So, Leslie, I hear you puzzling, what is it with you, anyway? Why this relentless quest for literary and/or internet greatness that you pursue to the exclusion of all else? What’s with the Fame Complex?
Well, I’ll tell ya.
It’s all about the water. The water I didn’t drink.
I am convinced they spiked our high school water fountains with some mysterious compound that conferred future professional triumph upon every female who consumed it. The fact that I only drank Tab at the time (regrettably, there was no Diet Coke back in those dark, dark days that were The Seventies) and never partook of this magical water supply is all I need to prove my hypothesis.
And how else to explain a world that is positively teeming with famous women who all hail from the same Wanna-Be-Snooty suburb just east of Hartford, Connecticut?
Famous Hometown Gal #1 is Candace Bushnell, she of the Sex and the City fame. The original column and book, that is, not the ridiculous piece of HBO dreck I hate but am nonetheless drawn to every week like that gory Expressway accident you can’t resist peeking at (and by the way, if you ever want to insult me just tell me that my writing “sounds like Sex and the City” and you will witness a meltdown the likes of which you could not imagine). Candace Bushnell, albeit a few years ahead of me in high school, grew up in my hometown, is now rich and famous, and hovers spitefully over my head, a wraithlike reminder that not only am I not rich and not famous, I am not even published.
Famous Hometown Gal #2 is political pundit and conservative radio show host Laura Ingraham. I actually had to go out and do an internet search to make sure that it was the same Laura Ingraham I knew, because I had a very hard time reconciling my memory of the little mouse-like creature from my youth theater group with the rabid right-winger who, to this day, insists that Clarence Thomas was the “best possible choice” for the Supreme Court. Misguided political instincts aside (oh, and did I mention that I happen to have a Masters Degree in Political Communication and think I would have been a damn good pundit myself?), she has written a couple of books that have been published, is relatively famous and most likely rich, and, thus, is yet another Famous Hometown Gal at whom I fume in silent envy.
Famous Hometown Gal #3 is also someone I met during my youth theater days. And this one hurts. Not only does this one hit close to home, it smashes through the plate glass window on the living room of my ego. This person has become, without ever knowing or, probably, caring, my arch-rival. My Lex Luthor. My Great White Whale. The nadir of every drop of wrath, envy, and rabid jealousy I can muster.
Who is this mystery nemesis who sparked my unyielding quest for fame?
I’ll give you a hint: she’s not a judge, but she plays one on t.v.
A few years ago, T.V. Guide published a feature article on Amy Brenneman and included several background interviews from people who knew her back “when,” including the woman who headed up our youth theater group. During an effusive discussion of Ms. Brenneman’s early theatrical aspirations, she recalled the time that Amy auditioned for the role of Emily Webb in Our Town, remarking, “She didn’t get the part, but we all knew she was going to be a star.”
You know why she didn’t get the part? You really want to know?
Because someone else did! ME! I got to be Emily Webb in Our Town. Not only that, but when auditions for the spring production of Peter Pan rolled around, guess who ALSO didn’t get to be Wendy, and guess who DID. Yup. Me again. Amy got to play Michael. As in the little brother Michael. Oh, sure, she later grew up and got to get naked with David Caruso on NYPD Blue, but I knew her when she was running around on a stage in a pair of red and white striped foot pajamas pretending to fly.
So where’s my t.v. show?
I’ve followed Amy’s career with morbid fascination and grudging admiration. She’s been all over the place. She’s done movies with Robert DeNiro, Sylvester Stallone, and Ben Stiller. She guest-starred on Frasier. She even popped up on my favorite morning radio show and flirted with the deejay while I lay in my bed listening in a blind fury, jealous teeth gnashing away. So potent and all-consuming was my envy that one day in graduate school, when someone in the class made an offhand comment about having a crush on her, I had to stuff my fist in my mouth to keep from screaming out loud.
Not only does she star in her own t.v. show, she’s also the head writer and executive producer. A fucking trifecta of success, if you will.
That’s about as accomplished as you can get.
Now, I’m not generally one for spending a great deal of time whining over the choices I’ve made in life, because I’m of the firm belief that everything that happens to us happens for a reason. But I do regard my Amy Brenneman story as a cautionary tale for all of you high school seniors out there, because it’s a dire warning about what can happen when you select a college simply because it has a pretty campus (shut up. I keep telling you I’m shallow. Maybe now you’ll believe me).
Inspired by my teenage community theater stardom, I entered college as a drama major, with every intention of pursuing an acting career. I must have been pretty good, because I was accepted into every acting program I auditioned for except for the one I really wanted: Ithaca College.
I really, really wanted to go to Ithaca because I fell in love with the campus the minute I saw it. It was all fresh and beautiful - pretty people, gleaming white buildings jutting out of the rolling green hillsides overlooking the blue waters of Lake Cayuga - what wasn’t to love? (I found out soon enough exactly what wasn’t to love about that picturesque setting when, during my freshman year, I got drunk, fell off a dance floor, broke my foot, and had to hobble up and down those rolling white hillsides on crutches for two months in the dead of winter).
Instead of accepting me into their acting program, Ithaca accepted me as a “general” drama major because they thought I sucked as an actress (and I know this for a fact because I snuck a look at my audition notes one day when my advisor wasn’t looking). I don’t blame them for thinking that, because I gave the worst audition of my life for them. I don’t know what happened - I’d been up late the night before, hadn’t memorized the piece well, and pretty much melted into a puddle of nervousness right there on stage. I guess it was one of those karmic things that changed the entire course of my life. I believe in those things too.
Anyway, I decided to go to Ithaca anyway on the gamble that I could re-audition for the acting program and hopefully get in at the end of my sophomore year. Instead, instantly bored with building sets for other people to perform in front of and eventually fed up with the flighty pretentiousness of the “real” acting majors (no way could I spend an entire career in the company of some of those flakes), I bagged the idea of a theatrical career entirely (interestingly, this was about the time I stopped writing too - I’ll let you all make up your own theories about how stifling one creative aspiration can often snuff out others as well; god knows I do). I left the snowy wilderness of Upstate New York for the urban bustle of Boston College and a Bachelors Degree in the much more civilized - and marketable - field of Communication Studies, where I soon encountered an even more pretentious creature: the I-Wanna-Be-In-Advertising major. But by then it was too late to go back, so I tried to make the best of it, slunk my way toward a couple of degrees, and ended up spending the next eighteen years in an endless series of cube farms, slinging everything from overpriced real estate to bug-riddled software until the sagging economy and my own less-than-stellar work ethic intervened and sent me screaming back to my creative roots. Which was where I probably should have been all along.
Once I started writing again (still unpublished, but nonetheless a modest success and having a hell of a good time as a copywhore), I began to feel like it was somehow okay to start rediscovering some of my other former creative ambitions and began dabbling in community theater again, a small pond that fits my big-fish dramatic aspirations quite nicely for now.
And here’s what I think: no matter how hard you try to run away from who you are, whatever the reason, sooner or later your own subconscious drags you back. If you’re smart, and if you have any sort of self awareness at all, you won’t fight it, because you’ll end up being miserable.
So I have to - very reluctantly - tip my hat to Amy Brenneman, because she obviously figured this out well before I did and was smart enough and bold enough to pay attention. And that’s why I’m going to let Amy, Candace, and Laura continue to carry the old hometown banner. At least for a little while longer.
Because I’m warning you, ladies. I’ve been busy. I’ve been productive. I’ve been prolific.
And I’m starting to feel like maybe there was something in the Tab, too.
4:39:16 PM 
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