Summer Reads Sampler

SASSY SUMMER READS
FOUR FABULOUS EXCERPTS FROM THREE RIVERS PRESS

SASSY SUMMER READS
AN EXCERPT FROM
THREE RIVERS PRESS
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
(And Other Concerns)
Mindy Kaling
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Copyright © 2011 by Mindy Kaling
All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered

trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States

by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2011.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kaling, Mindy.
Is everyone hanging out without me? (and other concerns) /
Mindy Kaling. —1st ed.
p. cm.
1. American wit and humor. 2. Kaling, Mindy. I. Title.
PN6165.K35I8 2011
818'.602—dc23
2011033922
ISBN 978-0-307-88627-9
eISBN 978-0-307-88628-6
PR INTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMER ICA
Book design by Elizabeth Rendfleisch

Cover design by Laura Duffy
Cover photography by Autumn de Wilde
Page 51, photo of Mindy Kaling and Conan O’Brien,

copyright © NBCU Photo Bank/Margaret Norton.
Page 113, photo of Mindy Kaling and Paul Lieberstein,
copyright © Michael Gallenberg.
Page 121, photo of Mindy Kaling directing Will Ferrell,
copyright © NBCU Photo Bank/Chris Haston/NBC.
All other photographs, Matt & Ben postcard,
and Matt & Ben script excerpt are courtesy of the author.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
First Paperback Edition
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Alternate Titles for This Book
H E R E W E R E some titles for my book that I really liked but

was advised strongly not to use.
The Girl with No Tattoo
When Your Boyfriend Fits into Your Jeans and Other Atrocities
The Book That Was Never a Blog
Always Wear Flats and Have Your Friends Sleep Over: A Step-by-
Step How-To Guide for Avoiding Getting Murdered
Harry Potter Secret Book #8
Sometimes You Just Have to Put on Lip Gloss and Pretend to Be

Psyched
I Want Dirk Nowitzki to Host Saturday Night Live So Much That

I’m Making It the Title of My Book
Barf Me to Death and Other Things I’ve Been Known to Say
The Last Mango in Paris (this would work best if “Mango” were the
cheeky nickname for an Indian woman, and if I’d spent any time in
Paris)
So You’ve Just Finished Chelsea Handler’s Book, Now What?
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8 • Mindy Kaling
Deep-Dish Pizza in Kabul (a touching novel about a brave girl enjoy-

ing Chicago-style pizza in secret Taliban- ruled Afghanistan)
There Has Ceased to Be a Difference Between My Awake Clothes

and My Asleep Clothes
I Don’t Know How She Does It, But I Suspect She Gets Help from
Illegal Immigrants
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Failing at Everything
in the Greatest City on Earth
I WA S H E S I TA N T to write this essay because, of course, I

would rather you guys think I’m some kind of wide-eyed
wunderkind who just kind of floated into my job at The Office
without even trying. I want you to picture me as a cute little
anime character that popped out from behind a mushroom
or something and landed in Hollywood. But writing about my
struggles was actually really fun. Besides, who wants to read
about success, anyway? Successful serial murderers, maybe.
COLLEGE RUINED ME
Not to sound braggy or anything, but I kind of killed it in college.

You know that saying “big fish in a small pond”? At Dartmouth
College, I was freakin’ Jaws in a community swimming pool. I
wrote plays, I acted, I sang, I was the student newspaper cartoon-
ist. All this, of course, was less a function of my talent than of the
school’s being in rural New Hampshire, where the only option for
real entertainment was driving one and a half hours to Manches-
ter, on the off chance the Capitol Steps were touring there.
After beer pong, floating in an inner tube down the Con-
necticut River, fraternity hazing rituals, building effigies and
47
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48 • Mindy Kaling
burning them down in the center of our quad, a cappella, and

driving to Montreal for strip clubs, student-run theatrical pro-
ductions placed a strong seventh in terms of what was fun to
do on campus. We had a captive audience with low standards,
which was a recipe for smashing success and the reason for the
inflated sense of self I have to this very day. If you’re a kid who
was not especially a star in your high school, I recommend going
to a college in the middle of nowhere. I got all the attention I
could ever have wanted. If I had gone to NYU, right now I’d be
the funniest paralegal in a law firm in Boston.
I got even more confidence from having a steadfast compan-
ion in my best friend, Brenda. A few words about Brenda. Bren is
the shit. In college, she was the star of every play at Dartmouth
from her freshman fall on. She looked the way a Manhattan
socialite should look: perfect posture, gazelle-like, with a sheet
of dark blond hair. Girls always worried she was going to steal
their boyfriends, but she never did. (I didn’t understand that at
all. It’s college! Steal some boyfriends, for God’s sake!) Bren and
I befriended each other early on, became inseparable through
a shared sense of humor, a trove of nonsensical private jokes,
and had the same enemies within the Drama Department. We
clung to each other with blind loyalty, like Lord Voldemort and
his snake, Nagini. I, of course, was Nagini. If you messed with
one of us, you knew you messed with both of us, and Voldemort
was going to cast a murder spell on you, or Nagini was going to
chomp on your jugular. It was such a good, dramatic time. Bren
was the kind of best friend I dreamed about having when I was a
little kid. I never knew you could have someone in your life who
was pretty much on the same page about essentially everything.
In theater, Bren would play Beatrice or Medea or Eliza Doo-
little, while I wrote well-attended comedy one-acts and occa-
sionally played Medea’s little buddy or something. I felt like a
big celebrity on campus. Well, the kind of celebrity you could
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Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? • 49
In 2010, Bren was my date to the Emmys. People thought

she was on Mad Men and I was her publicist.
conceivably be at Dartmouth if you weren’t a jock or a sorority

girl, who were the real celebrities. My fame was akin to that of,
say, Camilla Parker Bowles.
Our other best friend, Jocelyn, whom we met through our
singing group, was more or less the one directly responsible for
making the traditional college experience really fun. She was
less competitive and intense, and from Hawaii, so she was very
comfortable being naked, which was new to us and intimidat-
ing. She, along with our other friend Christina, made us go berry
picking and get our faces painted for football games, and she’d
host dinners in our shared dorm dining room. Jocelyn is willowy
Jocelyn and Brenda being really adorable at something

I don’t remember being invited to.
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50 • Mindy Kaling
and half-Asian, and while fitting the bill technically for a model,
has no interest in modeling. She’s just that cool. Me, on the other
hand, whenever I lose, like, five pounds, I basically start consider-
ing if I should “try out” modeling. When the three of us walked
down the street together, I looked like the Indian girl who kept
them “real.” I don’t care. After all these years with friends who
are five ten or taller, I have come to carry myself with the confi-
dence of a tall person. It’s all in the head. It works out.
So I left college feeling like a successful, awesome, tall per-
son. Then, in July of 2001, the three of us moved to New York.
LATE NIGHT DREAMS, QUICKLY EXTINGUISHED
The job I most wanted in the world was to be a writer on Late

Night with Conan O’Brien. I can’t believe that was two Conan
shows ago. It seems like yesterday.
I’d been an intern at Late Night three years before and was
famously one of the worst interns the program had ever seen.
The reason I was bad was because I treated my internship as a
free ticket to watch my hero perform live on stage every day, and
not as a way to help the show run smoothly by doing errands.
My boss, the script coordinator, greatly disliked me. Not only
because I was bad at my job, but because hating everything was
one of her personality traits. You know those people who legiti-
mize their sarcastic, negative personalities by saying proudly
they are “lifelong New Yorkers”? She was one of those. Her fa-
vorite catchphrase was “Are you on crack?” On my last day, she
shook my hand limply and said a terse “Bye” without looking
away from her J.Crew catalogue.
When I arrived in New York, I didn’t even really know how
to apply for the job. I had not kept in touch with anyone at Late
Night, because even as a nineteen-year-old, I knew that no one
wants to keep in touch with the intern. I had placed a lot of faith
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in Woody Allen’s belief that 80 percent of success is just showing

up. I said to myself: Are you serious? 80 percent? Sure, I can just
show up. Here I am, New York! Give me a job!
It turns out the other 20 percent is kind of the difficult, neb-
ulous part.
I wrote a letter to NBC asking how I could submit sketches
to be considered for Late Night. I got a letter back saying that
the network could not even open an envelope that contained cre-
ative material that was not submitted by an agent. I thought
the phrase “cannot even open the envelope” was a tad dramatic.
NBC legal, you drama queens. This initial rejection served as
NBC “negging” me, to borrow a phrase from my very favorite
book, The Game. It worked. NBC became the sexy guy at the
party I needed to be with. When I finally got with him, years
later, sure, he was fourth place, kind of fat, balding, and a little
worse for the wear, but I still got him.
Here I am, ruining my guest appearance on my hero’s talk show

with dorky gesticulation.
HOME IS WHERE THE BED IS
I was jobless, but so were Brenda and Jocelyn. Together we

rented a railroad-style apartment in Windsor Terrace, Brook-
lyn. The railroad apartment, for those of you who’ve never seen
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52 • Mindy Kaling
one, is styled after the sleek comfort of a 1930s industrial rail-

road car. All the rooms are connected in a line, and you have to
walk through one room to get to the next. Everything about it
is awful, except if you need a set for a play that takes place dur-
ing the Great Depression. The only people this intimate setup
worked for were three female best friends who had no secrets
from one another, were comfortable (enough) being walked in
on naked, and had no boyfriends (or no boyfriends who were
ever invited over). Enter us!
Real estate was our first disappointment in New York: we
had set our sights on trendy Williamsburg, which had plenty
of chic coffee shops, cool boutiques, and cute, straight guys.
I knew I wouldn’t have been able to afford those coffee shops
and boutiques, or had the nerve to talk to any of those hip-
ster guys, but I would have liked to be around them, and felt
that it was plausible I could have that life. After visiting sev-
eral basement-level tenements that were out of our price range,
we settled for Windsor Terrace. When we moved there, Wind-
sor Terrace was a Park Slope–adjacent mini-neighborhood that
could’ve been the exterior set for much of Welcome Back, Kotter.
Not grim, but not great. It was populated mostly by middle-age
lesbian couples who had taken on the noble challenge of gentri-
fying the neighborhood.
Brenda and I shared the center bedroom and the single
queen bed it would hold, and Jocelyn fashioned herself a sort
of bohemian-chic burrow out of the last bedroom, which, while
it was the only room with true privacy, was also the size of a
handicapped bathroom. She installed a twin loft bed and hung
a batik tapestry over the lofted area, where she would read books
and magazines for hours. Jocelyn is the kind of person who goes
into any room, sizes it up, and immediately tries to loft a bed
there. To this day, she lives in an apartment with a loft bed.
This was a good arrangement because Jocelyn has hoard-
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ing tendencies, and some degree of containment was crucial.

(Hoarding has pejorative connotations now, but you have to un-
derstand this was before the show Hoarders depicted hoarders as
gruesome loners with psychological problems. Joce is a hoarder
of the cheerful, social, Christmas-lights-year-round variety.) Joc-
elyn would save stacks of six-year-old magazines because there
might be a recipe in one of them for jambalaya, which she would
need someday if we threw a big Mardi Gras–themed dinner.
(This wasn’t crazy, because we would occasionally do things like
that.) People who visited our apartment and saw her curtained
lair probably assumed Jocelyn was a gypsy we had inherited as a
condition of getting the apartment.
I was going through a phase where all my photos had me

making a “whoo!” face.
And the stairs. Oh, the stairs. The staircase in our third-floor
walk-up was the steepest, hardest, metal-est staircase I have ever
encountered in my life. It was a staircase for killing someone and
making it seem like an accident. Our downstairs neighbor was
a toothless man, somewhere in his eighties or nineties. He lived
with what seemed like two younger male relatives, with “younger”
meaning in their sixties. In the dead of summer or winter they
would wear those ribbed white tank tops grossly named wife
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54 • Mindy Kaling
beaters, which is how we knew they were rent- control tenants (if
anyone wears year-round wife beaters, it is the same as saying
they are enjoying the benefits of a rent- controlled apartment).
They also spoke a language with one another that seemed like
a hybridized version of an Eastern European language and
the incomprehensible mumble of Dick Tracy henchmen. They
would’ve been frightening, except they were incredibly timid
and scared of us for some reason. Like when that monster
in the Bugs Bunny cartoon gets scared of a mouse and runs
screaming all the way back to his castle.
In the summer, feral cats in heat clung onto the screens of
our living room, meowing mournfully until we threw a glass
of water at them. When it got cold, the roaches migrated in
and set up homes in every drain. Sometimes, when I got up in
the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I would feel a dis-
gusting crackly squelch under my foot, and I’d know I’d have
to rinse off a roach from my heel. That was our apartment.
We took the bad with the pretty good. Plus, we could afford
it, Prospect Park wasn’t too far, and people already assumed
we were lesbians, so we fit into the neighborhood right away. It
was all good.
Until we tried to pursue our dreams.
Jocelyn accompanies me on the subway to my first-ever open mike gig.
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I AM TERRIBLE AT EVERYTHING
Everything I learned about trying to get hired as a comedy writer

came from the Film and Television section of the Lincoln Center
Barnes and Noble. I didn’t have the money to buy many of the
books there, so I spent hours sitting in the aisle, copying down
sections in a loose-leaf notebook. I was not the worst offender.
There were aspiring screenwriters sprawled all over the place there.
They’d nurse a single coffee for hours. One kid I saw there all the
time frequently brought a large pizza with him and ate the entire
thing slowly while handwriting inquiry letters to literary agen-
cies.* The only really valuable thing I learned from the Lincoln
Center Barnes and Noble was that the only way I could get hired by
a TV show was to write a “spec,” or sample script, of a popular cur-
rent show. That’s when I started working on my first spec, a Will &
Grace sample, having seen the show only a handful of times.
I went on one audition when I was in New York. I wasn’t ac-
tively pursuing acting jobs, but this one was tailor-made for
me. It was an open casting call for Bombay Dreams, an Andrew
Lloyd Webber–produced musical extravaganza that was trans-
ferring from London to Broadway. I was encouraged by the rela-
tive lack of actresses, aged eighteen to thirty, who sang, lived
in the tristate area, and also looked Indian. Nothing gives you
confidence like being a member of a small, weirdly specific,
hard-to-find demographic.
The first Bombay Dreams audition was a singing audition. I
auditioned with “Somewhere Out There” from An American Tail.
In the audition room I saw some Indian girls, but mostly Latina
girls trying to pass for Indian. The audition sign-in sheet read
like it was for a production of West Side Story.
* It is interesting to note that this Barnes and Noble no longer exists—

perhaps no one was buying books there?
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56 • Mindy Kaling
My singing audition went really well, mostly because they

were relieved an actual Indian person was auditioning. On the
way out, the casting assistant walked me all the way to the street,
saying, “We were really so happy you made it out here.” I nodded
demurely, like I had a million other auditions that week that
were more exciting than this one, and left. They were so happy I
made it out there? Why not just hand me my start paperwork? On
the subway I started planning what I would do when I got the
job. First I would go to Dean & Deluca and buy some tiny mar-
zipan candies in the shape of fruit, an expensive treat I noticed
a lot of fancy-looking older white women buying. Next I would
pay for an exterminator to come to our apartment to kill the
cockroaches. After that I’d take Bren and Joce out to dinner at
Le Cirque, like I was a creepy Wall Street sugar daddy and they
were my pretty arm candy.
I got a callback for a dance audition. I had never danced in
my life and did not know what to wear. I went to a dance cloth-
ing surplus outlet in Chelsea I’d seen ads for in the PennySaver.
Their stuff was discounted because it was irregular, which
means the colors were weird or some buttons were off. I bought
brown tights, a sleeveless pink leotard, and a white iridescent
skirt that wrapped around my waist and was fastened with Vel-
cro. I capped off the entire look with some traditional pink bal-
let slippers. In the communal mirror of the dressing room of
that surplus store, a young Asian girl trying on ballet clothes
with her mom said, “Mommy, you should dress like that,”
referring to me. The mom hushed her in an Asian language. This
sealed the deal. I had never felt more graceful in my life.
At the audition I looked like a fucking idiot. The other girls
were all dressed in versions of what actual dancers wear: low-key
black leggings, a tank top, and sneakers. I looked like the chil-
dren’s birthday party performer playing Angelina Ballerina, the
ballet-dancing mouse. A Kevin Federline–looking choreogra-
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pher taught us an incredibly complicated Bollywood dance rou-

tine, which we then had to perform on tape. I stumbled through
it like a groggy teamster who had wandered into the wrong room
backstage, breathing heavily and vaguely hitting my marks.
KFed stopped me before the song was done and kindly asked
if I needed some water. I laughed because, as everyone knows,
laughing is a great way to disguise heavy breathing. I then exited
on the pretense of getting a drink, and quickly left the building.
It remains the single most embarrassing performance of my life,
and it’s on tape somewhere. I like to think Andrew Lloyd Webber
watches it whenever he’s feeling down.
My Will & Grace spec was a disaster. In an attempt to achieve
the cheeky, gay-centric tone of the show, I had written a sample
so over-the-top offensively gay that it actually reads like a propa-
ganda sketch to incite antigay sentiment.
So things were coming together nicely for me to embark on
a full-fledged depression. One good thing about New York is
that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression.
It’s not like if you’re in Los Angeles, where everyone’s so actively
working on cheerfulness and mental and physical health that if
they sense you’re down, they shun you. Also, all that sunshine
is a cruel joke when you’re depressed. In New York, even in your
misery, you feel like you belong. But it was still hard to fail,
so consistently, at everything I had once been Camilla Parker
Bowles–level good at.
Brenda and I would fi x that, but we didn’t know it yet.
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Men and Boys
S OM E T I M E S I bring a script I’m working on to a restaurant

and sit near people and eavesdrop on them. I could ratio-
nalize it—Oh, this is good anthropological research for characters I’m
writing—but it’s basically just nosiness. I especially like eaves-
dropping on women my age. Besides being titillating, it also
helps me gauge where I’m at in comparison. Am I normal? Am I
doing the correct trendy cardio exercises? Am I reading the right
books? Is gluten still lame? Is soap cool again, or is body wash
still the way to go? It was through eavesdropping that I learned
that you could buy fresh peanut butter at Whole Foods from a
machine that grinds it in front of you. I had wasted so much of my
life eating stupid old, already-ground peanut butter. So, yeah, I
highly recommend a little nosiness once in a while.
Once, at BLD, a restaurant where I was writing, I saw two
attractive thirty-ish women talking over brunch. They had fin-
ished eating and were getting seconds on coffee, so I knew it was
going to be good.
I heard the following:
GIRL #1 (pretty Jewish girl, Lululemon yoga pants, great

body) : Jeremy just finished his Creative Writing pro-
176
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gram at Columbia. But now he wants to maybe apply

to law school.
GIRL #2 (tiny Asian girl, sheet of black hair, strangely huge

breasts [for an Asian girl]) : Oh God.
LULULEMON: What?
32D: How many grad schools is he going to go to?
LULULEMON: I know. But it’s not his fault. No publishers

are buying short stories from unfamous people. Basi-
cally you have to be Paris Hilton to sell books these
days.
32D: For the past ten years that Jeremy has been out of col-
lege doing entry-level job after entry-level job and grad
school, you’ve had a job that has turned into a career.
LULULEMON: Yeah, so?
32D: Jeremy’s a boy. You need a man.
Lululemon did not take this well, as I anticipated.

I felt bad for Lulu because I’ve been Lulu. It’s really hard
when you realize the guy you’ve been dating is basically a high
schooler at heart. It makes you feel like Mary Kay Letourneau.
It’s the worst.
Until I was thirty, I only dated boys, as far as I can tell. I’ll tell
you why. Men scared the shit out of me.
Men know what they want. Men make concrete plans. Men
own alarm clocks. Men sleep on a mattress that isn’t on the floor.
Men tip generously. Men buy new shampoo instead of adding
water to a nearly empty bottle of shampoo. Men go to the den-
tist. Men make reservations. Men go in for a kiss without giving
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178 • Mindy Kaling
you some long preamble about how they’re thinking of kissing

you. Men wear clothes that have never been worn by anyone else
before. (Okay, maybe men aren’t exactly like this. This is what
I’ve cobbled together from the handful of men I know or know
of, ranging from Heathcliff Huxtable to Theodore Roosevelt to
my dad.) Men know what they want and they don’t let you in on
their inner monologue, and that is scary.
Because what I was used to was boys.
Boys are adorable. Boys trail off their sentences in an appeal-
ing way. Boys bring a knapsack to work. Boys get haircuts from
their roommate, who “totally knows how to cut hair.” Boys can
pack up their whole life in a duffel bag and move to Brooklyn for
a gig if they need to. Boys have “gigs.” Boys are broke. And when
they do have money, they spend it on a trip to Colorado to see a
music festival. Boys don’t know how to adjust their conversation
when they’re talking to their friends or to your parents. They
put parents on the same level as their peers and roll their eyes
when your dad makes a terrible pun. Boys let your parents pay
for dinner when you all go out. It’s assumed.
Boys are wonderful in a lot of ways. They make amazing,
memorable, homemade gifts. They’re impulsive. Boys can talk
for hours with you in a diner at three in the morning because
they don’t have regular work hours. But they suck to date when
you turn thirty.
I’m thirty-two and I fully feel like an adult. Sure, sometimes
I miss wearing Hello Kitty jewelry or ironic T-shirts from Urban
Outfitters on occasion. Who doesn’t? I don’t, because I think it
would seem kind of pitiful. But a guy at thirty-two—he can act
and dress like a grown man or a thirteen-year-old boy, and both
are totally acceptable. Not necessarily to me, but to most people.
(I can’t tell you how many thirty- and fortysomething guys wear
Velcro shoes in Los Angeles. It’s an epidemic.) That’s one of the
weirdest things I’ve noticed about being thirty-two. It is a lot of
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women and a lot of boys our age. That’s why I started getting
interested in men.
When I was twenty-five, I went on exactly four dates with a
much older guy whom I’ll call Peter Parker. I’m calling him Peter
Parker because the actual guy’s name was also alliterative, and
because, well, it’s my book and I’ll name a guy I dated after Spi-
der-Man’s alter ego if I want to.
Peter Parker was a comedy writer who was a smidgen more
accomplished than me but who talked about everything with
the tone of “you’ve got a lot to learn, kid.” He had been a writer
at a pretty popular sitcom. He gave me lots of unsolicited advice
about how to get a job “if The Office got canceled.” After a while,
it became clear that he thought The Office would get canceled,
and on our fourth and last date, it was clear that he thought The
Office should get canceled.
Why am I bringing up Peter Parker? Well, besides moonlight-
ing as Spider-Man, Peter was the first man I dated. An insuffer-
able, arrogant man, but a legit man.
Peter owned a house. It wasn’t ritzy or anything, just a little
Spanish ranch-style house in Hollywood. But he was the first
guy I’d dated who’d really moved into his place and made it a
home. The walls were painted; there was art in frames. He had
installed a flat-screen TV and speakers. There was just so much
screwed into the walls. Everywhere I looked I saw another in-
stance of an action that, if the house were a rental, would make
you lose your deposit. I marveled at the brazenness of it. Peter’s
house reminded me more of my house growing up than of a col-
lege dorm room. I’d never seen that before.*
Owning a house obviously wasn’t enough to make me want
to keep dating Peter. Like I said, he was kind of a condescending
* Look, I’m not an idiot, I realize plenty of boys own houses. That’s,
like, the whole point of the Playboy mansion.
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180 • Mindy Kaling
dick. But I observed in Peter a quality that I found really appeal-

ing and that I knew I wanted in the next guy I dated seriously: a
guy who wasn’t afraid of commitment.
At this point you might want to smack me and say: “Are you
seriously another grown woman talking about how she wants a
man who isn’t afraid of commitment? Is this a book, or a blog
called Ice Cream Castles in the Air: One Single Gal Hopes for Prince
Charming? We’ve all heard this before!” But let me explain! I’m
not talking about commitment to romantic relationships. I’m
talking about commitment to things: houses, jobs, neighbor-
hoods. Having a job that requires a contract. Paying a mortgage.
I think when men hear that women want a commitment, they
think it means commitment to a romantic relationship, but
that’s not it. It’s a commitment to not floating around anymore.
I want a guy who is entrenched in his own life. Entrenched is
awesome.
So I’m into men now, even though they can be frightening.
I want a schedule-keeping, waking-up-early, wallet-carrying,
non-Velcro-shoe-wearing man. I don’t care if he has more tradi-
tionally “men problems” like having to take prescription drugs
for cholesterol or hair loss. I can handle it. I’m a grown-up too.
Kali_9780307886279_1p_01_r1.pdf 194 7/10/12 3:20 PM

SASSY SUMMER READS
AN EXCERPT FROM
THREE RIVERS PRESS
Apron Anxiety
My Messy Affairs In and Out of the Kitchen
Alyssa Shelasky
T hr ee R i v ers Pr ess
N e w Y or k
Shel_9780307952141_4p_all_r1.indd iii 3/14/12 3:33 PM

In order to protect the identities of those whom I’ve loved and fed,
successfully or not, I’ve altered some names, details, and events in the story.
Copyright © 2012 by Alyssa Shelasky

www.threeriverspress.com
three rivers press and the tugboat design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-0-307-95214-1
eISBN 978-0-307-5215-8
printed in the united states of america
Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright

Cover photograph Fuse/Getty Images
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
First Edition
Shel_9780307952141_5p_all_r1.indd iv 3/19/12 5:21 PM

3.
Oui, Chef
am standing near City Hall, heading toward my home across

I the Brooklyn Bridge, and there’s a gray-haired millionaire
wearing an Hermès tie, dancing to the tunes of a homeless man
on the trombone. New York, it’s good to be back.
Over the past year, I left the West Coast, disassociated my-
self from the Glamour dating blog, turned thirty, and after six
intense interviews, got a full-time job that I’m really proud of.
I’m a staff writer at People magazine, with a good salary, a pri-
vate office, and interesting assignments involving film, music,
television, health, human interest, and a lot more than celebrity
news. My editors all know that I accepted the job under the
condition that I won’t have to go clubbing, stalking, or slith-
ering into places where I don’t belong, and that I’m a reformed
party girl with an early bedtime.
Living in California completely reset my body. It took the
mani-pedi, buy-the-shoes, blow-the-doorman right out of me. Ulti-
mately, I had to go all the way across the country just to come
back down to earth.
When I’m not reporting, I spend a lot of time with my for-
ever sweet and easy sister, who’s working at Real Simple maga-
zine, just a few floors down from People. Or I’m having long talks
44
Shel_9780307952141_4p_all_r1.indd 44 3/14/12 3:33 PM

A p ron A n x i e t y
over a few drinks with my closest New York girlfriends, Beth

and Jill (Shelley, who I talk to ten times a day, and who is gradu-
ally mellowing out herself, never came back from L.A.). Beth
is from Western Massachusetts like me. She’s strikingly pretty
and reminds me, in her unpretentiousness, of the girls from
home. (When Jean died, Beth and I had just started working
together at a PR firm, and I remember feeling like she was the
only person who understood how the tragedy rocked my tiny
town.) And then there’s the smokin’ hot Jill, who’s as devoted
as she is difficult. She works in fashion and dates only fancy men
whom I describe as “camera ready.” She’s the one I count on
every time there’s a party or a plus-one; I just love her company.
As always, I’m enjoying a lot of alone time, too—hunkering
down at poetry readings, jazz clubs, and other weird and won-
derful gatherings, befriending singletons with short bangs
and Buddhists with perfect posture, and conversing with total
strangers on everything from capitalism to colonics. In this
city, you can meet more great people while buying a stick of
gum than most do in a lifetime elsewhere. Everyone has a story,
mind-bending or blood-racing, on this island of provocateurs.
On my favorite nights, I just putter around aimlessly, vacillat-
ing between culture and curiosity. There’s nothing I’d rather do
than roam the streets without watching the clock.
Not that life has been uneventful.
After L.A., I invested my life savings in an apartment in an
almost-happening neighborhood of Brooklyn called Ditmas
Park. I lived there for a few months, but when a meth-head
mooned me in the building’s elevator, I realized I wasn’t as edgy
as I thought. Soon thereafter, I rented the place to two librar-
ian pescatarians on a budget, while I waited for the property to
appreciate and the neighborhood to become a little less sketchy
and a bit more Starbucks.
45

A lyssa Shel ask y
I then moved in with my parents, who just bought a lux-

ury loft in a more enviable Brooklyn enclave called DUMBO
(which stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Over-
pass). Now, I listlessly inhabit a spare, windowless, prison-white
room meant to be an office (the only option besides bunking
up in my parents’ bedroom, which, disturbingly, they prob-
ably would have loved). On one hand, living at home was a
smart, economical decision so I could figure out the next steps
in my housing situation. On the other hand, I’m about to turn
thirty-one, and I feel a little foolish being a single, stay-at-home
daughter with all her money tied up in an apartment that other
people live in and that most taxi drivers can’t find.
I’m still meeting guys everywhere I go—at Citibank, before
a Shakespeare in the Park play, while doing crosswords on the
subway—and even though many men have that je ne sais quoi, no
one has been quite right for me. The problem is I need to be with
an alluring, off-the-grid kind of guy, otherwise I lose interest.
But it seems like all the dazzling men have such dark problems:
impending divorces, sex addictions, secret debt. I go to art
shows and housewarming parties with no shortage of fetching,
successful, normal bachelors who just want to love and be loved
like the rest of us, yet I end up embarrassed for their unoriginal-
ity and unable to bear a conversation with them about work or
the weather. So instead, I wind up in the arms of guys like the
hot, Hungarian bike messenger who was at a book reading (on
a drug deal) and put me in his phone as “Alyssa Sexy Jew.” Bad
judgment, exceptional hands. Such lousy, lust-driven decisions
are why Dr. Pappa, who I’m still seeing, has me committed to a
summer of no dating, no drama, and no strings attached.
Then I get a press release. . . .
Bravo’s A-List Awards are happening tonight and the lineup
46

includes Top Chef ’s current season of cheftestants. While I have

zero interest in cooking, something catches my eye. In my
wholesome, post-Californian-life, I’ve started to watch Top
Chef from time to time because even as a noncook, the show
relaxes me. So much so that I’ve written about a few of the win-
ners and the master chefs who have influenced them. But what
really hooked me this season was a crush I developed on the
token bestubbled bad boy, who I cleverly nicknamed “Chef.”
Chef looks like James Dean, says he’s Greek and Jewish, and to-
tally turns me on. I even forced my family to watch an episode,
because as I tell them, “I’m pretty sure the one making blood
sausage is my soul mate . . .” Only they would see that as a per-
fectly logical thing to say.
Today, like a paper airplane sent from Aphrodite, Chef is on
the tip sheet thrown on top of the New York Times and next to
yesterday’s coffee. Usually I’d go to something like this myself,
but I’ve just sworn off men, I’m living out of boxes in my par-
ents’ apartment, and I just don’t look or feel my best; I’m even
wearing one of my mother’s muumuus—which is not as Sienna
Miller as it sounds.
So in my place, I send a pretty, blond freelance reporter
named Stephanie to the Bravo party with simple instructions:
“Do not leave until you find out if Chef has a girlfriend. And
ask him what he looks for in a woman. Get specifics!” Profes-
sionalism has never been my strength.
I head home, take a sunset jog, eat a few bowls of cereal and
an entire carton of strawberries, floss my teeth, put on a night-
gown, and crawl into bed feeling slightly pitiful, not that I’d
ever say so. Just before midnight, my phone vibrates as I’m toss-
ing and turning. Apparently, professionalism isn’t Stephanie’s
thing either. She’s e-mailed me her transcript from the Bravo
47

A lyssa Shel ask y
event, along with a note: “Chef is very nice and very single.
Thanks for the assignment!! P.S. I know you’re not looking or
anything, but here’s his phone number. . . . Just in case.” Screw
journalistic integrity. Give the girl a raise.
While tucked under the covers in fuzzy socks and shea but-
ter cream, I reach for the light on the bedside table and start
to read the two-page interview on my BlackBerry. I am pre-
pared for a slight rush, a raise of the brow, and then hopefully,
a better night’s sleep. But as I read his responses—part juvenile
delinquent, part plain ole Joe—my eyes, freshly dotted in cu-
cumber serum, start to widen. He talks about his family’s villa
in Greece, and how he dreams of taking a girl there and mak-
ing her a peasant dish called reginatta, which he describes as
stale bread sprinkled with ocean water, covered with bright red
tomatoes and crumbled fresh feta. As for the girl, she should be
funny, down-to-earth, and extremely family-oriented. He says
he’s been a “kitchen-rat” his whole life and that it’s starting to
get quite lonely. He’s happy to have been on Top Chef, but he
might just become a marine biologist in Florida or a fisherman
in the South of France.
Wow. He’s just what I thought he’d be like: creative, care-
free, and vulnerable. As I read his answers, I am struck by how
unaffected he is. How can he be lonely? He’s such a rock star in
my eyes. And the perfect woman he described? She sounds a little
familiar. I mostly love that he’s a dreamer but doesn’t sound to-
tally dysfunctional. That’s exactly what I want, exactly what I
need. A flash goes off, and suddenly, I know without any hesi-
tation, that Chef is more than just a TV fantasy. He is my next
boyfriend.
Let me explain. There are three things I know about my bio-
logical self:
48

1. If I walk into a McDonald’s, even just to use the bath-

room, I will get a glistening red zit on the left side of my cheek
that will terrorize my life for ten days straight.
2. If I combine alcohol with pot, in any quality or quantity,
I’ll convince myself that I’m paralyzed from the neck down,
pee in my pants, and then puke.
3. When the future-boyfriend flash goes off, though it’s
always primal and never practical, the world better buckle up,
because we’re all in for a ride.
The next day at work, I immediately e-mail the special proj-

ects editor at People, asking if I can interview Chef for our an-
nual bachelor issue, explaining that a freelancer had revealed his
single status and that he’s definitely an up-and-coming heart-
throb. It honestly doesn’t matter if she gives me the green light
or not. I have to meet him. I then go to my weekly therapy ses-
sion with Dr. Pappa, who, just one week ago, made me promise
to not date this summer. At the time, I was totally on board,
but who would have thought Chef would be right around the
corner?
“I am going to contact him and who knows what will hap-
pen,” I say, after quoting verbatim the cute, off-the-cuff an-
swers he gave to Stephanie. I include the reginatta bit, hoping
the Greek nostalgia will perhaps soften her.
“Don’t do it, Alyssa. Please . . .” says the shrink. “It’s not a
good idea. . . . You really need to be single.”
“Don’t worry, Dr. P.,” I say, writing a check. “I’ll proceed
with caution.”
Who knows why I’m so self-assured when it comes to pursu-
ing guys, and in this case, an almost-famous guy. Some people
might say that I’m a hot girl; others might go with a hot mess.
49

A lyssa Shel ask y
I think it’s somewhere in between. I can be beautiful or I can

be busted, but I can’t get by on my looks alone, even if I tried.
Whether it’s my inherited confidence, or an inner cool when it
comes to the opposite sex, or some life-less-ordinary-aura, get-
ting guys has always been easy, and getting Chef should be cake.
Despite Dr. Pappa’s warnings and my editor’s impending
e-mail saying that Chef isn’t famous enough for the magazine,
I leave a message on his cell, in my deepest Demi Moore voice
possible, that I want to do an in-person interview with him
for People magazine’s bachelor issue. Screw it. I can get him on
the pages if I really need to. If not, this could be worth getting
fired for. He returns my message in a few minutes, sounding
dead tired and terribly adorable. He’s excited about the inter-
view, which I feel a little guilty about (but not really). We start
to e-mail and text, comparing our schedules, warming things
up. He says he lives in Brooklyn but is in the process of mov-
ing somewhere else. I write him that the sauce he made on last
week’s episode looked so good that “I wanted to take a bath
in it!” He writes back four seconds later: “That could be ar-
ranged.” This is my kind of guy. Eventually, we agree to meet at
a corner café in Williamsburg called Fabiane’s. Even over the
phone, we are on fire.
Hours before our interview, I am searching online for some-
thing food-savvy to say. At this point, the only thing I really
know about the culinary scene is that white wine goes in the
fridge, guacamole makes you fat, and Tom Colicchio is bald.
The more I think about how little we could have in common,
the more nervous I get, so I leave early and order a tequila shot
at DUMBO General Store, my neighborhood hang. I ask to
speak with the restaurant’s chef, who is “preparing for the din-
ner rush,” not that I understand what that means. “Hey . . .
um . . . what’s like a hot topic in the chef scene right now?” I
50

ask. He speaks broken English, is sweating his ass off, and tells
me he’s totally slammed. “No problemo,” I say, pounding the
shot and heading to the F train.
On the subway, I remind myself that our get-together is a
“business meeting,” so I put on my reporter’s hat and fool my-
self into forgetting about any romantic anticipation. I brush into
Fabiane’s with the look of an unflappable journalist, in a very
flappable short skirt, who’s done this hundreds of times. Chef is
there already, waiting for me by the dessert display, now walk-
ing toward me to say hello. He’s long, ruddy, and crazy cute.
Before I can reach out my hand, there’s a kiss on the cheek and
a tight hug hello. This doesn’t happen with Justin Timberlake.
We arrange a table for two outside, while I take out my
tape recorder, which I won’t be turning on, and my list of fake
questions, which I won’t be flipping through. I try to stay in
character, but the way he looks, the way he speaks, the way he
dresses, how our knees touch . . . I’m trembling. I’m not sure
what one orders on a bogus interview that’s turning into a first
date, with a French-trained chef and me, a kitchen-phobe, so I
fumble through the menu and somehow come up with chicken
curry salad. He gets a tomato and mozzarella tartine. We agree
on a round of Stella Artois. When the waitress walks away, we
waste no time getting to know each other.
“So, what’s your story?” I ask, with a beer bottle to my
mouth, half reporter, half temptress.
“I’ll tell you about me, if you promise to tell me about you?”
He smiles.
“Fair enough.” I smirk, locking my eyes onto his for a beat
too long.
He swiftly shares fascinating stories about his past, really per-
sonal things, and I assure him that everything’s off the record.
(If he only knew how off the record!) We are so instantaneously
51

A lyssa Shel ask y
comfortable around each other that when his Greek and Jewish
heritage comes up, I tell him that a Greek man once broke my
heart. Our food comes and I make the long story short. My eyes
well up when talking about John, as they always do, and he asks
if it still hurts. I say that I’m doing fine, that it’s all part of my
fiber now, and that I’ve never believed we get only one great
love anyway. I realize that I’m committing a faux pas by bring-
ing up old boyfriends, but this is not the kind of guy who plays
by the rules. He doesn’t even know they exist.
“Go on a date with me,” he interrupts.
“Why should I?!” I say teasingly, wanting to kiss him, se-
duce him, marry him.
“Just be my girl,” he says, with a naïveté I have never seen in
a man. “I won’t hurt you.”
I tell him I’ll consider it, and we share an excellent piece of
lemon cake, taking turns with one fork. It’s tangy and light,
with a generous rich glaze, the perfect way to end an early sum-
mer night. I’m hungry and I hog it because I barely touched
my chicken curry, which looked like bad news in school-bus
yellow. “Who orders chicken curry from a little French bistro?”
he jokes, as we walk away from the restaurant, nudging me
playfully on my side. Without a moment of self-consciousness,
I confess that I know nothing about food. He doesn’t so much as
flinch. He just wants to know when he can see me again. “Let
me think about it.” I wink, waving down a cab.
He kisses me good-bye, on the cheek again, but more af-
fectionately this time, brushing back my hair. We play it cool
for about two days or two hours. I can’t remember. But I do
remember not being able to sleep or stop smiling. I also refuse
to acknowledge that this is his last week in New York. He is
moving to Washington, D.C., to open a casual neighborhood
restaurant in Capitol Hill with a few partners. Caught up in the
52

fervor of it all, this strikes me as a minor detail, as if D.C. is just

down the street, somewhere in between Westchester and love-
comes-first. He seems to share my geographical haze.
We text every few hours, figuring out our next plans, and
the following night he calls just to see how I’m doing. Midcon-
versation, I fess up about the bachelor issue hoax: “You really
think I’d share you?” I tease, hoping it doesn’t come across as
too forward. He had totally forgotten about that which predi-
cated our entire interaction, the actual “interview,” and replies
that he doesn’t want to be shared anyway. “You’re the one for
me,” he says without any pretense. I have no idea how to re-
spond, so I say, “Thank you.”
There is something so innocent, so coltlike, about him. He
still has an old, cracked flip phone; he doesn’t have a Facebook
account. His favorite restaurants are diners and his dream vaca-
tion is fishing on a lake with rolling papers, a transistor radio,
and a few cans of cold Coca-Cola. When I tell him a long-
winded story about Winona Ryder, which he follows carefully,
he says at the end, “I love that. But who is she?” He’s a simple
guy, who works really hard, rewarding himself by putting his
toes in the sand and his hands on a woman, and I’m mesmerized
by the authenticity of it all.
Not long after he moves to D.C., Chef takes a train back to
New York for a proper first date. He finds his way to DUMBO,
where I am counting down the seconds. It’s a hot, humid night
in late June and just as he rings the bell downstairs in my par-
ents’ lobby, a summer thunderstorm hits hard. I take a deep
breath, check my outfit, smooth down my frizz, and head to the
lobby. My heart pounds as I spot him waiting outside in the rain
with ripped jeans and amber eyes. Before I can ask if he wants
Italian or Thai, he kisses my lips, wraps his tender arms around
my waist, and walks us down the cobblestone street, under the
53

A lyssa Shel ask y
Manhattan Bridge and the splitting skies. Our bodies are sticky;
our hair is wild. We don’t care where we’re going. It is the love
affair I never want to end, the perfect storm.
After that night, which rocked both my body and mind,
Chef starts buying me train tickets to visit him every weekend
in D.C. He’s renting a three-bedroom house with “the Boys,”
his tireless and tattooed sous-chefs. I like the Boys a lot; they’re
real teddy bears, but the house is situated in a dangerous neigh-
borhood, and ironically, their kitchen is infested with bugs and
beyond. In the morning, before he heads to the restaurant, Chef
always manages to make me strong coffee and cheese toast,
which is basically cheese melted on bread in the toaster oven,
but constructed with such confidence and so perfectly crispy.
I eat with my feet elevated, petrified of any critters that may
whiz by.
It breaks my heart that in building and launching the restau-
rant all summer, Chef and his roommates haven’t had any time
to clean up this run-down Capitol Hill clunker. It also breaks
my back—Chef essentially sleeps on a cot. So the first present
I ever buy him is a nice and comfortable “W Hotel” mattress,
which I purchase with my press discount. It’s the least I can
do—for both of us. He beams over the bed, saying it’s the nicest
thing anyone has ever done for him.
We like all things hotel-related. After making such a splash
on Top Chef, my guy is now invited to do a lot of cooking events
around the country. He includes me in everything, as if we’re
a package deal, and I am tickled pink to tag along. I sit in the
audience as he does his food demos, oblivious to his knife skills
but obsessed with his aura. When it’s time for the Q&A portion
of the event, I wait for some smitten soccer mom to ask if he’s
single, and for him to blush and brag about me. “Actually, that’s
my girl over there. . . . She’s the best writer in the world. . . .” I
54

swoon when he says this, especially because all he’s read are my
love letters to him.
When we go to a celebrity poker tournament at Foxwoods
Resort Casino in Connecticut, we skip most of the festivities
and stay in our suite, with the room-service menu and The
Hangover on demand. No one wins bigger than we do that night.
For a corporate event in Philadelphia, he is paid to make an
appetizer and meet some fans. Bored by the crowd, and enam-
ored with each other, we sneak off a little early. Arm in arm,
feeling very much like the untucked artist and his slinky muse,
we duck away, and I walk right into a glass door. Face first.
Bloody nose. He dies laughing. I die laughing even harder.
We have so much fun traveling in our pack of two, checking
into hotels, hiding out, watching movie marathons, and tying
and untying our terry-cloth robes. He always orders a couple
club sandwiches for us to share throughout the night. Chef is
a club sandwich aficionado. It personifies his style—simple
without being bland, layered without being complicated, and
ever so slightly retro. The sandwich has two things I’ve always
abhorred, mayonnaise and bacon, but I quickly get over that
and fall in love with everything about our toasted, toothpicked
ritual, the first of many.
He never has much time to enjoy New York with me now
that his restaurant is officially open, but when he comes in for
meetings, he tries to make a full day of it. I find us cool things to
do, like abstract one-act plays and raunchy underground com-
edy clubs. Since he’s been living behind a stove for most of his
life, he’s self-admittedly clueless when it comes to most things
nonkitchen. We see an outdoor production of Hair, just like I
did when I was little, and have such a wild time it’s as if we’re the
ones hallucinating. Despite his first-class cooking pedigree, fine
dining isn’t really our thing. After a movie or concert, if we end
55

A lyssa Shel ask y
up somewhere fancy, he does the ordering and I enthusiastically

oblige. But normally, we have picnics in Brooklyn’s Prospect
Park and eat at laid-back bistros. We could both exist on cheese
and bread, though he’d definitely prefer prosciutto with his.
One day we visit Jill and Beth, at Alison Brod Public Rela-
tions, the glammed-out PR firm where they both now work.
The girls shower Chef in swag from their clients—Sephora
skincare, Godiva chocolates, Havaianas flip-flops. He’s floored
by my friends’ warmth and generosity, walking out with five
bags of freebies, and hugs and kisses from a dozen blushing
girls. “Um, your new boyfriend is really hot . . . and has really
big feet,” Beth, who married her first boyfriend, giggles into
the phone later that night. “You’re great together, Lys.”
On a muggy Tuesday morning, I’m in my office pricing out
train tickets for the weekend when Chef calls and says, “Coffee
break?” What a surprise! He’s in New York? I run downstairs,
where he’s holding a cappuccino from my favorite local bakery,
and an important-looking envelope.
“What are you doing next week, and the week after that?”
“Working, visiting you, the usual. Why?”
“Because remember how I said my dream was to take the
love of my life to Greece?”
“Yeah?” I squint, slowly slipping into shock.
“Well, Lyssie, that’s you. Will you come with me to Greece?”
He has arranged and paid for the whole thing. It’s the end of
August, our three-month anniversary, and he’s taking me to the
villa he shares with his family, for fifteen days. I am speechless.
We’re going to have it all to ourselves. He took the train in just
to see my reaction.
When I tell Liz, my boss, that I’ll be using up all my vaca-
tion days and darting off to Europe to be with my new chef
boyfriend, she immediately gives her full approval. Liz loves
56

hearing about my life, and because she grew up in the seventies

with five sisters in San Francisco, there’s nothing she hasn’t seen
or heard. “Keeping up with the Kardashians is easier than keep-
ing up with me, right?” I say, twirling out of her office.
My family is also thrilled for me. They’ve treasured Chef
ever since they met him, when he told them a hysterical story
about waking up in a hospital room with his frowning mother,
a disturbed nurse, and a mysterious case of loud, uncontrollable
flatulence. That night at their loft, my mother made everyone
extra well done steaks burned down to hockey pucks, and Chef,
bless his heart, asked for seconds.
Getting to Greece is a saga of its own. Chef is as disorga-
nized as he is romantic, and there’s mayhem involving all things
customs, passports, and visas. But after seventy-two hours of
smoked almonds, Bourne identities, and broken sleep, we arrive
at the port of a village, where a beady-eyed taxi driver takes us
to the house. The orange sun is just coming up.
Perched on a cliff at the end of a narrow road and framed in
exotic flowers, olive branches, hummingbirds, and clotheslines,
the villa is more like a pretty little beach house than a sprawling
ancient estate. We find the hidden key nestled in the outdoor
wood-burning oven and let ourselves into our private haven.
The inside of the house is lovely and understated, and already, I
never want to leave. We haven’t slept in about two days, but be-
fore we crash, Chef finds the keys to the blue truck sitting in the
driveway, leads me outside, and buckles me into the passenger
seat. Delirious, I don’t ask where we’re going.
Driving down the steep roads of this gorgeous seaside vil-
lage, I stare at the views layered in lemon trees, mountaintops,
and an aquamarine ocean, while Chef stops at the market down
the street that’s just opening for its morning business. Then he
drives us down the coast. It’s astounding that a guy who can’t
57

A lyssa Shel ask y
remember to close the front door, and sometimes isn’t sure of

the month or year, can find his way through these rocky roads
like he’s never lived anywhere else. He hasn’t been back to
Greece in years, but he is in his element; he is by the sea.
Chef parks the car at a private cove, and we walk, holding
hands, down to the beach. I sit at the edge, where the waves
meet the sand, as Chef rolls up his pants and opens his market
bag. He takes out a hardened baguette, perhaps a day or two
old, breaks it in half, and sprinkles salt water all over the in-
sides. Using his bent knee as his cutting board, he slices some
very ripe tomatoes and takes apart a huge hunk of feta. Sitting
in the rocks and shells, barefoot, jet-lagged, and awestruck, I
realize that he’s making me reginatta, the dish he described in
his interview. We eat, kiss, and cry. It’s almost too much to pro-
cess that we’re both experiencing the phenomenon of a dream
coming true. I wanted to be with him before we even met,
and he wanted to be on this beach before he knew with whom.
Unbelievable.
We sleep away the rest of the day and resurface the next
morning feeling fresh, swiftly falling into our daily ritual. For
the next two weeks, I wake up first and make us a pot of cof-
fee, a vital activity I have cultivated over the past few years.
He wakes up two hours later, first calling me back to bed, then
boiling eggs to go with toast and homemade apricot marmalade
(brought over by a nice, nosy Greek neighbor). Over breakfast
on the porch, with bed heads and pajamas, we decide which
beach or covelike “crevice of love,” as he likes to call them, to
explore. I pack our CDs for the car ride, books for me, and div-
ing gear for him, and we get in our bathing suits and go.
Lunch is an ice cream, or a couple of Mythos beers, and
when we get too sunburned, hungry, or horny, we head back
58

to the villa by way of the market. The thing about Chef and
cooking is that when he’s not in his restaurant, he really can’t
be bothered. This doesn’t disappoint me one bit. Our meals are
low-key wherever we are, but I’m still careful not to cross the
line between adorably foodie-illiterate and downright stupid.
At the tented, outdoor markets, we shop for the glorious
food basics I grew up with—fruit, cheese, yogurt, bread, and
cakes—with a few delicious diversions. I can’t say no to baklava
and he’s a lamb gyro junkie. One après-beach afternoon, Chef
waits in the car while I run outside to buy a few bags of suc-
culent peaches and plums for the house. My selection looks out-
standing, but when I feed him a rock-hard peach, he scrunches
his face and tells me it’s totally not ripe! I’m not sure where I got
the idea, but I had always assumed all fruit should be hard and
crunchy like apples. He delights in calling me out on that one
(and I still prefer nectarines hard as tennis balls).
For dinner, we eat casually and compatibly, popping into the
local trattoria for Greek salads, a shared order of pasticcio, and
maybe a few bites of sweet, giant baked beans. While eating
gelato or ice-cream sandwiches, we walk home, watching for
shooting stars.
On our last night in Greece, we have to pack up our things
and close down the house for the season. I can’t seem to fit all
my sarongs and straw hats into my suitcase with all the evil-
eye charms and jars of honey I’ve bought for my family. Chef
nonchalantly suggests that I leave my beachwear here. “You’re
going to need everything next year, aren’t you?” he says, with
no clue how much his suggestion means to me.
Flying home, we review our upcoming schedules, with me
in New York and him in D.C., and suddenly the long-distance
just seems insane. It takes a two-minute conversation to decide
59

A lyssa Shel ask y
that we should move in together in Washington, and by the

time the plane lands, I’ve already e-mailed my boss, Liz, that
we need to talk.
The same day I return to New York, I tell everyone that it’s
official. I am leaving town and moving to Washington, D.C.,
to be Chef’s writerly girlfriend, who wears off-the-shoulder
T-shirts and says provocative things. Yes, me, in the nation’s
capital, where I have no roots, no friends, no facialist, no free-
lance work, no favorite homeless guy, no transgendered Star-
bucks girl, no go-to spin instructor—nothing other than my
unbelievable new boyfriend and his uncontaminated, hippie-
like heart. We’ll light up the city, grow Chef’s business, make
babies, and map out a beach house halfway between his restau-
rant and my family. Or something like that.
I give People as much notice as they need, which most of my
colleagues use as precious time to dissuade me from “throw-
ing away my career.” They’re not trying to be negative. It’s just
not the kind of culture at the magazine where women leave
their promising jobs with full benefits and car service just be-
cause they’ve met scruffy guys with great hair who whoosh
them away to the Greek Islands. I can barely look at Liz, who’s
been like a big sister to me since the day she brought me in for
a formal interview, when I couldn’t help but blow off all the
super-corporate questions and fixate on her translucent skin
and uncanny resemblance to Julianne Moore. A seasoned editor
with supreme grace, Liz has done her best to keep me on track
ever since, and because I respect her so, it’s my great pleasure to
deliver her good work. But like my mother, my sister, and the
other good women in my life, Liz also knows that my mind is
made up on moving to D.C. She accepts that I’m three parts
love, one part logic.
I have a good-bye lunch with J.D. Heyman, another top
60

editor at the magazine and a smart, funny, straight-shooting guy

that everyone at People really respects. Unlike Liz, he’s openly
apprehensive. “I know you really like this person, Alyssa, but are
you sure you want to do this?” he says, looking me directly in the
eye. It’s not like J.D. to get so personal. “I’m asking you to wait
it out. Give it a little more time, will ya?” J.D. recently guided
me through my first cover story, a huge profile on the actresses
from Sex & the City, an enviable assignment that brought me so
much joy. He worries I’ll feel depleted without New York’s in-
comparable energy and the camaraderie of being around other
people like me. While too gentlemanly to say so, I’m sure, J.D.
has also noticed my habit of rushing dangerously into romance,
further validating his concern. “New York will always be here,”
I ultimately tell him, with a trusting smile. “And the bus is only
twenty bucks.”
The few people who are excited for me are mostly friends
who are Top Chef fans. They think I’ll get invited to the best
dinner parties, have barbecues with Bobby Flay, fly to France
with Food & Wine. But I tell them that even though it’s what
intially drew me to him, the “celebrity-chef shitshow” is the
last reason I’m uprooting my life. Turns out, Chef’s career is my
least favorite thing about him. Owning a restaurant is a gruel-
ing, self-vandalizing profession—I can see that already—and
his place has been open only a few months. And being on TV, in
my very jaded opinion, is overrated. It can be lucrative if you’re
prepared to play the game, but show-business whoredom is not
for the fainthearted. It can make you, and it can break you.
Nonetheless, Chef likes the taste of celebrity; the validation
fulfills something inside him. And so, I feed the beast. I help
him hire a publicist and an agent, both with major reputations
for making chefs super famous. I buy him a BlackBerry for his
birthday, and we create a Facebook and Twitter account for
61

A lyssa Shel ask y
him. I even pull a favor with a producer friend to get him on

Good Morning America. I am totally committed to his burgeon-
ing career, even if mine is on hold. We’ll take turns kicking ass.
As my days at People wind down, I take the train to D.C.
every few days to look at apartments for us. It’s fall and Con-
gress is back in session, which means that work is booming for
Chef. I worry about adding any stress to his workdays, so I leave
him alone at the restaurant and stroll the streets of Capitol Hill
solo, checking out the one-bedrooms and bumping into portly
politicians who smell like shaving cream and never say “Excuse
me.” As I explore the neighborhoods, I try to mesh with my
new stomping ground. I stop into coffee shops, read the Wash-
ington Post in the park, browse the stores in Dupont Circle, and
do all the things that bring me simple pleasures in New York. I
try to stay lighthearted with all the unfamiliar people in their
unattractive outfits; I smile but no one smiles back. It’s not like
we’re all so copacetic in New York City either, yet I totally get,
and appreciate, those fuck-my-life dirty looks and broke-and-
exhausted blank stares. In Washington, no matter what I do,
or where I go, I can’t catch a vibe anywhere. But that’s okay.
Nothing is going to bring me down now.
On my last day at the magazine, I attend a morning staff
meeting with more than fifty people, where the editor-in-chief
asks everyone to raise their venti skim lattes in honor of my
scandalous stories, great sources, and something about an inner
sparkle. . . . Truthfully, I have to tune out the words. Otherwise
I’ll start to cry. People was a really nice place to work.
Luckily, the buzz of my BlackBerry distracts me as soon as
the meeting shifts back to business. I look down to read that
Chef has found us an apartment in Capitol Hill and rented it
on the spot! “OMG, LYS. It has a writer’s den overlooking a
62

cherry blossom tree, and a big, open kitchen . . . it’s soooo us!”
he texts. That I trust his taste to sign a lease without me shows
just how much I like his style. And it’s such a relief.
In our own version of “the trick,” Liz and I have decided not
to drag out our farewells. She’s not the type to get theatrical
in the office, and I’m almost embarrassed by my affection for
her. So she’s purposely going home early today to make things
easier on both of us. When I hear a soft knock on my door in
the late afternoon, I know it’s time. “You take care, chérie,” she
says kindly and gently, and as our glossy eyes lock, she exits my
boxed-up empty office and shuts the door.
I stare at the blank wall, where I once hung a framed copy of
a John Updike quote, “The true New Yorker secretly believes
that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kid-
ding.” And I weep.
I don’t know why the experience of parting ways with my
boss hits me harder than separating from any of my girlfriends
or even my family, but I suspect a small part of me knows that
in saying good-bye to Liz, I am leaving behind so much more.
63

Cheese Toast for Two Kids in Love
Serves 2
I could become a James Beard Award–winning food writer or a Top Chef

Master and I will always believe that the best food in the world is a simple thing
called “cheese toast”—which is fancy for cheese melted on toast. Chef has made
me cheese toast with Muenster, cheddar, Gruyère, Swiss, smoked mozzarella,
Roquefort, and anything else we can find in the fridge. The more options in our
cheese drawer, the more he layers. Usually he’ll use three slices with interesting
flavors on a piece of thick, hearty bread (I like pumpernickel). But to be perfectly
honest, a few slices of Kraft Singles on a frozen sesame bagel could make me
swoon, too.
2 large slices of bread, approximately 1 inch thick

Dijon mustard (optional)
Unsalted butter (optional)
4 to 6 large slices of cheese
Salt and pepper
On your bread, spread mustard or butter if you so desire. Cover

the bread with 2 or 3 slices of cheese. Put the bread on a baking
sheet under the broiler or in a toaster oven for about 2 minutes,
or until the cheese gets brown, bubbly, and almost burned. Then
remove from the heat, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and serve.
64

Life-Altering Lemon Cake
Serves 8 to 10
My life changed forever that night at Fabiane’s in Williamsburg, and the lemon
cake was the star of the meal, so it deserves a lot of attention. This version is
from the original Silver Palate Cookbook (Workman Publishing, 1982),
and it’s one of the best. I will never forget sharing dessert that night with Chef.
For the cake

½ pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus
additional for greasing the pan
2 cups granulated sugar
3 large eggs
3 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk
2 tightly packed tablespoons grated lemon zest
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (about 1 lemon)
For the lemon icing
1 pound confectioners’ sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
3 tightly packed tablespoons grated lemon zest
½ cup fresh lemon juice (about 4 lemons)
Place a rack in the middle of the oven. Preheat the oven to 325°F.
Grease a 10-inch tube pan.
Make the cake: In a large mixing bowl (or the bowl of a stand
mixer fitted with the paddle attachment), cream the butter and
sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, blend-
ing well after each addition.
In a medium mixing bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda,
and salt. Stir the flour mixture into the egg mixture, alternately
65

A lyssa Shel ask y
with buttermilk, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients.

Add the lemon zest and lemon juice.
Pour the batter into the prepared tube pan. Set the pan on the
middle rack of the oven and bake for 1 hour and 5 minutes, or
until the cake pulls away from the sides of the pan and a tester or
knife inserted in the center comes out clean.
Transfer the pan to a rack and let cool for 10 minutes.
Prepare the icing: In a medium mixing bowl, cream the sugar
and butter thoroughly. Mix in the lemon zest and lemon juice.
Set aside.
Remove the cake from the pan and spread the icing onto the
cake while still warm.
Let cool before serving.
66

SASSY SUMMER READS
AN EXCERPT FROM
THREE RIVERS PRESS

Y O G A Bitch

ONE WOMAN’S QUEST to CONQUER SKEPTICISM,

C Y N I C I S M , a n d C I G A R E T T E S o n t h e PAT H t o
ENLIGHTENMENT

Suzanne M O R R I S O N

Morr_9780307717443_4p_all_r5.indd iii 27/06/11 9:58 PM
Copyright © 2011 by Suzanne Morrison
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Morrison, Suzanne.
Yoga bitch : one woman’s quest to conquer skepticism, cynicism, and
cigarettes on the path to enlightenment / Suzanne Morrison.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Morrison, Suzanne. 2. Spiritual biography. 3. Yoga. I. Title.
BL73.M667A3 2011
204'.36092—dc22
[B]
2010041940
ISBN 978-0-307-71744-3
eISBN 978-0-307-71745-0
printed in the united states of america
Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Morr_9780307717443_4p_all_r5.indd iv 27/06/11 9:58 PM

1. Indrasana

. . . and before Kitty knew where she was, she found her-
self not merely under Anna’s influence, but in love with
her, as young girls do fall in love with older and married
women . . .
— leo tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Today I found myself strangely moved by a yoga teacher
who spoke like a cross between a phone-sex operator and a
poetry slam contestant. At the start of class, she asked us to
pretend we were floating on a cloud. As she put it, “You’re
oh-pening your heart to that cloud, you’re floating, you’re
blossoming out and tuning in, you’re evanescing, yeah,
that’s right, you’re evanescing.”
I briefly contemplated giving the teacher my yoga finger
and walking out. I’ve been practicing yoga for close to a
Morr_9780307717443_4p_all_r5.indd 1 27/06/11 9:58 PM

2 Suzanne M O R R I S O N
decade now, and at thirty-four I’m too old for that airy-
fairy horseshit. As far as I’m concerned, floating on a cloud
sounds less like a pleasant spiritual exercise and more like
what you think you’re doing when you’re on LSD while
falling out of an airplane. But I tuned out her mellifluous,
yogier-than-thou voice and soon enough found myself
really meditating. Of course, I was meditating on punching
this yoga teacher in the face, but still.
At the end of class, she asked us to join her in a chant:
gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate . . . which means, she said, her
voice shedding its yogabot tones, gone, gone, gone beyond.
She was young, a little cupcake of a yoga teacher in her black
and gray yoga outfit. Maybe she was twenty-five. Maybe
younger. She said her grandmother had recently passed away,
and she wanted to chant for her and for all of our beloveds
who had already gone beyond. In that moment, I forgave her
everything, wanted to button up her sweater and give her a cup
of cocoa. I chanted gone, gone, gone beyond for her beloveds
and for mine, and for the twenty-five-year-old I once was.
I turned twenty-five the month after September eleventh,
when the stories of those who had gone beyond that day were

YOGA Bitch 3
fresh and ubiquitous. I was working three jobs to save money
to move from Seattle to New York, and whether I was at the
law firm, at the pub, or taking care of my grandparents’ bills,
the news was on, and it was all bad. So many people looking
for the remains of the people they loved. So many images of
the planes hitting the towers, the smoke, the ash.
I had never really been afraid of death before that year.
I thought I had worked all that out by the age of seventeen,
when I concluded that so long as one lives authentically,
one dies without fear or regret. As a teenager, it seemed so
simple: if I lived my life as my authentic self wished to live,
then death would become something to be curious about;
one more adventure I would experience on my own terms.
Religion was an obstacle to authenticity, I figured,
especially if you were only confirming in the Catholic
Church so that your mother wouldn’t give you the stink-
eye for the rest of your life. So, at seventeen, I told my
mother I wouldn’t be confirming. That Kierkegaard said
each must come to faith alone, and I hadn’t come to
faith— and she couldn’t make me.
This was all well and good for a teenager who secretly
believed herself to be immortal, as my countless speeding

tickets suggested I did. But by twenty-five the idea of death
as an adventure struck me as idiotic. As callous, heartless,
and, most of all, clueless. Death wasn’t an adventure; it was
a near and ever-present void. It was the reason my throat
ached when I watched my grandfather try to get up out of
his chair. It was the reason we all watched the news with
our hands over our mouths.
I had recently graduated from college, having
postponed my studies until I was twenty-one in order to
follow my authentic self to Europe after high school. Now
I was supposed to leave for New York by the following
summer. Before the attack on lower Manhattan, I had been
nervous about moving to New York, but now what was
supposed to be a difficult but necessary rite of passage felt
more like courting my own annihilation.
Everywhere I looked, I saw death. My move to New York
was the death of my life in Seattle, of a life shared with my
family and friends. Given the precariousness of our national
security, it seemed as if moving away could mean never
seeing them again. I remember wondering how long it would
take me to walk home from New York should there be an
apocalypse. I figured it would take a while. This worried me.

YOGA Bitch 5
Even when I wasn’t filling my head with postapocalyptic
paranoid fantasies, death was out to get me. Once we got
to New York, my boyfriend, Jonah, and I would move
in together, and I knew what that meant. That meant
marriage was coming, and after marriage, babies. And only
one thing comes after babies. Death.
I came down with cancer all the time. Brain cancer,
stomach cancer, bone cancer. Even trimming my
fingernails reminded me that time was passing, and death
was coming. Those little boomerangs of used-up life
showed up in the sink week after week.
I measured out my life in toenail clippings.
“Stop thinking like that!” my sister said.
“I can’t.”
“Just try. You haven’t even tried.”
My sister, Jill, has always been the wisest, the most
grounded, of my three siblings. But she couldn’t teach me
how to live in the face of death, not then. But Indra could.
Indra was a woman, a yoga teacher, a god. Indra taught
me how to stand on my head, how to quit smoking, and
then lifted me off this Judeo-Christian continent, to fly

over miles and miles of indifferent ocean, before dropping
me down on a Hindu island in the middle of a Muslim
archipelago at the onset of the War on Terror. Indra was
my first yoga teacher and I loved her. I loved her with the
kind of ambivalence I’ve only ever had about God, and
every man I’ve ever left.
Indra introduced me to the concept of union. That’s
what hatha yoga is all about, uniting mind and body,
masculine and feminine, and, most of all, the individual
self with the indivisible Self— who some call God.
When I was seventeen, I was proud that I had chosen not
to confirm into the Catholic Church. I figured everybody I
told— all those sane people in the world who did not share
my crazypants DNA— would agree with me. I was right; most
of them, especially my artist friends, did. But one teacher,
my drama teacher, said something I’ve never forgotten. After
rehearsal one day, she listened indulgently while I bragged
about my lack of faith, a half-smile on her face. Then she
said, “It’s okay to fall away from the Church when you’re
young. You’ll come back when people start dying.”
People were starting to die. And as if my drama teacher
had seen something in the prop room’s crystal ball, spiritual

YOGA Bitch 7
memoirs started accumulating on the floor beside my bed.
I told no one what books I was reading. If I had, I wouldn’t
have said that I was reading them in the hopes of finding
God. I would have said that they were works of fiction,
really, redemption narratives dressed up in the styles and
mores of different times and places. I would never have
admitted that what kept me reading was the liberating
expansion I felt in my lungs as narrator after narrator was
transformed from lost into found.
Maybe that’s what led me to Indra. I don’t know. All
I know is that one night in the fall of 2001, I walked in
off the street to my first real yoga class. I had done yoga
in acting classes, and once or twice at the gym where my
sister worked, so I knew the postures already. I had never
been especially attracted to the idea of a yoga practice,
but now I walked into this studio as if I had spent all day
weeping in the garden like Saint Augustine, waiting for
a disembodied voice to sing, Pick your ass up off the lawn
furniture and go work your shit out, for the love of God.
That night, I stepped out of the misty Seattle dusk and
into a warm, dimly lit studio. Candlelight glinted off

the hardwood floors. The low thrum of monks chanting
emanated from an unseen speaker, and a stunningly
beautiful woman with straight, honey-colored hair sat
perfectly still in front of a low altar at the front of the
room. Indra. She wore flax-colored cotton pants and a
matching tank top. Tan, blonde, tall: I’ve never been one
to worship at the altar of such physical attributes. It was
more the way she sat, still and yet fluid, that attracted me,
and her eyes, which were warm and brown, with friendly
crow’s-feet lengthening toward her hairline.
Soon we were stretching and lunging and sweating.
The lights stayed low and her voice stayed soft, so that
eventually it almost seemed as if her instructions were
coming from inside my head. Toward the end of class,
we were doing something ridiculously hard, lying on our
backs with our legs hovering a foot off the ground until
my abdominal muscles felt like they would burst. Without
realizing it, I had folded my hands at my solar plexus.
“That’s a good idea,” Indra said, nodding at my hands as
she kneeled beside me to adjust my hips. “It always helps
me to pray when I don’t know what I’m doing.”
I had to laugh at how baldly she acknowledged my

YOGA Bitch 9
incompetence, but even as I laughed I wanted to point out
to her that I hadn’t been praying. I had been thinking, Kill
me. Please kill me. I wouldn’t pray. Who on earth was there
to pray to? Or, for that matter, who not on earth?
But by the end of class I was thanking the gods for this
teacher. Before I left, I wrote her a check for a month’s
worth of classes, and told her I’d be back soon.
Indra co-owned the little studio on Capitol Hill with her
partner, Lou. Lou was older than Indra by at least ten years,
but they were both the same height and weight— both
tall, both strong. That was one of the first things Indra told
me when I asked her about Lou, as if this were proof that
she and Lou had been designed for one another. I didn’t
go to Lou’s classes much— afterwards I always felt like my
tendons had turned to rubber bands, but he was too intense
and his gaze too penetrating for me. Also, his classes were
full of smelly drum-circle types. But Indra’s classes felt like
home.
I don’t know if I can fully express how bizarre a
statement that was. Indra’s classes felt like home. Not long
before I met Indra, I would’ve mocked myself mercilessly

for saying such a thing. Before her, my idea of exercise
was walking up the hill to buy smokes. Rearranging my
bookshelves. Having sex. Maybe an especially vigorous
acting exercise. Most of the time I lived above the neck.
I’m a reader. Being a reader means I like to be in small,
warm places like beds and bathtubs, whether I’m reading
or snoozing or staring at dust motes in a shaft of sunlight.
At twenty-five, the idea of physical exertion put me in a
panic. I would actually get angry, sometimes, when I saw
people jogging, sort of in the same way I would get angry
at people who wanted me to believe in a God who requires
us to be miserable all the time if we’re to get into heaven.
All joggers believed in an afterlife, I figured. They must;
why else would they be wasting so much time in this life,
which by all rational accounts is short and finite? In my
hometown the population was split. Half the people in
Seattle jogged and believed in an afterlife, and the other
half read and believed in Happy Hour.
At twenty-five I was firmly entrenched in the latter half
of Seattle’s population, so it came as an absolute shock,
not just to me but to everyone who knew me, when I
found myself going to Indra’s yoga studio in leggings and

YOGA Bitch 11
tank tops four times a week, sometimes more, to sweat
and stretch and experience what it was to use my body for
something other than turning over in bed. I would arrive
at the studio feeling like I’d spent the day tied by the
ankles to Time’s bumper, my fingernails scraping the earth.
I walked out upright, fluid, graceful, as if Indra herself
was the pose I needed to master. My acting teachers were
always telling us to find characters through their walks,
that if we could physically embody our characters, we
could begin to map their mental and emotional landscapes.
So, when I walked somewhere alone, I walked like Indra.
Spine erect, chin lowered, I was all straight lines when I
was Indra— tall and long, my softer curves elongating into
her ballerina sinew. My steps were deliberate and faithful.
No need to look down; Indra would trust the terrain.
In class I watched the way she eased her body into each
pose. No matter how excruciating the posture was for me,
no matter how mangled and unbalanced I felt in it, Indra’s
face was always calm. She seemed to be somewhere beyond
the pose, even, as if she were only faintly aware that her
body was being sculpted into the posture by an unseen
hand, her arms pulled into perfect alignment, trunk twisted

and massaged, the arches of her feet caressed into graceful
caverns. Her toes splayed out one by one like the feathers
in a burlesque dancer’s fan.
Indra made me want to buy things. Things like hair
straighteners. Even Indra’s hair expressed a certain serenity,
while my wavy, fluffy hair, forever escaping its hairbands,
said no such thing about me.
She made me want to buy yoga mats and books with
titles like City Karma and Urban Dharma and A Brooklyn
Kama Sutra. I left her class every morning and walked
straight to Trader Joe’s, as if the purchase of organic
cheese and tomatoes and biodynamic bubble bath was an
extension of my yoga practice.
And according to Yoga Journal, it was.
But the most amazing thing of all was that Indra made
me want to quit smoking. After class one morning, just as
I was putting on the long wool coat I had worn out to the
bar the night before, she asked me if I was a smoker. I told
her I was, you know, sometimes— like when I drank, or
when a girlfriend was going through a breakup, or like, you
know, when I was awake.

YOGA Bitch 13
“But I’m in the process of quitting,” I said.
Indra laughed, a deep, appreciative belly laugh. “I know
how that goes,” she said. She lowered her voice and leaned
toward me as if she were about to tell me something she’d
never shared with another student. “I was in the process of
quitting smoking myself— for about twelve years.”
“You’re kidding,” I whispered back.
She nodded. “But the thing about quitting smoking is,
it’s not really a process.” She smiled. “It’s an action.”
It wasn’t the last time Indra would call me on my
bullshit. But beyond her words I heard something far more
provocative, inspiring and terrifying all at once. I was once
you, so one day you can be me.
I wonder, now, if that’s the first time I felt ambivalent
about Indra? When for a moment I saw not just my
potential to be her, but her potential to be me? I don’t
know. All I know is that soon something happened that
made me willing to follow her anywhere, if she would only
teach me how to live.
It was Thanksgiving. That year my grandmother wasn’t
well enough to join us at my aunt and uncle’s for dinner,

but my grandfather would never miss a party if he could
help it. In fact, my grandfather usually was the party; now
that Gram’s health was failing, we all spent more and more
time hanging out at the house to keep Grandpa company.
It wasn’t unusual for my sister and me to arrive at our
parents’ and find our brothers mixing Scotch and waters for
Grandpa on a Friday night; all four of us often started our
weekends doing just that. This was not a chore. Even my
friends liked spending time with my grandfather.
My mom always called her father-in-law an old shoe,
the kind of person everybody’s comfortable around, who
you can’t help but love right away. My sister called him
the Swearing Teddy Bear. Six foot four, with a square head,
thick white hair, and bright blue eyes, my grandfather was
famous for saying the wrong thing at the right time. When
he met my friend Francesca for the first time, he looked her
up and down, a sly smile on his face, and said, “Well you’re
a spicy little number, aren’t you?” She laughed so hard she
almost spat her wine across the table.
When I told him that my best friend from the time I
was in elementary school had come out, he said, “That’s

YOGA Bitch 15
fine, but what the hell do those lesbians do together, Suzie?
What do they do?”
“They do everything a man and woman do together,
Grandpa.”
He wagged his finger, already pleased with himself.
“Ah, yes— except for one thing.”
Politically correct, he was not.
Grandpa wasn’t in the best shape. We all tried to get him
to ride his exercise bike, and sometimes he would oblige us,
pedaling halfheartedly for five minutes, before giving up and
requesting a tin of sardines as his reward. Mostly he liked to
sit in his big red chair, watching court shows and old British
imports, or listening to Verdi and Wagner through his
headphones, whistling along to the good parts.
After a long night of turkey and mashed potatoes, my
father and older brother were helping Grandpa into the
car when he started wheezing. This wasn’t unusual. The
mechanics of standing up and sitting down had given him
difficulty for some time; twisting and bending and lowering
himself all at once to get into a car was a lot for a man
who hummed to hide the grunts he made when he tried

to tie his shoelaces. But tonight the wheezing started even
as he walked down my aunt and uncle’s short driveway,
flanked by his two namesakes. By the time he reached the
car, the sound coming from his chest was like sucking on
taut cellophane, and as he tried to lift his foot to get in, he
crumpled against my father. I ran around to the other side
of the car and helped guide him into place as his breathing
thinned into reedy sips of air pulled through lips molded
like a flute player’s. His eyes were panicked. I held on to
his arm and willed him to breathe, taking deep breaths to
show him how it was done, how he could find his way back
to my face and to the car and to another night of sleep.
“Come on, Grandpa,” I said, stroking his arm. I breathed
deeply over and over again, this is how it’s done, just do what
I’m doing, but soon my own breath grew shallow and sharp
and I could feel that my face was wet. I was sobbing. Or
hyperventilating. Or both.
I don’t remember what happened next, except that I
was outside the car, being hugged by my cousin Gabe, who
is a priest, crying furiously until my dad ordered me to get
back in the car.
Grandpa’s breath had deepened a little and he relaxed,

YOGA Bitch 17
and we scrambled to get him home. On the drive, he rested
limply against the seat, exhausted. He turned his head
toward mine. “Well, this is no fun at all,” he said.
The next day, all I had to do was think about my
grandfather, and my chest and throat would constrict as
if I were drowning. I tried not to think about what was
coming, but it seemed as if the clock were running faster
than usual, as if I could only watch as time pleated like
the bellows of an accordion. I watched my grandparents
die, and then, as if only a day later, there I was, guiding
my father into the car, my own children paralyzed by
the realization that soon they would be guiding me. I
saw myself wheezing beside my panicked grandchild,
creating another link in this daisy chain of family love
and heartache, and I knew that it wouldn’t matter if I
lived an authentic life or not, if I lived for my family or
my boyfriend or some idea of my truest self. None of that
would help me as I peered into the void.
I went to Indra’s class and did everything she told me to
do. I inhaled when she said to inhale, I exhaled when she
said to exhale, and by the end, when we were lying still in
Corpse pose, I could finally breathe again.

It was just a few months later that I took all the money I
would have spent on a year’s worth of cigarettes— about
twelve hundred dollars— and gave it to Indra. It was
a down payment to attend a two-month yoga teacher
training in Bali with Indra and her partner, Lou. But I’ll
be honest: it wasn’t a down payment to become a yoga
teacher; it was a down payment on a new me.
Not long after I sealed my fate with that check, I
bought a thick, lined journal bound in teal leather, and
started to write. The act of writing wasn’t new; I had
kept journals since my tenth birthday, when my diary
had a Hello Kitty cover and a small brass lock to keep my
brothers out. But this time I was vaguely aware that I was
writing for someone I couldn’t pinpoint. Was I writing for
an older version of myself, so that I might remember who
I once was? Or was it for Indra, for Jonah, for the ether?
I can’t say for sure. But I’m thinking of Thomas Mallon,
now, who said, “No one ever kept a diary for just himself.”
In the case of the diary to follow, he is right.

YOGA Bitch 19

February 17, 2002
Seattle, 3:00 a.m.
Okay. So, I’m freaking out.
I leave for my yoga retreat in Bali one week from today.
I can’t wait to go, and I don’t want to go. It’s heartbreak-
ing to think that in one week I’ll be on the other side of
the globe, while Jonah starts packing his things to move to
New York. When I get back, he’ll be gone. I’ll have a few
weeks to shut down my life in Seattle before joining him
there. He’ll find an apartment for us in Brooklyn while I’m
still in Bali.
I don’t know what’s more shocking to me— that Jonah
and I are going to leave Seattle, or that my mother is actu-
ally happy that I’ll be living with my boyfriend. Living in sin.
She says she’d prefer it if we just got married already, since
everybody knows that’s the plan. But as she put it, “If you’re
not ready, you’re not ready. But I feel better knowing you’ll
be in New York with a man in the house.”
Bali. Two months away from home and family. I’m not
cutting the umbilical cord, not yet. I’m just sort of perforat-
ing it.
I used to have balls, dammit. I look back on the person
I was when I was fresh out of high school, and I don’t even
know her anymore. Back then, I did what I wanted. I didn’t
care what people thought of me, or if I was letting anybody
down. When all of my friends went off to college, I ran away
to Europe as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
I hadn’t even been out of the country yet, but I knew what
I wanted to do, and so I saved up my money and I did it.

I wasn’t afraid of anything. Now I feel like I have to apolo-
gize to my family for moving to New York. For cutting short
the precious time we have together in order to pursue my
own selfish dreams.
I’m even afraid of this journal. I’m terrified of being hon-
est with myself, but I’ve made a promise that I won’t cen-
sor myself here. Ever since the ex-boyfriend read my journal
(including an unfortunate entry about how I had cheated
on him with a German engineering student named Jochim.
Or Johann. I couldn’t remember), I haven’t been able to
bring myself to write about anything too risky, except in
code. But this trip will be mine. No boyfriend, no family. If
I write anything too damaging, I can always burn this book
before I come home.
I haven’t been to confession in over a decade. When I
was a kid my mom would say, “Don’t you feel better? A nice
clean slate,” after every confession. I usually felt guilty when
she said that, because I knew my slate was still smudgy. I
could never bring myself to do all of my penance— if the
priest said to do twelve Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers, I’d
do two or three of each and call it good. So I knew I hadn’t
really been purified.
But now I am ready for the clean slate. This trip to Bali
is an exhilarating adventure when I think about spending
two months with Indra, who I love. But it also represents
two months of Hail Marys and Our Fathers, a purgatory of
sorts, when I think about spending so much time with Lou,
Indra’s partner, who will be teaching alongside her.
Lou scares the crap out of me. I feel like he can read my
mind. Hell, I’m writing this right now and I have the creepy
sensation that he knows I’m doing it. I imagine him, al-
ready in Bali, in some womblike meditation chamber, shirtless

YOGA Bitch 21
and tan, wearing linen pants with an elastic waistband. I see

him breathing deeply, communing with Babaji, when sud-
denly he opens his eyes, and knows. That’s all he would do,
just open his eyes, and know. He wouldn’t know it with his
mind; he would know it with his mindbody.
When I first began attending Indrou Yoga last fall, I
quickly became aware of a certain group of slightly smelly,
deeply focused yoga students who followed Lou around like
he was Jesus in Spandex shorts. They showed no fear around
Lou, just reverence and adoration.
Lou makes me feel very small and very weak. Maybe it’s
the way he calls his students “people” as if we’re all more
hopelessly human and flawed than he is. It might be simply
that Lou reminds me of a priest. Well— a priest who smells
of curry, has fingernails stained yellow from turmeric, and
who chews cloves instead of breath mints. Lou’s the kind
of yogi who probably uses a tongue scraper. I think tongue
scrapers are revolting.
Which is not to say that Lou is Indian. Actually, I think
he was born and raised in Connecticut. The legend at the
studio is that Lou dropped out in the late sixties, wore his hair
long, and draped himself in East Indian getups that looked
like long linen nightgowns. He rivaled Timothy Leary in hal-
lucinogenic drug consumption, and when he was done with
drugs, he spent four years consuming nothing but fruit juice.
The first time I went to one of his classes, he looked
straight at me and said, “People, if you are here to study
yoga in the same way you studied aerobics in the eighties,
please leave. Yoga is not exercise. It’s a spiritual practice.
When I see you practicing, you’ll get more of my attention.”
I’ve avoided his classes since then. But now I’ll be with
him every day. Holy hell.

February 18
The last time I was in New York, a year or so ago, I was
smoking a cigarette at a downtown Starbucks when I over-
heard two women chatting outside the yoga studio next
door. They were gossiping, actually, but in a yogic sort of
way. It was clear that they meant their cooing to suggest
that they were more concerned than angry. They were talk-
ing about another girl in their yoga teacher training pro-
gram. They both spoke in soothing tones, their vowels as
round as the breasts of a Hindu goddess. Clearly this class-
mate of theirs had done something appalling, because their
conversation went like this:
“Feather just doesn’t get it.”
“Mmm-hmmm. She doesn’t get it. Poor Feather.”
“She doesn’t even get how unyogic she’s being.”
“I mean, I feel sorry for her, honestly. She just doesn’t
get it.”
“I know, and I can’t believe she thinks she gets it.
Mmmmm. She totally doesn’t get it.”
“She doesn’t get it at all!”
“I mean, maybe she’s a young soul, you know? Right? But
what troubles me is that she thinks she gets it.”
“Right? And now we’re upset and she’s polluting the
whole environment. It’s like what guruji said. She’s got,
like, no samtosha.”
“I had total bliss before she came in.”
“I know, total bliss, right?”
“Right!”
And so on.
At first I laughed at them. I went home to Seattle and
Jill and I joked about them for months. When I told her I
was going to Indonesia to study yoga, she said that if Bali

YOGA Bitch 23
turned me into one of those yoga bitches she would strap me

down and force-feed me steak and beer and cigarettes until
I came back to life. “I’ve got your back,” she said. I love my
sister.
But ever since I bought my plane ticket I haven’t been
able to stop thinking about them. I don’t know what I’m
more afraid of— that I will become one of them, or that
I’m going to a place where I’ll be surrounded by them.
What I keep thinking of as a yoga retreat is technically a
yoga teacher training. But I’m more interested in the retreat
part.
February 19
When I made these plans to be in Bali while Jonah moved
to New York, it seemed like a good idea. Maybe we needed
a break. We haven’t been getting along well in months. But
now that the date is approaching he’s sweet and attentive
and stays late at the pub till I get off my shift so we can go
home together. It’s like we’ve had a renaissance just know-
ing our time in Seattle is ending.
I’ve been packing very slowly, and today Jonah was
hanging out while I put my toiletry bag together. I’ve had
the same bottle of sunscreen for at least three years— I have
so little need for it beneath Seattle’s pewter skies— and I
started to pack it, but then I had a thought.
“Does sunscreen go bad?” I asked Jonah. He looked sort
of puzzled, and got up off my futon to look at the bottle I
held in my hands. “This bottle’s been around forever.”
He took it, popped the top, and squirted a tiny bit onto
his finger. Then, with a quick glance to make sure I was
paying attention, he licked it off his finger and smacked his
lips the way he would when testing butter to see if it’s gone

rancid. “Tastes fine to me,” he said, shrugging. For a mo-
ment I actually thought that he knew what sunscreen was
supposed to taste like when it had gone off, but then he
cracked up and started wiping his tongue with his sleeve.
“Blech,” he sputtered. “Remind me not to do that again.”
I hate the idea of coming home to find him gone.
A friend of mine, a sailor who’s been around the world
a million times, came to the pub last night and he and I
talked about Indonesia for a long time. I’ve always had a
bit of a secret crush on him. Last night I felt that familiar
thrill— equal parts euphoria and panic— when he walked
in. But today? Today I miss Jonah already.
Later
So, I know I said I wasn’t going to censor myself in this jour-
nal, but in this one instance, I have to: my friend, the guy
who came into the pub last night. I’ve been thinking about
it, and I can’t write his real name. It just feels wrong. So, I’ll
allow myself this one act of cowardice, even if it is terribly
Sex and the City of me. He’s a sailor, so that’s what I’ll call
him. The Sailor.
He gave me a novel to bring with me to Bali. I’m look-
ing at it right now.
Anyway, he’s just a friend. I mean— sure, there was one
night, before I was with Jonah, when we kissed. A lot. With-
out our clothes on. But that was three years ago. So there’s
no reason for me to feel guilty about him, even if I did get a
little jolt when I opened up the book he gave me and found
a card in it. It doesn’t say much other than “Bon Voyage,”
but still. . . . Normally this would send me into paroxysms
of guilt and I would fantasize about an alternate universe
in which I live with him and we lie around in his turret

YOGA Bitch 25
reading books all day and talking about them at night. And
other things. You know.
But I’m too depressed about leaving Jonah. Can’t even
enjoy a good fantasy.
February 20
So my yoga clothes for my yoga retreat in Indonesia were
made in Indonesia. Is this a good sign? Like, my pants will
get a homecoming? Or is this a terrible sign, that I will be
greeted as an imperialistic capitalist neocolonialist visiting
Bali to check up on my sweatshops?
Ugh. I’m pretty sure I was supposed to buy organic cot-
ton “Definitely made by grown-ups” yoga clothes. Shit. I’m
already behind the curve.
February 22
I e-mailed Indra to tell her that I don’t think I can go. I’m
not up for this, I’m not a brave person anymore and all I can
think about is that the world is about to end— everybody
says so, Nostradamus, the drunk at the pub last night who
kept saying, “You think 9/11 was bad? Wait till you see
6/13!”— and I don’t want to be away from my family and
friends when God’s other shoe drops.
Indra wrote back. She’s already in Bali, and she said that
if things go down she knows where she wants to be, and
it isn’t the U.S. She told me it’s beautiful and warm and
peaceful there, and that they’re waiting for me.
“Everything is simpler here,” she said.
Then she told me to do a visualization exercise in which
I imagine everything going well. “Imagine a best-case sce-
nario for your yoga practice, your meditation practice, and
your life in this unbelievable paradise.”

Okay. So, my visualization: I’m living in one of those
thatched huts I saw in my travel book. There’s a mud floor.
I’m sitting lotus style next to a straw bed, in flowing white
yoga clothes, the ones I saw in Yoga Journal and would buy if
they didn’t cost half the price of my plane ticket.
My roommate is sitting next to me, and we’re eating
curds and rice out of charmingly ethnic bowls. The curds
are delicious. Whatever curds are.
We’re reading sacred texts, and they are making us feel
very sacred. When it’s time to go to class, we leave with our
yoga mats leaning out of our straw bags just so— like ba-
guettes in a black-and-white photograph from France.
Hmmm. It’s working, kind of.
February 23
Up in the clouds.
I am not having a panic attack. I am not having a panic
attack.
Later
I just realized that I didn’t bring a single novel with me,
nothing fun to read whatsoever, and yet I probably tore
my rotator cuff waiting in the security line at SeaTac with
eighty pounds of sacred texts in my bag. At the forty-minute
mark I cursed the terrorists for ruining international travel,
and my shoulder along with it. Then I took it back. Didn’t
seem yogic. Also, bad luck: I’ve got twenty hours of flying
ahead of me and I don’t want to tempt fate.
That said, when I reached the hour-mark and still had
a half-dozen switchbacks to go before my turn for the X-ray
anal probe, I allowed myself a few unyogic epithets. They’re
winning! I wanted to cry as the TSA guy fondled my emer-

YOGA Bitch 27
gency underwear at the frisking station. The terrorists are

winning!
He smiled down at me as he folded the undies and put
them back. He smiled as if he could read my mind, and it
was a secret joke between the two of us. It was such a funny
smile I couldn’t help but smile back.
Then he opened my compact of birth-control pills, pre-
sumably to make sure the pills weren’t actually teensy tiny
little grenades.
So, back to my books. I’ve brought:
The Yoga Sutras. (“Threads of wisdom,” it says on

the back. Sutra means “thread.” Opening randomly
to a page, I read this: “The body is a disgusting place
to visit, a place of blood and feces and pus. So why
would you want to engage in sexual activity with
one?” And now . . . I close the book.)
The Upanishads. (Three different translations—
two of which the teller at Elliott Bay Book
Company nodded at, and the last of which made
him wrinkle his nose and say, “Ew, mainstream.”)
The Bhagavad Gita. (I read it in high school, senior
year, and pretended that I found it really deep and
interesting. I think it’s about a chariot race.)
The Autobiography of a Yogi. (Memoirists are
egomaniacs. I adore the irony!)
Trunk-in-Pond: The Illustrated Kama Sutra. (On
sale, pocket-sized, and Hindu, people.)
I also have a trio of New Age texts that, if put together,

would be called something like The Universe Comes of Age:
God(dess) in the Age of Aquarius. (Oh dear.)

Okay, I lied. I do have one novel. The one the Sailor gave
me. Oh, but I don’t even remember what it’s called. Forget it.
Arrgh. Still lying. It’s called Maqroll. Never heard of it,
and frankly I don’t even know why I brought it. I probably
won’t have time to read anything fun with all these sacred
texts to get through.
February 24
I wish this pen had Technicolor ink in it. From gray, gloomy
Seattle to this!
Bali.
I’m in Bali.
This has been the longest day of my life.
I got in this afternoon, bleary and buckled in the joints
from twenty hours of flying. After Jonah and I said good-
bye, I was so teary and freaked out, my sister gave me two
cigarettes in case I should need them. I put them in the
pocket of my gray wool pants, and when I got off the plane
in Denpasar I realized they were both broken and my pocket
was full of loose tobacco.
Which was unfortunate. I could have used one last dose
of home before hopping into a stranger’s Land Rover to drive
north to Penestanan, a village outside of the town of Ubud,
which, according to my travel guides, is Bali’s spiritual and
artistic center.
First impression of Bali? It’s hot. Like, steam-room hot.
The tiny Denpasar airport is the size of Seattle’s ferry termi-
nal, and as full of white people. These other white people
were smart enough to wear linen, though. The French-
woman next to me in customs eyed me in my black turtle-
neck and then leaned into her husband. “Quelle idiote,” she
said. “Elle est surement Americaine.”

YOGA Bitch 29
I would’ve been mad, except that she was right. I sifted

the tobacco in my pocket.
The hour-long drive to Penestanan made me wonder if
I’d survived the flight from Seattle only to die right here in
the middle of Indonesia. I mean, holy sweet mother Mary,
these Indonesians drive like buzzing road insects looking
to reincarnate as soon as possible. I honestly believed we
would be lucky if we only killed a handful before we made it
to the center of the island.
(My travel books told me that the Balinese are a very
sacred people, deeply reverent. There is no evidence of this
on their highways.)
And Holy Christ, the dogs! We were right in the middle
of the freeway when a pack of mangy-looking dogs darted
right in front of us. The driver, Made— who had the sweet-
est face and beautiful teeth— just laughed and swerved
around them.
“Puppies!” he said.
I tried to be enthusiastic. “Cute! Love, love dogs. I re-
ally do.” But I was lying; this pack looked mean. They kept
running alongside the Land Rover, barking hoarsely, clearly
wanting nothing more than to spread fear and disease. Their
backs were caked with dirt and more than one of them was
missing an eye or a leg. But when we slowed down I also
noted, against my will, that they were all— um. Virile. It’s
shocking to see balls on a dog. It made my blood run cold:
if these dogs aren’t fixed, then there will be ever so many
more of them.
We stopped at a light, and suddenly our car was sur-
rounded by men waving newspapers in the windows. Made
clucked his tongue and shook his head.
“Jawa,” he said. “Never take ride from Jawanese driver.”

“Why not?”
“They will screw you. You are Australian?”
“No, American.”
“Oh!” His eyes lit up, and he pointed to my right. “We
have your restaurants!”
A McDonald’s loomed like a plastic castle against the
horizon. As he pointed, he turned off the highway onto a
narrow dirt road, nearly taking out three motorbikes in the
process. Soon we were passing villages, thatched houses,
women carrying huge piles of laundry or building materials
on their heads, and more dogs.
Lots of dogs.
I am going to be here for two months. That’s what I kept
telling myself as I looked around and tried not to imagine
what those dogs smelled like. I tried to respond to Made’s
chatter about McNuggets and milkshakes, but I was dis-
tracted. I was starting to wake up. I mean— until now, this
had all been a fantasy. I had visualized this person, me
but with better arms and clothes, in a charming National
Geographic–meets-chic-import-store setting. But now all I
could think was, I am going to be here, in this sticky, stinky heat
for two months.
Spring in Bali was starting to sound about as entic-
ing as jumping into a sauna with a wet dog. I didn’t bring
some Yoga Journal model to Bali, I brought myself here, and
I couldn’t help but think that my pale, comfort-addicted
body was not designed for roughing it. And the prospect
of arriving at some mud-floored hut that was undoubtedly
crawling with island creatures made me yearn for my cushy
mattress and insect-free apartment.
I was headed for a complete meltdown. Packs of rabid dogs,
a mud-floored hut. I’d catch lice and ringworm and Japanese

YOGA Bitch 31
encephalitis. Come to think of it, it really hasn’t been all that

long since Indonesia’s last civil war. Maybe they’re cooking
up another one right now? At least if I’d gone ahead to New
York, I’d only have had to deal with cockroaches. Which
reminded me that Jonah is moving to New York in seven weeks.
I missed my sister. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to smoke.
So I sort of did this meditation thing. Well— it’s not re-
ally a meditation, at least not one I’ve ever done in class.
But it’s something I used to do on long car trips when I was
bored or starting to get carsick. I look around at everybody
else on the road, and I imagine them without their vehi-
cles. It’s sort of like the trick of imagining everybody in the
audience in their underwear, but it’s actually effective for
calming me down. So all of us on the road, we’re still in our
seated positions, holding invisible steering wheels or resting
an arm on the door. The motorbikes are still packed two to
a bike. But there is no bike. And there are no cars. All the
vehicles are gone, and we’re all just zipping across the earth
like this, just our bodies in space going very, very fast.
But once we had arrived and I stepped down from Made’s
elephant of a car, how very real it all became.
you know. it’s funny how scared I was. That was only
a few hours ago, and already I’m looking back at that
person— that person who was me— and feel like I should
have just relaxed and waited to see what would happen,
instead of imagining all sorts of terrible things. I mean, what
good does that imagining do, anyway? You won’t know what
something’s like till you’re there.
Take my roommate, for instance. The only thing I knew
to expect when I got to my lodgings in Penestanan was that

I would have a roommate waiting for me. We spoke on the
phone a month or so ago, very briefly, but her voice on the
line was light and airy and she said something about seeing
where the spirit takes us on this journey of the self and that we
would be on a wisdom quest or vision quest or something like
that, and so I was pretty sure she was of the New Age. Indra
had told me that Jessica was a massage therapist, but on the
phone Jessica called herself a bodyworker. I had no idea
what a bodyworker was, but I suspected that it was someone
who did not wear deodorant.
Made dropped me off in a parking lot, really just a gravel
road. To my right, the gravel mixed with dirt until it became
a trail leading into woods that looked as cool and damp as
the woods at home. To my left, green rice paddies stretched
to the horizon.
Jessica, pink-cheeked and lion-headed, stood where the
gravel parking lot met the sea of green. About my height,
but smaller in build than me, more willowy. She wore a
ballerina-pink sarong, a white camisole tank top, and ancient-
looking Teva sandals. She’s very pretty, like a muse, and her
blonde hair is something else— it was held off her heart-
shaped face by tiny headbands of her own braids woven
around her skull. My first thought was, I want that.
As if I could buy her braids.
The best news of the day? Jessica smells amazing. Like
vanilla and amber. Not a dirty filthy hippie in sight! Feels
like something to write home about. She doesn’t shave her
legs, though. But you know, I went through my own experi-
ment with hardcore feminism in high school, so I know all
about it. I’m with ya, sister. At least Jessica has the balls to
exhibit her hairy legs. When I stopped shaving, I wore lots

YOGA Bitch 33
and lots of tights. If I could’ve worn tights under my bathing

suit, I would’ve. Since I couldn’t, I just never swam.
Jessica had come to meet me with a Balinese girl named
Su. Su is about sixteen, I think, maybe even younger, and
she wears her jet-black hair in a long braid. Her family runs
the compound where we’re staying. It was sort of funny to
me that Jessica, this willowy blonde, was wearing a sarong
while Su sported capris that could have come straight from
the J. Crew catalogue. But just when I was thinking that
perhaps Bali was going to be more westernized than I had
imagined it would be, Su bent down to pick up my enor-
mous suitcase and placed it on her head.
I couldn’t believe it. I tried to protest (holy colonialist,
Batman!) but she wouldn’t hear of it. She just clasped either
side of the suitcase in her smooth, brown arms, and lifted it
onto her head. Talk about shame. Before I left Seattle, my
friend Dan gave me a bumper sticker to put on my luggage
(along with his advice to tell people I’m Canadian) and
there it was, his bumper sticker screaming out at me from
right above Su’s forehead: marxists get crazy laid.
Su giggled, clearly amused by the look on my face. “It’s
not hard,” she said.
And that was that.
Next I found myself following Jessica and Su past the
pavilion and into the hot green labyrinth of terraced rice
paddies that stretched across the earth everywhere I looked.
Some fields looked like wheat, with long, thin stalks shoot-
ing up around us. I ran my fingers through them as if they
were hair. Others were clearly younger fields, just mud blan-
keted by a thin sheet of water, like acres of mirrors spread
out across the earth. I caught our reflection in these mirrors

as we leaped from one terrace to the next and navigated
narrow pathways of mud and grass. Su could actually jump
with my luggage on her head. Amazing.
Everything smelled like heat and duckshit. My eyes were
blinded by the green.
After about twenty minutes we arrived here, at Bali Hai
Bungalows, my home for the next two months.
And remember what I was saying about how it’s crazy
to get all worked up in advance about something when you
have no idea what you’re in for? Here’s why. My mud hut?
It’s actually a mansion.
marxists get crazy laid.
When I looked up the hill to see our house shimmering
down at us, partly obscured by palm trees, I thought of that
song from The Sound of Music, the one that goes, “So some-
where in my youth or childhood, I must have done some-
thing good.”
And then I thought: When the people revolt, they
string up the folks in these houses first.
But then I became distracted by the pool.
Actually, there are three pools. Three pools! One regular
pool, one kids’ pool, and one that’s even smaller . . . the infants’
pool? The pet pool? I imagined the murderous pack of wild dogs
lounging about in their own pool, sipping umbrella drinks.
The compound is made up of five big houses, three just
off the dirt road, two up another thirty stairs or so from
there. We’re butted up against the forest, looking out over
the rice paddies.
Ours is the corner house, farthest from the road. Tiled
veranda, shiny marble floors, teak furniture throughout the
house. A vaulted ceiling on the first floor, where there’s a futon
with a batik print bedspread, a cozy corner by the windows

YOGA Bitch 35
with a table and chairs. To the right, a steep staircase; to the

left, a full kitchen with a refrigerator stuffed full of pineapples
and papayas. And tucked at the bottom of the staircase? A
bathroom that defies all expectations: gleaming gray and blue
tile, a vase full of jasmine on the counter next to the sink. A
long, deep bath with faucets for both cold and hot water.
Upstairs, which is where I am now, is one big bedroom
the size of my apartment in Seattle. In the center is a king-
sized bed with mosquito netting cascading from a hoop in the
ceiling, like a long and gauzy chandelier.
i just went downstairs to use the bathroom, and on my

way down, I stopped to stare at these incredible, bug-eyed
monsters carved around a glassless window— the only light
source on the dark steps— and I almost knocked into Su.
She started giggling at once.
I told her how beautiful I thought the bungalow was,
and she just giggled.
“Yes,” she said.
“I didn’t expect to have three pools on my yoga retreat!”
Her brow furrowed and she picked at her lower lip. I
thought maybe she didn’t understand me, so again, I said,
“Three pools, it’s great.”
“Two pools,” she said. Her expression grew serious as she
gathered her words. “The smallest pool is reserved.”
“Reserved,” I repeated.
She nodded and pivoted around me to continue up the
stairs.
I turned and watched as she took the steps two at a time.
She was almost buried in the shadows at the top when I
called out for her to wait.

“Who’s the smallest pool reserved for?”
She barely turned around as she answered me. “For
God,” she said.
Midnight
I think I’ve pinpointed the characteristic that makes Jessica
so strange and new to me: she’s earnest. Like, really earnest.
Most of my friends are funny, ironic, sarcastic types. Theater
people, writers, readers. You know, um, smokers. Smokers
are always ironic, aren’t they? (Although I’ve been hearing
rumors that we’re all going to lose our irony soon, now that
9/11’s happened. Apparently the age we’ve been in was an
ironic one, but now it’s over. Which is a weird thing, consid-
ering irony has survived most recorded wars, revolutions, and
plagues, but whatever, we’re a sensitive nation these days.)
No, Jessica’s earnest, and perpetually inspired. It’s like
she’s piped into some incredibly moving radio channel that
keeps telling her the Greatest News Ever. When she’s espe-
cially excited, her voice climbs to a silvery blue pitch and I
start to wonder if she’s going to break into song. When she
told me about the bodywork she does— something called
craniosacral massage— she said, “It’s just! So! Amazing!
That I get to do this incredible! Ah! Work.”
After I unpacked my things, I went downstairs just as
the sun was setting and found Jessica sitting at the table on
the veranda, writing in a spiral-bound journal. I sat down
across from her and we stared out over the darkening rice
paddies and listened.
There’s a gamelan orchestra that practices in a pavilion
in the middle of the rice paddies. All women, Jessica said.
The sounds they make are incredible, like a delicate silver
web hanging in the air one minute and the next, medieval

YOGA Bitch 37
knights in chain mail and armor start slam-dancing. I’d bet

you can hear them throughout the village. My first boyfriend
after high school— the one who liked to read my journal—
used to say that the gamelan was the most transcendent and
mystical of all musical forms. He would point out the percus-
sive clanginess of it all as if it were a direct link to the divine.
At the time, in his smoky apartment, I listened to it and
hated its lack of melody, its unpredictable noise.
But in this environment, this dark green night, it makes
perfect sense.
Jessica disappeared into the house for a while, and when
she came back out she had a plate of rice cakes and tahini,
jam, and avocados. I dug around in my straw bag and pulled
out all the hippie snacks I bought at Whole Foods last week:
unsalted almonds, soy crackers, hemp seeds.
And then, with the courage of a dozen resistance fight-
ers, I added a few pieces of the German-style beef jerky I
had swiped from the pub after my last shift a few nights ago.
“Oh, heavens to Betsy!” Jessica cried.
Naturally, I started to move the contraband back into
my bag, figuring Jessica’s a vegetarian who can’t eat in the
presence of my jerky. She was looking at me with wide blue
eyes, her lips puckered in disgust.
“There are ants in the tahini!”
She pushed the jar aside and I tried to keep from laugh-
ing. I’ve never heard anybody say “heavens to Betsy” before,
especially not over tahini. But mostly I was just so relieved.
I could keep my meat. After tonight, I’m pretty sure I won’t
be allowed to eat animals for two months. Who knows?
Maybe I’ll even go home a vegetarian?
Um, I can actually hear my brothers laughing at that last
thought, from ten thousand miles away. They like to say that

they are meatatarians. In their preferred diet, the only food
other than meat that isn’t verboten is butter, or anything that
can be dipped or drowned in butter. I suspect Jessica would
probably pass out if she had to eat dinner on their terms.
She’s sleeping next to me right now. We’re sharing a
king-sized bed that could sleep an entire family, it’s so big.
She’s lying on her back, with her head propped between two
pillows to keep her spine straight.
I don’t want to sleep. The darkness here is so heavy and
warm, and the mosquito netting is distracting. It reminds
me of the forts the sibs and I used to make when we were lit-
tle. Like I should be wearing Underoos or something. How
can I sleep? Being under a canopy is too thrilling. And I’m
in such good company; Bali’s wide awake, like me.
Crickets. Frogs. Dogs. A rooster— isn’t it a bit early for
a rooster? Sounds of the women packing up their gamelan
instruments. A clang, a gong, chatter. It’s all perfect. More
perfect than I ever could have imagined.
I wonder what everyone at home is doing. Jonah, is he at
work? At home? God knows what time it is there. Or if he’s
thinking of me, here on an island I hardly knew existed a
year ago, with no responsibilities to anyone but myself. I’m
absolutely on my own.
February 25
Morning
It’s 7 a.m. I’m up at 7 a.m. This is incredible. I wish I could
call everybody back home and tell them SEE? I CAN GET
UP EARLY.
Especially if I’m insanely jet-lagged, I guess.
We have class in two hours. I’m sitting on our tiled veranda,
watching Jessica. I’m eating papaya with lime and drinking

YOGA Bitch 39
ginger tea, even though it’s about four thousand degrees out
here. I would love some coffee, but Indra told me before I left
Seattle to prepare for a “cleansing” two months. Which means
no coffee, no sugar, no alcohol, and no meat.
Oh, and no sex. I told Indra that wouldn’t be a big deal,
since I was leaving the boyfriend at home, and she gave me
this funny look and then said, “No sex of any kind. You can
just as easily drain your own battery as another’s.”
Exclamation point!
Jessica is sitting lotus-style on the edge of the veranda, her
head tilted back, eyes closed. She’s pressing a large Starbucks
travel mug against her chest, and every few minutes she low-
ers her head to the mug and sips from it, then she raises her
face back up to the sun, smiling slightly, as if in worship.
I don’t blame her. For worshiping this place, I mean. Ex-
cept that I don’t want to close my eyes, I don’t even want to
blink, I just want to take it all in. It’s spectacular. Palm trees,
papaya trees, a slice of the turquoise pool sparkling below
us. It’s like eating breakfast in a glinting emerald sanctuary.
There’s a small temple off to the left of the veranda, with
a sculpture of a tiny, sexless god peeking out at us, smiling
placidly. It almost looks like the god and Jessica are smiling
at each other. Like they’re both in on the secret.
I did ask Jessica if she thought it would be bad if I al-
lowed myself coffee in the morning. She said yes. Which
is an understatement. She basically responded as if I’d sug-
gested it might be okay if I freebased cocaine before class.
“No biggie,” I said, but it came out in a sort of ragged
whisper. The thought of going without coffee made my throat
hurt in the way it does just before I break into uncontrollable
sobs. But that was fifteen minutes ago. I’m better now. I think.
OH SHIT. Oh my God. Oh God, gross. I just reached

out to take one of the prickly-looking lychee fruits from the
bowl in the middle of the table, thinking that maybe some
natural sugar could be my replacement for caffeine, but just
as I was figuring out how to remove the skin, a tickling on
my forearm drew my attention to a parade of ginger-colored
ants marching from the fruit in my hand up to my armpit.
Only now do I notice that the fruit is swimming in a
soup of ants.
I can’t stop wiping my arms of both real and imaginary
bugs. There’s a never-ending line of ants climbing up the
table leg like pilgrims on their way to the promised land of
lychees.
The only good thing about these ants is that they are
distracting me from my nerves about class. One hour till we
have to be there. Please, God. Let it go well.
Evening
Oh no. Oh God. Oh Jesus. Oh, this is bad. I don’t even
know how to say it.
No, wait. I do know how to say it. They’re a cult. A cult!
But it’s not Kool-Aid they’re drinking.
Shit, Jessica’s coming. I’ve gotta go. I know what’s in
that Starbucks mug of hers. Run, run.
Okay. I’m ready to get this down, now. I’ve escaped the
house and am safely ensconced in a little restaurant called
Wayan’s Warung. Wayan is this great big woman with, like,
five babies on her hips at all times and a booming laugh. I
wish I could tell her why I’m here alone.
But I don’t think it would translate.
Today started off so well. I got to class this morning a
little bit nervous, but excited to see Indra. And right away I

YOGA Bitch 41
felt like things were going to be okay. Everything was going

to be just fine.
Class was held in that big wooden pavilion where Made
dropped me off yesterday. It’s called a wantilan. It has a
pointed roof woven like a wicker basket and a panoramic
view of green fields and forest that makes me want to stand
in the center of the wood floor and spin like a top. All along
one side are the women’s gamelan instruments, a million
different xylophones and gongs encased in wood painted
red and gold. When we jump or fall, you can hear them
reverberating for minutes afterwards.
Indra and Lou arrived holding hands, both of them
dressed from head to toe in flowing white linen. I realized
right away it was the first time I’d seen them together. They
smiled at us, and then at each other, and then back at us. I
was struck by their commitment to being so yogic— I would
probably laugh if I tried to be so serene.
We quickly formed a circle, and Indra and Lou took
their places among us, Indra sitting on her heels, Lou
cross-legged. Indra looked into each of our faces before wel-
coming us. When she looked at me with her big brown eyes
I couldn’t help myself— GOD I am such a nerd— I broke
into a huge grin. It was just such a relief to see her. She
laughed.
As Indra talked about the two months ahead of us, Lou
massaged his entire body. He was constantly working on
himself, either his toes or his heels, his calves or his hips.
His earlobes, even. I wanted to tell him to calm down and
just hire someone to do that for him. Someone like Jessica!
But he just kept right on milking his toes, and seemed to be
only slightly there with us.
So we went around the circle, checking in.

Lou said, “I’m looking forward to our practice together.
It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be hard.”
He said some other stuff, too, but that’s all I really heard.
Indra said, “I’m excited for this great group of yogis and
yoginis to get to know each other! And Lou”— she turned
to him, her whole face brightening— “what do you say we
make these yogis into teachers over the next two months?”
And I felt like jumping up and cheering.
When it was my turn to check in, Indra made my day,
saying, “Suzanne is my plant, everyone! In Seattle, she al-
ways asks for the things I want to teach. So tell me, Su-
zanne, are you ready for some core work?”
“Yup, definitely core work,” I said.
“And how are you today, Suzanne?” Lou asked, cracking
his toes five at a time.
“Oh, fine,” I said. “Ready to stretch after the plane
ride yesterday.” Everyone laughed as if I’d said something
very true and funny. And then something awful happened.
Without a thought, I announced to the circle, “And also,
I’m fearing death.”
A moment of silence followed, and I felt the faucets in
my pores turn on. Then Indra looked into my eyes and I
stopped sweating. “We all are. That’s why we’re here. Good
for you, Suzanne.” And then we moved on.
So, right away, I felt that I was in good hands, that it was
the right choice to come here and get my head together be-
fore I move to New York. It occurred to me that maybe this
feeling of safety and understanding is why some people go to
therapy. And just when I was about to float up to the rafters
with relief and happiness, Indra said she wanted to have a
little chat about health precautions for our time in Bali.
“Don’t drink the water,” she said. We all laughed. I mean—

YOGA Bitch 43
we all pretty much know this, right? Doesn’t everybody know

that you don’t drink the water in developing countries?
Well. Indra says that when you’re in a place for two
months, it’s almost impossible to avoid drinking the water
at some point. For instance, one morning when you’re really
tired you might forget and run your toothbrush under the
faucet. Or you might be singing in the shower and not no-
tice that the water is running right down your face and into
your open mouth. Give that water a little time in the petri
dish of your stomach, and voilà: you’ve got the Bali Belly.
The thing about the Bali Belly is that it’s really nasty. It’s
amoebic dysentery, just like Montezuma’s Revenge or the Delhi
Belly, but Indra says it has a particularly bad caboose on the
end of its long, mean train. Apparently, after you spend several
days on the toilet, you start leaching toxins out your tongue.
And you know, I hate leaching toxins out my anything.
I’m completely against it.
So this layer of toxins, it starts out green— like mucus—
and then it turns gray, as if that mucus were decomposing
in your mouth. And then, when you’re dangerously dehy-
drated, your tongue turns black.
The second she said this, I started thinking about Um-
berto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, all of those poisoned priests
found with blackened tongues. I pictured my yogamates
sprawled across the floor of the wantilan, inky squids explod-
ing from their breathless mouths. And I quickly descended
from the happy rafters.
“But no worries!” Indra said. “Nothing to worry about.
There’s a really easy way to avoid contracting the Bali Belly,
and you don’t even have to take antibiotics. I’ve never had
to worry about the Bali Belly or a black tongue— because I
drink my pee.”

Right, I’m thinking. No antibiotics, great. Then: Wait.
Now’s when the wantilan became a carousel in the mid-
dle of the rice fields, spinning and spinning.
“People,” Lou said, “I know it might sound strange to
you, but urine therapy is a common practice outside the
Western world. It’s a natural way to fight aging, disease— ”
“And it makes for a great facial,” Indra added.
Lou was rubbing his neck something fierce. He seemed
suddenly very tired of having to explain all of this to us.
“Urine is very pure. It has a bad rap as a waste product. But
urea,” he finished, sighing and speaking at the same time, “is
a great toxin-killer.”
Indra said that urine has cured people of everything
from acne to AIDS. Like, they drink the urine and then
they say good-bye. To their AIDS.
I wasn’t even thinking about how crazy that is. All I was
thinking was, “But is it worth it?”
Indra was still talking. I got the feeling she’d delivered
this speech a few times. “Tonight, before you go to bed, drink
a glass of water. Purified water, that is! Then, tomorrow, when
you wake up, go into the kitchen and fetch a tall glass. Your
glass should be able to hold about eight ounces of liquid.”
I know from my career as a cocktail waitress that eight
ounces equals about four double shots. My mind sat with
that knowledge for a long, grave moment.
“Now, take that glass with you into the bathroom and
pee into it,” Indra said, “catching the midstream, just as
you would at the doctor’s office. And then—drink it.” She
rubbed her hands together as if she was just getting to the
good part. “If you do this every day of your stay in Bali, I can
guarantee you won’t leave with a black tongue.”
“Do it for the rest of your life,” Lou added, looking at us

YOGA Bitch 45
one by one, “and you will have greater health, happiness,

and, most important— a deeper yoga practice.”
Oh, Holy Jesus.
My teachers have told me to drink my pee. To partake of
my own piss. That urine is a beverage. I know from years of
cleaning up after both babies and grandparents that urine is
not a beverage. Urine is urine. So, were they joking? They
didn’t look like they were joking.
Indra and Lou went on to discuss the tasty option of
mixing urine with fruit juice, and I felt that familiar sei-
zure in my stomach, that feeling I used to get in church
when I knew at any moment I would burst out laughing and
piss Mom off. And just as I did as a child at St. Monica’s, I
started looking around to see if I could get anybody else in
trouble.
As I made my way around the circle, my eyes landed
on Marcy, a middle-aged woman from San Francisco with a
thick white ponytail. She was smiling. An easy target.
But then I noticed something. She wasn’t just smiling.
She was also— nodding.
And Jason, sitting next to her, nodding.
Jessica, my roommate, nodding.
They were all nodding. As if this were something we all
already did. As if one day our parents taught us how to pee
into the toilet, and the next day how to pee into our sippy
cups.
And then it dawned on me: I am the only one here who
doesn’t already drink from the midstream. I am the only one here
who hasn’t tasted my own waste. I am the only one here who
isn’t out of her fucking mind.
Looking around at my nodding yogamates and beaming
teachers, I knew that I had made a huge mistake coming

here. I had left my home, my people, and for what? To join a
cult? But I had to be careful. I’ve seen enough zombie movies
to know that your doom lies in your discovery. So even be-
fore I made the conscious choice, my neck tensed, my chin
lowered— and I nodded. I tried to smile, like great, so great
to be here with other people who drink pee, and I kept on nod-
ding. I doubt I was convincing anybody, but what else could
I do? I’m outnumbered, there’s no escape. I’m stranded on an
island, among pissdrinkers.

SASSY SUMMER READS
AN EXCERPT FROM
THREE RIVERS PRESS
Barr_9780307382450_3p_all_r1.qxp:. 1/2/09 10:16 AM Page 3
PEOPLE ARE
unappealing*
*EVEN ME
three rivers press

New York
Copyright © 2009 by Sara Barron

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Barron, Sara.
People are unappealing / Sara Barron.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Barron, Sara. 2. Comedians— United States— Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.B27A3 2009
792.702'8092— dc22
[B] 2008039915
ISBN 978-0-307-38245-0
Printed in the United States of America
design by elina d. nudelman
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
9
non- equity
I studied acting for four years at the university level and received a
BFA. That stands for Bachelor of Fine Arts to most, but my
mother’s favorite joke was that it stood instead for Big Fucking
Actor. “Look who it is!” she’d say when I’d fly home to visit. “My
big fucking actor of a daughter!” My stock response was “Very
funny,” to which she’d reply, “Well, I thought we ought to laugh
instead of cry about it.”
“It” was the hour of reckoning: I had my BFA, my memorized
monologue. I’d re-soled my jazz shoes and purchased a beret. It
was time to scrap the “student” portion from my title and gradu-
ate to “Actor.”
Ever watch TV? See a movie? Attend a Broadway show? If so,
perhaps you’ve noticed acting as a career path for the physically
attractive. Some of the beauties can act to boot, but first and fore-
most they’re oddly and unfairly pretty. On the attractiveness scale
from one to ten, these girls are tens. Conversely, I was not. I’m not
gratuitously self-deprecating. I’m just being realistic. Sporting a
98
PEOPLE ARE UNAPPEALING
FUPA and faint wisps of back hair, I hung just left of center: a
four. Stilettos, a hint of rouge, a nicely tailored dress— these
devices inch me toward a five, a six at best. But you wouldn’t stop
me on the street to say, “You ought to be in pictures!” And were
you privy to one or another of my college acting projects— let’s
say you’d been at Barnes & Noble’s magazine rack on the night I
hit the open mic— then you, like Peggy Pearson, would have told
me not to quit my day job. And you, like Peggy Pearson, would
have been ignored. I clung to my acting ambitions like a million
others so clearly destined to fail because the sparest shred of tal-
ent (I do do a great Tina Turner impersonation) mixed with a
pinch of encouragement and the desperate hope for fame can con-
vince you to pursue a ludicrous ambition. I have to be an Actor!
you decide. I can’t live a Life of Regret!
You’re primed to try. And primed to fail.
One Sunday morning not long after my college graduation, I
was on the phone with my mother. “Just called for a chat with my
big fucking actor,” she announced. “How’s it going, anyway?”
People love to ask you how it’s going when you’re in hot pursuit
of an acting career. Unstable artistic paths attract this line of
questioning and it’s ironic, I think, seeing as how the honest
answer is almost always “bad.” Variations include “very bad” or
“soul-suckingly bad.” Any actor who says otherwise is lost in a
maze of denial and the reason is this: Actors with careers on the
upswing don’t get asked the question in the first place, since, in
accordance with the nature of the beast, everyone already knows.
Everyone’s seen him/her in that movie starring Colin Farrell, the
Tylenol commercial, the walk-on role in a CSI show. So instead
of questions getting asked, praise is given: “You were wonderful
in that Tylenol commercial!”
A successful actor needn’t explain herself nor laundry list her
accomplishments; she’s too busy basking in her public praise. In
contrast, it’s the rest of us who must hone our desperate mantras.
Asked how the acting’s going, we throw down the card of over-
compensation.
99
S A R A B A R RO N
“How’s the acting going?”

“Great!” we say. “So great!” Then we forgo specific details with
a qualifying statement like, “I’ve got an audition,” or “I landed a
callback.” So vast are the variations on what this could entail,
they do nothing to support a claim of greatness. But it’s all we
have to cling to and therefore all we ever say.
I’d go exactly this route with my mother.
“So how’s the acting going for my big fucking actor?”
“Great, Mom! Really great. I’ve got an audition on Tuesday for
this one play called Feelin’ Fine, then another one on Wednesday
for an improv troupe, then another on Friday for a disco-danced
version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“Anything paid?”
“What?”
“Anything paid?”
This question confused me. Four months on the audition cir-
cuit, and a word like paid had lost its meaning. It seemed com-
pletely out of context when mentioned in regards to acting. It was
as though I’d said, “I’ve got an audition!” and my mother had fol-
lowed up by asking, “Chicken or beef?” It all felt very discon-
nected.
To support myself, I worked the evening shift at a Banana Repub-
lic in Soho, where I learned how to properly fold a button-down
shirt. Then I’d spend my days auditioning feverishly. I was like a
madwoman, having decided that what I lacked in cuteness, I’d make
up for in drive. Another woman might have the fuller head of well-
groomed hair, the more shapely, toned physique, but I’d work
harder. I’d audition for anything. In one week, I tried out for the
role of a street whore named Lavinia in a triple–Off Broadway pro-
duction of Bernard Shaw’s classic Androcles and the Lion, to which
I wore my beret and engaged in the following dialogue with a rag-
ing homosexual who read the role of Army Captain:
“You are brave, Captain!”

“Do you mock me, whore?”
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“Not I, Captain!”
“Do you even know how true Christians love, you whore?”
This was followed by an audition for a student film pitched as

Melrose Place meets Roots, then an original play entitled Take Me
as I Am about pedophilia as a disease to be understood rather
than reviled, then Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children,
then the part of Woodland Nymph #4 in an avant-garde perform-
ance piece called Fly Like the Wind, Geronimo. Maggie and I
went to this last one together after Maggie saw it listed on a flyer
in her local diner. The flyer said the producers wanted sixteen
bars of an up-tempo song, so I chose the Merman standard
“There’s No Business Like Show Business,” made it to bar num-
ber ten, and was promptly asked to leave. I waited for Maggie out-
side the audition studio nursing a juice box before she emerged,
ectastic.
“I got a callback!” she shouted. “The director called me ‘organ-
ically magical’!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Maggie didn’t know for sure but learned the rough translation
at the callback.
“Will you go onstage naked,” asked the director, “as you mime
being stuck in a box?”
Maggie was deeply insulted, told him no, and stormed out the
door. “How degrading is that?!” she asked me later.
“Very.”
“I mean, public nudity’s no walk in the park to begin with. But
nothing’s worse than”— a look of fear and disgust overtook
her—“mime.”
The first callback I ever got was for a sketch comedy group
called Lil’ Devils. The group’s creative director asked that I
improvise a scene about Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen having sex
with each other, which, frankly, I nailed. (Pun intended!) I had the
whole production team in stitches as I performed Mary-Kate atop
her twin in reverse-cowgirl position, hammering away until she
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bruised her own pelvis and cracked her sister’s ribs. Not only was
I being funny, I thought, but I was also commenting on the nega-
tive side effects of anorexia in Hollywood! This sort of multilay-
ered artistry was rewarded with a callback, yes, but not an actual
part. For as gifted as I may have been at mimed celebrity incest,
I’m not good at impressions. I mean, sure, my Tina Turner can
stop traffic, but the folks at Lil’ Devils needed someone with a
solid Walken or DeNiro.
This tease and denial of the callback broke my father’s heart.
“Did you hear back about the sketch comedy group?” he’d ask
expectantly. He wanted so badly to have something to show off
about. At various weddings and Bat or Bar Mitzvahs, we’d both had
occasion to endure the gloating parents of other commercial actors.
“Did you see Kimmy in the Herbal Essences commercial?! She’s
the girl whose hair gets frizzy from the rain?! Wasn’t it AMAZ-
ING?” The way they carry on, you’d think their child won the
Nobel Prize or, at the very least, contributed to society in some
microscopic sliver of a way instead of mugging for the camera
about freesia-scented styling gel. My father craved a taste of this
same sort of undue pride.
“Dad, this is tough to tell you, but I think that Lil’ Devils sketch
group went with someone else.”
“What?”
“I think they needed someone better at impressions.”
“But did they hear you sing?! Did you do your Tina Turner?!”
He was more deluded than a porky pageant mother. He
could not understand how anyone, having borne witness to my
version of “Proud Mary,” would—could!— deny me the chance
of an awed, adoring crowd. I imagined my mother trying to
explain it.
“Joe, it’s time to accept that maybe acting isn’t Sara’s forte.”
“What?” He’d try to convince himself that she was the one
who’d gone mad. “Have you gone mad?!”
“No.” She’d stay calm. “I have not. Now let’s focus on the posi-
102
tives: She doesn’t have cancer. She doesn’t do drugs. She’s learned
to fold shirts at Banana Republic.”
My mother had begun to make progress, combating the shared
hopes and dreams of my father and me, when the impossible
occurred and I scored a part. Two, actually. I’d be playing the dual
roles of Orange Girl and Sister Marthe in a quintuple–Off
Broadway production of Cyrano de Bergerac.
“Where’s ‘quintuple–Off Broadway’?” asked my mom. I could
hear the air quotes in her voice. “Downtown? Uptown? Brooklyn?
Queens?”
“New Jersey,” I answered.
“Do they have theaters in New Jersey?”
They do, in fact, though this particular production would be
mounted in the director’s apartment, in the living room he’d par-
titioned off with shower curtains.
“New Jersey has theaters,” I explained, “though I, personally,
will be performing in a much more avant-garde space than that.”
“Where?”
“A loft.”
Loft sounded artier than Jersey apartment.
“Are you getting paid?”
“What?”
“Are you getting paid?”
“I’m not sure I understand the question.”
As far as I was concerned, the opportunity to play the dual
parts of Orange Girl and Sister Marthe was payment enough.
Orange Girl (lest you’ve forgotten her noteworthy scene in act I)
sells her goods to fellow villagers. She asks, “Oranges? Milk?
Raspberry syrup? Lemonade?” And then just after Cyrano’s
entrance, after he’s said, “One more word of that same song, and
I destroy you all!” Orange Girl exclaims, “What an outrage!”
I’d say both those lines and then have two and a half hours to
kill “backstage” before reemerging in act V as Sister Marthe. I’d
say, “Sister Claire stole a plum out of the tarte this morning!”
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just minutes before (spoiler alert!) Cyrano confesses his love for
Roxane and dies.
I’d use my rehearsal time to practice alternate line readings
(“WHAT an outrage. What an OUTRAGE!”), a diligence I hoped
would impress the director, but it seemed rather to annoy him.
One day I let one slip that was especially robust:
Cyrano: One more word of that same song, and I destroy

you all!
Orange Girl: WHAT AN OUTRAGE!!!
The director got angry. “JESUS CHRIST!” he shouted from his

living room couch. “Sara, I need—NEED!— for you to tone it
down, okay?”
“Toning it down,” I repeated, and did a little salute, “toning it
down.”
This was a trick I’d learned in acting school: When you, the
actor, are given a direction, you repeat it back to prove your
understanding, e.g.:
“Sara, move back. You’re supposed to be behind Roxane.”
“Moving back, sir, moving back.”
“Can all the nuns exit stage right?”
“Exiting stage right, sir, exiting stage right!”
I considered this the height of professional behavior, yet for all
my fellow cast mates it seemed to connote my possible battle with
autism: Every time I did it, they’d give me wide-eyed and bewil-
dered looks, the worst of which came from the actress playing
Roxane. A doe-eyed eighteen-year-old who, when not busy giving
me the are-you-autistic eye, indulged in this horrific habit of call-
ing me “sweetie.” I have a rule of thumb with that word: If I’m
older and fatter than you, don’t use it to address me.
“Hey, sweetie!” she’d say while practicing one of her big, dra-
matic scenes. “If you’ve got a sec, can you do me the biggest favor
ever?” I always had “a sec”; I had three lines. “Can you run to the
deli and get me a Coke?”
104
With nothing else to do and without the backbone needed to

say no, I’d agree to her biddings. Then en route I’d count the rea-
sons I despised her:
1. Roxane called me “sweetie.”
2. Roxane had big, beautiful eyes.
3. Roxane called herself “a guy’s girl.” “I’m just a guy’s girl!”
she’d explain to Christian the heartthrob or Ragueneau the
bread-shop owner. “Girls can be so catty, you know? So all my
friends are always guys!” This common rumination disgusts
me every time I hear it. Disguised as some pathetic attempt at
an independent streak, what someone really ought to say is,
“My ability for interpersonal connection begins and ends with
my need for sexual approval!” This sort of woman flips her lid
at the chance to bowl or check the football score and for such
penchants she expects a fat helping of attention. Preferably
male. For my part, I prefer the title Girl’s Girl. Not contingent
on a penchant for fruity alcoholic drinks (though I do love a
double amaretto on the rocks), the foundation for my claim is
this: Between me and my close friends, flirtation and sexual
tension needn’t be the building blocks.
4. Roxane was eighteen, and eighteen made me feel old. I may
have been just five years older, but the thing about aspiring to
act is that anything can make you feel old. You’re over the hill
by the time you’re twenty-six. They don’t tell you that in acting
school, they don’t say, “Ditch all this: Lose thirty pounds, audi-
tion NOW!” though such advice would prove more helpful
than what they do dole out on chakras and vocal technique. It’s
true some successful starlets don’t hit their stride until they’re
twenty-six, but hitting a stride by twenty-six means you’ve
been booking commercials since you were ten. If by twenty-six
you’ve worked little enough that there’s still room on your
résumé for a show you did in college, good luck. You’ll need it.
If someone has legally rented a car and uttered the phrase “I’m
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thinking of giving acting a shot,” she’s in trouble— just as

deluded, I believe, as my father and I.
Roxane, in all her resplendent teenage-ness, made me consider

all these harsh realities. She’d set my wheel of unpleasant thought
in motion every single day and forced me toward a revelation:
This acting thing might not pan out. To be fair, it wasn’t just Rox-
ane that did it. It was Roxane plus the commute to New Jersey
plus the “theater” in New Jersey plus the shower-curtain stage in
the theater in New Jersey. There was also the issue of my costume,
which in the role of Sister Marthe included a habit made of felt
and paper towel. There are only so many times you can layer those
fabrics on your head before you wonder what the fuck it is you’re
doing, only so many times you can practice lines like “Raspberry
syrup? Lemonade?” before your mind begins to wander and the
pressing questions get too pressing to ignore.
Is this all there is?
Is this a bad idea?
Is there a God?
Am I an asshole?
If I punch Roxane the next time she says “sweetie,” how will
she react?
With two months of rehearsal, I had a lot of time to think and
I decided:
No.
Yes.
Maybe.
Yes.
She’ll punch me back. Then bitch and moan about how catty
girls can be.
These questions were exhausting, and exhausting is not my pre-
ferred mode of operation. The show zapped me of my auditioner’s
enthusiasm: I’d already auditioned for dozens of things, I’d finally
achieved my goal of getting a part, and the experience— all that
I’d been waiting for!— had turned out to be as glamorous as ath-
106
lete’s foot. So what was next? Had this production been a fluke?
Was it worth it to keep trying? Well, it goes against my natural
instincts to keep trying. I’m more of a quitter: When the going
gets tough, I do get going. It’s just that my brand of going takes
me away from completing a goal instead of driving me ambi-
tiously toward it. The prospect of being an actor started to look
much more difficult than I had imagined, and in an effort to clear
my head and gain perspective, I decided to take a couple months
off from the audition circuit and review my other options. My
BFA paired with my Banana Republic employment had earned me
the following skill set: efficient shirt-folder, masterful Windexer
(at the start of every shift I’d Windex all the mirrors in the fitting
rooms). Maggie suggested that I tack on the adjective hilarious.
Specifically, after seeing my closing-night performance in the role
of Orange Girl/Sister Marthe, she’d said, “Wow. You were hilari-
ous.”
“Really?” I asked. Sister Marthe, to remind you, makes her
entrance for the big, dramatic death scene. “That’s not quite what
I was going for.”
“Well, you were.” She shrugged. “You and that paper-towel habit
had the audience in stitches.” Maggie meant it as a compliment, but
I was worried seeing as how my supposed hilarity was unintentional.
“I’m not sure that that’s a good thing.”
“Well, then try something where it would be. You did really
well at that improv troupe audition, remember? Or what about
stand-up?”
Stand-up. Interesting. Now that Maggie mentioned it, it didn’t
sound half bad. Another person might have seen the creative foray
for exactly what it is, a horrifying chance to humiliate oneself
before an audience and— bonus!— the only career path less stable
and more difficult than acting. But I’m a renegade where practi-
cality is concerned, so to me it sounded fun. I liked the idea of
taking a break from the acting routine, all the while staying in
pursuit of a goal that involved a stage, attention, and applause.
And laughter! Laughter I’d encouraged!
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After Maggie made the suggestion, I couldn’t shake it. My par-

ents called to ask how the acting was going, and I told them I’d
switched gears.
“I’m done with acting!” I announced. “I’m trying stand-up
comedy instead!”
My father was saddened by the acting abandonment though
simultaneously excited about the prospect of the stand-up, and he
suggested that I open with my Tina Turner impression. My
mother, on the other hand, had a tougher time and started crying.
“Oh god!” she wailed. “Why!? Why?! Why don’t you try some-
thing stable! Why don’t you start over? You could be a paralegal!
Or a mailman! Just please try something where there’s health
insurance!”
My mother has never been a crier. I’d seen it only twice before,
once when my grandfather died and once when she had to pay for
an ER visit out of pocket. I found the situation very disconcerting,
and I handled it by doling out the same advice she would have
given me. “Let’s focus on the positives!” I told her. “I don’t have
cancer! Now you do one.”
She blew her nose and took a breath. “Well,” she managed, “at
least this way they’ll be laughing with instead of at you. And that,
I guess, is something.”
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10
bar rel of laugh
Writing a stand-up act is no easy task. Watching Leno perform his

opening monologue might convince you otherwise, but from per-
sonal experience I can say: Putting pen to paper to construct a
decent punch line is good only for a headache. That, and it’s an
effective way to get yourself to clean; nothing prompts the urge to
scour your home from floor to ceiling like staring at a blank page.
I’d spend ten minutes writing in a notebook I’d titled “Funny
Thoughts!” then break from my creative exploits to tackle my toi-
let with Ajax.
My lack of focus, skill, and originality is the only excuse I can
give for what I came up with: jokes at the expense of Gwyneth
Paltrow and Britney Spears (my “topical” material), in addition to
tirades I’d hammered out about dating a man with the last name
Hitler or, conversely, a Hasidic Jew. I wrote my Gwyneth bit
around the time of the ’02 Oscars, an event to which she’d worn
this odd Lycra top sans brassiere.
“Is it just me . . . ?” I’d ask using an inflection I’d heard ten
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dozen times from other comics. “Or did Gwyneth look like she
was sporting some serious FAT-BOY BOOBIES?!”
I’d shout the phrase “fat-boy boobies” like I’d offered up some
nugget of comedic gold, but the audience always seemed to dis-
agree. The notion of Gwyneth with breasts smaller than my
brother’s never succeeded in tickling anyone’s funny bone but my
own and consistently I’d leave the stage to an exhausted heckle
like, “Thank god,” or “Seriously?”
Afterward I’d sulk in the corner with an amaretto sour chased
by the preferred lie of all crap comics: “It’s their loss if they don’t
get me. I’m just too highbrow.”
My Britney Spears joke (and this was BTF, mind you: Before
the Fall) focused on a song of hers called “I’m a Slave 4 U,” a
three-minute masterpiece in which she talked about how much
she liked to dance and have sex. There was this one line of the
chorus where she sang, “I really want to spend tonight with you /
I really want to do what you want me to.” And from the way she
performed it— the belabored exhalation, the sigh and moan that
accompanied each note— you’d think she was mid-orgasm. All
this hemming and hawing just because she’d donned a pair of
couture underwear over her designer jeans? Just because she’d
thrust her crotch at a muscled hip-hop dancer? It struck me as
unrealistic, primarily because at this stage of her career, she still
laid claim to her virginity. Well I, as a comedian, wanted to com-
ment on this funny juxtaposition. So I’d quote the lyric to the
audience: “She sings, ‘I really want to spend tonight with you / I
really want to do what you want me to!’ Which we all know
means . . .” And then my punch line, “ANAL SEX!”
I’d get the occasional seal of approval from a guy in the audi-
ence: “Anal. Totally.” And one time a guy heckled after me that his
girlfriend had “an asshole tighter than a baby’s fist!”
You’d think a comment like that would force a joke into retire-
ment, but no. It stayed a fixture in my repertoire, a manifestation
of my comedic genius. I’m getting the audience to reflect on their
own lives, I’d think. I’m an artist.
110
In stand-up circles, to kill means to do well and to bomb means

to do poorly. That’s the slang the professionals use. Performing
my act once a week every week for a year, I killed just twice: once
at a high school in the Bronx, and once at a midnight show in
downtown Manhattan for three bachelorettes and their three
dozen cohorts.
The high schoolers laughed at my eight-minute joke set not
because they appreciated my cultural insights, but because in the
bright cafeteria light they’d managed to see the outline of my nip-
ples. I’d worn a thin, white T-shirt sans brassiere (à la Gwyneth)
and received a look of pity and discomfort from the school’s assis-
tant principal once I got off “stage.”
“Well that went well!” I said naively.
Before she had the chance to say, “It was your visible nipples,
not your cultural commentary,” a slew of rambunctious teenage
boys approached me.
“I seen yer tits while you talkin’!” shouted one.
Caught off guard, I wasn’t sure what to say besides “Thanks!”
So that’s what I did. A child said, “I seen yer tits,” and I replied,
“Thanks very much!”
Then he introduced himself as Lashawn and requested an auto-
graph. “Sign that shit ‘To Lashawn,’” he instructed, “‘from the
lady with wack nipples!’”
Never one to turn away my fan, I did as requested and signed
the front of his spiral notebook, “To Lashawn from Sara Barron:
the lady with wack nipples.” It was the first and last time I’d be
asked to sign an autograph.
My set for the bachelorettes proved more productive. These
ladies were a mess of acrylic backless shirts and penis straws, and
when I rambled on about Britney’s proclivities for backdoor entry
they went as wild as Maggie in a hospital. They were what’s called
my “target audience,” and, as such, they found my use of words
like anal, penis, sex, and shit hilarious.
Finally, I thought, a group astute enough to understand me.
After I’d finished my set, one of the women came over to
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introduce herself. “My name is Mariah,” she said, “like the

singer.”
Mariah was morbidly obese, and she wore a baby T that had a
picture of a Buddha on the front. Beneath the Buddha was the
phrase i’ve got the body of a god.
“And I wanted to tell you,” she went on, “I really like your
style.”
“I really like your style,” I answered back, and I meant it. The
baby T, while not my favorite look on most, is a whole different
ball game when worn by someone self-confident enough to laugh
in the face of her own morbid obesity. I hold that sort of self-
awareness in very high regard.
Mariah explained that she was a producer of “ladies’ entertain-
ment.” “And I’m putting together a show that I think you’d be
good for.”
Dr. Phil says that opportunity is the moment when luck and
hard work collide, and here, it seemed, was mine. It was neither
here nor there that the first industry professional to recognize
my talent was drunk and sporting a tiara. The point is that she
cared to buy what I was selling— dick jokes, butt jokes, and a will-
ingess to work for next to nothing— and that was all that mat-
tered.
Mariah’s show, she explained, was a variation on a Chippen-
dales revue. She’d titled it Lettin’ It ALL Hang Out! and it fea-
tured the Jewish drag sensation Ida Slapter and three male
strippers. “A black guy, a white guy, and a Mexican,” she told me,
“so whatever flavor you want, we got!”
As far as Mariah was concerned, the show was structurally per-
fect except for one small missing piece: a female comedian. And
she thought she’d found that missing piece in me. “Your stuff
making fun of dicks and fucking’s real funny,” she said. “The gig’s
yours if you want it.”
And how could I not? Before accepting a job, most people want
to know details about salary, or perhaps location or schedule is a
primary concern. But my checklist differs slightly: I want drag
112
queen interaction. I want male stripper interaction. And if there’s

the added bonus of performing for an audience of drunk and
sadly optimistic women, I’m in. I’ll hop on board faster than you
can say, “Sara Barron makes bad choices.”
Rehearsals began the following week. The first day there I made
the acquaintence of Ida and the strippers: one black, one white,
one Mexican, just like Mariah promised, named Hershey’s Kiss,
Bootstrap Bob, and Penga, respectively. Ida served as the master
of ceremonies, opening Lettin’ It ALL Hang Out! with an imita-
tion of the jiggly Colombian songbird Shakira, belly dancing
and spoofing the performer’s signature head-stuck-underwater
singing style. Then she’d deep-throat a piece of produce—
zucchini, cucumber, celery root; whatever was on sale at Whole
Foods that week, Ida downed it like a Tootsie Roll— to get
the ladies in the mood for the forthcoming buffet of multiracial
genitalia.
Penga was the first of the guys to take the stage. His routine
was to strip out of a business suit until he was in nothing but
what’s referred to by those in the male-stripper community as a
“banana hammock.” Then he’d mime oral sex on some lucky
bride-to-be, announce her vagina to be both “nutritious and deli-
cious,” and bow to uproarious applause.
Hershey’s Kiss went next. His physique was nothing to write
home about, but in keeping with cultural stereotypes, his “dick,”
as Ida called it in his introduction, was the size of a soup can and
twice as long. Like Penga, he wore a banana hammock that fit
tighter than a condom. This allowed every woman in the audi-
ence, whether she sat four feet from the stage or forty, to view his
strange and unusual gift. Hershey’s Kiss would then spend seven
minutes onstage doing anything he could to make it bounce vio-
lently around. And when it did, this sucker was of such size and
consequent power that it’d knock him square against his chest on
the upswing, then graze him midthigh on the return trip down.
It was my job to follow this display with a seven-minute joke
set. And as it turns out, amateur jokes don’t do a good job of
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holding an audience’s attention after they’ve spent fifteen minutes

staring at a horse cock. Up until this, my professional stage debut
in Mariah Ciarullo’s Lettin’ It ALL Hang Out!, the rudest antic
I’d endured while performing stand-up was a mock snoring noise.
These bachelorettes had plans to change that. See, the problem
with people who pay money to be entertained is that they’re
awfully impatient to be kept entertained. These women had spent
forty bucks a head, and not for penis jokes. For penis. Actual ones
attached to a Benetton ad’s worth of well-endowed men, and I
was an unwelcome pit stop en route to more of what they’d come
for (pun intended!).
And they hated me for it.
“You suck!” they’d scream.
“Get off!”
“I hate you!” and/or “I hate you, bitch!” were other audience
favorites.
We, as humans, each have our own personalized limit on how
many times we can handle being told we’re hated before we: a)
find the wherewithal to extradite ourselves from the destructive
situation, or b) learn to lean on medication. My limit is ten, and
once that number came and went, I chose option B. I’d pop a
Lexapro, hit the stage, and endure the scathing heckles. I did this
for two months and chalked up the emotional pain and self-
loathing I experienced to a simple payment of comedic dues. A
comic’s favorite conversation, after all, is always about how diffi-
cult comedy can be. And since so many of the professionals also
take the time to medicate with store-bought booze or a bottle of
meds, it seemed that all was as it should be.
Mariah, for her part, remained unaware of the disaster that
unfolded every time I took the stage. She was preoccupied with
Alan, the club’s self-described “head bartender.” Head bartender
by night, he worked as a personal trainer by day and as such kept
Mariah entertained with grain alcohol and flirtatious suggestions
on how best to combat her obesity. “The only thing I’d do if I was
training you personally?” he’d say. “I’d just add a little definition
114
through your arms and midsection. Maybe a few leg lifts to

tighten up those calves, but that’s it. ’Cause you look good, girl.
Really good.”
It was both adorable and humiliating to observe their interac-
tions. You knew Alan was in it just to try to build his client base,
that if push came to shove he wouldn’t touch Mariah with a bot-
tle of Bacardi, but the sweet part was seeing her so happy, so fleet-
ingly adored. Her face could’ve caught fire and she wouldn’t have
noticed, not as long as her “sexy baby,” as she called him,
remained unscathed.
Every night after I enraged the audience, Ida would return to
the stage to lighten the mood with an X-rated juggling act: three
dildos tossed around to the tune of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will
Go On.” Then by way of introducing Bootstrap Bob she’d say, “I
don’t know about y’all, ladies, but my heart goes on for big dicks!
Holla!” And with that, Bob would close out the evening with an
offbeat hula hoop routine: He’d masturbate until visibly aroused,
then take the toy on a few goes around his own impressive endow-
ment.
After every set at which I tried and failed, Hershey would wait
backstage to comfort me. Bob and Ida still had sets to do and
Penga didn’t speak any English besides the phrase “nutritious
and delicious,” but there Hershey would be, his arms spread
wide. “Sally Barron needs a hug,” he’d say. (Everyone in the show
called me “Sally Barron” and I went with it since bombing every
night didn’t do a lot to make me want to be remembered.) Then
he’d hug me and I’d emerge covered in canola oil. One of the
secrets I learned working alongside male strippers is that before
going out onstage, they douse themselves in cooking oil— canola,
preferably, as it’s the most resistant to beading and provides the
greatest sheen. Hershey, Penga, Bootstrap Bob, they all carried a
bottle to any professional engagement, packed in their manpurse
alongside a penis pump.
Penis pump?
Penis pump.
115
S A R A B A R RO N
Like Santa Claus or leprechauns, I’d heard of these strange, elu-

sive objects before but didn’t think they actually existed. Not until
one got tossed on the chair beside me, anyway. It looked like a hol-
low kazoo.
“But why?” I asked Hershey. “You don’t need a penis pump.”
“Exactly,” he replied. The exchange was like one of those com-
mercials for dandruff shampoo where someone says to a Head &
Shoulders user, “But you don’t have dandruff . . . ,” and we’re left
to intuit that Head & Shoulders is the reason why. Ergo: Penis
pumps are out there. Penis pumps work. And that simple if sur-
prising fact is on a short list I call “Hope.”
Over the course of several months, Hershey and I became good
friends. It was the inevitable result of hugging on a weekly basis,
of being stuck in the back corridors of a strip club with nothing
else to do but interact with one another. What transpired between
us was a platonic variation on the Dirty Dancing story line: Every
night after my set, in an attempt to lift my mood and broaden my
horizons, Hershey would teach me his core stripper dance moves.
I learned to shake the two halves of my ass in rapid, fierce succes-
sion. I learned to shimmy, to “drop” my “junk” to the “flo.” I dis-
covered the key to an effective pelvic thrust. I practiced constantly,
and this impressed Hershey, who thought I had a real gift. “Forget
the comedy,” he’d say, “bitch knows how to shake her shit! You’re
good!”
After three months and a marked improvement in my ability to
do what’s called a “whip around,” Mariah finally caught wind of
my comedic failings and fired me. Alan had shown up to work
one night with a woman named Song on his arm, and when
Mariah saw them “Frenching wildly,” as I used to say, she became
a metaphoric pot of boiling water, ready to blow the second some
asshole knocked her top off.
Next came my comedy set before the angry crowd.
With Alan preoccupied, Mariah finally had the time to watch
me perform, and when she did she seemed displeased.
“WHAT THE FUCK?!” she screamed.
116
“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“YOU FUCKING BOMBED!” she answered. “THE REPUTA-
TION OF MY SHOW IS ON THE LINE!”
Then she called me “pathetical” and explained (in fewer and
more violent words than this) that she’d no longer be needing my
services. There was no severance package, no “thank you for your
contributions to the cause thus far,” just a swift shove out the
door and a promise from Hershey that he’d call.
He never did. But his words stayed with me: You know how to
shake your shit . . . You know how to shake your shit . . . And
then, the words he didn’t say, the words he left me to intuit: You
COULD shake your shit . . . for CASH.
But would I shake my shit for cash? Could I shake my shit for
cash? Ass waxes and G-strings weren’t appealing aspects, but nei-
ther was a full-time job back at Banana Republic folding shirts for
eight bucks an hour. I mean, stand-up comedy sure as Sherlock
wouldn’t be my ticket out, unless, of course, I’d gotten on the
train to chronic poverty/depression. And if that’s where I was
going, I’d rather take the scenic route. I’d rather amble slowly
there in a pair of rhinestoned pasties.
117

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SASSY SUMMER READS

FOUR FABULOUS EXCERPTS FROM THREE RIVERS PRESS

Kali_9780307886279_1p_01_r1.pdf 5 7/10/12 3:19 PM

All rights reserved.

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered

Originally published in hardcover in the United States

PR INTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMER ICA

Book design by Elizabeth Rendfleisch

Page 51, photo of Mindy Kaling and Conan O’Brien,

First Paperback Edition

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H E R E W E R E some titles for my book that I really liked but

The Girl with No Tattoo

The Book That Was Never a Blog

Harry Potter Secret Book #8

Sometimes You Just Have to Put on Lip Gloss and Pretend to Be

I Want Dirk Nowitzki to Host Saturday Night Live So Much That

Barf Me to Death and Other Things I’ve Been Known to Say

So You’ve Just Finished Chelsea Handler’s Book, Now What?

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Deep-Dish Pizza in Kabul (a touching novel about a brave girl enjoy-

There Has Ceased to Be a Difference Between My Awake Clothes

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I WA S H E S I TA N T to write this essay because, of course, I

Not to sound braggy or anything, but I kind of killed it in college.

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burning them down in the center of our quad, a cappella, and

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In 2010, Bren was my date to the Emmys. People thought

conceivably be at Dartmouth if you weren’t a jock or a sorority

Jocelyn and Brenda being really adorable at something

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LATE NIGHT DREAMS, QUICKLY EXTINGUISHED

The job I most wanted in the world was to be a writer on Late

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in Woody Allen’s belief that 80 percent of success is just showing

Here I am, ruining my guest appearance on my hero’s talk show

HOME IS WHERE THE BED IS

I was jobless, but so were Brenda and Jocelyn. Together we

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one, is styled after the sleek comfort of a 1930s industrial rail-

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ing tendencies, and some degree of containment was crucial.

I was going through a phase where all my photos had me

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Jocelyn accompanies me on the subway to my ﬁrst-ever open mike gig.

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Everything I learned about trying to get hired as a comedy writer

* It is interesting to note that this Barnes and Noble no longer exists—

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My singing audition went really well, mostly because they

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pher taught us an incredibly complicated Bollywood dance rou-

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S OM E T I M E S I bring a script I’m working on to a restaurant

GIRL #1 (pretty Jewish girl, Lululemon yoga pants, great

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gram at Columbia. But now he wants to maybe apply

GIRL #2 (tiny Asian girl, sheet of black hair, strangely huge

32D: How many grad schools is he going to go to?

LULULEMON: I know. But it’s not his fault. No publishers

LULULEMON: Yeah, so?

32D: Jeremy’s a boy. You need a man.

Lululemon did not take this well, as I anticipated.