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Feb. 18th, 2009
LJ Idol, Week 21: Getting Involved
Feb. 18th, 2009 12:54 pmGrowing up, one of my friends was the daughter of the meanest man in show business, and so she took me and a few other kids to the opening night of 42nd Street on Broadway. I was eight, and, knowing I would get to go backstage after, my parents bought me an autograph book for the occasion.
You collect signatures. This is what you do.
The night is fuzzy in recollection, a strange mix of longing and fear and sex and a sense of adults laughing at me. I remember my friend's father announcing Gower Champion's death and girls in pink feathers tap dancing on giant dimes and the set for Shuffle Off to Buffalo.
I also remember backstage after: people crying, lots of noise, kissing, a chorus girl in little more than stockings laughing at me as she signed my book and folded the page across to make it easier for me to open to the next, a man running up the stairs, the yellow light of old-fashioned bulbs, Wanda Richert letting me touch her tap shoes, and the way I was too scared to do anything but smile slyly at Jerry Orbach as I hoped the devil really was just like him.
What I don't remember from that night is my friend or the world to which I was supposed to be tethered.
After, the autograph book went into a shoe box and the shoe box went under my computer desk, and I didn't think of it again until I turned twelve, until I hit puberty, until I fell in love with men on the television and started doing things like saving my allowance to buy Tiger Beat magazine.
My parents told me about the books of signatures they both kept as children.
You write away for autographs. This is what you do.
So I wrote fan letters and wouldn't allow my mother to check them for spelling. I surreptitiously slipped photos of myself in with the careful notes and it was, largely, not out of some tiny adolescent need to somehow be desired. Mostly, I just wanted to be seen and to be real.
Post cards came. Signed by actors or assistants, I didn't really know. By and large, I couldn't bear to look at them, lest the pictures see me blushing and remember me as the eight-year-old fascinated by the legs of a half-naked chorus girl, and so the postcards went into the shoe box and the shoe box went back under the computer desk, even if sometimes, I slipped out of bed late at night to choose something from it to slip under my pillow as I slept.
My mother asked if I was keeping the book up, since it might all be worth something some day.
You have to keep it neat and save it for a long time. This is what you do.
By the time I was fifteen, I had gotten a little smarter, a little more self-possessed, and I still wrote fan letters, but by then it was to go on about a performance or a character or a role.
It didn't matter, though. The same postcards came, went into the same shoe box and never, ever, I think, snuck out again. My words didn't matter and neither did the postcards.
Then Sam Neill sent me a letter. From New Zealand. After I'd written him about his performance in Amerika. It was probably one of the first fan letters the man ever got, and he wrote me a kind and flattered note and enclosed an autographed snapshot, and I laughed for days, never sending him a thank you note, because it seemed odd to thank someone just for being nice.
In the twenty or so years since then, I've met a lot of famous people. I've shaken hands with Bill Clinton and David Bowie and worked with people from Kathy Lee Gifford to Nicole Kidman. Sometimes we've exchanged a word or two, sometimes we've talked for ages trapped in a car or on a set together, and none of it matters, not really.
But it's given me very specific feelings about celebrity, about autographs, about a night in the maze of the Winter Garden dressing rooms when I was eight, and about desire too.
All of which can sometimes make my life at cons, which I do both for fun and professional reasons, very complicated, at least inside my own head.
I pretty much never get on the autograph lines or pose for pictures. And it's not that I don't see the point; it's that I see it all too clearly.
The book goes in the box and the box goes under the desk. This is what you do.
Because the fact is no one really cares about the autograph. Not anymore. Not in this modern world.
They care about that smile turned on them for twenty seconds, and they care about that hand resting on the small of their back for five and they care about being seen and made real by someone who both is and isn't.
I don't begrudge anyone that. I know it well, know the longing of it in my bones in a way that's nearly shameful, know a hundred fantasies of being seen and chosen and elevated, and know that maybe if I just had the balls or a certain lack of self-consciousness or even a surety of place in the hierarchy of such things (fan or pro, but not both, not semi-) that some of those stories could and might come true for me, at least just a little.
But I'm shy. Of pictures, of my shaking hands, of my faltering smile, of people who give off bright light and whose job it is to twinkle at me for just a moment, because somehow I am still eight.
Ask nicely. In a soft voice. This is what you do.
I can't go to cons without navigating this, without agonizing over where I opt out and where I opt in, and without berating myself for all the ways in which I get involved in the narrative of the process both intellectually and emotionally.
I saw 42nd Street the night it opened, and I'm still wearing the murky light strangers turned on me when I was eight-years-old.
When I come home from cons my mother asks after celebrities she doesn't care about by their first names, hoping that her daughter got autographs, yes, but also hoping that she somehow got chosen.
Because this is what you want, and this is what you do.
Except that it isn't. Not for me and not like that.
You collect signatures. This is what you do.
The night is fuzzy in recollection, a strange mix of longing and fear and sex and a sense of adults laughing at me. I remember my friend's father announcing Gower Champion's death and girls in pink feathers tap dancing on giant dimes and the set for Shuffle Off to Buffalo.
I also remember backstage after: people crying, lots of noise, kissing, a chorus girl in little more than stockings laughing at me as she signed my book and folded the page across to make it easier for me to open to the next, a man running up the stairs, the yellow light of old-fashioned bulbs, Wanda Richert letting me touch her tap shoes, and the way I was too scared to do anything but smile slyly at Jerry Orbach as I hoped the devil really was just like him.
What I don't remember from that night is my friend or the world to which I was supposed to be tethered.
After, the autograph book went into a shoe box and the shoe box went under my computer desk, and I didn't think of it again until I turned twelve, until I hit puberty, until I fell in love with men on the television and started doing things like saving my allowance to buy Tiger Beat magazine.
My parents told me about the books of signatures they both kept as children.
You write away for autographs. This is what you do.
So I wrote fan letters and wouldn't allow my mother to check them for spelling. I surreptitiously slipped photos of myself in with the careful notes and it was, largely, not out of some tiny adolescent need to somehow be desired. Mostly, I just wanted to be seen and to be real.
Post cards came. Signed by actors or assistants, I didn't really know. By and large, I couldn't bear to look at them, lest the pictures see me blushing and remember me as the eight-year-old fascinated by the legs of a half-naked chorus girl, and so the postcards went into the shoe box and the shoe box went back under the computer desk, even if sometimes, I slipped out of bed late at night to choose something from it to slip under my pillow as I slept.
My mother asked if I was keeping the book up, since it might all be worth something some day.
You have to keep it neat and save it for a long time. This is what you do.
By the time I was fifteen, I had gotten a little smarter, a little more self-possessed, and I still wrote fan letters, but by then it was to go on about a performance or a character or a role.
It didn't matter, though. The same postcards came, went into the same shoe box and never, ever, I think, snuck out again. My words didn't matter and neither did the postcards.
Then Sam Neill sent me a letter. From New Zealand. After I'd written him about his performance in Amerika. It was probably one of the first fan letters the man ever got, and he wrote me a kind and flattered note and enclosed an autographed snapshot, and I laughed for days, never sending him a thank you note, because it seemed odd to thank someone just for being nice.
In the twenty or so years since then, I've met a lot of famous people. I've shaken hands with Bill Clinton and David Bowie and worked with people from Kathy Lee Gifford to Nicole Kidman. Sometimes we've exchanged a word or two, sometimes we've talked for ages trapped in a car or on a set together, and none of it matters, not really.
But it's given me very specific feelings about celebrity, about autographs, about a night in the maze of the Winter Garden dressing rooms when I was eight, and about desire too.
All of which can sometimes make my life at cons, which I do both for fun and professional reasons, very complicated, at least inside my own head.
I pretty much never get on the autograph lines or pose for pictures. And it's not that I don't see the point; it's that I see it all too clearly.
The book goes in the box and the box goes under the desk. This is what you do.
Because the fact is no one really cares about the autograph. Not anymore. Not in this modern world.
They care about that smile turned on them for twenty seconds, and they care about that hand resting on the small of their back for five and they care about being seen and made real by someone who both is and isn't.
I don't begrudge anyone that. I know it well, know the longing of it in my bones in a way that's nearly shameful, know a hundred fantasies of being seen and chosen and elevated, and know that maybe if I just had the balls or a certain lack of self-consciousness or even a surety of place in the hierarchy of such things (fan or pro, but not both, not semi-) that some of those stories could and might come true for me, at least just a little.
But I'm shy. Of pictures, of my shaking hands, of my faltering smile, of people who give off bright light and whose job it is to twinkle at me for just a moment, because somehow I am still eight.
Ask nicely. In a soft voice. This is what you do.
I can't go to cons without navigating this, without agonizing over where I opt out and where I opt in, and without berating myself for all the ways in which I get involved in the narrative of the process both intellectually and emotionally.
I saw 42nd Street the night it opened, and I'm still wearing the murky light strangers turned on me when I was eight-years-old.
When I come home from cons my mother asks after celebrities she doesn't care about by their first names, hoping that her daughter got autographs, yes, but also hoping that she somehow got chosen.
Because this is what you want, and this is what you do.
Except that it isn't. Not for me and not like that.