FLOPPER I am afraid of many things. Drowning, fire, the disapproval of strangers on the Internet, that I''ll be hit by a bus without having had a chance to clear my browser history, that one day everyone else on the subway will suddenly be able to hear what I am thinking and turn on me. You know, the usuals. One thing I''m not afraid of? Looking like an idiot. See, I knew I was a writer. That was protection. No matter where I went, no matter what I did, I could turn it into a story. Fall through a hole in the sidewalk? Story.
Make the worst Final Jeopardy! wager of all time? Story. Anger the lord of the ocean, stab a one-eyed guy, and get very, very lost on my way home to Ithaca? Epic story. Those were the two things I knew about myself: that I was a writer, and that I didn''t mind looking stupid. Growing up, you figure out pretty quickly which of your friends is the person who doesn''t mind looking like an idiot, and that was me, hands down. I was the one going over to strangers and asking if the mothership had landed. I was the one standing in an airport with a giant foam cow hat on my head, accordion open, ready to greet friends as they landed, and not even because I''d lost a bet. Mortification was a poison to which I had built up immunity after years of exposure. Besides, it was much less embarrassing to be me than to have to stand next to me and admit you were with me.
And the writer in me had noticed that the bigger of an idiot you appeared to be, the better the story was. Nobody wants to hear, "And everything went smoothly, just exactly according to plan." Something had to go wrong. You had to trip up. That was where the excitement lay. I collected experiences the way some people collect old coins or commemorative stamps. One year, for fun, I called the ExtenZe male enhancement hotline every day for a month, with different voices, just to see what would happen. (What happened, if you want to know, was that Phoebe, who worked the dinner shift, got annoyed when I identified myself as Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a fun fact about the ExtenZe male enhancement hotline is that they make you identify yourself before you start your call) and threatened to transfer me to the police.
) All of this seemed to be leading to some kind of grand adventure. I sat there, glumly, waiting for a wizard to drop by the house and invite me to steal dragon-gold, or a wise old man in a brown hoodie to offer to teach me the ways of the Force. But no one showed. I would have to strike out on my own. What was a field in which a willingness to look foolish might come in handy? Of course! Reality television. Like anyone growing up after 1980, I always had the dim, nagging sense that I was supposed to be famous for something. A certain measure of fame just seems like our birthright these days, next to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Food, shelter, Wi-fi, and the sense that someone''s watching; these are the modern requirements for survival.
The only thing more terrifying than the feeling you''re being watched is the feeling that you''re not. Privacy is just an uncomfortable reminder that you''re not a celebrity. My portion of fame, I knew, was waiting somewhere, neatly labeled in a holding facility. To claim it, all I''d have to do would be fill out some sort of form and show up in the designated audition city. And until that moment it was my right, as an American, to stare at the television and mutter, "I could do that." If I were being really honest with myself, these people I saw competing on television all possessed skills that I lacked--whether on American Idol or America''s Got Talent or even America''s Most Wanted . I could hold a tune, but only the way you hold a stranger''s cat: not closely and not long (not to mention the strange yowling noises). I Got some Talents, all right--excellent grammar, for one--but they weren''t the kind of thing that would exactly sing on the national stage.
Whenever I tried to "smize," model-style, people asked if I''d been possessed by an ancient and evil spirit. I had never murdered anyone, to the best of my knowledge, and if I did I would certainly not elude capture for long. But there are always two ways of making it on the air: to be spectacular, and to be spectacularly bad. The second group was more fun to watch anyway. Why be Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood or that one ventriloquist guy whose puppets all seemed oddly racist (get new dummies, Terry Fator! Then you won''t have to sit there with a pained expression while they rant about the people taking our jobs), when you could be short, sweatshirted William Hung, wrangling his painfully earnest way through "She Bangs!" or Leonid the Magnificent, dropping his equipment as the big red X''s buzzed above him, weeping profusely and promising that "next time, I will be perfect"? Sure, on one path lay Kelly''s international fame and Terry''s bucket loads of gold, but on the other lay William''s Christmas album, Hung For The Holidays . Now that was what I called a career trajectory. That was a story! And that was going to be my way in. I was going to seek failure out-- n the national stage, with a glowing neon X attached.
The plan was simple. I just had to become dramatically, unquestionably, horrifically bad at something. I had to get myself in front of the judges and flop like no one they''d seen before. Maybe, if I worked hard, I could become just as earth-shatteringly terrible as my idols and wind up on the air. It certainly seemed like my best shot. My trouble was that I''d had little practice failing. I came up during a very specific era of child-rearing in which everyone seemed to believe that if Little Sally ever failed at anything, ever, she was going to be completely wrecked for life. Dutifully they set about sanding off the sharp edges of existence and childproofing all possible scenarios against hazards of choking under pressure.
Trophies for everyone! A part for everyone in the school play. No failure. No rejection. You are a golden snowflake. Have a sticker. For someone who hoped to make a career of rejection, this was a considerable setback. I had no opportunity to pursue failure in high school either, where, distressingly, I kept succeeding at things. By senior year, I had been appointed president of four clubs and had mysteriously become captain of the volleyball team, even though I never left the bench.
As a flop, I was a failure. College was a different story. With a clean slate and thousands of people who didn''t know that I was doing it on purpose, I could begin my training for the big bomb. I began collecting rejections. There was an art, I quickly learned, to flopping. You couldn''t just be bad. Half the art is knowing how to go too far. You must keep a straight face.
If you''re auditioning, you must sing badly, but feelingly. You must put the emphasis on the wrong syllable, read comedy as tragedy and tragedy as comedy. Overact, overgesture, pause for no reason midsentence and open and close your mouth like a bewildered carp. You must, in a word, turn in a whole performance. I began my training in my freshman year, auditioning for plays under a false name. You could be more convincingly terrible, I discovered, when you had a backstory, so I crafted a character. Her name was Gloria Nichols. She had recently lost a lot of weight, loved to make bold gestures where no bold gestures were called for, and was polite to excess, striving to please an unseen vocal teacher who told her she had great promise.
"Any talents?" the student directors asked. "I have heart!" I wrote. "And kidneys!" Gradually, I broadened my scope. I auditioned for the Women in Science Players Ensemble. It was the first audition I''d seen listed that was on campus but involved no one I could conceivably ever have met. For my monologue, I recited Yoda''s death scene from Return of the Jedi in its entirety, doing all the voices. It was a natural choice; as a Star Wars fan, I already had the dialogue memorized. "Lu-uke," I croaked.
"There is another s-ky-wa-kk-errr." When it was over, they looked at me. They seemed to be deciding whether to be angry or confused. "What possessed you to choose this as your monologue?" they asked. " Star Wars is science," I said. It was a start. Later that fall, when I saw a Craigslist ad for Halloween Dancers, I knew it was directed at me . even though my dance experience was restricted to the five miserable years of ballet that gets foisted on every girl of a certain demographic too timid to play soccer.
To give you an idea of how good I was at ballet, when we performed The Nutcracker , I played the Girl with the Butterfly Net. There is no such character in The Nutcracker . After each scene of the real ballet was finished, I ran across the stage holding a butterfly net. The Craigslist ad was for "Pussycat Doll-Style Dancers." As far as I could tell, it did not require prior experience, and it paid. The audition was all the way out in Quincy, Massachusetts. I took the subway there from Cambridge, since I somehow had the naive idea that everything in Quincy was located conveniently on top of the T stop. This turned out not to be the case.
Having decided to look the part, I found myself walking along Massachusetts State Highway 3A in leopard-print leggings and a tank top. Cars kept slowing. I waved them on. The.