Scrappy Little Nobody(60)

We were getting ready to shoot the activities fair scene, and once the sun came up, I was happy to be spending the day outside. One by one, all the producers came up and said something awkward to me. Obviously, they had the best intentions and it’s the Emily Post thing to do, and I’m the weird one for hating it so much, but I wished more people could tell the difference between the “leave me alone” vibe I give off all the time by accident and my actual “leave me alone” vibe.

I wasn’t sure if people in the cast would find out, and I wasn’t sure I wanted them to. I didn’t want anyone to think I was irritated with them, but at the same time I didn’t want to field more perfunctory condolences. But perhaps because death isn’t juicy gossip, or because everyone was used to me being a misanthrope, or because by noon that day Kim Kardashian had announced she was divorcing Kris Humphries after just seventy-two days of marriage, my news had not spread.

After lunch our director, Jason Moore, was going over an upcoming shot with me. Because it was a Steadicam shot, for a moment we found ourselves alone in a crowd. We were both idly studying the prop flyers on the “activity booth” in front of us, and he took a breath. “Hey, I didn’t say anything before—”

“Huh-uh.”

By the time I hit the second syllable he was walking away. He really sees me. About a month later he brought it up again and we said a few sentences about it. That was it.

We shot more of the activities fair the next day, and on Wednesday we switched to nights to shoot the “riff-off.” Thursday was more of the riff-off and Friday we shot the initiation party scene where Jesse tells Beca they are going to have aca-children and Chloe gives her some bi-curious vibes. Not a bad night for Beca, actually. It was a little trickier for me. Night shoots start at sundown and go until sunrise, so we were scheduled to finish that scene around seven a.m. Saturday morning, the morning of the funeral. My flight was at seven a.m., so I packed my suitcase and brought it to set with me and got in a van to the airport at five a.m. That wide shot of us all dancing at the end of that scene? I’m not in it.

I got through airport security and took off my makeup with a wet wipe in the bathroom. The sun started to rise. Since there are no direct flights from Baton Rouge to Bradenton, Florida, where my family was, my first leg took me somewhere in Texas. I understood that this was my fastest option, but as the fatigue started to set in, it was maddening to know that I was heading farther from my destination. The ability to sleep on planes would have been helpful. The next leg took me to Florida and I landed midday.

My mom picked me up at the airport and we headed straight to the funeral home. I changed in the car so we wouldn’t be late. I had borrowed a simple dress from the Pitch Perfect wardrobe department since I didn’t have anything in Baton Rouge that was appropriate for a funeral.

The service was lovely. Either the elderly are practiced at giving compliments or people really loved my grandmother. She may have been insensitive about weight gain and curt about proper piecrust technique and used terms like “lifestyle choice,” but she was generous to a fault and put others before herself. You could feel the love in the room. My mom started to lose it and so did I. Five years earlier, I’d refused to cry at my grandfather’s funeral as part of some misguided point of pride. My brother had done a reading and after every line, I distracted myself by making up a Dr. Seuss–like rhyme in my head.

“He will not be burned though through the fire he walks.”

I would not, could not with a fox!

Even though I was exhausted, that wasn’t the reason I couldn’t hold it together this time. My mom was grieving the loss of her mother. I knew that before, but I could feel it now, and seeing my mom in that kind of pain was simply awful.

I’d never been in a receiving line before, but everyone had nice things to say or a story to share. A few people seemed too happy to meet me given the circumstances. Some told me how proud my grandma was of me, and my mom would chime in, even through tears, “She was proud of all her grandchildren.” That was true. She talked about all four of us constantly; certain people just had selective interests. A few mourners seemed more focused on making weird comments to me than on grieving, which pissed me off, but I tried to grimace through it and chalk it up to faulty social filters after seventy or something.

Then, as my mother stood next to me weeping, a woman reached for my hand and smiled as though she was about to say something playful and a little bit naughty.

“So you’re the actress! Oh, you’re very good . . . but we know these aren’t acting tears!”

Lady, what the f*ck did you just say to me? You mean the tears streaming down my face as we prepare to bury my grandmother and my own mother sobs next to me? No, these are not “acting tears.”

Maybe she says weird shit in every situation, maybe she felt like a jerk about it afterward, but I’ve never come so close to hitting someone who was smiling in my face.

I had to get to Vancouver, because I was shooting a scene in The Company You Keep the next morning. Oh yeah, that was happening, too. I’d been warned that the logistics would be tricky because of Pitch Perfect, but I had said yes because Robert Redford was directing and that seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.

Under the circumstances, leaving my mother to film a glorified cameo felt decidedly unimportant. There was already a car in the parking lot waiting to take me to the airport. The situation was not conducive to grief. I said good-bye to my relatives and got my suitcase out of my mom’s trunk. In the car I changed back into jeans and browsed Reddit on my phone. I bought some trail mix at the airport and got on a plane to my layover city.