and gyrating in front of a huge waterfall. Then in the middle of a sun-drenched desert. Then stopping traffic in the center of Bombay’s busy market district. My day, like a screwball comedy in Sanskrit, clung desperately to its through line.
Here’s how the day went. Bright and early on Tuesday morning I marched into the ITNC studios with the determination of Norma Rae and the optimism of Gidget, resolved to ask Lorna Douglas if she would star in my mother’s Christmas celebration. But by our first early morning break my resolve recoiled. I succumbed to the belief that if you think the answer to your question will be bad it’s safer to avoid asking the question altogether. By ten-thirty, however, I realized that if I didn’t report back to my mother with a yea or a nay as to Lorna’s participation pronto, she would use her maternal powers to psychically haunt me from the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. She had done it before; she would do it again.
Luckily, luck was my lady and I spotted Lorna sitting by herself during a break in taping. Her lips were moving like those of a silent film star on crack, so I could tell she was using her down-time to memorize lines while a few feet away the makeup team surrounded her costar, Lucas Fitzgerald, to reapply a fake scar to his face. I knew it would take them more than a few minutes since Lucas’s character, Roger Renault, was a race car driver who had sustained terrible burns from a recent boating accident and the resulting scar started at the left side of his forehead, ran over the bridge of his nose, somehow never made contact with his incandescent blue eyes, and ended on the sharpest point of his right cheek. The implausibility of the scar was matched only by the implausibility of my question getting a positive response from Lorna. But the time had come for me to somehow try and make the implausible plausible.
“Hey, Lorna! Sorry to interrupt, but this December my mother is organizing a Christmas musicale for her senior citizens’ group in New Jersey and she’d like you to be the headliner and perform for free,” I explained. “So how’s about it?”
“Cool,” was Lorna’s monosyllabic reply.
For a second I thought she was referring to her scene partner’s scar, which I had to admit did look grotesquely arousing, and in the next second I understood why Lindsay found the guy in Mask a masturbatory fantasy, but in the second after that I realized Lorna had seriously answered my indecent proposal.
“You’ll do it?” I asked.
“Sure,” she monosyllabically replied.
Just as I was beginning to think Lorna was saving all her dialogue for the camera, she added her disclaimer.
“As long as there’s no press, I can use my own band and it’s before the GMHC show,” she demanded. “It’ll be like a rehearsal.”
If all women were so accommodating and logical, I might consider heterosexuality as an alternative lifestyle.
“Lorna!” I squealed. “Forgive my zeal, but you are the first woman since Lynda Bertadotto to make me truly happy.”
“Who’s Lynda Bertadotto?” she asked.
“Sixth-grade teacher,” I explained. “She made me sit next to Richie Troisi so I could help him with his sentence deconstruction. He looked just like Scott Baio and I still have the puka beads he gave me as a thank-you for helping him master the intricacy of the adverbial clause.”
“God, that’s romantic,” Lorna said. “Pathetic, but romantic. You should have the writers include that memory in my back-story.”
“I’m sorry, but I prefer to keep the puka beads private,” I replied. “Richie’s married now with three kids and, well, I’d hate to stir up trouble.”
“Gay and moral,” Lorna said with a sad smile. “Another illusion shattered.”
I ignored her stereotyping and circled back to the reason for our conversation—I needed to lock her in before the makeup team was finished cosmetically mutilating Lucas’s otherwise flawless face and she would be called to the set.
“So I’ll get the details from my mother, and her girl—which is me—will be in touch with your girl, who actually is a girl,” I stammered, “and a mighty pretty one I might add.”
Lorna tilted her chin to the left and clenched the skin around her eyes the same way she did when her character, Ramona, put a hit on her sister Renata’s psycho doctor, Rodney, when she found out he caused Roger’s accident as an act of revenge against Renata’s family. I knew that look could not be good.
“You think she’s mighty pretty?” Lorna queried.
How stupid could I have been? Lorna may be even tempered and cooperative most of the time, but she is still an actress midway through her second contract cycle on a daytime drama and perilously close to her thirtieth birthday. Every producer knows you don’t tell an insecure, aging actress that her younger assistant is mighty pretty.
“Well, yes,” I stumbled, “in that I-was-nice-looking-in-collegewhy-the-hell-am-I-so-ugly-in-the-real-world sort of way. And by real world I mean your world and not MTV’s.”
“She does wear a lot of makeup,” Lorna rationalized.
“Applied with the restraint of a kabuki,” I offered.
This comment seemed to pacify Lorna, and her artificial warmth started to thaw the ice in her veins. Soon the actress was all businesswoman.
“My GMHC gig is December fifteenth, and we have a one-hour rehearsal on the fourteenth. As long as your mother’s thing is before then we have a deal,” Lorna said. “If not, there’s no way I’m hauling my ass to Jersey to entertain a demographic that’s not going to be around long enough to do me any good.”
Before I could mumble “That’s the Christmas spirit,” a high-pitched shriek pierced through the studio, sounding like an Indian princess after she’s been ripped from her would-be lover’s arms by a Hindi villain. In this instance, the Indian princess was being played by Lucas.
“My eye!” he screamed. “Oh dear God! My eye is on fire!”
Lucas’s eye wasn’t actually on fire, it only felt that way. Some of the glue holding the fake scar in place had dripped into his eye, causing it to turn a bright shade of red and burn like a Vietnam-era soldier’s pee the day after he grabbed himself a fine piece of poontang. Not that I have any idea what that feels like, but I’ve heard stories. Lucas cried and flailed about so animatedly it took a while for the makeup team to flush out his eye with water. He didn’t stop moving entirely until Lorna slapped him across the face.
“You’re an actor!” she declared. “Use your pain.”
I felt as if I was watching Uta Hagen bitch-slap Marlon Brando. Lucas’s one good eye focused intently on Lorna, while the other one tried desperately to open fully. It was like watching a mildly retarded baby chick being born. But there was beauty within that ghastly looking inflamed eye. And ratings.
“Action!” the director shouted.
There was a kind of hush all over the set and then the magic of soap opera began. Lucas and Lorna as Roger and Ramona played out their scene with more sincerity and passion than either of them had ever previously produced under the harsh, unforgiving studio lights. At the end of the scene Lucas dropped to his knees, not out of thankfulness that he just delivered the performance of his life, but out of anguish as his reddened eye began to swell. This time when the director shouted, it was for an ambulance.
As they wheeled Lucas away on a gurney I waved good-bye, but since I was on the side with the injured eye I’m not sure that he saw my show of support. The director called for an emergency meeting with the writers to write Lucas’s character out of the rest of the script, so I took the opportunity to press speed dial number one on my cell phone and once again call Frank. Just as I was hearing his message I got an incoming call. Could Frank finally be answering one of my many voice messages? Nope, just my mother. Well, if I couldn’t be satisfied, at least I could satisfy.
“She’ll do it,” I said.
My