Off The Record by Jennifer O'Connell

Author:Jennifer O'Connell
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2011-10-04T18:17:27+00:00

Once I checked in at the front desk, they kept me and Teddy apart. The producers thought it would heighten the drama of the moment if we met for the first time onstage. Although it wasn’t really the first time we were meeting, it may as well have been. When Teddy last saw me, I was still wearing my Bonne Bell root beer Lip Smacker.

But there was no Lip Smacker tonight. I’d been ushered into the makeup room, seated in a swiveling barbershop chair and covered in a paper bib designed to protect my clothes from the powders and gels and creams about to be slathered on my skin. A makeup woman applied foundation, eye makeup and MAC Pink Poodle LipGlass before the stylist ran a straightening iron through my hair, creating a slight bend and more body than I’d achieved in thirty-two years of abuse at the hands of curling irons, hair dryers and even chemical perms, back in the good old days. I was looking more like Janey with every passing minute.

“Voila!” the hair stylist cried when she’d pumped the final mist of hair spray. “What do you think?”

I stared in the mirror and took a deep breath before answering. It was still me, but I was somehow transformed—like they say in Spinal Tap, it was me turned up to eleven. In some ways it reminded me of when we had to sell the house on Memorial Circle. Once the moving men removed the sofa and chair from the living room, we stood in the empty space and noticed for the first time how faded and worn the carpet had grown right under our feet. The areas once concealed beneath furniture stood out in stark contrast, the carpet’s pile brighter and more vivid from years of hiding. If you hadn’t seen the before, you would never have realized how different it was from the after.

“I think I look like someone Teddy Rock would write a song about.”

I figured Ian had probably drilled Teddy until he had all of his perfect rock-star responses down pat, so while I waited in the greenroom I rehearsed answers to every possible question Dave could ask. This sounded easy in theory. In reality, Teddy had an entire team of people in a private room with him somewhere while I sat in the greenroom next to the nine-year-old winner of Nebraska’s annual fiddle tune competition and the owner of a German shepherd who could bark the theme songs to 1970s sitcoms. Forced to listen to Thor rehearse the theme from Laverne & Shirley while a third-grader polished his trophy with a chamois cloth, I felt seriously outnumbered.

In law school I’d spoken in front of an auditorium filled with people, and four minutes talking to Dave had to be easier than two hours debating the merits of tort reform. At least there were no desks they could put their heads down on for a nap. So why were my hands practically misting? And why was

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