8 Million Stories: All The World's A Stage

I’m on stage wearing a sailor’s bib and cap, melting to the floor in a melodramatic death as the curtain closes in front of me. How did I get here? I don’t consider this question because if I did, I would just sit and shake my head or call up a friend and yammer, and I’m supposed to get busy placing a chair centerstage for the bare-assed girl pulling on a fish tail.

Three weeks later, I can revisit that night and what it meant for my personal New York mythology. I had arrived from Florida just two days before. I booked it as vacation time, but really I was prospecting. I wanted to move to the city. I lacked direction but I had that vague, stupid and nearly universal feeling that once I got there, things would just happen.

I did a lot of wandering. At the Bowery Poetry Club, a subdued young girl with a calm stare struck up a conversation with me. Before I left, she handed me a flyer for “Naughty Nautical Nite” at The Slipper Room and told me they were always looking for stagehands. I glanced it over but figured that nothing legitimately cool could be so easy.

Later that night, I found myself outside The Slipper Room, at Orchard and Stanton. The scene was intimidating. Skinny pants, bandannas and hipster bangs crowded at the door.

Dressed in Sam’s Club jeans and battered Pumas, I didn’t even remember the name of the show I was trying to bluff my way into. Still, I’d developed an algorithm for these sorts of things. Check your reason for not acting: If it’s shyness, then act impulsively. A guy was taking cash and checking IDs. “I, uh, stagehand,” I said to him. “Someone told me.”

“What?” asked the door guy. “Who are you?” But the queue behind me was getting impatient, and as I continued to stammer, he just waved me through.

Inside, a man in a suit identified himself as the stage manager. “Do you know how to work a camera?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, taking his question as generally as possible.

It turned out to be a Handycam on a tripod, easy enough to learn. I was all ready to record the show when, to my chagrin, the real camerawoman arrived to do her job.

Still, after this bit with the camera, I had a real answer when someone asked, “What are you doing here?” I would say, “Well I was manning the camera earlier. Do you need anything else?”

Then I’d add the merch booth on top of the camera work, and so on, with each new task I performed. My white lies propped each other up, creating a hollow foundation of legitimacy where there had been none at all.

The further I got from my initial nothingness, the less it mattered. I felt like Anne Baxter in All About Eve. Eventually I was telling others what to do.

“Did you go to school for this?” asked the camerawoman, whom I taught to use her machine. I laughed.

Ultimately, just like Eve, I got my moment in the spotlight. They put the sailor clothes on me and handed me a bouquet. Some girls in the dressing room gave me blurred and complex instructions, waving a paper, with words I couldn’t see, at me. Their stage directions went something like this:

“Step out and dance with the girls.”

“Should he be dancing or standing still?”

“I don’t know. Just follow the Asian man.”

“And then when the albatross falls, you die.”

Then the curtain opened.

I forgot my instructions and followed the Asian man. We danced with the girls, for what occasion I don’t know. The albatross fell, someone nudged me and I died extravagantly.

This was my fantasy about living in New York—that it would be like living in a dream. And not just because events can take place that, when viewed objectively, make no sense.

Here, anything you do today won’t matter because no one will remember it tomorrow. You’re not required to act in character.

I hung around backstage and watched the rest of the performances. There was Rosie Rebel, flopping around on roller skates and squeezing lemons on her fruit-juicer bra cups.

Co-host Jessica Delfino sang a half-ironic, wholly funny ditty between chirps on her rape whistle. Her partner, Dame Darcy, did a Nazi burlesque act in a suit that was patterned with zippers. Afterward, they took me to a cast party at Darcy’s nearby apartment.

I wondered how they’d all gotten there in the first place. Did they have big plans and solid connections? Or did they just pretend, like me, that they already belonged?