The Chronicles Of Jessica

I'm sure the people at Starbucks can attest to that, too. But I hear that they get health insurance, so maybe they should just zip the lip.

I'm temping again. I really hate to exaggerate (hee) but I can seriously liken the effects of having to return to this line of work after having been a full time actor for so long to something like having driven a mercedes benz, and voluntarily decided to trade it in for like a really gassy mule. With hoof disease.

What continues to amaze me is how much money people are willing to pay to employ a temp to sit here and do absolutely nothing...all...day...long. I've maybe done the equivalent of 1.5 hours of work and I've been here six days. But the irony is, the more computer programs you know and the more experience you have, the more in demand you are and the more you get paid. So, because I am considered a high level administrative assistant, I'm making almost twice per hour what someone without that training would be able to pull in. Even though I almost never have to use that knowledge base for anything, and instead spend almost every minute of the day on the internet, adding to my already swelling coffers of completely useless information. Do you know what kind of wallpaper J Lo and Marc Antony have in their rumpus room? I do! Have you ever wondered how sunscreen works? I can tell you! Are you interested in how your astrological profile can best advise your choices with respect to the stock market? Pick me, pick ME!

And all I really want to do is dress up and pretend to be other people. There's some irony somewhere in there that is just stunning.

Well, since complaining is not really my style (heh) I will just try to be grateful that I have a job at all. I know Visa and Mastercard are.

Today on Good Morning America they had the results of a scientific study which found that "attractive" children are 300% more likely than "unattractive" children to be buckled into the safety seat of a grocery cart. Apparently on some deep subconcious level, parents are not as concerned about the safety and well-being of the homely progeny as they are about the cuties.

I have to say, as someone who didn't grow hair until right around kindergarten and was thus being constantly mistaken for an effeminate boy, I found this all incredibly disturbing. Of course all the parents interviewed for the piece thought it was baloney (or bologna, if you prefer); they said that a parent would love their child and protect him/her no matter what they happened to look like. Still you have to wonder, I mean it was a scientific study, done by scientists. Why would they go around just making things up for Good Morning America? Just to fuck with us? Surely there is some kind of scientist oath of honor that prohibits that kind of thing.

And who's evaluating which babies are attractive, that's the other thing about it. Obviously that's pretty subjective. For example, there are lots of people who find Barry Manilow attractive, they go to his concerts and throw thong underwear at his head and sing at the top of their lungs when he does "Mandy", completely oblivious to - well, I don't have to say it out loud, right? We can all see where I'm headed with that, I think.

Anyway, it's befuddling. Just like the fact that some women seem to turn into drooling piles of estrogen when they see Dave Navarro, or Kid Rock, or Tommy Lee, or Kobe Bryant (although I think his allure is a little tarnished these days. Rape charges will do that for a fella.)

But, oh, the most disturbing part of the segment was when they went into this public school with two actresses, "A" - who was the more traditionally attractive one, I suppose, and "B", who was not. They had each of the actresses read the children a story, "Frog and Toad Forever" (great story by the way, I highly recommend it) and then later on they ask the kids which teacher was the best. ALL the kids raised their hands for the hottie. And when John Stossil (see, there's another example, I'm sure at least his wife finds him attractive) asked the kids, "So do you like having a pretty teacher?" all the kids said, "YES!" And when he asked why, this one boy raised his hand and said, "Because when you're pretty that means you're smarter!" Ouch! The naked truth, out of the mouths of babes! I know my experience has completely upheld that theory; I mean in our school the prettiest girls were definitely the smartest*! And they had the best sense of humor*, and the highest ideals*, and they were by far the most chaste!*

*these are lies.

For those of you reading who are not career actors, let me throw in a little aside here which you may find illuminating. You ever watch a movie or a t.v. show and they have like a great big huge ugly person in it, like in that movie Seven where they have the obese man that gets murdered as punishment for gluttony? Or Anne Ramsey in Throw Momma From the Train? And you wonder, I wonder how they go about finding the great big huge ugly fat person? Do they just put out an ad for "great big huge ugly fat person"? Actually, dear readers, that is exactly what they do. The casting person gets what's called the breakdown, and right there in it will be a description of exactly what they want. "Face like the back of a truck." "Ass the size of a truck." "Massive herpetic outbreak, preferably near mouth. Must have valid license to drive truck." And then the agent calls up these unfortunates and says, "I've got the perfect part for you!" And no one gives a second thought to feelings, because it's just supposed to be a job.

And it is a job. Yet I couldn't help feeling mildly sorry for the actress playing teacher B. There was nothing really objectionable about her appearance, it's not like you would look at her and start bleeding out your eyes or anything. She just wasn't what Good Morning America considers 'traditionally beautiful'. For that matter, neither am I. But would I have accepted the SAG day rate to be denigrated by that moustache John Stossil, go into a public school to read a story to kids only to be torn apart by them for not being attractive enough after I left the room? Would I have swallowed my pride in myself and my looks just for something as empty and as fleeting as money?

You bet your ass I would.

So email me, Good Morning America! I'm at your disposal. Just make sure craft services keeps the mini-quiche coming.

For those of you who have been perturbed about not being able to make comments on the entries, WebMaster Marcus is looking into it. He says it may require some sort of new configuration specs, which I think is computer guy speak for "head of a live chicken."

A quick shout-out to my buddy Vadim, whose Off-Broadway musical, 'Putman County Spelling Bee' has been nominated for (at least six that I know of) Tony awards. When I spoke with him this morning to congratulate him, he said the phone has been ringing off the hook but the callers have not, disappointingly, been offering no-strings sex. He has given tentative permission for me to hold the Tony if they do win one, but only if I wash my hands thoroughly and don't look directly at it.

Some readers (my mother) may feel that I should also have been nominated for a Tony by now. To them (her) I would say this: It takes time to build a career. Maybe I could have won a couple Tonys by now if you hadn't been constantly interrupting my career chi with harranging me about making you a grandmother, and wondering aloud why Judy from the Snapple ads has such commercial viability when I'm clearly funnier, and pointing out that Renee Zellweger is a squinting stick figure who doesn't even come close to me.

I do agree with those last two assessments, though. Love you, Ma!

Moving on. I was thinking today that I could possibly stand to develop a little more grace and poise before being that much in the public eye, anyway. For some reason embarassing things just seem to befall me constantly, I'm at a loss to explain it. In the last week alone, the following incidents have threatened to rid me of any shred of dignity I still possess.

1. Standing up to exit the A train at 42nd St., I discovered that a pair of panties had gotten stuck in the leg of my jeans in the wash cycle and had chosen this particular moment in time to make their escape out of my pants and onto the subway floor. I did consider simply leaving them there but several people had spotted the offending undergarments and were eyeing me worriedly so I really had no choice but to pick them up and stuff them (as nonchalantly as possible) into my purse. Besides, they were a favorite pair.

2. At Cafe Metro near Grand Central Station, I was preparing a fountain cup of diet coke when I grasped the cup too close to the lid, thereby causing the lid to pop off and soda to spew all over the counter, the floor, and me. Fortunately I was wearing brown tights at the time. The Sprite consumer next to me? Not so lucky.

3. I keep setting off the security alarms at the Duane Reade Pharmacy every time I go into one. It doesn't seem to matter which one, or what I have on, which purse I am carrying, or even if I've made a purchase: the alarms at Duane Reade will blare loudly whenever I enter or exit. This in turn prompts the ever-vigilant Duane Reade security team to search me thoroughly before letting me pass through the door, whereupon the alarms blare again, and all the other customers look at me pityingly as though I have a shoplifting problem.

4. At a meeting recently, I needed to duck out early so I tried to sneak behind this faux-chinese screen at the back edge of the room so as not to disturb the speaker or the other attendees. But the screen was deceptively flimsy, having been put together with these three little interlocking tabs instead of several panels held together by, oh I don't know, let's say a HINGE? (Pier One, I hate you and everything you stand for.) All three of the panels came apart simultaneously and I stood there holding them up and feeling like a B episode of I Love Lucy until a fairly ominous silence from the other half of the room alerted me to the fact that the speaker had stopped speaking, and the other attendees had most definitely been disturbed.

"I was trying to be unobtrusive," I said brightly. No one laughed. Which made it worse.

5. I pulled out a drawer in the desk at work and it came completely apart from the rollers, spilling pens and post it notes into my lap and onto the floor. Loudly. This, I actually managed THRICE. Mm hm. Three times. Nice of them to put the temp at the defective desk. As a subtle act of defiance in response to their courtesy, I took a bunch of the pens home with me.

So maybe it's kind of an okay thing that I'm not up for any major awards any time soon. You never see that kind of thing happening to Renee Zellweger. Of course when you have that kind of money and you do stupid things, you're known as 'eccentric'. When poor people do dumb stuff, well, it's just dumb.

And yes, Auntie Jan, I'll run those panties through the wash before I wear them again. Mea culpa.

Aloha! It's been a while since my last update so allow me to just tuck right in. Sorry for the wait but I'm feeling like it's always better to leave them wanting more. A theory that Paris Hilton is clearly unfamiliar with. That rich waif is everywhere! She'd probably come to a party at my apartment if I had a couple of photographers and some Red Bull.

By the way the comments thing is up and running, so comment away, if you are moved to do so.

Last week I had a callback for an all-girl sketch/improv group, and the auditions were being conducted at this space downtown, by the producer, we'll call him - I don't know - Byron. (You don't really meet a lot of Byrons these days. Shame, really.)

I had met with Byron and a couple of his cohorts the week before but I didn't get to actually audition for them; I had to see a guy about a bridesmaid's dress and I took off after waiting for about an hour, but I left my picture with them and I suppose it was sufficiently impressive to them to garner me another meeting. Either that or Byron is really hard up for funny girls with experience, or he's using this whole audition front as a way to meet chicks. (It's been done!) But for now we'll roll with the idea that my resume was impressive; just so my self-esteem doesn't suffer.

I just didn't get a good vibe from the guy, though. He seemed really kind of aggressive and petulant, like he was getting off on having all these people there that he could boss around. I was half expecting him to send one of us out for a latte and some high-end biscotti. I really dislike guys like this. It's a variation on the theme of guy who I always seem to wind up temping for, you know, just oozing with entitlement and self-importance. They can't expend the time or energy to be polite, it's just too depleting for them. And talk about helpless! I actually had one guy who wanted me to remind him to eat lunch. You know, I'm hoping for a degree of success in my life, too, but I guaran-freakin'-tee you that I will never need to be reminded to take meals. I take meals liberally and often and without provocation.

But I digress. He calls me, and I frankly have nothing better to do on Saturday so I figure what the hell. Of course, that decision was made before I made the decision to let Nora Cassidy experiment on me Friday night with her Apple Martinis of Death. We wound up lurching around midtown like a couple of drunk sorority girls, in a desperate search for this Chips Ahoy sandwich cookie which I'm still not convinced actually exists. (It is now my white whale.) When I woke up Saturday I wasn't too sure where I actually was, or why someone had been mixing paper mache in my mouth all night. I realllllly considered cancelling on Byron. The ninth avenue street fair beckoned to me (meat on sticks!) but like a responsible little actress, I decided to keep the appointment. I head down to the theatre and there are only a handful of other women there, but they all seem cool; we mess around for a while with some ideas that he gives us and we try to get something funny going. After a relatively short period of time, Byron (who frankly does not seem all that interested in our acting, for whatever reason) wraps things up and tells us he just wants to have a brief one-on-one conversation with us before we take off.

And that's when he fondled me.

Kidding! You thought that's where this was headed, didntcha? Dirty readers, all of you.

I go in and I'm sort of standing there gabbing with him and the other two guys there, sort of talking about what I've been doing for the past year, and so on, when Byron leans forward in his chair really purposefully and says to me, "What's going on with you right now? You're obviously very nervous."

Well, I really wasn't. I mean it was becoming more obvious by the minute that Byron was a complete dinkus; if I didn't have the opportunity to work with him that really would be very all right with me. But he startled me! I seemed nervous? Why did I seem nervous? I didn't feel nervous. What was going on with me? Anything?

I said, "No, I'm fine." And he says, "You're really projecting a lot of nervousness right now."

Yikes! Why was I projecting so much nervousness? What could this mean? I really was flummoxed. Something must be going on with me if Byron was so clearly picking up on it. Maybe I had to pee! That could be it! Sometimes if you have to pee you sort of seem like you're nervous. So I said, "Well, I sort of have to pee?" And the moment I said it, I knew it was a lie. I didn't have to pee at all. This guy was trying to do some kind of psuedo-producer mind-meld thing on me. He was the one projecting! I was fine! But having said that I had to pee, I couldn't very well go backsies on it. Byron said, "Well, go (points finger towards hall) and come back!" So I went to the bathroom, locked the door and I sort of stood there feeling like an idiot, approximating the amount of time that it would take me to actually pee. Then I went back. And as I'm sort of resuming the conversation, talking about, you know, ACTING, he leans forward in his chair again:

"Clearly you're still very nervous."

Now I was just annoyed. I mean, for one thing, if I was nervous, how would this be helping? Would being accused of being nervous make me less nervous? Is that some well-known property of nervousness physics that I missed in school? Again, I said, "No, really, I'm fine."

Then he really gets going. "Look," he said, "I'm a producer. And I can stand across the street and tell you what's going on with people. Across the street."

Clearly Byron has fascinating powers of perception. But has he ever been wrong? What if he thought that someone was flirting with him, for example, but really they just wanted some ham? Maybe these powers of perception were all fantasy, a figment of his bald imagination? It seemed to me then that he couldn't pick up on the most important emotion I was experiencing - a desperate urge to bitch-slap him.

"Well," I said. "I'm not really sure what it is you're picking up on, but it isn't nerves." He seemed satisfied with that, I guess; I was dismissed and I left and that was the end of that. I haven't heard from him which, as you can imagine, is the source of some serious disappointment for me.*

*this is a lie.

Later on that day, I met up again with Nora at the Old Navy on 6th Ave. We found cardigan shangri-la, and then we went over to Cosi to get a sandwich. Well as I'm coming back to our table I see Nora rushing out the front door and when I looked out the window, I could see that she was standing over this woman crumpled up on the sidewalk. I went out there, and Nora said that the lady had just sort of collapsed and nearly hit her head on this concrete planter. We got her to her feet and into this chair; she could hardly stand up. Nora thinks we should call an ambulance, so she calls on her cell phone and we wait with the lady, whose name is Mary. Nora is trying to figure out if maybe she's having a stroke or some kind of episode; she's an older lady but not really elderly. And she didn't seem homeless or vagrant, though she was in need of a serious manicure. (What?)Well I go inside to get us some drinks and when I come back Mary is puffing on a Parlaiment. WTF? Nora and I exchanged some loaded looks. Mine said, "Why are you letting her smoke a cigarette, she could be having a heart attack!" Nora's look said, "I know but what could I do, she's a stranger and whyistheambulancetakingsodamnlong????!!!"

Later on Nora would hesitantly confess that while I was inside getting the beverages, it dawned on her that the problem with Mary was that she had had a few beverages already. Perhaps, more than a few. Nora realized abruptly, despite lacking the high powered perceptive abilities with which Byron is so keenly in tune, that Mary was trashed.

Well, after she finishes the butt, Mary decides she's had enough of...whatever it was we were doing and she gets up. Only she's still really out of it and she almost falls again, right into the table of this woman selling these awesome anti-Bush buttons. (I bought five.) We kept saying, Wait, Mary, don't you think you should just wait for the ambulance to come and check you out? But she was off like a shot. Well, not a shot, exactly, more like jelly out of a water gun. Our good intentions had come to naught. Nora pulled out her cell phone and told the 911 dispatch to cancel the ambulance.

But as we watched Mary disappear out of sight, we were reminded of ourselves, of the apple martinis, and of the philosophical truth that is so easy to forget, and yet is so consistently shown - we are all connected.

j.d.

Confidential to JKS: I'm proud of who you are, and I'm proud to call you my friend. You're gonna rock the district and love this new life phase, I know it. Mwah!