

“They have this new device that they put on your ignition. You breathe into it, and if it detects alcohol on your breath, your car won't start. Brutal, right? But wouldn't it be awesome if they could put something like that on my cellphone?”

The sound of dead fucking silence resonated through my body. My knees felt weak. I didn't understand what had happened; that exact same joke had killed when I did it before for the Comedy Central thing.
Did they not hear the punch line?

I didn't really know what the hell was going on at the time, but I do now. Those people were there to see Drew Carey. They didn't give a shit about me in my light blue tank top with my big platform shoes rambling on about how I liked to drink and dial.

I was way too new at stand-up to have any idea how to handle the situation so I just plowed through my jokes, not that I needed to pause for laughter anyway, and said good night.

As I walked away from the microphone, down the steps, and off the stage, I noticed that the emcee wasn't passing me from the other direction. He was nowhere to be seen and the stage was completely empty. Now I really didn't know what to do, so I kept going. I certainly wasn't going to walk back onstage to the packed crowd of annoyed Drew Carey fans. I felt like they wanted to hurt me.

After at least a minute of dead silence and a crowd of confused faces, the emcee blew past me near the doorway and muttered something that sounded angry. The reality of what a disaster this night had been started to sink in. I knew my agent would be looking for me so I ran and hid in the bathroom. I locked the stall and cried. It was a scene from one of those Lifetime movies I like so much.

After an hour I figured the coast was clear so I headed out of the bathroom and out of the club. I managed to avoid everybody except the emcee.

“What the fuck was that?” he asked.

“What?” I asked back, defensively.

“You had like three minutes left onstage. You don't get offstage when the emcee isn't even in the room,” he scolded me.

I didn't bother to fight back. He was right. I felt defeated. I felt humiliated. I felt like I had no idea what the hell I was doing. “I'm really sorry,” I mumbled, then I left. Right as I got to my car, my platform wedge gave out and I went flying face-first to the pavement.

“That's about right,” I said out loud.

I got in my car, picked the gravel out of my hands, and drove back to my apartment.

I wasn't sure how much damage I'd done to my future, but my agent seemed to brush it off. “It was too early for you to be auditioning for the festival. No big deal …” That was pretty much his response.

Even though he seemed okay with what had happened, I was not. I had thought that things were taking off for me, but now it felt like none of the good things from the past couple of months had even happened. I wondered if it was over before it really started. I obviously didn't know how to handle myself in the comedy world, plus the idea of doing stand-up again made me cringe. I thought that maybe the times before when I'd done really well were a fluke, and what happened at the Improv was the reality. Too bad the me then couldn't talk to the me now, who knows one bad night is just that. It doesn't wipe out all of your good ones.

A week later, I got my first audition for a TV show. I spent a ton of time working on my lines and preparing for the audition. I felt really confident going in. Keep in mind, I felt confident that night at the Improv, too.

The day of the audition it was pouring rain. I drove to
Fox studios and proudly handed them my ID. The guard at the gate directed me to where I was to park, then showed me where my final destination was. The two looked really far away from each other, but I've never been good at reading maps. I parked as directed and headed to my audition in the rain. I had an umbrella but when the wind is blowing at forty miles an hour, they don't help much.

I had read a map correctly for once; the building I was going to
was
really far from my parking spot. I noted that spots closer to the building were marked
RESERVED
and fantasized about the day I'd be the lead on a sitcom and would get to pull right up into one of those spots. It wouldn't say
RESERVED
, though. It would say
SARAH COLONNA
.

When I finally got to where I was going I was relieved to see that the other girls were in the same shape that I was in: sopping wet. I signed in and waited anxiously to be called to see the casting director.

The audition was over in minutes. I read the scene twice and the casting director smiled and told me I did a great job. He shook my hand and thanked me for coming in. I remembered that my acting teacher said that you never know what it means if your audition goes quickly.

“It can be a good thing. If they give you some direction and you take it, then they've seen what they need to see.”

That casting director had given me direction, and I knew that I had taken it. I didn't mind the rain or the walk back to my car because I felt great. Nobody is harder on me than I am, so if I felt I'd done a good job that meant that I had. I didn't know how it all worked, but I sat in my car and prayed that I got the part. Maybe I sucked at the showcase the other night because I wasn't supposed to go to Montreal.

I was supposed to be in town so I could get this job. Maybe stand-up wasn't my thing as much as acting.

Later that day my phone rang and I saw that it was my agent's number.
This could be the call
, I thought.

“Hello?” I answered excitedly.

“Hey, it's Ron.”

“Hey! What's up?”

“How'd it go today?” he asked.

He was messing with me. He wanted to drag out the good news!

“Good. Really good. I think he liked me.…”

“Hmmmm. All right. Well, we just got a call from him. I don't want you to get upset, but he wasn't quite as positive.”

Or he was trying to find a nice way to tell me to move back to Arkansas.

I was silent for a minute. “Well, okay then. What did he say?”

“He said you were kind of a mess. That you looked like the wind just blew you in. He was worried about your appearance.”

My appearance? I'm not always well put together, but I certainly am when I need to be and that day I needed to be.

“Well, the wind kind of did blow me in. It was pouring rain and I had to park seventeen miles from the building.”

“Calm down, I just wanted to ask you what happened.…”

“But everyone looked like that. I mean, my hair was wet but I wasn't in rags. I didn't have BO. I just had to walk there during a tornado, no big deal!”

“He just seemed upset about it. Look, it's the first time
he met you and we've really talked you up. Maybe he's just being really hard on you or had weird expectations.”

“Did he say anything about my acting?” I asked.

“No, not a word. He just told us your hair was a mess. That was his feedback.”

I was silent.

“Don't sweat this. It sounds like he's got a stick up his ass today. I'll touch base with you later,” Ron said. We hung up.

I immediately called my friend Liz. She and her husband, Brandon, were my college friends who had moved out to California. She was working at a talent agency and I thought maybe she knew something about this casting director.

“Oh my God, him?” she asked. “He's just a bitchy queen. That has nothing to do with you. What did he say about your acting?”

“Not a word. I spent all of this time preparing for the audition and all he cared about was that my hair was messy,” I told her. “I guess I should have worn a cap.”

Even though I laughed the incident off, my ego took a huge beating. I wasn't feeling very confident about my life decisions. And I wasn't feeling very talented. The phone call I got from my agency a few weeks later didn't help.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Hey, it's Peter.”

“Oh, hey Peter.” I was confused. He worked with Ron but he never called me.

“Listen, I've been trying to get you in the door with casting directors and it's just not working. Nobody has ever heard of you and you don't have any credits to help me sell you. We're just gonna part ways. Good luck down the road.” He said it all in one breath and with very little compassion.

“Hey, Peter? Just one thing …”

“What?” he sounded like he was being forced at gunpoint to listen to what I had to say.

“You guys knew I had no credits. You came to me. I just want that to be clear. Maybe it was a mistake, but please don't talk to me like I've been a burden.”

Don't be too impressed. I cried for about an hour after that. I went straight to my bedroom and curled up in a ball. The sports editor's daughter in me felt like this was strike three, and I was out.

I
spent the next year and a half dating somebody that I didn't really like. I liked him as a friend, I liked him as a person, but as a boyfriend he kind of sucked. He was a comic, so knowing that Ira would hear about it and figure out that I had moved on and was doing great motivated me to keep things going with Marvin.

Marvin was a huge flirt. He had a way of making a girl feel special, which—if you are slow on the uptake—is what girls want. Unfortunately he didn't discriminate, so I spent most of our relationship encountering women who were “shocked” to meet Marvin's girlfriend since they were “sure he was single!” In some ways his flirtatious nature probably kept us together past the point that we should have been; I was so busy fighting for my new boyfriend's attention that I
didn't have time to think about the fact that I was still hung up on my ex.

I tried a few times to get Marvin to go by his real name, which was Greg. Greg was a nice normal name and Marvin was his shitty middle name. For some reason he preferred it. I'm not sure what the deal is with me dating guys who like to go by ridiculous names. He insisted that the name Marvin was more original than Greg. I explained to him that sometimes things that seem original only seem original because everyone else is smart enough not to use them.

The day that he asked me to move in with him was the day that I knew it was about to end. At the time I was living with a girl named Nicky and he was living with a guy named David. Nicky was lots of fun to live with, but she was messy. Sometimes she'd get up from the couch and would leave behind crumbs when she hadn't even been eating. She put food wrappers in the bathroom trash, which really grosses me out. One should always know the difference between kitchen and bathroom garbage. I'm also certain that her unreasonable love for cigarettes is how my cat developed asthma. The asthma was something that I discovered after weeks of listening to him wheeze. I assumed it was a hairball so I continued to give him remedies that pet stores and the Internet told me to. When things didn't get any better I took him to the vet, who diagnosed his condition and informed me that my cat would need a cortisone shot every few months to keep it under control. I cursed Neil and his audacity to die and leave me with an asthmatic cat.

So it was after about a year of dating that Marvin started looking for an apartment for us. I told him that I wanted to get my own place.