Spur of the Moment (9 page)

13

The Tap-Dancing Cult Leader

T
he only problem with living a double life of soon-to-be-superstar /regular person was that it was exhausting. With performances and practices, they had just one free night a week. Ana had been looking forward to Monday night all week so she could get some rest. She was sprawled on the recliner practically drooling in her stupor of exhaustion. Ramiro and Scott were playing back-to-back games of Hot Shots of Golf 3 on the X-Box. Ana had been sitting there for several minutes, staring absently at the TV screen before it occurred to her that watching people play video-game golf was about as much fun as watching people play real golf, which was to say, not at all.

She glanced into the kitchen. From her seat in the recliner, she could see Jason grading papers at the kitchen table. She didn't know how he did it, performing and practicing six nights a week, working all day, and then somehow managing to create lesson plans and grade papers in the middle of it all.

He looked so angelic, sitting there, working studiously, concentrating intently, his hair mussed adorably from running his fingers through it as he graded his students' papers, as if trying to decipher what appeared to be hieroglyphics but were supposed to be essays on cell division.

Marin was on the phone, laughing with an old friend about something or other.

Ana loved that she lived with these four people. It made her feel like she was able to hold on to all the good parts of college life without the annoying stress of exams and essays. The five of them hadn't moved from Boulder to Denver until both Marin and Ana had graduated, but once the last of them was out of school, there was no more reason for Scott and Jason to commute to their jobs in Denver from Boulder, and they'd rented this brownstone in Capitol Hill. But since they'd taken all their furniture and “decorations,” such as they were, from the house in Boulder, it hardly felt like they'd moved at all.

Their furniture could only be described by the word “eclectic.” There was the flowered couch that had weathered years of abuse and showed it in every stain of mysterious origin and every tattered cushion. It was enormous, however, and easily as comfortable as a bed for sleeping on. Then there was the kelly green recliner that matched nothing and did so with willful extravagance. It, too, was worse for the wear and had several tufts of yellow foam peeking out from various places. There was the white-and-yellow loveseat that housed the remnants of many a spilled beer. Next there was the cheap Target entertainment stand and a coffee table that had teeth marks on all four of its legs from somebody's brother's puppy who'd visited one day many years earlier. While they didn't mind hand-me-down furniture from their parents or friends, Scott had spared no expense when it came to their enormous TV, top-of-the-line stereo, and X-Box. Also, the room was decorated with several of Scott's abstract paintings. Ana thought having original art in the house was the pinnacle of class.

It was the greatest house in the world to Ana. Ana didn't believe in destiny, exactly—that everyone had a life mapped out for her from fetal cell numero uno—but she did believe that in every life, twists of fate presented themselves, and you said yes or you said no, you grabbed on for the ride or were too scared to take the risk, you let bad luck beat you down or you made the choice to grow stronger, and the richness or the pallor of the life you led was determined based on the choices you made every day. For Ana, she had come to college at a time when she was so thrilled to be free of the iron grip of her mother's grasp, she was ready to try anything. Then she saw a cute boy putting up posters for auditions. She thought,
hey, why not give it a try?
And the rest was history.

On the day of the auditions, Ramiro had explained what improv was. “Even though improv is made up entirely as you go, there are rules, tips, and strategies that will help you succeed. For those of you who make it, we'll teach you all that stuff. Today, we just want to get to know you and see a little bit of what you can do. The one rule I'll share with you up front is
don't try to tell jokes.
Try to tell an interesting story. The humor will come naturally out of a good story. If you don't tell a good story, I don't care how many jokes you tell or how much natural talent you have, your performance will be boring to watch. Improv can only succeed if everyone works together as a team. People who want to hog the spotlight by cracking jokes cause scenes to bomb big time. Just give yourself the freedom to see where things go, don't even think or worry about trying to be funny. Scott, Jason, and I will do a couple scenes for you to give you an idea of what this is all about, but first, are there any questions?”

“How many people are you going to take?” a guy with a dorky salad-bowl haircut asked.

“We're looking for two people,” Jason said. “But we'll probably ask about four or five to join us because the dropout rate tends to be pretty high with improv. It takes a while to become good at improv, and some people can live with bombing until they become good at it, and some just can't. For those of you who make it, we'll practice three times a week for the first four months, then we'll drop to twice a week. Improv is just like any sport—you need to practice to get good and you need to practice to stay good.”

Ana scanned the room. There were about fifteen people auditioning, all of them male except for the blond woman. She figured that they'd probably only take one woman, and it was going to the blond for sure whether she had any talent or not. She was
stunning.

“We need a suggestion from the audience. Someone give me a thing,” Ramiro said.

“An invention!”

Jason jumped into character and began the scene. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, please take a seat,” he said in a Thurston Howell III voice. Ramiro and Scott sat on the floor, looking up at Jason.

“I have seen the future,” Jason said.

“Tell us, tell us!” Scott said.

“As you know, the year 1900 is fast approaching. I have invented something that, with your help, will change the future. We'll ring in the new millennium with an invention that will change the world as we know it . . . and will also make us very, very rich. My invention will bring us convenience like we've never known before. There are, of course, some downsides, but not to worry, we can cash in on those too.”

“What are they?” Scott asked.

“Oh, it's not really important.” Jason started tap dancing, slowly at first. “The important thing is that we'll be rich. Let's . . .”

“Stop tap dancing around the issue! Tell us the downsides!” Ramiro said.

“I'm not tap dancing.” He started dancing faster. He was really good at it! But of course he hammed it up, exaggerating and occasionally flying his arms out in a tada! manner.

“You are tap dancing!”

“I'm not tap dancing.”

“You are tap dancing!”

“I'm not tap dancing.”

“You are tap dancing!”

“I'm not tap dancing.”

Ramiro couldn't help it, he giggled. He quickly suppressed his laughter, but it made the “audience” laugh even louder, seeing that even the performers thought Jason was hilarious. “Okay, except you are, and if we're going to help you, we need to know everything.”

Jason slowed the tapping down, almost to a stop. He'd stand still, then let out a little ta-tap, ta-tap. “Okay. The invention will enable us to travel anywhere we want, but to do that, it will require that we clear cut acres and acres of land all across these fine United States. I figure we'll open a clear cutting business, and we'll make out like bandits.”

Ramiro and Scott looked at each other and nodded approvingly.

“Also, it is very expensive to feed. Currently the only way to fuel it is with oil, but I'm sure that will change soon. We'll figure out something else soon. Until that happens, it will let off toxic gases that will destroy the environment and our health . . .” He shook his head and waved his hand as if this were a trifling matter. Ramiro and Scott looked at each other and did the same thing, shrugging.

“It's very expensive and requires constant maintenance and breaks down regularly and people will need to buy replacement parts and we'll set up our entire society to ensure that we can refuel it constantly, but we'll sell all this stuff, and people will buy it, I'm telling you, they'll buy it! We'll be rich. Me and all my loyal followers, we'll be rich!”

“Excellent idea, sir. What do you call this invention?” Ramiro added.

“An automobile.”

Scene over.

They performed three more scenes. In one, Jason was an Australian guide, leading Mr. and Mrs. Blufflekowski through the crocodile-riddled rivers of Australia in search of a rare bug. Next Jason played The Four-Hundred-Year-Old Archaeology Professor and then a Chinese acrobat.

As Ana watched Jason, she couldn't believe how talented he was. He was very funny, but he was also a great actor. She'd thought he was gorgeous the first moment she saw him—that was why she was here, auditioning in this fleabag excuse for a theater—but he was more than hot, he was talented! She was in love!

The character of the Cult Leader was a perfect example of Jason's goal in life of bringing the injustices of the world to light in an amusing, entertaining way. This was why Ana loved him—he was smart, funny, talented, and he really cared about people other than himself. He was always looking out for the underdog.

After the guys performed a few scenes, they started randomly picking out groups of two or three or four wannabe Iron Pyrits to perform together for three minutes. They did this over and over until each person had performed at least twice.

Marin had felt completely comfortable performing. Ana, on the other hand, wanted to wet herself and throw up as soon as she walked up there. Once she got the first words out, though, she relaxed a little, and she felt like her scenes weren't completely awful, just mostly awful.

Next Scott, Jason, and Ramiro asked all the wannabes to stand up and tell everybody a little about themselves.

Ana watched person after person go up and give their mini-biographies and she realized that most of them were pretty damn boring to listen to. It would be easy for her to be more memorable and entertaining than the other people.

She was the third-to-last person to go up in front of the group and talk about herself. As soon as she was facing the audience, she put her right foot to her left knee, raised her arms overhead like a ballet dancer, and said, “The main thing you need to know about me is that when I'm nervous, I like to dance.” She moved slowly into an arabesque. She said everything in a bored monotone. “Also, I like to do gymnastics. I like to tumble. I like to tumble quite a bit. I've been studying gymnastics since I was a little girl, and I find it so relaxing. Of course, I've run into problems with it sometimes.” She did deep pliés, with her left arm outstretched to the side, curved gracefully, and her right arm moving in circles from below her waist to above her head as she dipped into a plié and raised back up. These were all warm-up moves she'd done before practices; she used lots of these moves in her floor routines. “Like one time, when I was taking the SAT, the administration chick got all in a huff when I did some summersaults down the aisle.” People laughed appreciatively. Ana thought, I
love
this! “Or this summer when I lost my virginity . . . well, not so much lost as threw away. Gave it away. Pawned it off on somebody. Anyway, I'd like to tell you it was romantic and erotic and wonderful, except . . . it wasn't. See, I'd wanted to be in love when I had sex for the first time, but I kept waiting and waiting for the guy of my dreams to come along, and he never showed up. Anyway, I did not want to go to college as the first virgin in the history of the universe. Plus, virgins are constantly fed into volcanoes as a sacrifice to the gods—the health risks of virginity are pretty dire. So I was dating this guy over the summer, and even though I didn't really like him, he had the equipment I needed to be devirginized, so I went with it. It was on a Saturday afternoon, and I didn't think I'd be nervous, but as he was struggling with the condom, I started having a panic attack. I really wanted to do some back handsprings or cartwheels to relax, but before I could he was on top of me, and . . . I don't want to say it was bad, but how do I put this? I was as dry as a desert, and our equipment was rubbing together like two pieces of glass. There was this ee-ee-ee-ee sound, and it wasn't the headboards. And when he pulled out, there was this sound of air being expelled from a vacuum-packed package.” Ana made the “Thwock!” sound to uproarious laughter. “Well, so, I guess that's all you need to know about me. Oh, one last thing. My name is Ana Jade Jacobs and I grew up in Broomfield, Colorado, and I have my very own pair of Wonder Woman Underoos that still fit me. Thanks for hearing me out. Catch ya later.” Ana waved goodbye and as she walked back to her spot on the floor, the applause surged around her.

Ana felt awesome. This comedy thing? She was
hooked.

14

The Summer of Elastic Waistbands, Part One

I
t had been a summer of elastic waistbands for Ana, and if she didn't do something quick, it was going to be a winter of elastic waistbands as well. Already she was having fantasies of tearing the drapes from the windows so she could wear them toga-like to avoid having to wear her pants that cleaved her body in half. If she kept going like this, there wouldn't be enough room for both her and the rest of the actors on the small stage. Action must be taken!

It was a Friday night and she had an hour before she was supposed to leave for the theater. For dinner she had steamed veggies and a small serving of pasta with marinara sauce. It was not even a little bit satisfying.

She'd been overweight for several years now, but lately things had reached a critical point where she simply had to put the brakes on her ever-expanding elephantine bod.

She'd put on the twenty pounds in her freshman year in college. While it was routine for students to complain about the food in the dorm cafeteria, Ana thought it was heaven. It was a big improvement from her mother's cooking, and she could always count on there being something to eat. She loved that, not having to worry about whether there would be something to eat at the end of the month. There had been so many times growing up when she and her mom would have no food in the house. There would be spaghetti sauce but no pasta; peanut butter but no bread; taco-flavor packets up the yin yang but no meat, taco shells, lettuce, or tomatoes. She loved the dorm cafeteria. There was always cereal
and
milk for breakfast. At dinner, there was always an entrée
and
a vegetable. And there was a salad bar at every single lunch and dinner, which she found to be supremely reassuring. The cafeteria buoyed Ana with a sense of calmness and safety.

Added to her voracious appreciation of dorm food was her discovery of beer. Boulder had tough underage drinking laws, so going bar hopping before you were twenty-one was practically impossible, but there were always tons of house parties on campus. Plus, since Ana had befriended Ramiro and Scott when they were twenty-one, she was constantly going over to their house after practices to have a few beers and play epic rounds of video games or darts.

Ana had spent the last three years of college trying to lose weight, but she never lost more than a few pounds. She ate well and worked out regularly, but apparently eating until she wasn't hungry anymore was too much for her to reach her goal of lithe sveltness. So she'd made peace with her weight; she wasn't unhealthily obese. But lately she hadn't been working out as much, so not only had she gained weight, she'd gotten out of shape. It wasn't just an issue of vanity, although if she wanted to make it as an actress, it sure did help to be tiny. It was true that female comedians were held to slightly different standards than other actresses, enabling Roseanne and Rosie O'Donnell to become famous despite their weight, but it certainly didn't hurt to be thin. Ana couldn't remember the last time there was a large woman on
Saturday Night Live,
for example. There was often a big guy, like Chris Farley or Horatio Sans, but no big women.

But her real concern was that she didn't fit into her clothes and she didn't have the money to buy new ones. As she sat at her desk day in and day out, she could feel her thighs spreading out like pancake batter on a griddle. It felt like she was carrying around a sleeping kitten in her lap as her gut spilled onto her thighs. Maybe Chelsey could give her a deal on personal training. Maybe having Chelsey monitor everything Ana ate would help inspire her to work out more and eat better.

Ana brought her dishes to the sink and returned to the table. It was the time of the month that she always hated. No, not that time of the month. The rent-due-on-the-first-of-the-month time of the month. Rent was due in a couple days, and Ana had to get out her whip and flog her roommates roundly until they finally paid their share of the household expenses.

Ana paid all the bills in the house, mostly because she didn't trust anyone else to do it. Jason always wrote her a check without being asked, but Ana had to nag the other three for at least four days straight before they finally paid up. Ana
hated
to nag. Plus, Marin was chronically short of funds, meaning that there was always a lot of last minute “I'll pay you back” negotiations to work out before Ana could deliver the rent and pay the utilities.

Marin's perpetual cash-flow problem drove Ana batty. Marin hadn't had to take out any student loans, while Ana had had to pay for college herself. Ana would be paying off her loans till she was sixty. Marin's parents had bought her a brand-new Explorer for graduation, so she didn't have any monthly car payments either. Ana had bought a used car, but she still had $6000 to go before it was paid off, so her monthly expenses were considerably more than Marin's. Granted, she made more money than her roommate, but not nearly enough to rest easy. Ana couldn't believe how much credit card debt Marin had racked up, but Marin never worried about it. Money wasn't real to Marin. She pulled out the plastic, got what she wanted, and didn't worry about the pesky details of how she'd ever pay it all off.

Ana, on the other hand, worried about money constantly. She'd spent her whole life worrying about it. That's what happened when you had a single mom who worked as an underpaid administrative assistant.

Ana's mother, Grace, was sixteen when she'd gotten pregnant. Grace never talked about Ana's father, no matter how much Ana begged for any detail about him—his nationality, his hair color, his height, anything. Her mother often joked that it was an immaculate conception, and sometimes that's how it felt, like Ana had popped into the world out of nowhere. Ana was desperate to know what parts of her came from him, but it really did feel like she was just her mother's daughter. She looked a lot like her mother. They were both short and voluptuous, they had the same amber eyes and thick brown hair, so Ana couldn't figure out what she got from his side of the family. A history of cancer and heart disease, probably.

Of course what she hoped was that his side of the family was fabulously wealthy. She'd spent her entire life fantasizing about him coming back into their lives somehow to give them bankfuls of cash. She used to hope he'd be alive so she could meet him; now it had been so long she didn't care if he was alive or dead—an inheritance would do just fine, thanks.

The fantasy had many different permutations. There was the one where he'd been penniless when he'd met her mother and didn't feel worthy of her, which is why he ran off. But over the years he'd built some fabulous business empire—most likely in the form of life-saving medicines or medical equipment—and now that he was worthy, he'd return and ask Grace to marry him and whisk them away to a life of ease and comfort.

Then there was the one about how he'd been called off to some obscure, top-secret war, and then had become a prisoner for the last twenty-three years, but when he got out, with a huge payment from the offending government of whatever mosquito-ridden, jungle-bound nation, he'd come back and whisk Ana and Grace away to a life of ease and comfort.

Or there was the one where he was a dashing prince of a little known foreign country, and his parents demanded that he marry the princess from some other little known foreign country to keep the nations from war instead of marrying his true love, Grace Jacobs. But now that the princess had died and peace had been declared, he could return to claim Ana and Grace and whisk them away to a life of ease and comfort. A life where Ana never had to worry about going hungry in the week or two before her mom got her monthly paycheck on the first. No matter how Grace tried, she always ran out of money by the end of the pay period.

From a young age, Ana had a habit of checking the cupboards and refrigerator daily. For the first couple weeks of the month, the sight of food gave her such comfort. The last couple weeks of the month, the dwindling supplies gave her stomachaches and tension headaches. She'd had a stomachache through most of grade school, and her problems with insomnia had started in kindergarten.

But Ana knew that the reason money was tight was because of her, because she'd come into the world when her mother was only sixteen. Grace was always talking about college, and how the only way to get ahead in this world was to go to college. Then she'd sigh wistfully and say that she wished she could have gone. “If only things had been different.” Ana knew that she meant, “If only I hadn't had a baby at sixteen, all my dreams could have come true.”

Because Grace's biggest goal in life was for Ana to go to college, Grace hated the idea of Ana doing anything that might divert her attention or time away from studying. Ana had taken gymnastic lessons at the YMCA since she was a toddler (they'd had a program that enabled low-income students to take lessons at no cost). When she'd gotten to grade school, her mother wanted her to quit gymnastics and concentrate all her efforts on academics. Ana had been eight years old when she told her mother that having an extracurricular activity looked good on a college application. Eight years old. How had she even known that then—where had she heard it? Maybe it was because her mother's friends were all in college and Ana absorbed it from being around them. Ana absorbed, too, the way her mother looked on with such jealousy and longing whenever her friends talked about school; even when they were talking about teachers they hated or pulling an all nighter to study for an exam, Grace coveted it all.

“College application” had been the magic words. With that and the promise that if Ana's grades ever dropped, she'd quit gymnastics immediately, she was able to continue practices and competitions. Then in high school, she quit gymnastics to become a cheerleader. She wanted to try out for plays, student government, and the school paper, but her mother worried that if she added another activity on top of cheerleading, her grades would fall and her future would be over. They'd had so many arguments that went along the lines of “I want you to have the opportunities I never had . . .” and Ana saying that she wanted opportunities like being in school plays and writing for the paper. Then Grace would pull the “if only things had been different for me” card, and Ana, though furious with herself for doing so, always felt guilty, literally felt guilty for being born, and her mother almost always won.

Ana had felt like the adult in their small family for as long as she could remember. She'd been there through all the times her mother had cried after another boyfriend had broken up with her. Ana knew that the fact her mom had a kid certainly didn't help in the pursuit of a husband—yet one more thing for Ana to feel guilty about. Ana always dutifully brought home the notes from teachers and didn't let her mother do anything until she'd signed them. Ana always did her homework without being asked. And when her mother had the morning queasies (in her first week of college Ana finally realized these were actually hangovers after she'd experienced her own hangover for the first time), Ana would bring her mother orange juice, a vitamin, and three Excedrins before getting dressed, making her lunch, and getting to school all by herself. Ana learned young not to miss the school bus, ever.

She had the grades and the scores to go to an Ivy League school, but not the money. So she chose the University of Colorado at Boulder. Boulder was just twenty minutes from Broomfield, the suburb where she'd grown up, and where her mother still lived. Even though college was only twenty minutes away, Ana lived in the dorms and then in a house with her friends from her improv group, so at least it gave her some distance from her mother.

Growing up poor had made Ana desperate to
be
somebody. Somebody who never needed to worry about where her next meal was coming from. Somebody who had enough money in the bank that if she lost her job, she wouldn't fall into crushing debt and poverty and be out on the street. Somebody who could own her own home—not a puny condo decorated with '70s-style carpeting and god-awful green drapes like her mom—a house. Somebody with such style and great clothes that when she ran into her classmates from grade school and high school they would feel waves of remorse for having made fun of her Kmart clothes and limited wardrobe when she'd been a kid. They'd kick themselves:
Gosh, I wish I'd been nicer to her way back when.

Ana pushed the bills aside and looked at her watch. It was almost seven o'clock. Oh what she wouldn't give to be able to stay home tonight and go to bed early. She was exhausted.

“Marin, are you almost ready? We're going to be late for the warm ups!” Ana called.

“Coming! I'm almost ready.”

Ana went to the bathroom and fixed her makeup, leisurely redoing her hair. She knew when Marin said she was almost ready she wasn't even close to ready. Ana finished freshening up and went and sat on the couch, idly flipping through an
US
magazine. She, Marin, and Chelsey subscribed to every tabloid rag there was. They were improv comedians, so reading celebrity gossip wasn't a guilty pleasure, but important research.

Ana stopped at an article describing how various celebrities lost weight. They had pictures of the stars going from “Puff to Buff.” Ana would have given her left eye to look like just one of these women in their alleged “Puff ” stages. Puff her ass. The caption should have read, “From Healthy to Skeletal.” Reese Witherspoon had cheekbones that could slice concrete. And hello, when she had been “Puff ” she'd given birth about eleven seconds earlier!

She looked at her watch again. Shit, they were going to be really, really late. Ana started getting anxious. “Marin! Get your ass down here!” Ten more minutes passed before Marin deigned to show up, and by then Ana was about to have a coronary. But as soon as she saw her friend, she calmed down.