Scrappy Little Nobody Page 4

  The ultimate negotiation tactic? Be willing to walk away. I certainly wasn’t willing, but my dad was, and as he said, I wasn’t grown and it wasn’t my decision.

  The producers agreed to give me a weekly per diem, and that kept us afloat while we were in New York. (When the show closed I had nothing left over, but I won the final “five-dollar Friday” draw and went home with around $250 in cash. Each bill had the name of a cast or crew member written on it, and I cherished them. I vowed never to spend them. When I got to high school, I started dipping into my stash to chip in whenever someone’s older sister would buy us booze until all the bills were gone. I know. It’s all so Little Girl Lost.)

  It wasn’t a financial win, but the experience was incredible. The show was based on the movie musical High Society with Grace Kelly, which was based on the movie (and stage play) The Philadelphia Story with Katharine Hepburn. The plot centers on a woman who is about to marry the wrong man and the complications that arise the weekend before her wedding. I played the woman’s little sister. I had a bunch of solid lines, a funny musical number, and a great piece of physical comedy in the second act that only once drew blood mid-performance.

  The cast and crew were sweet beyond words. They were encouraging and serious and they believed in me. They told me to stay focused on dance lessons, despite my apparent lack of aptitude; held half-serious competitions for crying on cue; and recommended movies and books that they felt “smart young women” should know. Lisa Banes, who played my mother, would lightly bounce along to the music before our entrance and whisper in an old-timey voice, “Let’s go do a great big Broadway show.” How great is that?!

  They treated me like I was family and wanted to make sure that my real family was okay under the stress of one parent moving to New York. Once a month my dad and I would drive home to Maine after the Sunday matinee and make it back in time for the Tuesday night show. On those days the entire cast would speed up their dialogue and cut off every laugh a moment too soon so that I could beat traffic. Only one cast member indulged in languid pauses during those performances, and our conductor, Paul Gemignani, would punish her by radically speeding up the tempo of her songs.

  One of my closest friends asked me recently if I had a favorite memory from my career. I do, but it’s not my own. It’s one of those stories I was told so often that I can picture it as clearly as if I were there. The only reason I’m certain I wasn’t is because I was onstage at the time.

  The first time my mom came to visit, my dad snuck her into the alley just outside the stage door and told her to listen.

  “They’re almost done. That’s the curtain call music.” He leaned in a little closer to the door and held up a finger. They listened quietly. Suddenly the applause swelled.

  “That’s for her.”

  My mom burst into tears.

  I love this story. Luckily, most of the stuff that made my mom proud didn’t revolve around me performing.

  I hit the jackpot. I didn’t have to go to school (my dad was tutoring me) and I got to run around New York City all day. Sometimes I was lonely. I met most of the other kids who were in shows at the time, but as I said, child actors are crazy, and the conversations often looked like this:

  “Anna Kendrick is a great name. Is that a stage name or your real name?”

  “It’s my real name.”

  “You got a good one. Good syllabic symmetry.”

  I’d try to catch my dad’s eye and find some recognition that this was not normal preadolescent behavior.

  I did make a few friends. My closest friend was Nora, an understudy in The Sound of Music. The Sound of Music kids were intimidating. They seemed like this sexy, co-ed gang (proving once again that even the dorkiest subcultures have their rock stars). Nora was the only thing I had that resembled normal preteen life. We had sleepovers and went window shopping, we sang along to pop music and show tunes, and each of us tried to convince the other that she was the pretty one.

  Even though I was friends with Nora, we didn’t see each other all the time, and I had no other good friends. Sometimes working and commuting didn’t feel as easy as it did other days. I knew the show like the back of my hand, but I still had to do it every night.

  Sometimes I would get home after a show and I couldn’t sleep. I’d sneak into the living room and watch TV until the sun came up. Then I’d sleep all day and dread going to work. I’d dread the drive from Yonkers. I’d dread putting on my costume. I’d dread warming up. I’d dread my entrance. I’d dread my first line. I’d dread my song. I’d dread the drive home.

  I was so happy to be doing this incredible thing, but at this point, dear reader, I’d like to use my one “What do you want from me, I was twelve years old, tired and lonely and working the kind of job that full-grown adults do” card.

  I needed a break. Just a little one. Anxiety typically only becomes unmanageable for me when I feel I have no choice, when I feel trapped. I just needed a break in routine so I could shake out the dread.

  One day, when we were halfway through the first act, I reached my limit. I needed to take a break RIGHT NOW. Don’t get too excited; this isn’t a story about me bailing on a Broadway show mid-performance. I told my dad that I didn’t want to do the show the next night. He knew I wouldn’t be asking if I wasn’t serious and kind of desperate. At intermission, we went to speak to the stage manager . . . no, it was a producer, maybe . . . I remember we were under the stage, but who the hell was in charge of that? Who did you talk to about taking a night off and why the hell was their office under the stage?I At any rate, my dad told the appropriate woman that I was going to stay home and rest the following night.

  “Well, tomorrow night is tough.” She winced. “It would be a lot easier for everyone if you took off a night next week.”

  Just being near a serious conversation between adults made my stomach turn (it still does, actually), and when she looked over at me she could see that I was upset.

  “Do you want a glass of water, honey?”

  In show business, when you tell people that you need something and it runs counter to what they want from you, it’s amazing how often they will offer you water. This is code for Deal with it.

  I agreed that having a night off the following week would be just as good. The advance notice would make it less stressful for my coworkers, and I really didn’t want anyone to be mad at me.

  We scheduled my night off for a Tuesday so that, coupled with the Monday (which was always off), I would have a real weekend of sorts. My dad took me up to the Catskills. We went to a mall, and I swam in the hotel pool, and I even rode a fat, probably dying horse at a nearby ranch.

  In the car on the ride home, I was quiet, and Dad said, “You really needed the night off when you said you did, huh?”

  I nodded and he hit the steering wheel. I hated that he was mad. Which is weird since he was only mad because he hadn’t been able to make me happy. Love is some funny shit, right?

  When the show closed, I was sad but relieved. I was ready to go home. Still, maybe because I’d seen my family struggle to pay the bills, even while my father was working two jobs, it was disconcerting to be unemployed. Sure, I could go home and go to school and see my friends and family, but at what cost? Was I a twelve-year-old has-been?

  I’m still haunted by this fear. It has made me very cautious of feeling comfortable in my career—and turned me into a bit of a workaholic.

  Even now, every job I get, I worry that it will be my last. I think becoming a washed-up hag is sort of my destiny. So if you see a wrinkled old bitch wearing a tattered fur and chain-smoking in an off-Broadway back alley . . . that’s just me. Starting four years from now.

  * * *

  I. My memory is bad and I could probably ask myself these kinds of questions on every page, but I’m going to do my best to fill in the blanks from here on out, and I hope you’re cool with that, too. XO!

  hell, thy name is middle school

  In elementary school, we
had an afternoon of “health class” once a year. The teachers separated us by gender and explained what we could expect from puberty. They handed out maxi pads to the girls and gave the boys . . . pamphlets on styling a wispy mustache that ONLY grows at the corners of your mouth? I may never know.

  There was a lot of emphasis on how excited we should be to start our periods. This is a dirty trick, but now I understand why it’s necessary. It comes for us all, so there’s no point working little girls into a panic over it. However, there was perhaps too much emphasis on the magic of becoming a woman. So much so that I missed a few key points on the logistics of menstruation. For example, I thought that once you got your period you had it every day, all the time, for the rest of your life. This sounded pretty awful, but the girls on the tampon boxes looked excited about it, and I trusted anyone who could rock a side ponytail.

  I was also promised an “awkward” stretch of time when all the girls would tower over the boys. For me, that moment would never come. In middle school, hiding the fact that I still shopped in the kids’ section became almost a full-time job.

  In elementary school, being the smallest was cute. It had given me an identity, even made me feel special. But you know how thirteen-year-olds don’t want to hang out with eight-year-olds? They don’t want to hang out with you if you look eight years old, either.

  My height made me an easy mark. When my sixth-grade crush enumerated the reasons he wouldn’t date any of the girls in our class, my label was “too short.” I laughed, then retired to the girls’ bathroom, where I got on my knees and prayed to Jesus to make me taller. No one in the world was suffering more than me.

  Once girls started getting boobs, a whole new area of uncreative slams emerged. “Hey, Anna, you should date a pirate, because they love sunken chests.” Where do boys learn these insults? Is there a manual? Is that what they got in health class?!

  When I came back from doing High Society, no one my age cared. (Despite High Society being the eighteenth-longest-running Broadway show ever!I) I had hoped my classmates might be impressed, but weirdly, a picture of me in the local paper singing in pigtails did not make me the hit of the school.

  While no one at Lincoln Junior High especially cared about my New York sabbatical, dance and music classes gave me a level playing field of equally dorky contemporaries to befriend. I even went to overnight choir camp in the summer. (I’ll say that again in case you weren’t already in love with me . . . choir camp.) It was the only place where I was the cool girl. Well, not cool maybe, but I stood a chance. It’s no surprise then that in my professional career I have played a “cool girl” character precisely once, in Pitch Perfect, a movie about choir.

  Man-eater.

  In eighth grade my crush was the new kid, Darryl. He’d transferred from somewhere exotic that I remember being New York or Chicago but was probably Canada. On his first day, a girl in gym class got hit hard with a basketball and dropped to the ground, holding her head. We all stood there with our mouths open, but Darryl scooped her up like it was nothing and carried her to the nurse’s office. The kid ran heroically to her aid! Like an adult in a movie! Why couldn’t that head injury have been mine?!

  One day a girl asked me—in front of Darryl—what size my pants were. Middle school was a time when kids asked each other all kinds of inappropriate questions, and if you didn’t answer, you were the weird one. She was trying to expose me as a genetic freak, still forced to shop at the Limited Too because of my undersized arms, legs, and everything else. Guess what, haters, I’d been shopping that very weekend! (Jesus, take the wheel!) I’d been to Wet Seal—which was trashy, but at least it wasn’t a store for children—and found a pair of jeans that I didn’t have to pin in the back.

  I shrugged and said, “A small, I guess?”

  “Don’t you mean a children’s size twelve?” She turned to Darryl. “She still shops at, like, Gap Kids.” (I didn’t. Gap Kids was too expensive.)

  Oh, you stupid bitch.

  “No, they’re from Wet Seal,” I said, pulling out the tag to prove their origin. “Yeah, it’s a zero, I guess.”

  “It’s a double zero,” she pointed out, still trying to shame me. Today I assume she passes her time flaying old ladies for sport.

  In a flash, I realized I could say, “So? Are girls not supposed to have small waists?”

  “No, no,” Darryl said, “that’s proper.”

  I had abruptly crossed over into the land where being small was a good thing! And Darryl had spoken four words to me! Suck it, you crone!!

  It should be noted that a double zero was a good fit for a thirteen-year-old girl who was so painfully underdeveloped she didn’t get her period for another three years. If you aren’t a size double zero, congratulations, you don’t look ten anymore.

  That was the best interaction I’d ever had with Darryl. I figured I’d take that little seedling and let it blossom; hit my stride once we got to high school, and I (fingers crossed) got boobs. I’d play the long game. Alas, he moved away again after eighth grade. And I did not get boobs in time for high school.

  Yet looking young—a source of crippling insecurity—was a huge professional asset. My agent was thrilled I wasn’t growing. As long as you still look the part, casting directors value a few extra years of experience and maturity. Plus, child labor laws are more relaxed. Couldn’t the kids at school see this was good for my career?

  A lot of the kids I’d met in New York were taking breaks to “just be a kid” for a while. Were they crazy?? I wanted to “just be a kid” as much as the next guy, but I wasn’t about to take a career in the arts for granted. There are only a handful of parts for children on Broadway at any given time, and maybe the paucity of roles should have been a sign that taking a break wouldn’t hurt. But I could see a future where I got drunk at office parties and babbled about how I’d been a child star (because my alternate-reality self would definitely overstate her former glory).

  The first thing I booked after High Society was the musical version of Jane Eyre. It was in the workshop phase, when the producers assemble a cast to run through a show for a couple of weeks. The idea is to get the show on its feet so that it can be improved before a potential Broadway run. Based on each workshop, the writer, composer, and director will go away and make changes, then do it all again. Sometimes all the actors are re-hired. Sometimes they aren’t.

  There was a challenging but thrilling piece of music for Young Jane that had made the role difficult to cast. Consequently, I was treated like a bit of a unicorn. The producers sent up prayers (in direct opposition to my bathroom-stall plea) that I would stay the same size. But the show was at least a year away from getting to Broadway. Occasionally, I’d catch the producers tilting their heads at me, gauging my height with an invisible yardstick. I made a point to transition my rehearsal attire from chunky boots to thin-soled ballet flats and ruefully dug out my Limited Too best to look as young as possible.

  I was with that show for about a year, doing additional workshops or giving special cabaret-style performances to rooms of potential investors. But after a while, a bittersweet atmosphere took hold. There was a consolatory vibe at what would be my last performance, but I didn’t know why. I would have recognized the behavior if I’d ever had a boyfriend: I was about to get dumped.

  I was sad to lose the job. My disappointment was slightly allayed when I heard they’d had to cut Young Jane’s song because they couldn’t find a replacement to sing it. That might not have been true; the song slowed down the pacing of the first act anyway.

  This was not the only time I would lose a job this way, but I confess I was grateful for every inch I gained. Finding even one article of adult clothing that fit me seemed like a reasonable trade-off to being fired. Maybe I should have prioritized my professional pursuits, but my home life always felt equally significant. Decorating my locker seemed just as important as getting new headshots.

  I had to compartmentalize, because everyone else did. People a
t school didn’t care that I had an audition for Touched by an Angel, and, weirdly, casting directors didn’t care that I had a four-page French assignment or that Courtney from choir was being mean to me for NO REASON.

  While I was in one place, I tried not to think about the other. It was sort of like living a double life. Like a spy! Yeah. I was like James Bond. Like a loud, unsexy James Bond.

  MGM, the next time you want to reboot the franchise, you know where to find me.

  * * *

  I. That year.

  camp

  The summer before my senior year of high school, I went to New York and made a nonunion film called Camp. It was a unique film in many ways. People have either never heard of it or they want to tell me that it changed their life, no matter how inappropriate the circumstances. I am very glad this movie helped you come out to your parents, and as I was saying, my insurance only covers the generic form of RectaGel.

  Camp was written and directed by Todd Graff, based on his real experiences at Stagedoor Manor, the (in)famous children’s theater camp in upstate New York. Stagedoor is a haven for every young misfit out there who’d just die if they were forced to be in one more school-sanctioned production of Peter Pan. The camp is known for putting on arguably inappropriate shows with its young campers. Imagine The Glass Menagerie or Once on This Island—a musical about tensions between the light- and dark-skinned Haitians—with an all-white preteen cast. It’s not universally relatable material for a movie.

  Because the movie was replete with song and dance, a monthlong rehearsal period was scheduled in Manhattan. Most of the cast members were local, but some of us had nowhere to stay for the duration of rehearsals, so indie production company Killer Films found competitively priced living spaces to accommodate their out-of-town actors. For example, I lived in the walk-in pantry of a small uptown apartment shared by three film students. Don’t worry, the film students were really nice and the pantry was mostly empty.