Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences by Nancy Balbirer

Author:Nancy Balbirer [Balbirer, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING
Published: 2009-07-01T07:00:00+00:00

7. Friendly Fire

I met Jane rehearsing bit parts for Saturday Night Live. I was just out of NYU; she was just out of high school. We bonded in that way you do when you’re marooned in a dressing room for a week, waiting to be called onto the set: both wearing head-to-toe thrift-store black, sharing smokes, and looking forward to our first “big break” airing live all across the country. An assistant talent coordinator told us, twenty minutes to airtime, that our sketch had been cut. I got so upset I almost threw up, but Jane was all business:

“Can we still come to the party?” she asked.

“Uh . . . no.” The minion’s tone was flat and crushing.

We repaired to a crappy bar for a round of kamikazes and a good cry. For several hours, we swam in a pool of sad stories from our childhoods. Jane lived on the Upper West Side with her mom, a fretful, Shelley-Winters-in-Lolita type who’d never recovered from being left for a younger woman by Jane’s dad. She told me she missed her dad terribly and rarely got to see him since he lived in California with his new wife. She told me she hated having a big nose and a fat ass, both of which she blamed on her dad’s side of the family. I told her I lived in the Village with my cat, Max; that I wanted to be a great lady of the stage like Eva Le Gallienne; and that I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about: she was beautiful. Jane smiled, a preternaturally rueful smile, and said that no matter how pretty she was or could ever be, there would always be someone prettier. She said I should remember that too, as it would be “one of the suckiest things in life.” We exchanged numbers. Within weeks, we were inseparable. We freelanced with the same agents. Sometimes, we went on the same auditions.

One day, Jane picked me up for a casting call. When I opened the door, her eyes bugged out, and she stuck out her tongue.

“Oh my god! You can’t go like that! You can’t, like, go in there with frizzy hair and no makeup and expect them to ‘get it’! You really have to at least try to look pretty, you know? Here, let me fix you . . .”

She rewet my hair, blew it out flat as a pancake with her Mason Pearson brush, and did a quick makeup job.

“You may wanna stuff, too . . .”

“What?”

“Your boobs. It’d be better to stuff.”

Why did it matter what my boobs looked like, I wanted to know. We were trying out for chorus parts in an experimental version of Antigone—for no pay.

“I’m not about that. I’m an artist. My job is to analyze the text and live truthfully under the imaginary circumstances of the play,” I declaimed, giving Jane the whole Mamet spiel while she stuffed a pair of Nike tennis socks into my bra.

“Wrong,” she said, adjusting me for symmetry.

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