Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire) Read online

  “You really are weird,” Janna said, and we exchanged phone numbers instead. She wrote in her phone, Jessica the Bridesmaid and I wrote in mine, Janna the Bodyguard. We already had the kind of inside joke that would forever be burned into our memories—or, at least, our iPhones.

  She hugged me good-bye, saying she’d like to come to New York City for Christmas. “Maybe we can hang out for a cup of frozen hot chocolate as we watch all the ice skaters spin in circles in Rockefeller Center?”

  I nodded my head, my eyes dim with the thought of the friendship we could have under normal circumstances. Could we be friends this way? If she came to visit me, my roommate would call me Jen, my doorman would call me Kimmy, and she would call me Jessica. Could we be friends even though she didn’t know my real name? Jimmy is one of my closest friends, and he still thinks I go by Kimmy. He will never know differently, and if I have anything to do with it, neither will she.

  “I hope to see you soon too,” I said to her, giving her one last hug and heading out of the giant whale-mouth-like doors, leaving everything as is, including the people, for now.

  chapter seventeen

  Stand-Up Comedy School Dropout

  All I know for sure is that there’s a bright light stinging my eyes, and I begin to wonder if this is it—if this is how it’s all going to end. The light won’t go away when I blink to the left or when I stare to the right. It’s as if I just exited a movie theater, my pupils painfully adjusting to daylight.

  I’ve forgotten where I am. I’ve forgotten what I’m supposed to be doing.

  Oh, dear God. Did I die? It’s me, again. Jennifer Glantz. Are you still there? I know we haven’t chatted since the whole Steve Harvey debacle, and we both know how that turned out. But I need another favor. I need you to turn this light off and let the rulers of the afterlife know that I am not ready to hug them hello yet. There are still slices of pizza in Brooklyn that I want to eat and library fines in Los Angeles that I would like to pay off before I trade in my New York City one-bedroom apartment for a high-rise in the sky. It’s just not my time to go, okay?

  There’s all that talk about how your whole life flashes before your eyes right before you kick the bucket. I think it’s happening to me right now. The sharp light is live-streaming a montage of my most sacred memories. I see myself at five, building sandcastles with Styrofoam cups, sitting in the surf full of seaweed. There’s me at twelve, tossing a Frisbee across the yard for my dog, Brandy, to fetch, but she decides to run in the opposite direction toward my peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead. Oh, great: me at eighteen, kissing a guy with a metal loop attached to his eyebrow and a tattoo that says, smile, in Chinese letters, on his left pec. I see one more. I’m twenty-six, now smooching a guy with a guitar strapped to his back as a homeless man stands next to us burping to the tune of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Now that I think about it, I wonder what happened to that guy? Not the one I locked lips with—the one with the burps. Those belches were Broadway-worthy. I should have gone back and given him some Tums.

  Wait a minute. I feel something. It’s my heartbeat. It’s knocking loud, louder, so loudly against my chest, my neck, my wrist. I am alive. I know for sure that I am because I tug on my shirt and it’s soaking wet. I have never been happier to feel my sweat glands.

  I make an X with my arms and furrow my brow until the light is gone, finally. It has moved across the room and is now haunting its next victim, a sign that tells me where I am, that reassures me that I am not walking toward the gates of heaven; I am walking onto the stage at the Broadway Comedy Club.

  I notice my feet are now planted in the center of a wooden paneled stage that creaks whenever I shift my balance. I’m moving around a lot, avoiding mouth-to-microphone contact as much as possible. But I realize that the low-key sounds, panicked mantras, and whispers of oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, are being announced to the audience thanks to the unforgiving acoustics of this place.

  The crowd is already chuckling, probably assuming that the look on my face is part of my act. I’ll go with it as long as they keep laughing.

  I have to say something. I have to start talking now.

  “Dating is expensive and awkward.”

  I have broken the ice. I have started my tenure as a stand-up comic, and I feel as if I’m going to vomit the two slices of pizza I gobbled before I went onstage.

  “The second that bill arrives, us girls, we lose all eye contact. We’re shuffling around in our purse, trying to pull our wallet out from a stack of expired Bed Bath and Beyond coupons and hair ties. We look like we’re a DJ spinning tracks.”

  I look out to the packed room of strangers, who are as silent as they would be if someone sealed their lips with Krazy Glue—though, magically, they’re managing to guzzle their way pretty easily through the two-drink minimum. There’s a brief burst of laughter from a table in the front. I move to the lip of the stage, raise my arm to shield against the bright light once again, and see that Kerri is sitting in the front row. She’s bobbing her head up and down, trying to tell me that I’m doing just fine, that I should just keep going, so I do.

  “I don’t do that. Because I don’t have a wallet. So I just say hey, I’ll get this one. Because they’re supposed to say no, right? Yeah. No: they say yes. And then I’m stuck paying $53 for their steak dinner and my appetizer-sized kale salad with dried cranberries.”

  I’m only up here on this stage because I’m no good at reading the fine print. I throw away receipts, sign my first and last name on the dotted line, submit payment via my PayPal account prematurely, before I’ve had a chance to digest what happens if I change my mind.

  What happened was late one Friday night, which is when I get most of my dazzling ideas, I ripped my Bank of America monthly statement into ten almost-even strips of paper. On each strip, I wrote down a fear of mine. Fear is what steers us in the wrong direction; it’s what wakes us up in the morning like an annoying alarm clock that can be heard three apartments away. I was becoming a twentysomething who was frightened by more things than a middle-aged Jewish mother who sits at home most afternoons and watches Fox News. So I decided to do something about it.

  I crumpled up the strips and tossed them into a cereal bowl I had just used to eat my Lucky Charms. Then I turned off my lamps, reached inside, and picked out one, and only one, piece of paper. Whatever fear was written down would be the fear I would conquer this year, the one I would stare down like a cowboy does a bull in an old Western rodeo.

  It could have been anything, really. My fears were quite diverse, illogical, and without a distinct pattern. I could have found myself jumping out of a plane with a parachute strapped to my shoulders, eating a chocolate-covered cockroach, or even making myself an appointment with a financial advisor to glance over the damage I’d done to my savings account with my irresponsible habits. But instead, written on the tightly folded piece of paper, was something I feared more than anything else. It was something I really didn’t want to do. It said: “Go to stand-up comedy school and then perform at a New York City comedy club.”

  My dad can turn any situation into a punch line. He’s made dinner tables, business meetings, and trips to the doctor for a routine checkup his own personal stage to deliver the kind of material that makes people hoot and holler for more. When you’re around him, it’s best you tuck a napkin over the collar of your shirt, for you never know when he’s going to hit you with a joke that will make the lemon-flavored seltzer water flow out of your nose. I got his height, obsession for rock music, and love of a good ice cream cone after dinner, but I wasn’t blessed with his natural ability to be funny. Sure, I could memorize jokes pretty well, repeating them over and over in my head just fine. But when it came time to say them out loud, I sounded like a monotone high school biology teacher trying to take attendance.

  What scared me the most about doing stand-up comedy was that everyone in the room was paying top dollar to kick back a cold one and giggle on autopilot. It was the comedi
an’s job to flip that switch on. I was pretty sure if I tried to do this at a New York City comedy club, there would be some angry customers demanding a refund for my subpar performance, to say the least.

  But a late-night Friday promise is a promise, so I went online, Googled “NYC Stand Up Comedy Schools,” and within ten minutes, I was a paid-in-full student who was starting class at the end of June. Oh, the power of the Internet. I was going to do this. I was going to high-five a fear that made my acid reflux flare up when I imagined doing it.

  I was ready for this until one morning, the day before I was supposed to report to comedy school, I decided I didn’t want to go anymore. It was more than that, actually. I really couldn’t go anymore. My professional bridesmaid Craigslist ad had been discovered that morning, and I was now hiding on the ice-cold bathroom floor at my full-time job, watching my inbox light up on my phone. I was sending calls from reporters straight to voice mail and texting my brother to help me figure out a way to make this nutty accidental situation into a real-life business. In just twenty-four hours, my life had become a blockbuster comedy that I wanted to screen only in the comfort of my own home or on the floor of this bathroom. I was no longer interested in getting up on a stage.

  I called them the next morning and begged like a child who was making a case for why she should skip out on school because she couldn’t stomach learning about long division for a third day in a row. “You have to let me out of this class. You can keep my fifty-dollar deposit and refund the rest of the tuition; I just need you to take me off the roster.”

  The woman who answered my panicked phone call was named Martha, and she sighed so loudly it almost started to sound like her natural way of just breathing in and out. You could tell my simple request wasn’t unique. Martha was swarmed with calls from last-minute scaredy cats wanting to stay home on their litter box of a couch.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll take you off the list.”

  Phew. That was easy. I was relieved.

  “But I’m putting you in the January class. So you have six months to pull yourself together and show up.”

  “Listen, Martha.” It seemed as though she wasn’t catching my drift. “This class sounded wonderful when I signed up two weeks ago. But I’ve thought it through, and I’m not interested in publicly humiliating myself anymore.”

  “You have to take this class, Jen,” she slammed back, as if she were my dial-a-date therapist.

  Poor Martha. She had no idea she was sharing phone waves with the most stubborn human being in the entire world. Once I make up my mind, there’s nothing anyone can do or say to change it. If I want to drive left, I drive left. If I want to eat a burrito from Chipotle for lunch, I eat a burrito from Chipotle for lunch. Even if that means my left turn will add an extra forty-five minutes to my commute or the Chipotle next to my apartment is unexpectedly closed for renovations and now I have to take the F train to the M153 bus and then walk seventeen blocks to eat a tofu burrito with extra guacamole, I’m going to do it.

  “If you don’t show up in January, we won’t refund your money. You’ll lose the $499.”

  “I’ll see you then,” I said, immediately. I knew I would not be able to snooze at night, in my overpriced New York City apartment that I have to work three jobs and eat one-dollar pizza for dinner to afford, knowing that I just tossed $499 up in the air like I just don’t care.

  “When you’re single, everybody you know is trying to set you up with everybody they know. Mid–Pap smear, my gynecologist asked me if I wanted to meet her nice Jewish nephew for dinner. Once my rabbi pulled me aside at a funeral to ask me if there was anybody in the room I’d like to do a mitzvah with. By now, every Jason Cohen or Ian Schwartzberg on the East Side of Manhattan has my number.”

  A couple of laughs travel across the room. I look toward the back wall at a flashing red digital clock that says I’m up here for another two minutes and forty-two seconds. That’s nothing, right?

  Wrong. I have suddenly run out of jokes.

  I initially forgot about my January back-to-school promise. I really did. I wouldn’t be up here if the school didn’t have a great accountability system that made my phone ring the night before class was supposed to begin, with a friendly reminder from my pal Martha.

  “Is this Jennifer Glantz?”

  “It depends. Is this the New York Public Library? If so, the check is in the mail, okay?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Who is this?”

  “Martha. From comedy school.” I felt like, at this point, she should have said Martha from collections.

  “Is it that time of the year already?”

  “School starts tomorrow. Do I have to remind you what happens if you don’t show up?” Now she was sounding more like Martha from the Brooklyn mafia.

  “No. But want to remind me why this class is going to help me at all in life?”

  I didn’t mean to dish her some attitude, but I was in the middle of running a business, by myself, from the crack between my couch cushions. I didn’t have time to think about being funny.

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a professional bridesmaid.”

  Martha laughed so hard I had to move the phone away from my ear.

  “That’s not one of my jokes. That’s the truth. I work weddings as a hired bridesmaid.”

  “Easy. This class will help you give wedding toasts that don’t put people to sleep.”

  Martha was slowly becoming many things, one of which was a genius. She was right. After a while, all wedding speeches sound exactly the same. Just change the bride and groom’s name, an inside joke here and there, and there you have it: a two-minute toast that the guests just want to get through so they can drink from their raised glasses of champagne.

  All wedding party speeches start off with poetry about how beautiful and stunning the bride is. The middle is cushioned with a childhood joke; an embarrassing jab to the bride’s taste in music, fashion, or her DVD collection; and one aww-inducing story about how she came to the rescue when your world was falling apart. It all ends with a toast to the radiating couple, wishing them a lifetime of happiness, laughter, and of course, love.

  But the truth is, it would make more sense, it would be more honest, to wish them a lifetime of limited fights in the middle of the grocery store over which kind of oatmeal to get, adventures that take them more than sixty miles away from their suburban house, and the kind of love that has them waking up in seventy-five years together, whipping the Polident off each other’s dentures.

  I’ve started to get creative with my wedding speeches. I’ve said adios to the usual template and now find ways to make them a little more nontraditional. But that doesn’t always work. That doesn’t always make for a good speech. The last speech I gave at a wedding, I did it as if it were a game of Mad Libs. There I was, standing up in front of a room full of tuxedo-clad men and Spanx-encased women with a glass of champagne raised at half staff, asking people to shout out a verb, an adjective, and a noun to fill in the missing words of the speech on the spot.

  It would have gone down as the most memorable and adorable speech ever given at a wedding if people weren’t scratching their heads, trying to remember what an adjective is and what a verb is not. Or if they could hear me over the clinking of forks on plates and the loud chatter of the fraternity boys sitting at table number sixteen. Or, if, just for three minutes, their attention spans could outlast a fruit fly’s. Perhaps my own personal guru, Martha, was right. Maybe stand-up comedy school could help bring some natural humor into my wedding toasts and help me entertain 250 glassy-eyed guests who are in the midst of a midparty snooze fest thanks to the open bar.

  I’m now two minutes away from writing this experience off as a business expense, something I could reference next week during my meeting with Ray as one of my greatest failures of all time. I just have to figure out a way to improvise, to tell jokes on the spot, since my material stretched for only ninety sec
onds and I still have ninety more left.

  I look down at Kerri, who is rooting for me as if she’s cheering on a runner fifty yards away from a marathon finish line. “Go with the bridesmaid stuff,” she whispers, and I stand up straight, brush the wrinkles out of my shirt, and go on, talking about a topic I know oh-so-well.

  “So, I’m a professional bridesmaid.”

  The room comes alive with laughter. It is, officially, the most entertaining thing I have said all night.

  “Want to know what that really means? It means you have to lift up the bride’s dress so she can pee. Have you ever helped someone pee before? I have. You want to know what happens? All of a sudden, you have to pee too. You find yourself bent over, one hand holding up her dress, one hand covering your crotch, and you’re doing a little dance, praying that you don’t pee all over the place. But you will.”

  I can now count the laughs on one hand from the kind souls who are offering me the laughter equivalent of a pat on the back. But five laughs is five laughs. The other sixty people in the room can remain comatose for all I care.

  The clock says I have thirty more seconds: thirty more seconds and I’m out of this place. What can I talk about for thirty more seconds? Dating? Already did that. Pizza? There’s really nothing funny about pizza. Food? Why yes, I’ll talk about my slowing metabolism’s relationship with food.

  “I can’t eat like I used to anymore. I have to eat foods that sound like celebrity baby names. Kale Jolie Pitt. Quinoa Kardashian. Sweet, sweet, Apple Martini, I mean Martin. I’m drinking almond milk. I didn’t even know you could milk an almond? Please, somebody, show me the nipples.”

  The countdown clock is flashing a row of 0s in my face, and the bright light is making its way over from the Broadway Comedy Club Sign and into my eyes once again. My time is up, and I am done.

  “I’m Jen Glantz. That’s G, l, a, n, t as in tom, z as in zebra.” I want everyone in the audience to know who I am and to remember, forever, what I just did. It might not have been the most haha-worthy performance, but for four minutes and thirty seconds, I was doing the Argentine tango with one of my worst fears. “Thank you for coming out tonight.”