This Will Only Hurt a Little(30)
Was this woman fucking with me?
“Well, we’re launching a line of dolls to coincide with the show’s premiere, and we’ve been looking for a girl who could play the live version of Cher. Will you take a look at this material and see what you think?”
Do I even need to tell you what happened next? As you can well imagine, I fucking killed it. My Cher impression had been AT THE READY for MONTHS. And here we all were. It wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined I would be putting this particular talent to use, but it would do. The job paid like two grand a week! I’d been working as a hostess at California Pizza Kitchen for over a year and still hadn’t made that much.
I had several fittings before the pre-toy fair in order for them to build a life-size version of the outfit the doll came in. Also, four full days of rehearsal. Yes. Rehearsal. My script was one of the longest, about nine pages total. And in those nine pages—which I was to deliver in my VERY BEST CHER impression—were tons of statistics and projections and also just a basic explanation of who these characters were and why toy shops all over the world would want to sell them.
The two giant ballrooms at the Phoenician were transformed into a toy wonderland, a maze of perfectly art-directed lands for the dolls and their human counterparts to live in, to do their very best to be sold to buyers from around the globe. I learned fairly quickly what the deal was from the Barbie girls who were flown in from L.A. and had done the circuit before. Basically, different groups of buyers were to be shuttled through the various rooms with a guide from Mattel. The Mattel marketers responsible for your doll would almost always be in the room with you, in case there were questions that weren’t in your script. But if the question was something covered in your script, they preferred if you answered the buyer directly and in character.
My marketers were two fun young women in their late twenties who thought everything I was doing was amazing. I mean, not to toot my own Clueless-doll horn here, but they did basically win the fucking lottery with me. My impression was spot-on and really funny. Plus, I have an insane ability to memorize anything. Great big hunks of dialogue have never been an issue for me. (I sometimes thought the writers on Cougar Town were trying to fuck with me just to see if I would be stumped, but nope. I always got it. Even when I was handed new half-page monologues while I was sitting in the makeup chair.)
By the time the pre-toy fair opened, I was beyond ready. I loved the different groups of businesspeople coming in to listen to my spiel, and I felt so proud when one of the more experienced Barbie girls said to me, “Wait. You do your whole thing every time? Normally the buyers just cut you off and start talking with each other about the doll. You must be really good.”
The day the CEO of Mattel, Jill Barad, came through was especially exciting because she brought SHARON STONE with her. The Sharon Stone. This was 1996. This was PEAK SHARON STONE. The two impeccably dressed women watched me with bemused expressions as I gave my little performance, and then Jill raised her hand to stop me and they both clapped. Sharon swept her scarf over her shoulder and as she was walking out turned back to me and said, in her very best Sharon Stone, “You’re very talented and I think you’re going to be a big star someday.”
When the doors closed behind them, my marketing reps and I almost died. If Sharon Stone said it, it must be true. I could barely contain my excitement.
I felt so grown up, getting to work at six-thirty in the morning, grabbing coffee and a cheese Danish from the catering they had for everyone working the fair, chatting with the other actresses as we got dressed in our Barbie outfits and then making it to the showroom floor by 7 a.m. sharp to go over the schedule for the day. I was finished at 6 p.m. and would drive home, windows rolled down, air-conditioning blasting (it was summer in Arizona, after all), smoking cigarettes and listening to music with the volume turned up all the way.
The two weeks flew by, and before I knew it, the toy fair had packed up and left town. How was I supposed to just go back to my job at CPK and then to my senior year of high school? I was a real working actress now!
As senior year started, I began working at another restaurant, an upscale Mexican place that was in the same strip mall as CPK. Kate and I both moved over there together. I can’t exactly remember why. Maybe we were offered more money. Maybe we were tired of BBQ chicken pizza. Maybe we were sick of the low-grade sexual harassment we were subjected to at CPK by one of the managers. WHO KNOWS? What I do know is this: I was seriously done with being in school and I couldn’t wait to graduate and get the fuck out of Arizona.
I had to figure out what colleges to apply to that I had a shot of getting into and that—even more important—were in Los Angeles. There wasn’t a chance for UCLA or USC, which I didn’t have the grades for and which were also prohibitively expensive if you were applying from out of state. So that left only a few places. CalArts, which had a conservatory program that I had to audition for, and Loyola Marymount University. I had a few older guy friends who were all attending LMU, so I decided to apply there. Also, since it was Jesuit, I knew my parents would be into it.
“The Jesuits love to drink, but they are the best at education!” my mom would always say.
I started spending a lot of time with my friends Brett and Craig, who were friends from theater. Brett was also in my French class and we would sit together and make fun of our crazy French teacher and pass nonsensical notes back and forth. Craig was tall and skinny with floppy curly hair. The two of them were fairly nerdy; they mostly just hung out with each other, making weird movies on Brett’s parents’ video camera or recording slightly offensive comedy songs on Craig’s boombox. Still, I liked both of them a lot and occasionally would drive us all off campus for lunch. Sometimes I thought I must seem like an alien to sweet Craig, with his art-house movie theater job and his love of Charlie Chaplin. He was the lead in the school play that fall, and I had volunteered to be the assistant director. I actually ended up having to replace one of the girls in the cast when she basically refused to memorize her lines and kept ditching rehearsal. Also, she was pretty terrible, and I think our theater teacher was happy to have a reason to get rid of her and have me step in a week and half before the show went up.