So Anyway by John Cleese

Author:John Cleese [Cleese, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-68025-7
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2014-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

And then we all bowed and waved and left the stage, except for David Hatch, who stepped forward and said, “Well, as you can see, there have been one or two changes in the running order of the show,” which I always liked, as a silly, upbeat way of getting things started.

Connie took one look at me as I stood there, “singing” and “dancing,” and—as I later learned—thought to herself in horror, “Oh no! Oh God! He’s terrible!” And, of course, I was terrible—absolutely terrible, since I have no musical ability at all; indeed I was so aware of my ineptitude that the results of my natural lack of talent were made even worse by my acute self-consciousness about it.

So as I pranced about the stage like a wounded heron, Connie started making plans to escape the dinner that we had arranged for afterwards: perhaps she could just disappear, leaving a note that her mother had been hit by a bus in Jakarta and that she didn’t know when she would be back; perhaps she could feign an attack of lockjaw when we arrived at the dinner table; anything, anything to avoid the moment when she would have to make some comment about my performance skills.

And then, as she sat there enduring an agony of embarrassment, I reappeared on the stage to do a sketch with David Hatch (when I vetted him for a job with the Secret Service) and my battiness made her laugh a lot, and so everything was all right in the end, even though at dinner afterwards she hardly understood a word Nick and I said, because we “talked so fast in our English accents”…

And so, with great decorousness, Connie and I started to see each other regularly. We loved talking together and I think we both knew we might be in a serious relationship.

I remember that I was surprised to learn how much of Connie’s time was taken up by auditions. In the fourteen months since I’d left Cambridge I’d never done one, so I was very amused when, two weeks later, I was asked to read for a role. Although the Cambridge Circus cast had been represented by a New York theatrical agency while we were on Broadway, we were sure that none of the agents really knew who we were. But one of them called, and told me I’d been invited to audition for a British show that was coming to Broadway in the New Year: Half a Sixpence with Tommy Steele. I just laughed and laughed and felt I couldn’t resist: the idea that I could tell Bill and Tim that I was auditioning for a Broadway musical was going to be well worth the humiliation involved. Unlike Dudley Moore’s one-legged man auditioning for the role of Tarzan, I was not expecting to land the job.

So I went along to the theatre and hung around backstage until I was called, at which point I walked to the lighted part of the stage and gave my name.

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