There are times when I have to wonder why I continue to live in New York City, with its disgustingly over-priced real estate, disgustingly overpriced everything, actually. Its sidewalks overflowing with trash and throngs of tourists in matching yellow ponchos, summers that are hotter than the tenth level of Hell in apartments that never come with air conditioning, a homeless population larger than my hometown who have more change in their collection cups than I ever have in my wallet. And to be a part of all this I pay a thousand dollars a month for an airless sixth-floor shoebox with a leaking sink and a broken toilet in a building that smells permanently like a litter box.

But then there times like the past forty-eight hours when I realize why I still live in this place—so I will never have to make up a story again in my life. Saturday night, in my attempt to become better acquainted with the downtown area, I thought I’d meet a friend for dinner on the Lower East Side, which anyone familiar with Manhattan can tell you, may as well be Rhode Island from where I live, but does have cool restaurants. Of course as soon as I emerge from my forty-five minute train ride with half the population of Chinatown, I have a message from my coworker detailing how I am to go to the other side of the city to give $500 to the transvestite magician we hired to entertain Neiman Marcus (don’t ask because I truly have no idea). Now I’m not sure how many of you have tried to locate a bank, let alone an account containing $500, in the trendy shopping district of Soho at 8pm on a Saturday, but it’s really not a lot of fun. Then try finding a single envelope and a cab so you can beat a magical drag queen to the front desk of a hotel so exclusive they barely let you in the lobby to leave half your pay check in cash because RuPaul has her wig in a knot waiting on the money to make a payment on her implants. Apparently my job description now includes “ATM to the Stars,” or whatever the hell she is, and your guess is as good as hers….or his.

The next night, I felt inspired to go be a part of the very “New York” phenomenon of poetry-reading in the East Village. Why I do these thing to myself is still not clear, and I really should have know by location alone- land of the Mohawked deep-thinker, where ripped tights and combat boots are always in style, I found myself wanting to explain to everyone I passed that safety-pinning your shirt together is not a fashion statement, so much as time to go buy new clothes.
I’m really only there for a friend, knowing as you do that I’m about as deep as my martini glass and by the time I get to the bottom of that I’m basically done with poetry. And so the reading goes pretty much how you’d expect an East Village event to go: angry lesbians, details of botched suicide attempts, rants with no meter, or rhyme or reason, with meanings as elusive as the damn waitress whose drink tray was my only salvation. Sadly without a-rhythmic bongo drums in the smoky background, but very bitterly Bohemian just the same. Line of the night: “There is no ‘I’ in fuck.” And all this time I thought it was a silent vowel -- thanks for clearing that up Mister Webster.

As it’s a Sunday night, I really have no intention of getting drunk, but when the star reader is introduced as a professor of erotic poetry who “channels the universe” at the New School, I have no choice but to begin chugging alcohol. So up to the microphone walks a 5-foot-tall, sixty-year-old Minnie-Mouse-looking woman, wearing round glasses as big as her head, and she begins reading- no shouting really- her series of Summer inspired erotic haikus. Now I am a grow woman and should be able to listen to a poem about sex, but when grandma is screaming about bush (and making no reference to the current President), I don’t care how old you are, you are going laugh out loud. So as she’s talking about flossing with ass hair, I have reverted to my 12-year-old self, with tears streaming down my cheeks, shaking with laughter and trying desperately to remember every word to tell all of you. I really nearly had to leave the room during the 5-minute rant on her ‘cream,’ where she told us how she would “cream all over Kansas, so there will be enough creamed corn for everyone,” much to the delight of the Heartland’s farmers, I’m sure. Thankfully she had books of her poetry for sale, which of course I had to purchase, so I now have my very own autographed copy Minnie’s view on balls and asses.

Basically just your run-of-the-mill weekend- drag queens, nymphos, vodka and me!

Living in Manhattan, it’s often difficult to understand how wedding dressmakers survive. We can’t even date properly, so how in the hell are we ever going to get married? Paradoxically, though, bridal magazines fly from the newsstands, purchased by the pitifully hopeful, the madly in love, and all the other female lunatics in the City. I’m not saying you’re crazy for wanting to get married, but if you think you’re going to meet Prince Charming in this urban kingdom, then you truly are living in a fairytale—no fairy godmother to save you from the homeless man lurking under the bridge; the mice in the subway have yet to change into white horses; you can never get your designer slippers back from the wicked drag queen; and there is certainly no happily ever after.

Now everyone knows that the best way to meet the man of your dreams is while everyone is highly intoxicated in a noisy crowded bar. That way you can really get to know the other person through meaningful conversation like, “what do you do,” “do you live in the City,” and “where are you from originally” (if you really want to dig deeply into their psyche). As Manhattan has about a million bars and restaurants, one would assume this island to be the ideal location to search for, and naturally find, your mate. What these poor magazine-reading girls fail to understand is that these bars don’t hold the secret to their happiness, but the source of their angst.

Case in point: The Dating Ritual of Corporate Guy and Corporate Girl. After a long week at the office, barely attractive Corporate Guy and his hardly passable Corporate Buddies decide to tie one on because they are A) trying to escape the pressures of their fast-paced, entry-level jobs and B) trying to fulfill all their convoluted fantasies about moving to New York and becoming the fabulous alcoholic hedge-fund playboys they read about in Maxim. So, here are the guys, dutifully pounding beers in an effort to become completely hammered before 11 o’clock.
Meanwhile, unfortunate-looking Corporate Girl dons her best “going out” clothes, which she can’t really afford and really shouldn’t be wearing, and meets her (strategically) less attractive three friends, carefully chosen for the evening to resemble the lesser co-stars of her favorite HBO series (she, of course, is Carrie). So the hopefuls stumble in their stilettos down to whatever corporate hot-spot the office was buzzing about that week, order four cosmopolitans and begin scouring the bar for the most suitable-looking group of Corporate Guys, meaning either the best looking/best dressed, or the better find—the group with no females nearby.
Having carefully positioned themselves, our wannabe girlfriends begin the age-old “desperately-wanting-to-get-your-attention-while-trying-to-pretend-I-don’t-notice-you” dance, hailed from the beginning of time as the only appropriate behavior for the single female. I mean, God forbid we should be the first to speak. After a few more drinks, the groups eventually merge because these suave, confident guys have finally consumed enough alcohol to actually become so, and the girls have begun artfully pairing themselves off with the most attractive, or if he’s already taken, the most gregarious (code for inebriated) guy. Now the real battle begins. Corporate Girl is trying to determine if he will be a good father to their two soon-to-be-conceived children, while Corporate Guy is trying to determine if his chances of scoring outweigh his need to use the restroom. As the conversation gets deeper (now on to reality television and rent prices), Girl feels a connection and Guy feels his bladder. Eventually, he has to excuse himself, figuring she’ll be gone when he returns; meanwhile, Girl uses his absence for a quick huddle with her friends to make sure that everyone has the game plan for getting home, and, more importantly, that no one expects her to join them.

Finding her still waiting when he emerges from the restroom, Guy is pretty confident this one is in the sack, so he staggers over and begins the typical version of bar foreplay—slobbering all over her face until she suggests privacy before her shirt flies off in public. At this point, he’s too drunk to remember her name (fortunately “Baby” works on every girl), but miraculously he can recall the condoms in his jacket and the shortest route to the restroom. By this time, Girl is totally wasted off only two cosmos because she skipped dinner to feel thin in her outfit (though from a look at her pants’ seams, she probably should have skipped lunch too). So she’s ever-so-gracefully sloshing her cocktail, much to the amusement of the martini inventor—1 part precarious glassware, 1 part straight alcohol, dash of high heels, mix well and watch fall over. Long story short, she’s willing to do pretty much anything to keep his interest up and he’s willing to do pretty much anyone to keep his interest up (so to speak). Inevitably her evening of Sex and the City becomes Screwed in the Bathroom, and then she sits by the phone for two weeks waiting for him to dial the number she shoved in his pocket as he leapt out of the cab. Apparently these Corporate girls aren’t as smart as they think they are because they play this same game every Friday and Saturday night as if their lives depend on it, and all I can say is that when your wash-rinse-repeat dating cycle hasn’t gotten you any closer to an alter, then it might be time to get a new shampoo.

While getting a guy to ask you out is not always easy, it is not the most difficult task you will undergo; actually dating him, now that may be the hardest thing you ever do. Truly, God has the most acute sense of humor. First he makes us social creatures, then he makes our parts complimentary, and then he creates DNA. It’s not that women are from Venus and men are from Mars (no matter how much we’d like to return them there sometimes), the truth is that we are simply programmed differently. The difference in the X and Y-chromosomes is just that tiny little leg of the X missing from male DNA—unfortunately that one small piece contains all the communication functions and any sort of social graces. Fortunately for those one-legged wonders, they also aren’t burdened with basic relationship comprehension skills that might require them to communicate effectively in social situations that don’t involve beer and scoreboards. This genetically handicapped DNA makes it impossible for a man to remember to call in a timely fashion, prioritize his relationship with his girlfriend above his relationship with his golf clubs, or comprehend how “quality time” might not always include Sports Center. And truly, all they need to do is Act Right—it is really not that hard. And don’t look at me like you have no idea what that means, ‘cause everybody knows your momma taught you how to Act Right: call when you’re supposed to call (though not after 10 p.m. on a school night), say what you’re supposed to say (“I’m sorry” works in basically any situation), and don’t talk with your mouth full (perhaps not as important for this situation, but still good advice).

Now I am not saying that all men in New York are assholes (my gay friends are quite considerate), nor am I claiming that only men in New York behave this way. To be sure the Y-chromosome is just as moronic the world over. However, the population distribution being such as it is, New Yorkers do encounter more of the chromosomally challenged on a daily basis, as it’s just a matter of numbers. Many assume the numbers would work for women in New York, but they are clearly just Sex and the City fans in Iowa who have never seen a man dressed for work in a suit or tasted a cosmopolitan, ‘cause neither are all they’re cracked up to be. Let me break it down for you: there are about 8 million people in New York City. For simplicity’s sake, say 50% percent are women, so we’re at 4 million men. At least half of those are gay, depending on what time of night it is and how much they’ve had to drink, and just go ahead and forget about anyone living in the boroughs ‘cause I can feel the hives start halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge, and we’re at about 1 million. Now of these one million, two-thirds are married and of the third that are left, a quarter won’t do because they are illegal immigrants, alcoholic –workaholics, actors (code: waiters), or other various undesirables. The remaining 150,000 or so are mostly Corporate guys, whom we have already eliminated, leaving us about 200 decent and eligible men and over 3 million single women. Thus, attractive, intelligent, independent females find themselves temporarily insane waiting for phone calls, emails, and passing glances from overgrown frat boys who’d rather guzzle beer with their buddies than pick up a phone, even for the possibility of sex, which is given away freely for the chance to sleep in his one-room piece o’ crap apartment instead of in the converted living room she shares with two other girls. It’s no wonder sex-toy stores are so prevalent, but what boggles the mind is why, after all this time, the Y hasn’t figured it out. No, better, why hasn’t the X? One could argue the free drinks and occasional dinners, especially in a city as expensive as New York, but after all the effort of finding the guy, getting the guy, putting up with the guy, and then losing the guy, and the crying and the complaining over the loss of what—some jack-ass with little more to offer than a ride on his Metrocard? No thanks honey, if all I’ve got to look forward to are 12 ounces of beer and 12 months of therapy…I’ll buy my own drinks from now on.

Last night I stared into the face of death—and then she blinked. Turns out it was just another regular at Bergdorf Goodman—seventy-year-old body, thirty-year-old face, and lips so full of collagen that even Goldie Hawn would be jealous. My job, such as it was, required that I stand behind a jewelry counter at Bergdorf Goodman, while the who care’s of Manhattan’s Upper East Side swarmed about for a book signing. There I was, wedged between a $10,000 necklace and a $5,000 nose, trying to understand how anyone was supposed to believe that one came installed with the original package. It’s like playing Mrs. Potato Head with all those interchangeable facial features- one week cheekbones are in, the next they’re out, with just a stroke of the knife.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of walking through Bergdorf Goodman (or been threatened with unemployment), then let me welcome you to the People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Money club, or as we like to call it back home—Real Life. Let’s face it, if you are actually shopping in that store then you either have a Park Avenue address or are spending all the money you brought on your vacation from rural Nebraska on a single designer silk wrap, in an effort to impress your friends and neighbors, none of whom will have even heard of the designer, and trust me, no one even knows what to do with a wrap, especially not in Omaha. So, yes, Bergdorf Goodman, nine floors of ridiculously priced shopping disguised as your living room. Complete with a café that serves chopped salads the ladies only pretend to eat, and a salon whose services, from what I can tell, consist of layered hair cuts and matching highlights for you and your fur coat.

True clients of Bergdorf Goodman are a society unto themselves. They prance about air-kissing their “friends,” but it’s a mystery how they even recognize each other, as their faces grow increasingly younger with age, rendering them positively frozen in their twenties. Frozen being the operative word; while their eyebrows display a constant state of surprise, no other features budge for fear the staples will come lose and the skin on their chin will return to its rightful place somewhere near the abdomen. Though, like trees, you can determine the age of these unnatural wonders by counting the rings on their neck. You can always tell the new money because they haven’t yet found the best plastic surgeons. One poor girl’s chest looked like two balloons had been stapled to her ribs, leaving a great chasm she insists is cleavage but what is truly a lawsuit, bless her heart. I have never understood why stick people think they need to have D-cups, they look like they’re going to fall over, and honey, nobody—NOBODY—thinks they’re real.

I’ve never found any of these socialites to be particularly friendly, but then if I were carrying around 15 extra pounds on my chest and hadn’t so much as sniffed a piece of cake in the past three years, I might be a bit irritable too, especially if that Muffy bitch had just bought the last Berkin bag right out from under me. Truly, the waiting list for a kidney can be no more agonizing than that of next season’s handbag. My only line of defense last night was the open bar, were I found myself at home among the cocktails. The cater waiters were friendly as well—the peasant class always recognizes its members, especially when attempting unsuccessfully to disguise themselves amidst the upper class.

I’d like to think that someday I’d be able to afford to shop at Bergdorf and spend the GDP of a third world country on a single pants suit. Amazing the outfits you can justify if you refuse to recognize the poverty of many African nations, or the ninety-sixth homeless man that your Manolos stepped over on your way to the spa. Until that time, however, I shall continue to visit only as often as my job requires my presence at Bergdorf Goodman—the definitive department store, the Fifth Avenue Mecca, and the place where silicone goes to die.

It appears the days of the “nice gesture” have gone the way of Michael Jackson’s career—everything comes with strings attached these days. I attempted to redeem a travel voucher last night toward the purchase of a plane ticket to visit my family this spring. Now this voucher was a goodwill gesture extended to me after the travel debacle that consumed the majority of my Christmas experience. Of course at the time I thought the airline was so respectable and gracious, so intent upon keeping my travel business that they would extend an olive branch, insuring that I would once again fly with them. Yeah right. Of course they sent me a voucher; apparently they sent every third person a voucher because they know no one will ever be able to redeem them. Just call the little 800-number and someone can assist you in redeeming your travel voucher. Forty-five elevator-music-filled minutes later, a real live operator, who by the way has no more information than the website, takes all your travel information before informing you in her humorless monotone voice that you must physically present the voucher at a ticket counter within 24 hours to finalize your travel, and that’s 24 hours from right this minute! If you have a problem with the policy, she’s happy to explain it to you in terms of a grocery store coupon. Why thank you for that economic lesson, Bertha, but a $75 airfare discount is a little more important to me than 50 cents off a gallon of milk, especially as I’m lactose intolerant and I don’t buy groceries.

I live in New York City. I do not own a car. I do not leave the island of Manhattan unless I am flying off of it. Thus the mere notion of just visiting the airport is nearly incomprehensible to me. What’s more, the cab fare to and from the airport would not only nullify the voucher, it would put me in the hole! Thus my options are narrowed. I could take the bus, but while I have no problem with public transportation, the last time I took a shuttle bus to an airport I had the pleasure of sitting behind the bus driver and his girlfriend. Basically I spent and hour and a half in Karaoke hell, listening to the girlfriend’s rendition of every song on Light FM. I realize that I am young and still supposed to be sacrificing, but neither my hearing nor my sanity is a facet of my person with which I’m willing to part.

Now I find it hard to believe in this the age of computer technology that an airline cannot somehow electronically track a simple voucher. Now that I think about it, should I be trusting my life to people who can’t install a working phone system? I mean it took 9 attempts before the automated system even put me on hold! That electronic woman kept telling me to try back later. Bitch. Is the idea that these people can defy the laws of gravity, hoist a multi-ton piece of metal into the air and propel it across the country, yet they can’t get my bag on board with me a little odd to anyone else? The hotdog vendor on the corner of 49th St. checks his email on a hand-held device, but the woman at the terminal gate is assigning my seat on what looks to be an early model mimeograph. You want me to pay you hundreds of dollars to lose my luggage, delay my flight, and run up my cell phone bill so that you can look like a hero for giving me a $75 apology note I can never use? It’s a bit like the old “let’s do lunch sometime” that you give the girl you used to be friends with in high school when she corners you in Walmart while you’re engrossed in the check-out magazine you deliberately picked up to avoid making eye contact—you know you’ll never come through, but asking somehow absolves you of the guilt you should feel for pretending you didn’t recognize her the last 12 times she took your order at Wendy’s.

So now I have to make a decision. Do I try an alternate mode of transportation? Train and rental car are both incredibly expensive, take way too long, and smell of previous customers. Or, do I find another airline? The problem here being that there’s only one carrier that flies directly into my tiny hometown. Otherwise I’d be forced to land hours away, and I have never been a cut-your-nose-off-to-spite-your-face kinda gal (my features are much too delicate for such atrocities). Were it not for my lazy, spoiled lifestyle I might fight the good fight, never fly this airline again, and let them miss my semi-annual trips to Po Dunk, USA on the cheapest flight in the cheapest seat shoving bags of peanuts in my purse and grabbing an extra soda for the road. Alas, I fear even the most righteous must crumble in the name of convenience. Thus, I am forced to submit and pay full price on the same worthless airline on which I have suffered so greatly, though to be sure they have not heard the last from me, as tomorrow I will exercise the final and most destructive weapon in my arsenal….the strongly-worded email.

People are often confused by my relationship with my mother, but it’s really very simple. We’ve gotten along great since I was an 8-year-old and we couldn’t figure out who was in charge—we just called it a draw and decided to be friends. In fact, by the time I left for college I was just about done raising her. She’s turned out all right, though I did leave during her formative years.
My mother is an amazing individual—her ability to remember the past twenty years of General Hospital subplots while never remembering which of her children she’s speaking to truly boggles the mind. Since my siblings were born, my name has become a twelve-syllable conglomeration of every person in our house—some days the dogs’ names are thrown in for good measure. I’ve been “whatever-your-name-is” for the past ten years, even though you’d think she would remember her first born.
Recollection is actually quite an issue for my mother, who hasn’t committed a phone number to memory since the advent of speed-dial. The only reason she knows where I went to college is because it’s printed on the top of loan bill she’s still paying—my actual degree is a distant phrase fading into that region of her brain reserved for most other details she’s certain she can almost recall. My major resides there with thank you notes, graduation gifts, craft projects and all the other forgotten items. I swear she doesn’t remember any of my friends’ names, but really, if she can’t get her own kids straight, she surely isn’t going to worry about anybody else’s. Probably, all she could tell you about my job is that it prevents me from answering her daily phone calls about critical issues like: “the Weather Channel says you’re cold,” “your Daddy took the railing off the back deck,” or anything she read in Reader’s Digest.
Bless her heart she does try; unfortunately the old “day late and a dollar short” is usually the best she can do. I have been dropped off and picked up late from every function I’ve ever attended—occasionally I wasn’t picked up at all. Her life operates on a ten-minute delay, and that’s if the traffic lights are in her favor. You know the road that’s “paved with good intentions?” Yeah—it’s our driveway. She was so excited this year when the package she sent me for St. Patrick’s Day actually arrived on March 17th—of course, it contained my Valentine’s Day card, but why get bogged down with details? Nothing, however, beats my Easter basket. When I was two-years-old she began making me a stuffed cloth Easter basket. As usual, she “got a little behind,” and the basket wasn’t finished in time for me to use that Easter, or the next. She did finish it though… the year I turned twenty-two.
It’s not that she doesn’t want to be on top of things; it’s just that she has too many pots on the stove, none of which contain anything you’d ever want to eat. We’re talking about a woman who can kill a roast at 20 paces. A one-dish wonder (wonder if the dish is safe to eat), she is a firm believer that the power of cream of mushroom soup can turn any batch of random ingredients into a casserole. The Queen of the Slowcooker, her most famous (or infamous) recipe is the Naked Chicken in the Crockpot—just place whole, naked chicken in pot and turn on—no liquid, seasonings, or sides needed…. yum! Of course, no matter how awful the dinner was, congealed in the next day’s lunch box, it’s even worse. Other kids traded their snacks in elementary school, but one look in my lunch box, and kids just gave me food out of pity. I was perhaps the only college student in America who looked forward to fall break and a nice restaurant-cooked meal.
Trying to explain my life to her is an exercise in futility. You can’t defend the necessity of owning designer shoes to a woman who thinks Prada is a city in Germany. Of course she quickly realized she was mistaken—that it was Prague, Germany where all those great chocolates and clocks are made. (Geography was never really her strong suit, though she knows enough to realize that I live so far away she must shout into the phone.)
I know I’m not alone; everyone has his or her crazy mother stories. It’s odd really, how someone who can’t remember to wash your soccer uniform in time for the game can remember the exact time of your birth. How the woman who can’t remember her PIN number will never forget the first time she heard your heart beat. So maybe she takes a nap every afternoon—she didn’t sleep a wink any time you had a fever. And maybe her dinners aren’t great, but she’ll drive all the way to school to deliver your forgotten lunchbox. And she wasn’t the Girl Scout Leader, but she’d never miss your dance recital. There’s not a single picture in your baby book, but she has your first hair cut in an envelope in her dresser and your baby teeth in her jewelry box. She can still remember how you smelled the day you came home from the hospital and the first time she felt you kick in her stomach. She’s never cried as hard as she did on your first day of kindergarten or cheered as loudly as when you scored your first homerun. She doesn’t understand your clothes or your music but she knows when you need a hug. You can’t get her to wear the trendy Capri pants you bought her for her birthday, but she’ll wear with pride the awful necklace you gave her the Christmas you were five. And God, she asks so many questions about every little thing and you think, “Do you have no life?!” Of course she doesn’t—she gave her life up so you could have one.
Sometimes I don’t know what to do with the woman who took twenty years to sew my Easter basket. But I do know that after all those years, that basket was a testament to my mother’s devotion, a symbol of the little girl I will always be to her, a labor of love from the one who loves me like no other, and to this day, is the greatest gift I have ever received.

Mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be actors

So why did I sideline the pursuit of an acting career for steady, daytime employment that doesn’t reject you on sight? Oh, I don’t know, perhaps it was waking up at 6 a.m. for a 9 a.m. audition where, if you’re lucky, you’ll get seen before your dinner shift starts at 4 p.m. Or maybe it was feeling like a member of a cattle herd—I was prime non-union beef—underfed, overworked, and constantly suffering from foot-in-mouth disease. Let’s be honest though, it wasn’t the early mornings or the long line that kept me from throwing myself into the largest temp pool in the U.S. It was knowing that if I did get up and get in that line, they would be there, waiting for me…the Actors.

I can spot one a mile away—the overeager face, the flee market attire, the headshot practically pinned to her chest like a marathon runner with tap shoes and a resume. Typically I cross the street when I see one, especially as they tend to travel in packs, drawing strength from reinforcement by their fellow rejects that they are, in fact, far more talented and better looking than anyone on the cast of Friends.

Waiting five hours to audition is painful at best, but waiting with Actors is excruciating. Overhearing their ridiculous conversations is pitiful but amusing, until they begin talking to you. You see I really don’t care about your regional theater credits. No, I don’t want to see your headshot. I’m sure you were an amazing Sandy in your high school production of Grease, but really I’d just like to read my book. I have no idea if there is an “official list,” (nor would I tell you if there were), I don’t know where the proctor is, and of course I don’t have an agent—if I did I wouldn’t be here with all these Karen carpenter wannabes.

Seriously, some of these women haven’t been fed in weeks. The idea of being “hungry for it” is a metaphor, right? Their faces are priceless when I pull a bagel out of my bag—it’s something like fear mixed with disdain, like they’re breathing in second-hand carbs. My cream cheese really pushes them over the edge, and I see them start to drool over my breakfast as they spoon up a small scoop of yogurt (got to make it last until dinner). Eventually though, as I finish my bagel and cease to be a health threat, they begin to circle, dying to talk—about themselves—to someone, anyone, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t always me. I put on my best “I have no interest in acknowledging your presence let alone speaking to you” face, but apparently I haven’t shed enough of my southern hospitality because inevitably Becky Braindead and Wendy Witless start talking to me. And of course they want to be all buddy-buddy, like I want to sit around and swap recipes with a girl who hasn’t so much as sniffed a piece of cake since she moved here five year ago and caught the “acting bug.” She had a pretty serious case of it, couldn’t keep anything down for the longest time. Thankfully she discovered the cure-all powers of medicinal cocaine. Now back home we call this bulimia and drug addiction, but what do we know?

Now there is the Actor (highly irritating but relatively harmless), the Model-Actor (Actor with less talent, zero personality and an eating disorder), and the worst possible version, the Musical Theater Actor. This is the one who, in addition to thinking that she is the next Meryl Streep, also thinks she can sing. A word to the wise here: just because your momma thinks you can sing, doesn’t really mean you can. In fact, I bet you got all your talent from her…and she’s tone deaf. These people are remarkable—no truly, you must experience it yourself for the full effect—they can totally disregard everyone in a room, warm-up like they were in their shower, not sing a single pitch correctly, and have no idea how horrible they are. Amazing. Once I was staring in disbelief, which the squawker mistook for awe, and I had to spend the next half hour learning about “vocal technique” from a woman who sounded like she’d spent most of her practice time on the filter end of a Marlboro Red.

So in an effort to salvage my fading desire to become a compcard-carrying member of “the business,” I decided to enroll in some acting classes—yes, perfect way to escape actors. Now I was smart about it, I didn’t just leap into the first class I could afford (I mean who am I kidding, the concept of actually “affording” something flew out the window when my first Visa card arrived.) Oh no, I got a book—the book in some circles—Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting. I wanted it to be that change-of-life, coming-of- age, born-again-in-the-light-of-true-knowledge kind of experience, and maybe it could have been, had I made it past page four. Not that I wasted my money, though; Uta is often an answer in my daily crossword.

Obviously books weren’t gonna cut it for me, I needed serious instruction, real acting with real actors. So, I hop a train all the way down to the West Village, which to an Upper East Sider may as well be Delaware, and attempt to enroll in a musical theater class. The registration people convinced me to audit a class first, and God bless them for that. I found myself in this three-hour-long debacle of what appeared to be public voice lessons for the vocally challenged. I felt like I was either sitting in on a taping of Candid Camera or I was watching an after-school special about the bad talent that will befall you if you run away to New York. The first thing that struck me was that these people were paying to humiliate themselves in front of like twelve other people. I already have a voice teacher who insults me privately (if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard “what the hell was that,” I’d be quite wealthy-even by New York standards). But you see, that’s the thing about Actors, not only do they not know if they suck, but they will not know in front of God and everyone. If I’m gonna suck, I’ll do it in private, thank you very much.

So here I am listening to the Latin-American duet, You Are the Sunshine of My Life—now forgive me, but I know Stevie wasn’t seeing double when he wrote this. The actual student had brought a friend in to help him, not sing harmony, but jump in after “you-auh-thugh-sun-shine-of-ma-life”(in evenly spaced, monotonal sounds), with “yes-you-aughhhh.” This was the point at which I began stuffing my scarf in my mouth to keep from laughing out loud. They couldn’t hold a candle to the next girl, whose rendition of I Feel the Earth Move under My Feet, had me praying the earth’s movement would swallow me up and put me out of her misery. This small, pale girl wobbled back and forth, breathing after every syllable, until the teacher, all five feet of her, got up in her full ski suit and began stomping around the room with her eyes closed shouting, “you’ve got to feel it!” at the top of her voice. At that point, our own Carol King closed her eyes, clenched her fists and sang half a notch louder, by sacrificing every actual pitch in the song while bouncing on every-other off beat. Now when you’re auditing a class, you’re not supposed to leave early, but as my other option was choking to death on my scarf, I bolted. I realized a couple of things as I walked home: number one, that was the last day of the semester so it had taken them four months to work up to being that bad; and number two, I had to get out of musical theater while my hearing was still in tact.

It took me the better part of a year to recover from the nightmare of my first “acting class,” but, after about nine months of spending my nights out in those Chinese restaurants that offer free wine with dinner, I had finally scraped together enough money to buy admittance to yet another freak show—thankfully this one came without a soundtrack. So the first class was the great “getting to know you” game, where we all stood up one at a time and poured out all of our frustrations about the business—and life itself—on a room full of strangers, who were either sizing you up as competition or completely blocking you out so they could practice their own fantastic introduction—which, for the record, sounded amazingly like the one before… “can’t get an agent”… “they’re only hiring big names”…and my personal favorite, “ I’m so surprised that it’s not about talent, it’s all just a business. Somebody alert the media, this girl has just used both her brain cells at the same time!

After an hour and a half of hearing lists of everyone’s small-town acting rolls, exaggerated screen credits and what I’m certain were home-correspondence drama courses, I was already over these people. But, fair’s fair, I marched myself up to the front of the class and told them all the work I had been doing. Contrary to popular opinion, I can be seen performing daily—in my shower—a one-woman extravaganza that’s revered by my sixth floor neighbors (I have an extra large bathroom window with no curtain). I’ve never had a problem finding monologues….of course I’ve also never looked for them, and my only actual experience with acting is occasionally trying to act like I have some sense (my illustrious career as a pageant loser not withstanding, as I did actually manage to convince them I wanted world peace). As for public speaking, “A senior at the University of North Carolina, I am contestant number one,” is the longest anyone’s let me hold a microphone, but I did learn how to walk down stairs in heels- some fake tits and a sequined gown and I’m almost qualified for Vanna White’s job.

I stuck around for a few classes; long enough to perform my first-ever monologue. After which, the Jennifer Aniston wanna-bes in the front row used all their collective mental capabilities to ask me a question: “So, if you like, don’t wanna be an actress, like what do you want to do?” Swallowing my initial response of “get far away from you,” I had to admit that it was a valid question. A very wise woman once told me about acting, “if you can do anything else, do it.” Great advice, though maybe not what you want to hear from someone you just paid three hundred dollars to teach you how to get into the business. So if the class didn’t help me find the best audition material or get me an agent, it doesn’t matter, since it taught me the greatest lesson of any course I’ve ever taken: I may not have a clue about what to do with my life, and I may not know exactly who I want to be, but I am damn sure that I am not and have no desire in becoming…an Actor.