Julie Klausner Read online

  Sundry dumb fantasies about being onstage suchly pranced about my noggin with cartoonish frequency around that time, fueling my case for a long car ride up to Yorktown, which I laid out point by point in efforts to convince my parents to haul me upstate to the audition. They did, and while I speed-belted the first two bars of “Tomorrow” in a lineup of five other third-graders, my mother made small talk with the other kids’ stage mothers. My mom was always encouraging, but she was no Mama Rose: The idea of time wasted at commercial auditions or tuition thrown at acting schools that gave out homework assignments like “go to the zoo and observe an animal” was dismissible by her as something done for kids who aren’t terribly bright.

  I, thrillingly, made the cut at round one of the tryouts, so in between that first night and three days later, when my dad drove me to my callback, I’d already counted, battered, and deep-fried all possible chickens. I’d written my bio for the program, which made generous employ of the phrases “auburn songstress” and “unwavering gratitude,” told off my enemies in my hypothetical Tony Award acceptance speech (“Who’s a fat retard now?”), and practiced signing autographs in a stage name I’d chosen—“Kitty Clay”—that was better suited to a 1950s character actress who only played prostitutes. I had set myself up for a mighty descent.

  My father, atonally humming along to “Up On the Roof” on 101.1 CBS-FM, was privately happy I hadn’t made the cut. Not because he didn’t encourage my performative instincts: in fact, “supportive” was a tepid modifier for the kind of pride my father took in watching me onstage. He loved watching me captivate and made sure I knew I was star-stuff, and was always front row center at all of my school performances, ready with flowers and praise, even after the doozies. Like when the accompanist at the Y disclosed, at the last minute, that she did not have the sheet music to Gypsy, and I opted over “a cappella” and “not at all” to give a fully-committed performance of “Rose’s Turn” along to a cassette of the score from the production starring Tyne Daly, complete with Claudia Teitelbaum providing the off-stage “Yeah!” in between “You like it?” and “Well, I got it,” which, from an eight-year-old girl, is technically performance art.

  No, my dad was just relieved that I didn’t get the part because now he was off the hook in the chauffeur department. It was an hour-and-a-half commute back and forth from Scarsdale to Yorktown Heights, where rehearsals were held, and if I’d been cast as Annie, or even one of her ragtag orphan chums—a demotive possibility that hadn’t even darkened the doorway of my ego-addled young mind—he would have had to drive me back and forth five days a week or risk breaking my heart by telling me no. And the sound of that word was always jarring coming from his lips, whether it referenced a third cookie or the actualization of a grandiose fantasy. My mother told me weeks later, once I’d calmed down, that they wouldn’t have driven me to rehearsals if I’d made it, but took the “We’ll cross that bridge!” attitude when she first took me to the audition. My mom, ever-presumptive of her conversation partner’s familiarity with the idiomatic canon, never finished the second part of clichés. From her, it was always “A stitch in time” or “The apple doesn’t fall,” which was deeply confusing advice to a little girl merely trying to make sense of why Andrea Blum—a popular classmate whose mother was a backstabbing monster with an eye-lift that made her look Korean—stole my Doritos.

  Being in that play, I reasoned, would have emancipated me from the social oppression I heroically endured daily at the French-manicured hands of the Alpha Jewesses of Solomon Schecter Hebrew School. I was so tired of being at the business end of the sneer of Andrea Blum, not to mention Lizzies Shapiro, Steinberg, and Strauss—the tannest girls with the longest lashes and the scratchiest Benetton sweaters in the grade, whose precocious sarcasm was rivaled only by alpha girls with blossoming breast buds in junior high. I wanted so badly to get this role and bid “Later, losers!” to them all. They’d see me from the cheap seats, I thought. And I’d be onstage with a grown man and a live dog. The sobbing recommenced.

  My dad, now feebly whistling along to “Under the Board-walk,” told me to relax. It was good advice with a beginning, middle, and an end that I couldn’t heed, hysterical in the wake of my rejection. What kind of terrible mistake had been made? I thought I had the lead in the bag when I arrived at the open call and saw I was the only redhead auditioning. Everybody knows Annie has red hair, and who wants to put a wig on a kid without leukemia? I was prepared, too, having practiced along to both the movie and the album from the Broadway show, tapping on carpet in my bedroom and letting, respectively, Albert Finney and Reid Shelton promise Annie/me that he didn’t need sunshine to turn his skies to blue, “I don’t need anything but you!”

  In reality, a little girl needs more than her dad, even if he is Oliver Warbucks, the moneyed plutocrat with the heart defrost-able only by the Depression-era optimism of a carrot-topped hobo. But my father, who instilled in me a love of musical theater so potent that I am unable to listen to the cast recording of Sunday in the Park with George without bursting into tears, gave me the impression when I was growing up that he was the only man I’d ever need.

  My father is a stocky accountant of modest height with a Bronx accent and a bald spot who smiles with his eyes. He is amused by stories as simple as “I saw a golden retriever with a toy in his mouth walking down the street today.” He is an impossibly warm man: When he shakes your hand, he’s probably touching your shoulder as well, and he always looks at me after he cracks a joke at the dinner table, to make sure I know he was goofing for my benefit. He always kept an eye on me, making sure I called home if I was spending the night at a friend’s house or going into the city, and whenever I protested at his protective overtures, he’d just say, “You’re my only daughter,” which I took to mean that I was the only person in the world.

  My dad is used to acting the part of patriarch since his father—the one I’m named after—died from a heart attack at a young age. The middle child of three boys, and, from what I glean, a bit of a rumpus-starter in his adolescence, one of the chief defining characteristics of my father is, perhaps idiosyncratically, his deep appreciation of musicals. He still talks about the first Broadway show he ever saw: Li’l Abner, a show that is, like Annie, based on an ancient, ridiculous comic strip. He recalls sitting starry-eyed as a youngster in an orchestra seat as actors bleated the show-stopping “Jubilation T. Cornpone” number, agape at the spectacle of it all. But although he always loved musical theater, my father was never a performer. Even if he had the ability to carry a tune in a steel-lined bucket, it’s not his nature to take the spotlight. He’s the guy who shines it.

  It’s an untrue stereotype to say all gay guys love musicals, but it’s a pretty good ballpark generalization to say there aren’t a ton of straight men under fifty who thrill when told the planned activity for the evening starts with a cab ride up to Times Square and ends when Tommy Tune takes a bow. Heterosexual men typically abhor the pageantry of musical theater; its broad humor, the artifice of a character breaking out into a full-throat ballad during a tender moment, the camp of it all, at once terribly out of date and in questionable taste. What I personally delight in—the humor inherent to stuff so bad it’s good, or at least funny—is a language unintelligible to many a girl-liking boy, with the exception of certain types of straights like tea-sipping PBS-aficionados and actors, who are gay by definition, because all actors are in love with themselves.

  It was at the age of eleven or so, soon after I lost that role in Annie, when I realized that my ability to sing, dance, and generally captivate an audience including but not limited to my father in the front row was not a guaranteed means of seducing dudes. Twenty years later, once I’d abandoned musical theater to be a comedy writer, I would learn that being funny wasn’t either.

  I WAS at sleep-away camp, playing Rusty Charlie in boy drag in Guys & Dolls, when I sang the bafflingly titled “Fugue for Tinhorns” number, bedecked in an oil-paint mustache, a man’s tweed
jacket, and a French braid that a counselor tucked beneath a plastic derby hat. It was as though I was the recipient of some perverse challenge that dared me to feel pretty. But at the time, I was wholly confident that my performance, mustachioed or not, would close the deal with the boy whom I’d, until then, had only flirted with at socials. His name was Evan Pringsheim, and he hailed from exotic Chappaqua. We were paired off once I told my bunk I liked his face, a gossip morsel my campmates broadcasted to Evan’s friends, who chanted, “Do it!” until he was literally pushed, red-faced, from of a lineup of his contemporaries, into my general direction, like a cannibal tribe’s offering of a virgin into a volcano’s simmering maw. I was delighted. Mine, all mine!

  I’d pulled out all the stops with Evan during our five-p.m. encounters, telling him jokes I’d stolen from the “Truly Tasteless” collections I’d browsed at B. Dalton and about the time I lost that tooth. All the while, I was clad in my fail-safe boy bait outfit: the neon pink T-shirt that bellowed LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA in banana yellow all-caps, and my “fancy shorts.” It was a lethal combination—a veritable bustier-back/seamed stockings combo—but Evan hadn’t kissed me yet. I knew that once he saw me work that round in “Fugue”—the one where all of the gangsters are singing over each other about the horses they think are best to wager on—he would belong to me.

  So, I was wrong. Wrong like Hitler was wrong. But for a couple of hours that night, while I was blissfully distracted onstage at sleep-away camp, I missed my father less. Evan didn’t say anything after the show: I think he was being kind, in a way, pretending it never happened. Like he didn’t have to sit there and watch his girlfriend in mustache makeup singing, “Just a minute, boys! I’ve got the feed box noise! It says the great-grandfather was Equipoise.” Maybe he figured out that he if pretended it never happened, one day he’d be able to get an erection.

  Evan had alchemized something embarrassing into something invisible, and his nonreaction to my pursuit marked the first of a lifelong trend. As long as I can remember, I’ve had to fight off urges to chase and conquer boys who seem blasé. It’s decidedly unladylike.

  Men who disclose obsessions with girls from day one are Don Juan or Alexander Portnoy. But I am amorous the way fat people are hungry. When I have a crush on someone, I feel like Divine in Hairspray, warning everyone in her proximity that her diet pill is wearing off. My enduring pursuit of the opiates provided only from male attention, glorious male attention, has destined me to a lifetime of displays of unseemly and comically humiliating behavior.

  EVAN PRINGSHEIM of Chappaqua was the first of many would-be beaus unable to circumnavigate the wall of Daddy I’d erected on all sides of me, its bricks held together by the mortar of song and dance. When Evan dumped me at the end of the summer, I wailed like I did in my dad’s car, taking refuge back home in the comfort of my parents and my brother, who told me, after what was ostensibly my first breakup, that “Men are slime.”

  I took to heart that christening philosophy, but it didn’t make me feel any better after I’d been let down. I’ve just always wanted a boyfriend, OK? Just like I wanted Cookie Crisp on my birthday and that Barbie named Miko who was supposed to be Hawaiian and came with her own tie-dyed bathing suit.

  But boys and roles aren’t things you can tear from shelves and take to the cash register.You have to put yourself out there, sing your eight bars, and then wait to hear if you’re the one who makes sense for the gig. And if it doesn’t work out? Well, then you’ve got to make sure that somebody who loves you is around to remind you there will always be another show.

  kermit the frog is a terrible boyfriend

  When The Muppet Movie aired on network TV in the early 1980s, my family used the VHS tape that came with our first-generation General Electric brand VCR to record it. I wore that cassette down to its black plastic casing, repeatedly delighting in the travails of Kermit and his friends on the lam from frog-leg baron Doc Hopper, and grooving right along to the Electric Mayhem. I was in preternatural awe of the character actresses in the film: Madeline Kahn, Carol Kane, and Cloris Leachman all had cameos, and I still credit that movie for my Austin Pendleton crush. But more than anything, as a little girl, I wanted to be exactly like Miss Piggy. She was ma héroïne.

  I was a plucky little girl, but I never related to the rough-and-tumble icons of children’s lit, like Pippi Longstocking or Harriet the Spy. Even Ramona Quimby, who seemed cool, wasn’t somebody I could super-relate to. She was scrawny and scrappy, and I was soft and sarcastic. I connected instead to Miss—never “Ms.”—Piggy; the comedienne extraordinaire who’d alternate eyelash bats with karate chops, swoon over girly stuff like chocolate, perfume, feather boas or random words pronounced in French, then, on a dime, lower her voice to “Don’t fuck with me, fellas” decibel when slighted. She was hugely feminine, boldly ambitious, and hilariously violent when she didn’t get her way, whether it was in work, love, or life. And even though she was a pig puppet voiced by a man with a hand up her ass, she was the fiercest feminist I’d ever seen.

  I took my cues from Piggy, chasing every would-be Kermit in my vicinity with porcine voracity and what I thought was feminine charm. I was aggressive. I never went through a “boys are gross” phase—I’d find a crush and press my hoof to the gas pedal. I wasn’t the girl who couldn’t say no—I was the one who wouldn’t hear it. I left valentines on the desk of my first- grade crush, Jake Zucker, weeks into March. I cornered Avi Kaplan in the hallway and tried to make him kiss me. I begged my mom to tell Ben Margulies’s mom about my crush on him in second grade, in hopes she’d put in a good word for me, like that has ever worked.

  I didn’t think of myself then as I do now, in retrospect; as a pigtailed, red-faced mini-Gulliver, clomping around in Keds and a loud sweater, my thunder thighs tucked into stonewash casing. I’d catch the scent of “a MAAAAAAAN!” and want to club a cute boy I liked on the head and drag him by the hair to a cave, where I could force him to like me back. But at the time, I thought of myself as a pig fatale. Miss Piggy wanted what I did, which was to be famous and fabulous and to be loved by her one true frog and occasionally Charles Grodin. But looking back, I realize Kermit was, for lack of a better term, just not that into her.

  So much about Kermit the Frog is intrinsically lovable: his sense of humor, his loyalty to his friends, his charm and confidence in who he is, despite the challenges of being green. But at the same time, Kermit has a distinct indifference to the overtures of his would-be paramour that I came to expect from the boys who crossed my path from grade school on. I think watching Piggy chase Kermit gave me an odd sense of what men and women do, in real life, when they’re adults. I figured that if you—glamorous, hilarious, fabulous you—find a boy who’s funny and popular and charming and shy, and you want him, you just go out and “Hi-Ya” yourself into his favor. Piggy and Kermit represented the quintessential romance to me. And I don’t know how healthy that was.

  Watching The Muppet Movie again recently gave me a feeling of déjà vu, and not in the way you expect when you watch a movie you loved as a kid. As I watched Kermit haplessly biking down the street without a care in the world, about to be smushed between two steamrollers, I thought, “Oh my God. I know that guy. I’ve dated him.” Kermit, beloved frog of yore, suddenly, overwhelmingly, reminded my adult self of vintage-eyeglass-frame-wearing guys from Greenpoint or Silver Lake, who pedal along avenues in between band practice and drinks with friends, sans attachment, oblivious to the impeding hazards of reality and adulthood. “Oh my God,” I thought. Kermit is one of those hipsters who seem like they’re afraid of me.

  It all came together.

  Remember how content Kermit was, just strumming his banjo on a tree trunk in the swamp? That’s the guy I’ve chased my whole life, killing myself trying to show him how fabulous I am. Remember how, on The Muppet Show, Kermit used to politely laugh at Miss Piggy’s earnest pleas for some kissy-kissy, or fend off her jealousy after flirting right in front of her with one of his prett
y guest stars? Piggy had to canvas relentlessly to get herself a good part on that show, while Kermit was always the star. Because she loved him, Piggy would always take whatever he felt like giving her. And it was never anything too fancy, like the jewels she’d buy for herself. Pearls before Swine? More like bros before hos.

  Kermit never appreciated what he had in Piggy, because she was just one great thing about his awesome life. He had the attitude women’s magazines try to sell to their audience: that significant others are only the frosting on the cake of life. But everybody knows that cake without frosting is just a muffin.

  Kermit didn’t want to devote his life to making Piggy happy—he just wanted to host his show and enjoy hanging out with his friends. Anything more she’d ask of him would warrant a gulp. Do you remember The Muppets Take Manhattan ? At the end, Piggy actually tricks Kermit into marrying her, subbing in a real minister for Gonzo in the Broadway show that calls for Kermit and Piggy’s characters to get fake-married. This shit goes down after Kermit tears Piggy to pieces in front of all their friends, deriding her about how no frog like him would ever go out with a pig like her.