Let Me Be Your Star (2 page)

But
Downton Abbey
seemed like a pinprick of light in
the darkness. Sure, whatever I wound up writing about it would ultimately sink
into the black hole of the Internet, with a Google hit, the memory of the
commenter who wished you’d be gang-raped, and a check for $150 arriving seven
months later the only evidence it had ever existed at all. But it might be fun
for me. It might make me want to get up in the morning again, if not, like, to actually
leave the house. So I asked my friend Julie if she would put me in touch with her
editor at Vulture, and suggested my recapping the show to him.

In time, this would seem like how Jack Warner originally
offered the part of Rick in
Casablanca
to Ronald Reagan. As it was, I
received a nice email from Willa Paskin, then the deputy editor, a couple of
days later.
Downton Abbey
was already spoken for by a writer on staff;
but there was a new show that would air on NBC after the holidays that nobody
had jumped on yet.

“It’s called
Smash
,”
she wrote
.
Had I
heard about it? And more important, was I “into” musicals?

Am I into musicals?
I supposed it depends what you
meant by “into.” “Into” as in “like,” or “into” as in the precise moment when
the sperm goes “into” the egg?

She said she’d send me the screener right away.

* * *

“The child is the father of the man.” William Wordsworth
said that.

“For God’s sake, Rachel, it was 23 years ago, get the fuck
over it already.” My mother said that.

As is often the case, the truth probably lies somewhere in
between. But none of that changes the fact that when I was nine years old, I
auditioned for, and was rejected from, the Omaha Jewish Community Center’s new
production of
Fiddler on the Roof.

I still remember everything about that horrible afternoon.
It was my younger sister’s birthday, which, as you can imagine, was already a
difficult day for me. I remember putting on one of my favorite outfits: a blue
sweater with a border of French Provincial windmills knitted around the hem;
black velvet capri pants, and for the first time, my black leather synagogue dress
flats with no socks — a gamine look I hoped would help me glow with Audrey
Hepburn-like serenity as I watched the smaller, cuter, blonder organism my
parents had decided to spawn tear through her mountain of presents, opened the
jigsaw puzzle or paperback book my grandmother would have wrapped up at the
last minute for me so I “didn’t feel left out,” and did my best to ignore my
mother’s frantic gestures to me to ferry the frosting-smeared plates back to
the kitchen, like I was some kind of fucking scullery maid.

The party had dwindled down to just family when the phone
rang. My heart started thudding against my ribcage, as it had been doing all
week. I cowered in the furthest corner of the living room in a state of almost
erotic terror, waiting for the news. Hours seemed to pass before my mother put
down the phone and appeared in the doorway.

“We didn’t get in,” she said simply. The entire family had
auditioned, as part of a misguided and quickly aborted attempt to find a hobby
we could all enjoy together. The bowling hadn’t worked out very well either.

“Yeah,” I said, “but what about me?”

“You didn’t get in. None of us did.”

“What?” I felt like the skin was literally being pulled away
from my face, like somebody had put a giant version of one of those Gwyneth
Paltrow cupping things over my entire head. “What do you mean?”

“I guess they didn’t want us, honey.”

“But why?” I gasped. “
Why
?”

“I don’t know why. I guess that’s just show biz.”

“No.” I shook my head. “You don’t understand. Ask them
why
.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I mean, call them back and ask them why. Now.”

Maybe it was the terrible desperation in my voice, or the
horrible finality of my words, or the fact that my eyeballs had rolled back in
my head and bubbling black tar was suddenly dripping from every orifice in my
face. Maybe she just loved me, who the fuck knows. No matter the reason, she
made the call.

“Um, hello, is this Andrew?” she asked. Her voice was about
an octave higher than usual. I’m not sure who she was more afraid of, him or me.
“This is… yes, that’s right, we just spoke.…Well, I’m sorry to bother you, but
it seems I have a very disappointed little girl here…” I glared at her. How
could she make me sound so desperate? Everyone knows that’s the show biz kiss
of death.

“Yes,” she continued, “and she was just wondering, well,
why…
you know, just in case there was something she could do better next time.”
I hovered anxiously as she waited, tapping the end of a pencil against the
block of rainbow-colored paper she kept next to the phone. “Uh huh… yes, I see.
Mmm. Yes, I understand. Thank you for telling me.”

“Well? What did he say?”

She sighed. “He said it really just came down to numbers.
There were just a lot more girls that auditioned than boys. He also said that
he thought about picking you, but there weren’t roles for the rest of us, and
he hated to think of me spending my life in the car driving you back and forth
from rehearsals for the next three months.”

“Then call him back,” I hissed. “Call him back and tell him
it’s not a problem.”

Levelly, my mother met my gaze. “No. I’m not going to do
that.”

Here’s what I remember happening next: I let out a
bloodcurdling scream that rattled everything in living room, from the pictures
on the walls to the tiny crystal panda I had bought the faithless matriarch for
her birthday with thirteen dollars I had saved up in change; then I ran onto
the back patio, dug an enormous clump of rosemary out of the herb box with my
bare hands and flung it, roots and all, to the flagstone pavement. I did the
same thing with the Italian parsley, the lemon oregano, the garlic chives (lest
you think I’m a total monster, it was
my
herb box, tended by me and paid
for out of my allowance). Then I place my soil-smeared hands over my face and,
wrenchingly, began to weep hot, muddy tears.

I didn’t stop for the rest of the night.

There are far worse motivations for a career in show
business than vengeful fury. If it was good enough for Joan Crawford, it’s good
enough for Rachel Shukert, which is why I have six heads in my shower and strap
my husband into bed with a canvas harness every night. But you’re only as good as
the people around you, and it was now clear to me that in this aspect, I was
severely lacking. If I wanted get anywhere, I was going to have to be my own Baby
June
and
Mama Rose.

So began a merciless regime of monastic training. Every day
after school, I holed up in my room, looking for audition notices in the local
newspaper, poring over librettos and Broadway fake books, singing through
scores until I was note and letter perfect:
Camelot, Guys and Dolls, Sunday
in the Park With George.
I checked out the original cast recording of
A
Little Night Music
from the public library so many times the librarian
finally
gave
it to me. On weekends came the real work: an intensive
seven-hour session during which I would move the furniture out of the living
room and sing and dance my way through all four discs of the Smithsonian’s
History
of the American Musical Theater
, beginning with Lillian Russell and ending,
tragically enough, with “Sunrise, Sunset.” (
Smash
reference?) In my
interpretation, each number had a different directorial vision, which often
included major costume changes; obviously, one needed quite a different look to
perform, say the moody interpretive dance to “Ol’ Man River” than to tongue-twist
one’s way through “Tchaikovsky” the famously — and fiendishly — difficult Danny
Kaye number from
Lady in the Dark.
Men’s parts, women’s parts, it didn’t
matter, I did them all; hell, I could play Nicely-Nicely, Benny, and Rusty
Charlie in “Fugue for Tinhorns” all at the same time, a feat that to this day
has been matched only by the Tuvan throat singers of the Mongolian steppe.

And it paid off. Mere months after I was rejected from
playing a non-speaking Anatevkienne who got to make a cute little curtsy as she
sang about being consigned by her father into a life of constant, religiously mandated
drudgery, I was cast in my first-ever role as an angel — a goyische angel! — in
a semi-professional production of
The Snow Queen
at the local children’s
theater. A smattering of other small roles in local theater followed: an
Annie
here, an
Oliver
there. When I was twelve, no less esteemed a
publication than the
Omaha World-Herald
deemed my portrayal of Brigitta
von Trapp “personable” and commended my ability to stay in character when my
sailor skirt fell down during a particularly militaristic bout of marching
during “Do Re Mi.” By the time I was in high school, I was busting out the big
guns: Ado Annie, Dolly Levi, and in a deliciously ironic twist, Golde in
Fiddler.
If you needed someone slutty, funny, bossy, or fabulous in a way that the
boys that already knew how to put on their own eyeliner would appreciate, I was
your girl.

Then I got to college and realized there were a lot of other
girls who could belt a comedy song and they could mostly do other things too,
like dance. So then I got very pretentious and did experimental theater, but
you mostly had to be able to dance for that too.

So that’s when I started writing. And on good days, I could
almost convince myself it was what I had wanted to do all along. Those who
can’t do, teach. Those who can’t manage to put on outside clothes with enough
regularity to teach, recap.

* * *

TV recapping is a peculiar discipline that has flourished
in our disconnected, hyperconnected,
insert-your-own-meaningless-Thomas-Friedman-byword-here age. It began in the
early wilds of the Internet with seminal sites like the original Television
Without Pity, whose gifted, pop-culture-obsessed stable of writers turned out,
sometimes over a period of several days, erudite mini-dissertations on the
latest episodes of a handful of buzzed-about shows. Now, when the virtual water
cooler has by and large replaced the physical one for the vast majority of
America’s underemployed creative class, there’s hardly an entertainment or pop
cultural website from
The
New York Times
down that doesn’t offer
some sort of insta-summary of the shows that aired the night before. The endeavor
presents an interesting meta-literary challenge. How to write a compelling
narrative about another narrative, and for an audience divided among itself:
the people so obsessed with a given episode they want to spend the next six
hours reading about it on the Internet vs. the people who couldn’t be bothered
to watch but want to know the salient plot points; the commenters with minute
knowledge of every detail of a character vs. the ones whose idea of
contributing to the conversation is to petulantly wonder “why should we care
about any of these people.” Faced with such divergent needs and expectations,
an individual recapper can choose (although maybe that’s not the best word; at
that time of night, and on that kind of deadline, “choice” has about as much
relevance to the words you’re banging into your computer as it does to the
reproductive policy platform of the current Republican Party) to go a few
different ways. She can stick to a basic reiteration of plot points, peppered
with a few clever jokes or editorial asides. She can choose a single thematic
thread for intense, scholarly critique, or she can bypass analysis altogether
by means of a witty listicle or a series of gifs of Steve Buscemi cavorting
with a harem of scantily clad prostitutes or Don Draper getting slapped by a
prostitute or Tyrion Lannister sliding drunkenly off a chair and directly onto
the oiled crotch of yet another prostitute.

Or she can slide deep into the depths of her subconscious
and dredge up anything she might find there, no matter how absurdist or
tangential. It’s a risky proposition: you might produce a series of by turn
fanciful and lacerating essays on art, love, and life itself, or you might wind
up a big pile of absurdist, tangential bullshit.

I’ll leave it up to you where mine wound up.

“They’re good,” my staff editor said of my first
Smash
efforts. NBC had sent screeners for the first four episodes, so I was able to
write the recaps in advance: Each one took three days to write and was about 4,000
words long. “But there’s a point where these things just become unreadable, you
know what I mean?” That point, it was suggested to me, was at about 2,500 words
of absurdist, tangential you-know-what.

Other than this gentle suggestion, editorial input — particularly
in the first season, before some routine staffing turnover resolved itself — was
relatively minor. For better or worse, I was left to solve the peculiar
problems of recapping this increasingly peculiar television program pretty much
on my own.

The initial premise of
Smash
was simple enough; it
was a fairly standard backstage drama revolving around the creation of a Broadway
musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Its cast of character included
Debra Messing and theater veteran Christian Borle as the writing team; Jack
Davenport as the womanizing, Fosse-esque director/choreographer; Anjelica
Huston as the ex-husband-haunted, drink-tossing, tough-as-nails producer
desperate to prove she could score a big hit on her own. Megan Hilty, a
peroxide blonde powerhouse who was unfamiliar to most of America, played Ivy
Lynn, a chorus girl also-ran mysteriously unable to break out of the ensemble
despite being a) incredibly talented and b) the daughter of a Broadway legend
played by Bernadette Peters (we’ll get into that later); it also “introduced” us
to her rival and our star, Katharine McPhee, who most of us has already been “introduced”
to from her run on Season Five of
American Idol,
where she came in
second to Newt Gingrich.