Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

high, hanging out in bars, and having carnal knowledge of complete strangers. Discouragingly enough for those of us who want to believe that good work habits matter in life, many of these people went on to earn vast sums of money while still finding the time to continue to be attractive, get really high, hang out in bars, and have carnal knowledge of complete strangers.
    I walked outside to mingle with that day’s sybarites. Someone was using skills he received completing his MFA to sculpt a bong from a cantaloupe. It was passed around. Inhalation occurred. Minutes later, someone said dreamily, “We should get a…pizza.”
    Silence. The guy who made the suggestion looked worried.
    “Did I just say that out loud?”
    Heads nodded dreamily.
    “It is called a pizza , right?”
    Everyone besides me pondered. Eventually, someone nodded. Yes, that’s what it’s called. The CD player, showing more industry than anyone around the pool, slipped from one George Michael tune to the next. I fidgeted in my lounge chair.
    I had spent the first part of the day with a handful of attractive and quick-witted twenty-somethings who, while they existed only in my head, knew when they were talking out loud, knew their problems could be resolved in twenty-two minutes, and knew the word for pizza. These three-dimensional characters didn’t strike me as believable. Having had enough of the real world, I ran back to the sanctuary of my computer and my spiders. I had grown fond of those spiders. I had even named some of them. A few more months of this and I’d be taking their suggestions for dialogue. Perhaps I needed to reconsider my pre-midlife-crisis career change.
    Looking back, I think I was ambivalent about starting at the bottom, down in the sitcom bogs. This is not because I thought I was too grand for an entry-level assignment. No, my great fear was that my writing was just good enough to get me in at the bottom, and I would stay there forever, eventually becoming its queen. This fear was not completely irrational. Once, during ameeting, a television executive who had read my sample scripts leaned across her desk and said to me, “You’re good.”
    I tried to find an expression that said, while modest about it, I heard this all the time, and not just from my office spiders.
    She continued, “You’re not just good. You’re Saved by the Bell good.”
    I waited for the laugh to follow. She was joking, dear God let her be joking. Her expression of having bestowed upon me a great blessing didn’t change. For months afterward, I was haunted by the specter that if I worked hard and had a massive stroke of good luck I might—just possibly—write a sitcom episode that worked in a special appearance by Carrot Top.
    In the end, I didn’t stay with sitcom writing because that career path wasn’t helpful. I wanted to help. I wanted to be of service. Thanks to ninety-hour workweeks, sitcom writers are only of service when lavishly tipping the Thai-food guy. I couldn’t wait that long. I had to help now. Hiding the pets so my housemates wouldn’t get them stoned was a benevolent act but not quite enough. The answer came to me as I frowned, talked to spiders, and struggled for punch lines: I’d become a talent agent. Yes, that’s it. I’d represent actors, using my lifetime of experience in the entertainment industry to protect and serve these talented, fragile artists. The sheer simple genius of my idea caused me to stop, midword. God, it was so perfect, so logical, so helpful.
    And so wrong. I spent about two years and nearly all my remaining goodwill being a talent agent. The agency where I worked was not big but it was prestigious. We had a small roster of clients who continue to win awards and critical acclaim on a regular basis. We had a larger roster of clients whose faces makeyou stop and think, “Wasn’t he in my sister-in-law’s wedding party?” The actors I represented were worthy people and, for the most part, genuinely