Happy Accidents
Jane Lynch

Dedication

For Mom and Dad

…and every kid out there mustering up

the courage to answer the call of their

own hero’s journey

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword by Carol Burnett

1. Pontifical

2. Grand Delusions

3. Refuge

4. Normal

5. The Call of Comedy

6. Compulsion

7. Angry Lady

8. Walk Like a Man

9. Canyon Lady

10. Jobber

11. The Dangers of Flattery

12. “Perfect”

13. Feast

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

I FIRST BECAME AWARE OF JANE LYNCH WHEN I SAW the movie Best in Show.

I had turned into a Christopher Guest junkie after seeing his brilliant comedy Waiting for Guffman. He created an atmosphere of sheer mirthfulness. I loved the wonderfully talented group of actors he put together. He let his players run with their characters without the benefit of a formal script. They were not only actors but also writers and improvisers. He trusted them, and they were hysterically funny. I couldn’t wait until his next movie would be released.

That turned out to be Best in Show. Along with his regular group of actors, there was a new face, and I thought she was terrific. I looked for her name at the end of the picture: Jane Lynch. I hoped she would become one of the rep players in Christopher’s future movies. She did.

Next came A Mighty Wind, followed by For Your Consideration. In each of these films Jane played an entirely different character, with hilarious results. Later, I was bowled over by her scene-stealing role opposite Steve Carell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. These aren’t Jane’s only credits by any means, as you’ll learn when you read her down-to-earth, heartwarming (and sometimes, heartbreaking) life story.

I finally had the pleasure of not only meeting her but getting to work with her in a little-known movie, Post Grad, starring Michael Keaton. I played her mother-in-law, and most of my scenes were with Jane. The main thing I took away with me from that experience is how much Jane made me laugh even off camera. She sees the “funny” in everything.

And then came Glee. I loved the show from the get-go. I asked my agent to call the producers and let them know I’d be willing to carry a spear, or whatever, if they’d only allow me to get into their sandbox and play … preferably opposite Jane. My wish came true. I was cast as Jane’s mother, who was a former Nazi-hunter … (excuse me??). We got to sing, “Why, oh why, oh why, oh—why did I ever leave Ohio?” from the Broadway musical Wonderful Town. Did I mention that Jane has a great singing voice? Twice, I jumped up and down in front of the TV set in my living room when she won the Emmy and a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Sue Sylvester.

I remember once many years ago when I was doing The Garry Moore Show and the brilliant vaudeville comedian Ed Wynn was the guest star that week. Sitting at the writers’ table one afternoon, Ed was regaling us with tons of wonderful stories about the icons he had worked with and known throughout his illustrious career. Among those he mentioned were Bob Hope and Jack Benny. He gave us his definition of comedians, which I never forgot:

“Comics say funny things [Bob Hope] and comedic actors say things funny [Jack Benny].”

Jane is cut from the same cloth as Jack Benny. She doesn’t need a joke to get a laugh. What’s funny about her is her “take” on any character she’s playing … and I might add, because she’s a wonderful actor, she plays the character very seriously, thereby making it that much funnier.

I was honored when she asked me to write this foreword. Her story is fascinating, and she relays it without holding anything back. It’s all here, warts and all. She has gone through a lot in her life (good times and bum times) and tells about it with courage and honesty. She has come out on top as a performer and as a human being.

I’m happy to call her my friend.

—Carol Burnett

1
Pontifical

IF I COULD GO BACK IN TIME AND TALK TO MY twenty-year-old self, the first thing I would say is: “Lose the perm.” Secondly I would say: “Relax. Really. Just relax. Don’t sweat it.”

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t anxious and fearful that the parade would pass me by. And I was sure there was someone or something outside of myself with all the answers. I had a driving, anxiety-filled ambition. I wanted to be a working actor so badly. I wanted to belong and feel like I was valued and seen. Well, now I am a working actor, and I guarantee you it’s not because I suffered or worried over it.

As I look back, the road to where I am today has been a series of happy accidents I was either smart or stupid enough to take advantage of. I thought I had to have a plan, a strategy. Turns out I just had to be ready and willing to take chances, look at what’s right in front of me, and put my heart into everything I do. All that anxiety and fear didn’t help, nor did it fuel anything useful. Finally releasing that worry served to get me out of my own way. So my final piece of advice to twenty-year-old me: Be easy on your sweet self. And don’t drink Miller Lite tall boys in the morning.

I DON’T KNOW WHY, BUT I WAS BORN WITH AN EXTRA helping of angst. I would love to be able to blame this on my parents, as I’m told this is good for book sales. But I can’t.

Enjoying a Very Merry Breakfast, Christmas 1980.

I grew up in a family that was pure Americana. We lived in Dolton, Illinois, one of the newly founded villages south of Chicago created to house the burgeoning middle class. We were like the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting, except it was the 1960s and ’70s, so he would have had to paint us with bell-bottoms and a stocked liquor cabinet. I didn’t settle into myself as a child, but the family I had around me was entertaining and embraced the life we had.

My dad, Frank, was a classic Irish-Catholic cutup. He was always singing a ditty, dancing a soft-shoe, or cracking wise while mixing a cocktail. He was almost bald by the time he was nineteen, and every day he’d smear Sea & Ski sun lotion on top of his naked head, then slap a little VO5 onto his hands and smooth the ring of hair around the sides with a flourish. “How do you like that?” he’d say to himself in the mirror, and sing under his breath, “I’ve got things to do, places to go, people to see.” And after that daily Sea & Ski ritual, damn if he still didn’t end up getting skin cancer on his pate. However, it would be lung cancer that took my dad from us in 2003, and I miss him every day.

I can remember my dad, when I was really young—so young, it’s like Vaseline over the memory—dancing with me in the living room. “Do you come here often?” he’d ask, twirling me around and singing along with Sid Caesar: “Pardon me miss, but I’ve never done this … with a real live girl …”

My dad also did a bang-up Bing Crosby. I loved it when he sang, and we never had to wait very long for it. He’d sing while putting sugar in his coffee, while buffing his shoes, or for no reason at all. He’d make up songs about us, the more ridiculous the better: To the tune of “Val-deri, Val-dera,” he’d sing “Janeeree, Jane-erah.” My nickname became simply Eree-Erah. He added –anikins or -erotomy to the end of anyone’s name. My older sister was Julie-anikins, my younger brother, Bob-erotomy. One of his favorite joyous exclamations was “Pon-TIFF! Pon-TIFF!” from the word “pontifical,” which was his way of saying “fabulous.” And “My cup runneth over” was boiled down to “My cup! My cup!” Speaking of cup, coffee was coffiticus, my mom was L.T. (Long Thing, because she was tall), and the phone was the telephonic communicator. We would roll our eyes or feign embarrassment—but we all wanted to be the subject of Dad’s silliness, to be a part of his joy.

The Lynch family in red, white, and blue for the 4th of July, circa 1964 (I’m on the right).

Each day, when Dad came home from his job at the bank, the first thing he’d do was put his keys and spare change into the saddlebags of the little ceramic Chihuahua that sat on his dresser. Then he and my mom would indulge in their nightly cocktail ritual with their favorite drink, Ten High Whiskey. Dad had his with ginger ale and Mom had hers with water, and they’d toast with the words “First today, badly needed.” Dad would say, “L.T., let’s get some atmosphere!” and they’d dim the lights and start singing something from My Fair Lady, Dad harmonizing perfectly to my mom’s melody.

Banks were closed on Wednesday, and my dad loved his day off. It started at Double D (Dunkin’ Donuts) because he loved their coffiticus and the chocolate cake donut. Wearing his blue elasticized “putter pants,” he would check off items on his to-do list. He was forever singing something goofy under his breath; “liver, bacon, onions …” was a favorite. He wanted us to be as enthusiastic as he was about his accomplishments. If Wednesday’s lawn work went unnoticed for its superior greenness, he’d plead, “Rave a little! Rave a little!”

Dad goes after Mom with our new electric knife.

My mom, Eileen Lynch (nee Carney), was, and still is, gorgeous. Tall and blond, with navy blue eyes and beautiful long legs, she never failed to turn heads. She always had a nice tan in the summer. And she’s a clotheshorse who never pays full price … ever … unlike her middle kid. To this day (and she is now in her eighty-second year) she puts on an outfit every morning. She’s classy down to her socks. She would kill me if she saw the comfort shoes I sneak under those long award-show gowns, especially because we have been known to watch hours and hours of What Not to Wear together. I share her love of fashion— I just don’t have her eye, or the figure to look fabulous in anything off-the-rack like she does.

Mom is half-Swedish and half-Irish, but the Swedish tends to win out. She can get sentimental, but for the most part, she’s strong and independent and doesn’t suffer fools, show-offs, or braggarts, and of course I’m nothing if not a foolish bragging show-off. Somehow, she manages to love me anyway.

But when Mom opens her mouth, she’s hilarious, though mostly she doesn’t mean to be. She’s a bit spacey, and her synapses don’t fire as fast as the rest of ours. She has always been unperturbed by her oblivion—and barely fazed when she finally gets the joke.

Her eyeglasses were always full of fingerprints, smudges, and pancake batter. I’d take them off her head, wash them with dish detergent, then put them back on. “Wow!” she’d exclaim, seeing what she had been missing.

She is absolutely frank with her opinions and literal in her interpretations. In our family she was the perfect “straight man” to the hijinks.

Our house ran like clockwork. All five of us sat down to dinner at the same time every day, after which Mom would have another cocktail, and maybe another. Dad would watch the news, and at 10 P.M. he’d eat a Hershey bar with almonds and settle in for Johnny Carson’s monologue. After that, it was time for bed.

My parents truly loved each other, and almost always got along. If you ask Mom now about their life together, the only negative comment she’d come up with is “Sometimes he’d bug me.” She had to have at least one criticism; she’s Swedish. Dad, on the other hand, had no criticism of my mother. And for a man in the sixties, my dad really got women—he understood and loved them. Once, when he had to go buy my mom Kotex at the store, the guy at the counter, embarrassed, slipped them into a paper bag. He started to carry them outside, so my dad could take the bag where no one would see, but my dad just laughed. “It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t need to sneak out the back door.”

Apparently my mother was unaware that witches don’t have vampire teeth or wear sunglasses. With Dad and first grandbaby, Megan.

He also liked women’s company more than men’s. For a number of years when I was a kid, we went on vacation to summer cottages in Paw Paw, Michigan. The guys would all go play golf while the women sat on the beach. My dad would stay with the women, sitting under an umbrella in his swim trunks, with Sea & Ski slathered all over his pasty white body, chatting the afternoon away.

THOUGH WE WERE ONLY TWO YEARS APART, JULIE AND I were totally different. From the moment I was born, she was looking to create her own family because she now wanted out of ours. She loved dolls, little kids, and telling people what to do. She was thin and pretty, with long blond hair—the Marcia Brady to my Jan.

But Julie had a great sense of humor—we all did, thanks to our parents, who taught us by example that being the butt of the joke is a badge of honor. Julie was the space cadet, so we Lynches would mock her in a high-pitched dumb-blonde voice that made her giggle. We were not a thin-skinned people.

And although Julie and I fought like crazy, we insisted on sharing not only the same room but the same bed the whole time I was growing up. I still don’t know why. I mean, we hated each other. When I recently asked her what was up with that, she had no answer either. On the same ironic note, we also wrote words to The Newlywed Game theme song about how much we loved being sisters. “Everybody knows who we are / We’re not brothers, you’re a bit too far / We are sisters by far!” I shared the writing credit for this masterpiece with Julie, but in truth, I wrote it all by myself.

My brother, Bob, was the much-awaited son. Dad was ecstatic when he came along two years after me, thinking he’d finally get to partake in the classic American father-son ritual of playing catch. But Bob was shy and not athletic, and he couldn’t have cared less about classic American rituals. I, on the other hand, was a huge tomboy and wanted nothing more than to play baseball from sunup to sundown. I would have killed to play Little League baseball, unlike Bob, who dutifully put on his little uniform every Saturday but just hated it. My dad did enjoy throwing the ball with me, but I always felt like he’d rather have played with Bob.

Unlike me, Bob was quiet, and he did everything he could to avoid getting any attention. Even when he was little, he refused to wear clothes that matched because he didn’t want it to look like he’d tried. He just wanted to blend into the background, which I, the family ham, did not understand at all. Dad would clap him on the back and say, “That’s my boy!” which only caused Bob to shrink in embarrassment. All I could think was I’ll be your boy!

I always felt like I got the middle-child shaft. My parents had their hands full with whatever Julie was demanding at the moment, or they were worried about why Bob was hiding in his room listening to Led Zeppelin. I was the easy one, and I thought that would get me something. I kept offering myself up to occupy the space Bob kept turning down. But I just didn’t have a place. So, of course, the frustration would build and build until I finally pitched a fit: “No one pays attention to ME!” For them it seemed to come from nowhere, and they’d look at me like I had ten heads. I just wanted a little attention.

There was never much discipline in our family, not to mention academic supervision. I’d bring home my report card, and no matter what my grades were, Dad would barely glance at it and then sign it with a flourish and say, “That and a quarter will get you a cup of coffee.” Mom might occasionally throw her hands up and say, “How come nobody brings a book home? Nobody studies around here!” We wouldn’t answer, and she’d forget about it as we all went back to watching Gilligan’s Island. Six months later, she’d say it again: “How come nobody brings a book home?”

On my first-grade report card, my teacher wrote, “Jane does not take pride in her work. She spends too much time talking and visiting.” My mother wrote back, “I spoke to Jane about this and she has promised to do better.” I’m sure that never happened. I could no more stop myself from talking and cutting up than I could stop the earth from turning.

Whether at home or at school, I’d do anything to get laughs or attention. When the phone would ring, I’d rush to it and answer in a baby-talk voice that cracked the family up—“Well hellooooo, who’s calling, please?” Once, when I was about eight, my mom got on the phone after I’d answered it, and I could tell she was defending me. “Well, that was my daughter …. She’s eight …. I beg your pardon!” And she slammed down the phone. I am pretty sure the person on the other end asked if I was developmentally delayed.

My sister was embarrassed by my antics, but my brother, the quiet one, would be smirking in a corner. He was supremely dry in his humor, and because he was so shy, it snuck up on you. He’d come up with a particularly witty youthful retort like “someone’s got their panties in a wad.” I’d watch him walk away so pleased with his little quip that he’d relive the moment by mouthing it silently.

Once, again when I was about eight, my brother was listening to his transistor radio. He kept switching the earpiece from one ear to the other, which I thought was his idea of a joke. “You can’t do that,” I said. “You can only hear out of one ear.”

“No, I can hear out of both,” he answered. And that was how I discovered I was deaf in my right ear. I really thought that everyone could only hear out of one ear, because for as long as I could remember, that had been true for me.

I told my mother that I couldn’t hear out of my right ear, and she took me to the doctor to get checked out. Turns out I have nerve deafness, probably a result of a high fever when I was a baby. My parents had taken me to the hospital, where I was put on ice to bring the fever down, but the right ear must have been already damaged.

I didn’t think too much of it, since I’d been doing fine all this time. But I could hear my mom saying to the doctor in a hushed tone, “Will she live a normal life?” I think this was my mom’s constant concern for me, reflecting her Midwestern priority list, on which “normal life” came right after “food” and “shelter.” But I was thrilled with the diagnosis, because I was finally special—and getting some attention.

It came in handy, too—when I wanted to take revenge on a bully in elementary school. I was a safety patrol officer, which meant I wore an orange vest and helped kids cross the street. When one boy whacked me in the head as he crossed, I pretended he had deafened my one good ear. I made a big deal out of it, holding my head and looking scared, and they called the kid’s mom in. Someone yelled, “CAN YOU HEAR ME?” while I just shook my head and flailed my arms. That kid was in trouble.

AS MUCH AS I JOKED AROUND, AND AS LOVING AS MY parents were, I still always felt a weird, dark energy bottled up inside. Even as a very young kid, I had a sense I was missing out on something. My body was filled with a buzzing nervous tension that constantly threatened to erupt in what my mother came to call “thrashing.”

Whenever the pent-up energy got to be too much, I’d throw myself to the floor and pitch a fit. I’d flail my arms and kick my legs, rolling around like I was possessed. It wasn’t even that I was angry or upset—it was just that I couldn’t take the built-up pressure. I had to release that energy somehow, and the only way that I knew was to have a total spazz-out on the floor.

“Get up! Stop thrashing!” Mom would shriek. She had absolutely no idea what I was doing or why. But I couldn’t get up or stop—not until I’d spewed out whatever was bottled up inside me. It never lasted very long, as I wasn’t really that upset. It was more like this was something my body needed to do—a sudden physical cataclysm, like a violent sneeze.

The problem was, I just never felt quite right—in my body, with my family, in the world. As much fun as I had with my parents, sister, and brother, I still felt like an outsider, like no one understood me at all.

These feelings scared me, so I would joke about them. “I know you adopted me,” I’d announce gravely to my mother. “I know I came from the Greens, down the street.” There were no Greens living on our street, but that was part of the joke. I didn’t belong anywhere, to anyone. I was alone.

I not only felt out of place in my family, I also felt out of place in my own body. Growing up, I didn’t feel like the other girls seemed to feel. I wanted to be a boy. I loved Halloween, because I could dress up as a guy—I was a hobo, a pirate, a ghost who wore a tie, and one year I was excited to dress as Orville Wright for a book report on the Wright Brothers. I went bare chested in the summers until I was eight and my mom finally pulled the plug on that. She grabbed me off my bike and sent me into the house. “Put a shirt on!!” Watching Disney movies, I wanted to be the heroic prince—not the weak, girly, pathetic princess who always needed rescuing. I had no interest in being saved by a guy on a white horse.

Whenever I could get away with it, I’d sneak into my dad’s room and put on his clothes. I loved everything in his closets— his suits, his button-down shirts, his ties, his shoes. I’d dress myself up, fill his martini glass with water, and look at myself in the mirror, sipping my “cocktail” like the quintessential sixties man I longed to be. It was very Mad Men. (This past year I went trick-or-treating as Don Draper. Some things never change.)

I embraced the melodramatic potential of all these feelings clashing around in my body. “No one understands me!” I would cry, hurling myself onto my bed in tears. As I saw it, there was only one person in the world who ever understood me, and he had died on my fourth birthday. My grandfather.

I actually have no idea if Grandpa understood me at all, but this was a useful notion for an emotionally overwrought child to cling to. The family lore was that whenever I came over, he would shout, “Here comes the house wrecker!” He adored me, a truth that seemed obvious enough in one of the few surviving photographs of us together. It was taken in June of 1964, just before my fourth birthday. My sister and I are wearing matching dresses and playing near my grandfather, who is beaming at me with a look of pure love.

Grandpa beams adoringly at me. Oh, and Julie’s there, too.

The fact that he died soon after that picture was taken and on my birthday only added to the mystique, and for years afterward, whenever I felt sad or alone, I’d think to myself, If only Grandpa were alive. He would have appreciated me.

I just wanted to believe that someone, somewhere, understood me. And since Grandpa wasn’t an option, I went for the next best person: Mary Tyler Moore. I watched a lot of television and loved The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Soon, I began imagining myself as a character in it. I’d write scenes for myself, where I’d go to Mary for advice, and she’d look into my eyes and say, “Jane, you are so special.” In my scenes, Mary and I had a very sweet, tender relationship. She got me.

When I was twelve, the feeling that I was odd and misunderstood jumped to a whole new level. That was the year my friends the Stevenson twins gave a name to another feeling I’d been having.

Jill and Michelle Stevenson were in my class at school, and every year during spring break they went with their parents to South Florida. They told me about a weird thing they’d seen there. “Sometimes,” Jill said, “you’ll see boys holding hands with each other on the beach, instead of with girls. It’s because they’re gay.”

They could already procure a tone of scandal and disgust, as if the subject were the sexual proclivities of circus freaks. I just stood there in shock.

Oh my god, I thought, that’s what I have. I’m the girl version of that.

No sooner had this thought burst into my head than another followed: No one can ever, ever know. I may have only just learned what being “gay” meant, but I knew instinctively it was a disease and a curse. I’d always had crushes on girls and hadn’t really thought too much about it. But watching the Stevenson twins’ mortification about the South Florida boys told me everything I needed to know: being “gay” was sick and perverse, and if you had the misfortune of being that way, you’d better hope no one ever found out.

2
Grand Delusions

LIKE ANY GOOD, CLOSETED YOUNG LESBIAN OF THE seventies, I developed a raging crush on Ron Howard.

Not a well-known fact, but many young lesbians have gay boyfriends, or crushes so safe they might as well be gay. Happy Days was my favorite TV show, and Ron, who played all-American boy Richie Cunningham, was cute, boyish, and asexual—all Mayberry and apple pie. I thought Anson Williams, who played Potsie, was cute, too, but less so. As I wrote in my scrapbook, he was just “pretty good foxy.”

Ron and Anson came to town in the summer of 1974, just after I turned fourteen, to promote Happy Days. When they were on WGN, the big talk radio station in Chicago, I called in and said, matter-of-factly, “Hi, I’m fourteen and I want to be an actress.” I don’t remember exactly what Ron said, but it was something sensible like “Stay in school, be in plays, and then when you get out of college, if you still want to do it, you should come to Los Angeles.” Then, Anson Williams piped up: “Jane, here’s what you should do,” he said. “Go downtown to the Screen Actors Guild, get a list of agents, and start writing to them.”

My desirability assessments of the stars of TV’s Happy Days.

This was stupid advice to give to a fourteen-year-old girl in Chicago—especially one whose entire acting résumé consisted of a couple of school plays and a sixth-grade talent show where I pretended to play the guitar. But I didn’t know that. I decided Anson was right, so not long afterward, when I was downtown with my parents, I made sure we stopped by the Screen Actors Guild office so I could get a list of talent agents in Chicago. An office assistant made a copy on mimeographed paper for me, and I went home and wrote them all letters. Our family had visited Universal Studios on a vacation to California the previous summer, so I sent a letter off to them as well. I watched the credits of The Brady Bunch, to see who cast the show, and wrote them a note of my availability while I was at it. I think I even sent a school picture.

Needless to say, the talent agents and studio executives did not come knocking. But one afternoon, maybe six months later, I finally did get a reply. It was from the office of Monique James, the head of casting for Universal Studios.

Okay, so it was from Linda, assistant to the casting director, who perhaps was taking this opportunity to feel better about her assistant status by crushing the dream of a young girl in suburban Chicago. And … she spelled my name wrong. And … it was just about the most unencouraging letter she could have possibly sent.

An observant child, or maybe just one who wasn’t completely delusional, would have felt dismissed by this. But I was over the moon—it was on Universal letterhead! Yes, they got my name wrong, but Jamie is such a cute name! I was never a fan of my name anyway. I was so buoyed by the letter that I put it in my scrapbook. Linda Abbott and Monique James might have thought I would never come to Hollywood, but in my mind I was trying to figure out travel plans.

I had known early on, almost out of the chute, that I wanted to be an actress. My first theatrical experience happened at the age of about five, when my parents took me to see a school play one of the neighborhood kids was in. I remember going into the dark theater, and when the lights came up, there was this whole world that came out of nowhere. It was alive and bright and you could see that everyone had makeup on.

We were sitting very close to the stage, and as part of the play, there was a little kid in a cage, playing a bird. I remember thinking, Let the bird out of the cage, let him out! That is how real it was to me. I was transfixed by the whole experience, as if I were watching magic happen right in front of me.

My folks loved to sing and perform themselves, and even more so with an audience. This was post–World War II cocktail culture, and Rodgers and Hammerstein weren’t the only ones exploring the world through song and dance. Our parish church, St. Jude’s, put on a show every year called Port o’ Call, and this was the highlight of my parents’ performing lives. The various schoolrooms at St. Jude’s were transformed into McGinty’s Irish tavern, full of revelers, or a Hawaiian luau with grass-skirted hula dancers, or a risqué German cabaret for which the neighbor ladies donned fishnets, eliciting hoots and howls. The audience would go from room to room, taking in various spectacles from other ports of call. I was there with my parents every night until the final bow was taken. I was absolutely riveted by the frenzied backstage energy of putting on a show. I remember the smells and the sights, the thick pancake makeup, and how they all dropped trou in full view of one another in the tiny cloakroom that served as the dressing room. All the adults were so focused and engaged when they put on these shows. And I was literally beside myself with elation to be among this business called show.

Dad sings “Look to the Rainbow” in the Irish Room, St. Jude’s Port o’ Call show.

But to my parents this was something you did for fun, not for a living. My mom was not on board with my plan to become an actress. As I wrote those letters to agents at our dining room table, she asked, “Who are you writing to?” When I told her, she spoke to me in that flat voice of Midwestern reality.

“Janie, you know, people can’t always do what they want to do,” she said. “And it’s probably not realistic to think you’ll be a Hollywood star.” To her, my saying I wanted to be an actress was a little like saying I wanted to be an elf. “Well, honey,” she’d have said, “you can dress up as one, and you can have fun as one, but you’re not gonna be one.”

I’m sure that to Mom, this was just realistic motherly advice, like telling me to stay out of traffic. She wanted to convince me to dream a little less big, to protect me from heartache—but of course her words just made things worse. Sitting there at the dining room table, I started to cry from the depths of my soul, feeling my life was over before it had begun.

My mother felt terrible. She tried to console me, saying she wanted me to be the best actress I could be, but that I should be careful of aiming too high. Years later, she’d tell me that until that moment, she’d had no idea how dead serious I was about being an actress. But that realization didn’t change her message. She would reluctantly support me in the years ahead, but she still wanted me to have a backup plan, which usually involved learning to type.

About five months after getting the Universal letter, I got a reply to a fan letter I had sent to Vicki Lawrence, a star of The Carol Burnett Show, a program I so loved and wanted to be on that it hurt just thinking about it. She sent me an autographed photo, a soft-focus headshot of her gazing meaningfully into the camera, her hair gently feathered. It came with a form fan letter printed on blue paper, but at the bottom she’d written a note: “Janie, Keep working hard, learning, & be determined & positive!”

Vicki Lawrence wrote me back!

I knew that Vicki had gotten on The Carol Burnett Show because of a fan letter she’d written to Carol. So, of course, I had the fantasy that my letter to Vicki would produce the same result. The fact that it didn’t was of no consequence to me—I’d received a personal note from Vicki Lawrence. And she’d even spelled my name right.

These snippets of encouragement were huge to me—my bubble was now un-burstable. I pasted Vicki’s letter and photo into my scrapbook, along with the Universal letter and my Ron Howard photos, and continued forward.

SPEAKING OF MY SCRAPBOOK, I DUG IT OUT RECENTLY and was delighted to find it was a proud monument to absolute mediocrity.

Included are my report cards (mostly Bs and Cs), in addition to other cherished mementos of averageness:

 An “Award for Achievement” from Vandenberg Elementary School—the award they gave to kids who didn’t win an award.

 A handwritten schedule for my basketball team, the Dirksen Junior High “B” team, showing a final record of three wins and eleven losses.

 Ribbons for third-place finishes in a 1975 swim meet.

I appear to be greatly amused by my own mediocrity, writing silly notes in the margins throughout the scrapbook:

 Beside my basketball numerals, which were awarded to benchwarmers (starting players received letters), I wrote in all caps: “AGAIN! HA HA!”

 Next to a note from my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Gerson, that read “Mr. & Mrs. Lynch, Jane has put forth much more effort recently. She is doing better work and behaving better. I hope this continues,” I scribbled: “It didn’t! HA!”

 Beside the letter from Universal, in which my name had been misspelled, I wrote: “Jamie, Ha ha! I think I’ll keep it.” On the next page, I pasted the envelope the letter had come in, highlighting its return address of the “New Talent” department. I wrote, “New Talent! That’s me!”

There is no Volume #2.

I did not like his singing. I did not write a letter asking when he would sing again.

Of course, not everything in the scrapbook was a monument to mediocrity. There was also a photo postcard from Anson Williams, who kept writing me for some reason, with a handwritten note on the back.

As I recall, when Anson sang he sounded like a Lawrence Welk baritone. Not my cup of tea, so I never did his bidding. (Besides, he was only “pretty good foxy.”)

DURING FRESHMAN YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL, I WAS CAST as The King in a one-act production of The Ugly Duckling (the beginning, incidentally, of a lifelong pattern of being cast in roles originally intended for men). I was thrilled out of my mind—this was what I wanted to do with my life! This was my dream, and now I was officially taking the first step toward fulfilling it.

My name appeared in the school newspaper, The Bagpipe, along with those of the rest of the cast, and by all appearances, I was on my way. But when we started rehearsals, I found myself paralyzed with fear—the fear of blowing it. So … I quit the play and joined the tennis team instead.

I don’t think anyone understood why I had quit. I’m sure I didn’t. I know now it was out of pure terror. I was face-to-face with my destiny and I walked away from it rather than risk failure.

In my scrapbook, I pasted the article about The Ugly Duckling, then right next to it, I pasted another article about the tennis team. Underneath, I wrote this: “Had to drop out of play because of tennis, but mostly because I couldn’t get my character. Darn!” Obviously I had either read something or heard someone talk about the importance of “getting your character,” and I used that to feel better about what I had done. My poor little fourteen-year-old self had no idea how to process this.

But deep down inside, I knew I had killed the thing I most wanted in the world. I couldn’t stand to stay away, though, so I signed up to work on the stage crew. Stage crew—when I could have been in the thing! In the official program for the evening of one-acts, I made little check marks next to all my friends who were in the cast and crew—and I put a little star by my own name. I was putting on a brave face, but inside I was crushed.

My poor little conflicted self!

Making things even worse, I was now officially branded a quitter. In the spring of my freshman year, I tried out for another play, but I didn’t get chosen. One girl who got a part told my sister, Julie, it was because I’d quit The Ugly Duckling. When the same thing happened with Man of La Mancha—I was even passed over for the chorus!—I realized with dread that at age fourteen, my acting career was already over.

One night, as my parents sipped their “first today, badly needed” cocktails, I poured my heart out to them at the kitchen table. I cried as I explained why everything was ruined, and my mom tried to soothe me. “You made one mistake, Janie,” she said. “It doesn’t mean your life is over.”

But I was inconsolable. I started having dreams in which every one I knew had gotten a part in a play, and I was the only one who was left out. All these years later, I still have those dreams. And when I wake up, I hug my Emmy.

MEANWHILE, MY SISTER, JULIE, MADE THE POM-POM Squad. Julie was a big eye-roller, especially with me. She was always bugged by my corny jokes and goofy faces at home, but when I was about to be a freshman in the high school where she was a junior, she was wracked with fear that I would embarrass her. She was skinny and cute and looked like she just walked out of the Sears catalogue. I was clumsy and silly and had a belly. At the breakfast table, she’d say, “Okay! Get all the goofiness out now, before we go to school. Now! Get it out! Get it out! Get it out!”

My sister and I couldn’t have been more different. She went through a neatness phase where, every morning, she’d make the bed—but because I slept later than she did, I was usually still in it.

“Just slide out!” she’d say. “Don’t mess it up!”

I was a slob, so she didn’t want me touching her stuff or wearing her clothes. And she was right—I don’t know if it was the oil in my hands or what, but I had a way of ruining anything I touched. Everyone would get the same paperback math books at the beginning of the year, and somehow, by the end, mine would be completely destroyed—smudged black, dog-eared, bent cover. Everyone else’s was pristine, while mine looked like I’d taken a bath with it.

So my sister, sensibly enough, wouldn’t let me wear her clothes. “Don’t even touch them!” she said. “You’ll ruin them, or stretch them out, or both.” She even went to the trouble of locking her favorite pair of jeans to the hanging rod of our closet, through the belt loop. Which meant I had no choice but to cut them off. When she saw me strutting down the hall wearing them, she shrieked aloud. As I passed her, she mouthed, “I’m going to kill you.” I’m pretty sure I didn’t care one way or another about those jeans. I simply enjoyed tormenting her.

I tormented her in other ways, too. She wanted nothing more than to be able to sing, but the family musicality eluded her. So when I caught her in the downstairs bathroom pouring her heart into a pitchy rendition of “Edelweiss” into a tape recorder, I had to play it for all her friends.

Yet my goofiness and ability to woo with humor worked in Julie’s favor, too. There was a group of “cool girls” that she wanted so badly to hang out with. She was invisible to them. Despite the fact that she was blond and pretty, her shyness could be paralyzing. She wanted me to come to the rescue.

Two members of this cool group of girls were Carol, the good-time party girl, and June, the wholesome sweetheart who reminded me of Julie Andrews. They were both in my second-semester Algebra I class. I had barely passed the first and was hanging on by a thread as the second semester began.

When I told Julie that these girls were in my class, she instructed me on how to win them over for her: get them to laugh at me so they’d ask me to go out with them one weekend. I would then bring Julie with me. I said, “What am I, your clown?” This question didn’t really need an answer.

By the second week, the class was lost for me as far as the algebra was concerned. I obediently became the class clown and a pain in the teacher’s ass. I remember Carol and June doubled over laughing at what I’m sure were my hilarious shenanigans. They invited me to hang out with them one Friday night and I brought Julie with me. We hopped into several cars, cracked open beers, and drove around town. This was a huge group of girls, about fifteen of them. And they were a delightful mix of personalities: some were cheerleaders, some were popular, some not so much, some got straight A’s, some loved to party (my subgroup). What we all had in common was we loved to laugh and hang out. We had our own language and inside jokes. We’d scream from car windows as we drove by the boys hanging out in the St. Jude parking lot, “What’s your gimmick?!” This would just crack us up. I’m still not sure why we found this so funny.

I had started drinking in my freshman year of high school. At first, it was just a little Boone’s Farm or a beer here and there, but by my junior year, I was drinking every night. And now my new friends and I would party hearty on weekends together. We went to football games and Flings (school dances). We’d have keggers at one another’s house. There was no drinking behind my parents’ backs, though: it was all in the open. It was a drinking culture all round in this neck of the woods in the late 1970s. Our house was the place to go for singing and drinking. We’d sit around the kitchen table, and Mom and Dad would tell stories and sing songs from their youth. My favorite was their two-part harmony rendition of “Coney Island,” a peppy 1920s tune. My new friends adored my parents and couldn’t get enough of them.

My parents were creatures of their era—they loved to drink and throw parties. As soon as I was old enough to think of it, I’d sneak downstairs after everyone had gone and take sips out of the leftover drinks. I also liked relighting the cigarette butts that people had left behind, so I could practice smoking. Once, when my dad caught me lighting up outside (I was about twelve, and I had literally picked up a butt out of the gutter in front of our house), I overheard him proudly telling Mom in the kitchen, “She’s out there smokin’ like a pro!”

When my mom would have a few drinks, she might get a bit sloppy and sentimental, and my dad would gently prod her upstairs to bed. But no matter what she drank the night before, she never, ever had a hangover. She’d be up at five in the morning, bright-eyed and ready for the day. So drinking just seemed like a lot of fun. And with this new group of girlfriends, I was starting to do it for real, with the sole aim of getting wasted.

To the manner born.

My friend Peggy Quinn’s house was another fun place to party. Unlike the Lynches, the Quinns were good Irish Catholics who dutifully produced a tribe of redheaded children with saint names. What made their house the best place in the world, as far as I was concerned, was that Mr. Quinn had a keg in the basement. I don’t remember that we were allowed to drink from it, but I was captivated by the idea of it. He had a keg … in his basement.

I remember Big Jim Quinn sipping a glass of his Special Export out on his front porch and me out there with him, shooting the breeze upon a summer’s evening. I guess I felt comfortable enough to tell him the secret I had only ever told my mom, Ron Howard, and Anson Williams: I wanted to be an actress. I think he was the first grown-up who took me seriously. Instead of telling me to learn to type or some other surefire way to make a living, Mr. Quinn said, “You get out there and do that, Jane. And be sure to thank me when you get that Academy Award.”

I flunked that second-semester Algebra I class, by the way, but the class wasn’t a total loss. I had successfully pimped myself out for my sister and got us both into one of the popular cliques. But even in the midst of all the parties and goofing around, I still had that feeling that I was on the fringes of life and not genuinely a part of the world around me. Much of it had to do with my big gay secret and the fantasy life it spawned. I was noticing a different girl every week, but the one I fixated on most was in that same Algebra class, and she was deaf. I imagined romantically rescuing her from her alienated existence and making her feel that her thoughts and dreams were understood. I realize now that I wanted so desperately to be rescued that I projected it all on to her. But to a high school freshman that was irrelevant. I would blissfully slip into daydreaming about sweeping her off her feet whenever the teacher started writing equations.

What I didn’t know was that soon I would meet someone with whom I would feel connected and understood—my own unlikely version of Prince Charming.

3
Refuge

CHRIS AND I FIRST SPOTTED EACH OTHER ACROSS the crowded floor at a dance at St. Jude’s the beginning of our sophomore year. How I missed noticing him all of our freshman year at Thornridge High, I don’t know. But there he was: smaller than the rest of the guys, hair dyed bright red, and extremely fey. I was taken aback, yet attracted at the same time.

He seemed to see something in me, too. He sidled over to where I was standing, scanned me up and down, and said, “Hmmm … we’re going to have a lot of fun together.”

My friend Josephine, who was standing with me by the door, giggled. She thought he liked me and wanted to go out with me.

But I knew that wasn’t what he meant.

What he meant was that we had found a soul mate in each other, and he was right. We quickly became inseparable best buds. We even gave each other nicknames—he was “Gwiz” and I was “Trix”—just because we thought nicknames were stupid, and it was fun to make fun of stupid things.

Like me, Chris was not your typical teenager from Dolton, Illinois. But unlike me, he couldn’t have cared less.

Chris had a big mouth, and when I say this I don’t just mean he was loud (although he often was). I mean his mouth was enormous. Mine was nothing to sneeze at either. We talked about lots of things with those mouths of ours, but the fact that we were both gay was not one of them.

I had been a pretty solid rule-follower prior to meeting Chris. Chris lived to ignore or, if possible, destroy all rules. He reveled in questioning those in authority and throwing the ridiculousness of their rules back at them. Yes, he stuck out. But he just walked through the world exactly as he was—a goofy, funny, quirky guy. For the first time in my life, I felt like I’d found a kindred spirit—even if my spirit was not as fully exposed. I could look at him and see something of who I was reflected back.

“Jane is fine. Chris is fine. But Jane and Chris are trouble.”

Chris seemed to live to make me laugh. I would be walking down the stairs between classes at Thornridge High School, and suddenly, a few steps above me, a guy would trip and tumble down the stairs, arms flailing wildly and books flying past. He would land with a thud at the bottom, then look up at me, all Cheshire cat. It would be Chris, throwing himself down the stairs to crack me up. Again. My own private Stooge.

He loved to make prank phone calls, which gave me anxiety. He was sly and could be snarky and loved to shock people, especially adults. They never knew what hit them. Once, he said to our Spanish teacher, “Your hair is such a beautiful shade of red—why do you dye the roots black?”

On Sundays, he was the organist at St. Jude’s. For most of the service, he would play standard church fare, but if you listened closely to his incidental music after Communion, you would hear the dulcet strains of something like “Afternoon Delight,” played in minor chords. He’d catch my eye and solemnly mouth the words: “Gonna grab some afternoon deliiight …” No one mocked piety like Chris.

He was also immune to Catholic guilt, despite St. Jude’s doing everything in their power to break his defiance. He had been in school there from first to eighth grade, and the one person who seemed to be on his side was the hip young priest we all loved because he related to us kids. And it turns out, he did, but not in the way we thought. We later discovered this priest was actually a pervert (the extent of his misdeeds have only recently come to light when he was removed from public ministry in 2005). He’d targeted Chris at one point: when he was in seventh grade, the guy had tried to show him his underwear drawer at the rectory, asking him, “Have you ever seen a grown man naked?” (hopefully unintentional in his quoting of Peter Graves’s line in Airplane). Before he could get any further, Chris said, “If you touch me, my father will kill you,” whereupon young Chris was sent on his way. Christopher John Patrick would not be intimidated by anyone.

My whole family adored Chris, but no one more than my sister, Julie, who loved it when he made fun of her dumb-blonde ways. She begged him to mock her. He had heard the tape of her attempting to sing “Edelweiss” and was merciless in his imitation of it. She loved it. “Do it again!” she’d plead. She also loved that he colored his hair and cared about how he looked, and he played it up for her. A few years back, my dad was battling that awful lung cancer and we were all so devastated. But Chris called and said, “Tell Julie I had a full face-lift.” She belly laughed hard for the first time in a long time. He knew just what to say. (He lied. He’d actually only had a partial one ….)

One Ash Wednesday, Chris convinced me to cut choir, my favorite class, and go with him to the Chicken Unlimited across the street. Over Cokes and fries, we used cigarette ashes to make crosses on each other’s forehead, intoning, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” When we got back to school, we told the campus cop we had been at Mass. Nothing was sacred.

On the flip side of this disregard for our family faith, Chris had a love, a reverence even, for the pageantry of the Catholic Church. On Friday nights, when most of Thornridge High was drinking itself silly at a kegger, Chris and I, plus our pal John Carr, would do what we called a “church tour.” John was another sly and witty fellow, soon to come out of the closet. His other big secret was that he wanted to be a priest.

John Carr hearing confession in Man of La Mancha.

Back in the late seventies, some churches kept their doors unlocked because they were supposed to be a place of refuge, a place you should be able to enter at any time to escape whatever was chasing you. We knew which ones on the city’s south side were kept open, and we high school snots snuck in. We were usually drunk and doing poppers and giggling our heads off, but there would always come a moment when it got absolutely serious. We would perform the Mass, and we’d mean it. If Chris could unlock the organ, he’d play the entrance hymn, and if not, he’d hum it solemnly. My role was to lead the imaginary congregation in song. John would play the priest, making his ceremonial walk up the aisle toward the altar, kissing the good book and performing all the other ritualistic gestures, and begin the Mass.

If we could get into the confessional booths, we would take turns playing priest to the others’ confessor. We would mostly goof around pretending to be people from our own parish. We had them coming clean on ridiculous sins like having VD or something. Chris told me that John would actually confess to him. Of course, Chris wasn’t really a priest, so he told me everything. John told him that he was afraid he was gay; that he missed his dad, who’d died when he was a kid; that he feared he wouldn’t get into the seminary because his grades were so bad. John Carr was a bright light—funny and smart—but not a fan of school or studying. He died of AIDS in 1996.

On some level, I knew Chris was gay. It became harder to ignore once he started driving into Chicago for the weekends, not so secretly going to gay bars and hooking up with guys there—but I still somehow managed to deny it to myself. He lived like there was no tomorrow—smoking, drinking, doing drugs; generally doing whatever he wanted. Chris couldn’t help but be himself. He has always been constitutionally incapable of anything else.

And he never felt shame about anything he did. Chris’s attitude was The world just needs to catch up with me. In this way, he and I were very different. I really wanted to fit in, wanted to want to have a boyfriend, wanted to want to have kids. I wanted to want what every other girl in the world seemed to want. I did not want to admit, to myself or anyone else, that I did not.

I tried to act like the straight kids, but I couldn’t even fake it. I went out on a couple of dates with guys, but it was a struggle the whole time. I’d be deep in my own head, thinking, This should be nice. I should want to kiss him right now. I knew how I was supposed to act, how I was supposed to feel, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t be that person.

Chris was a lifeline, because with him I could be myself. It was also hard to be worried with so much laughing and goofing around, and his self-acceptance was contagious. As awkward as I felt around others, I felt like myself with Chris.

Choir was where we really flourished. We both loved to sing, so we never cut this class (except that one Ash Wednesday at the Chicken Unlimited). We’d even sing on the way there. It helped that we had to go through a breezeway with awesome acoustics that ramped up our harmonies. Then we’d spend the first fifteen minutes of the choir hour in the girls’ bathroom, smoking with any boy or girl who wanted to share a hot-boxed Marlboro.

But the real joy was singing in that choir, with so many different voices coming together. District-wide integration meant that black kids were bused into our white neighborhood for high school. This had caused riots in our school, and cops patrolled the hallways to keep the peace. The choral room in A Building was one of the only places at Thornridge High School where integration worked effortlessly. Black and white kids, football players, cheerleaders, nerds, and wood shop guys all lifted their voices in song together in this room. It was an idyllic setting, not unlike the version in Glee. Our differences seemed to disappear as our voices were raised in song, and the harmony lifted us beyond ourselves. For Chris and me, it was a refuge.

The other times I felt at ease were when I drank. My drinking self was good and had nothing to fear or be ashamed of. If I was drinking and with Chris, the good fired on all cylinders. Dolton was right next door to a suburb called Hegwisch, a blue-collar area with a famous record store and more bars per capita than any other burg outside Chicago. Al Capone had loved the prairies and heavily wooded landscape of this place and was said to have hidden out there a lot. For us, the winding roads of Hegwisch led to cash-strapped taverns more than happy to sell drinks to teenagers doing poppers. I used to love going with Chris to this one real dive bar called Jeanette’s, a place filled with toothless old men. One obese and gummy guy called “Uncle Frank” would sit immobile in a dark corner and yell at us. “I love you kids!” he’d slur. At those moments, I loved him right back.

Chris introduced me to a few new things, too. The first time I smoked pot was with him, during sophomore year. He failed to tell me that he’d laced it with angel dust, so I began to hallucinate at Pizza Hut and was so out of my gourd that I had to spend the night in his garage.

Pot scared the hell out of me, with or without angel dust. I panicked when I smelled it. If I went to a party where someone was smoking it, I expected the cops to swarm the place, and judgment and paranoia must have been written all over my face. I began to be known as “the Narc,” and I started to notice that I wouldn’t be invited to certain parties. It hurt my feelings, even though I continued to feel that pot smoking was evil. I was, however, very happy to get loaded on booze.

IF YOU LOOK BACK THROUGH MY HIGH SCHOOL scrapbook, you’d think I was one of the popular kids. I was involved in a million activities—speech team, girls’ choir, basketball, tennis, theater guild. And despite earning the “quitter” label after The Ugly Duckling, I even managed to get small roles in a couple of plays my sophomore year, playing a male police officer (go figure) in Arsenic and Old Lace and a tomboy (ditto) in The Brick and the Rose.

But it wasn’t until my senior year that something transformative finally happened. That was the year my theater arts class put on Godspell.

Somewhere in the back of my head I was aware that Godspell was based on a Bible gospel—we sang “Day by Day” at guitar mass at St. Jude’s—but I didn’t care. I just wanted to put on a show! I loved the music, and we wouldn’t have to try out; if you were in the class, you were in the play. Chris and I listened to the original cast album over and over.

We also went downtown to see the show live at the Drury Lane Theater. Chris, our friend Ed (another soon-to-be-gay musical theater lover), and I went at least ten times. That professional cast added some funny bits and one-liners that we claimed for ourselves and brought home to Dolton. We were obsessed.

Our production played one Friday night only. Everyone in my family, extended and otherwise, came. We thespians were beside ourselves with excitement. We put everything we had into this thing and made a plan to drink real wine during the final betrayal scene that closes the play. We wanted to be crying real tears, and we were pretty sure we couldn’t unless we were tipsy.

Ed played Jesus, Chris was John the Baptist/Judas, and along with being in the ensemble, I played the hussy who sang “Turn Back, O Man.”

I was now a part of the magic that had so mesmerized me when I was a kid seeing my first stage play. I actually lost my balance I was so excited—I almost fell over several times the day of the show—and I smelled funny. I would have this smell many times in the future and would come to know it as the pungent odor of pure, unadulterated fear. But because it was mixed with pure, unadulterated joy, I survived.

We were all swept up in the electricity of putting on this show. We were more focused, disciplined, and committed than we had ever been in our young lives. We had all pitched in to build the set together, and showed up after school for rehearsals. When we finally performed, no one missed a line or a cue. We were a team, and we supported one another. Being a part of this group of fellow actors, feeling needed and valued and there for one another, was a high I would chase for the rest of my life.

We were playing pretend, but we were sharing the experience. I had always felt so different and thus “less than” my peers. I remember thinking that even if I, Jane Lynch, wasn’t worthy of friendship, then at least I knew the character I was playing was. In everyday life, I second-guessed myself relentlessly. But in a play, my difference was hidden and I was worthy. I was needed. Because it’s written—it says, I am.

And that was the heart of the matter: on stage, playing a role that was written in black and white—I could not be rejected. The only place I felt safe from that possibility was on stage, and I loved it. In fact, I still get joy from it, even today. In any movie, TV show, or play that I’m in, I’ll still have that fleeting thought: These people might not want to be my friend after this, but for the next 8.2 seconds, they’re all about me and I’m all about them.

Finally, I had found my place.

But unfortunately, right in the middle of this transcendent, fantastic experience, disaster struck. Jesus and John the Baptist, also known as Ed and Chris, started spending all of their time together, without me. I didn’t know what was happening—or didn’t want to. All I knew was that now I was the odd man out.

In response, I acted as cold and mean as I could. With this, I was starting a pattern that I would rely on for far too long in dealing with what felt like rejection. My hope in acting this way was that the person I felt had wronged me would ask what he’d done wrong. Chris didn’t, of course—I’m not sure he ever even noticed. My mom noticed, though, and she became worried that I had fallen in love with Chris—not a surprising conclusion, since I was acting exactly like a jilted lover. One afternoon, she finally gave voice to the fact that I was still too stubborn to admit.

“Honey,” she said, “I don’t want you to get your heart broken. But I think maybe Chris likes boys. Don’t you think that maybe he and Ed are boyfriends?”

“No, no, no!” I snapped. “Chris isn’t gay.”

It was getting harder to deny it to myself, though. I mean, even my mother knew. It was hard to miss. My wild and free-spirited Chris had always stuck out in our little suburb, but by the time we were seniors, he was taking it to a whole new level, with an afro and parachute pants. It was the late seventies, but still: to say he stood out is an understatement. But I still didn’t want to acknowledge that “gay” existed. Now it was right in front of me. Chris and Ed were having an affair. Chris even wrote “I will love Ed forever” in my yearbook.

In the pain of feeling dumped, I wrote Chris a scathing letter telling him that he looked like a freak and I didn’t want anything to do with him anymore. I was a stereotypical closet case, rejecting him for his open homosexuality that got him a boyfriend and left me alone. I pushed him away for what I was afraid of in me. Maybe I was also afraid of guilt by association, that other people would think I was gay, too. Whatever it was, I felt that he needed to be punished for flaunting his gayness. Didn’t he understand you were supposed to keep it under wraps?

But also, deep down, my heart was broken. I felt rejected on a soul level. In some ways, Chris was my first true love. I trusted him like I trusted no one else in the world, and I showed him parts of myself that no one else saw. Now he was gone. All that had been good in those final months of my senior year of high school was suddenly buried under despair.

After graduating from high school, I reluctantly set off for Illinois State University, which at that time was where the B and C students in Illinois went to college. I had absolutely no academic curiosity or drive, and I didn’t particularly want to go to college, but that was what people did. With my impressively low ACT score ISU was the only school that admitted me, so I packed up my things and headed for Normal, Illinois (of all places).

I was assigned to a room in an all-girls dorm, and at any given moment, I had at least three very severe crushes: I was obsessed with the ladies of Hamilton Hall. Perhaps getting out of Dolton and away from my family allowed me to admit these feelings … sort of. I still put them in a mental file labeled “intense feelings of friendship,” managing to continue to ignore the pounding refrain of “You’re gay!” knocking on my psyche’s door.

Before I left Dolton, my mother had said, “Jane, don’t major in Theater. Major in something like Theater but where you can get a job, like Mass Communications.” In her mind, a general smear of media would satisfy my need to trod the boards. I desperately wanted to be an actress, but wanting also to please, I followed my mom’s advice.

Unfortunately—or, really, fortunately—when I tried to register for Mass Comm 101, all the classes were closed. So instead, I started taking acting courses on the sly. It was truly luck that the one state school with low enough standards to admit the likes of me had one of the best undergraduate theater departments in the country. Several original Steppenwolf Theater ensemble members had been recent graduates, including Laurie Metcalf and John Malkovich. The professors were treated as minor celebs themselves and managed to inspire both respect and fear in their students. Freshmen weren’t allowed to audition for shows during their first semester, but as soon as second semester started, I tried out for Lysistrata, a very cleverly updated musical adaptation of Aristophanes’ classic about the Peloponnesian War.

The play had been rewritten with a Southern theme: the Athenians were Gone With the Wind–style upper-crust Southerners, the Spartans a big old tribe of hillbillies. I managed to land a speaking role, which was a huge coup for a freshman. I’m sure there was nothing subtle about the way I played the country bumpkin Karmenia of Kornith, but I also added a minor twist to her character—one that, in retrospect, seems a bit odd, considering how deep in the closet I was. I made her an open lesbian.

There was a line where the lady warrior from the Isle of Lesbos said something like “You know, we women hang very close on Lesbos,” intimating that island’s Sapphic past (as if the name of the island didn’t make that clear enough). So I thought it would be funny to be super-obvious and ad-lib, “You told me weren’t gonna say nothin’…” When I first delivered the line, the director cracked up. Which I guess wasn’t surprising; there was a lot of whispering that she was a closeted lesbian herself.

As far as I can recall, there was only one open lesbian student in the theater program. She was burly, with a deep voice and hairy legs and armpits: the perfect stereotype of a butch lesbian. She also had a chip on her shoulder and a demeanor that said “Fuck you. This is who I am, take it or leave it.” Looking back now, I can appreciate how brave she was.

Our theater department was full of closeted homosexuals. We were too afraid to look at this aspect of ourselves, so of course we marginalized the one person who had the courage to be who she was. Needless to say, I didn’t want anything to do with her.

I was so excited to be a part of the cast of Lysistrata, which was a huge production featuring all the big department stars. (It was like in the old days of Hollywood, when MGM would do a movie like Grand Hotel and the entire roster of studio talent would appear in it.) I was always taking a look from outside my body and marveling that I was now one of them. A few of the women were so talented and such bright lights that I worshipped them like they were movie stars. The comedy was very pithy and smart. The music was inventive and fun. I was over the moon.

Sophomore year, I auditioned for Gypsy. The list for principal cast went up before the chorus list, and I almost didn’t check it because I was pretty sure that if I got anything it would be chorus. But there it was: my name on the principal cast list. I was gobsmacked. I was cast as Electra, one of the three strippers.

I had always loved singing, which is perhaps not surprising given how musical my parents were. Our whole family sang together almost every day, mostly Christmas carols and show tunes—Funny Girl, Man of La Mancha, The Sound of Music. In fact, we were mildly obsessed with The Sound of Music. When it was playing at the River Oaks Cinema, my mom dropped me, my sister, and the Climack girls off for the first showing of the day, and we never left our seats. We watched it over and over until she picked us up later that evening.

Gypsy would be my first time really singing a solo on stage, and although I was terrified, I proceeded to “act as if” I could do it. I also had no reason to believe anyone in their right mind would ever buy my baby-dyke self as a stripper. Obviously the director thought I could do it—he had given me the part—but I was afraid that what he saw wasn’t really there, that I had somehow fooled him. Looking back, I can see that I couldn’t give myself credit for anything, like I felt obliged to bow to the altar of my fears and trepidations. Maybe it kept the bar low, expectation-wise. But unlike my reaction to this kind of inner challenge when I walked away from The Ugly Duckling in high school, it never crossed my mind to quit.

The big show-stopping burlesque stripper number in Gypsy is called “You Gotta Have a Gimmick.” My character, Electra, had the gimmick of electricity: she “did it with a switch,” an actual electrical switch on her costume that lit her up. “I’m electrifying and I ain’t even trying!” she squealed. I worked my butt off rehearsing, and suddenly I found this full, robust chest voice I’d never had before. It felt wonderful, like massaging my soul. And even though I was über-critical of myself at this point in my life, I was flushed with victory. I’d walk through the quad with a giant inner smile, thinking, I’m in the school musical.

Unlike the other shows I’d been in, Gypsy was practically a professional production. The auditorium was state-of-the-art, and we had top-notch sets, lights, costumes, and a full stage crew. I imagined that this was what it must be like to do a show on Broadway.

MY PARENTS, TRUE TO FORM, WEREN’T TOO CONCERNED about what grades I was making in college. They were more interested in whether I was happy and making friends, and whether I needed money. (My dad would periodically mail me $20, with a note saying, “Here’s some green for the scene, teen.” He also sent $1 rebates for Ten High Whiskey to my dorm room, because you could only cash in one per address.) When I changed my major to Theater Arts, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t notice, and they didn’t. The Theater Arts Department had talent-based tuition waivers, and I auditioned and got one. My parents learned of my new major when they received the tuition bill marked “paid.” “Hey! Good for you!” Suddenly, being a theater major was pretty cool.

I loved my acting classes, and I even loved my theater history class. I actually started to get good grades because I gave a hoot about what I was learning.

One Christmas break, I was particularly excited to go back to Dolton because I wanted to show off a new skill I’d been developing. In one of my acting classes, I was learning to speak in what is called American Standard English, which has the objective of neutralizing speech to get rid of obvious regionalisms. I not only took to this process, I loved it in the way only a pedantic, overcompensating, insecure young person could. I practiced and practiced and decided I would speak American Standard English all the time. When I went home for the holidays that year, I launched right into showing off my new skills at the family Christmas party. “I had an in-ta-view lahst week,” I declared haughtily, as my sister rolled her eyes. My mom had a squinty “say what?” look, and our neighbor, impressed, said, “Gosh, Jane, you sound just like you’re from Boston!”

But sounding haughty was only the beginning. With my newfound success in the theater, I suddenly discovered—and unleashed—my inner diva. The more comfortable I got and the more empowered I began to feel, the more I tried to force my genius on others. If something in a production I was in wasn’t to my liking or up to my standards, I’d pitch a fit. I never hesitated to tell everyone exactly what they were doing wrong, in the most condescending tones possible. After someone poured their heart into a scene, I’d protest with “I didn’t believe you at all.” And for some reason I was surprised that this behavior seemed to alienate people ….

Looking back, I can see I was a repressed, judgmental adolescent who mistook my newfound adequacy as brilliance. As with most overcompensating virgins, my puffed-up ego would soon be deflated by a heavy crush.

4
Normal

IT WAS IN MY JUNIOR YEAR AT ILLINOIS STATE THAT I became mentally and emotionally consumed by a full-on crush. This was beyond the vague feeling of dread that I’d had since the Stevenson twins’ revelation. My “gay” now had a focus, and she was a petite, spritely professor with perfect handwriting. That she was straight didn’t matter. I wasn’t thinking I would ever actually win her love. And when I daydreamed about kissing her, I imagined myself as a handsome boy, so I still wasn’t entirely on board with the whole “gay” thing.

But nonetheless, the intensity of my obsession was almost overwhelming. Seeing her for class on M/W/F wasn’t enough, so I used to walk by her office just to smell the patchouli. I still hadn’t done anything about being gay, but the fantasy was awesome, and gay was getting good.

And then, suddenly, she left. She got a job somewhere else, and for the whole of that summer break home in Dolton, I couldn’t even get up in the morning. For the first time in my life, I understood what depression was. In order to get through it, I turned it into something noble, heroic almost. I even gave it a soundtrack. I was depressed to the song “Another Grey Morning” by James Taylor. I am pretty sure for him it’s a song about heroin addiction, but for me it was about the loss of a fantasy. And I grieved this loss like the death of a loved one.

Here comes another grey morning

A not so good morning after all …

Oy gevalt, the drama.

HAVING TASTED THE THRILL OF A FIRST CRUSH, I WAS primed for another. After the great summer of mourning, I returned to Normal for my senior year on the hunt for love. I found another teacher, but at least this time I picked an actual gay lady. She had spiky hair, unshaven legs, and a low, butchy voice. She didn’t rock my world, but there was enough projection on my part to get the crush going.

My initial reaction to her was shock, though. She was obviously a dyke, which made me extremely uncomfortable. But then I got to know her, and I really started to like her. She loved to party, and she loved to hang out with us undergrads, and we just thought that was so cool. Yeah, she was a professor, but she was only ten years older than we were, which at my age was just enough to make her seem wise and alluring. And she was out and proud about who she was, unlike so many of us Midwestern theater majors who were still firmly encased in our shells. Normal, Illinois, had not seen anything like her, and I found myself positively intrigued and excited. We began to flirt. She started it. But I followed. We’d sit too close, let our eyes linger too long, and brush our hands together. It was the first time I had ever flirted with anyone.

But we went back and forth with it. We’d flirt, but then one of us would pretend nothing had happened. Maybe the image of herself as a professor chasing a slightly unhinged undergrad in and out of happy hours was just too much for her. As for me, I was titillated and then terrified, with no in-between. I felt like if I went forward there would be no going back—I’d be for-real gay, not just in-my-head gay. Then one night we greased the wheels with a few dollar pitchers of beer, and things got interesting.

We were at a party and she was dancing to a Devo song with full punked-out abandon. I walked up to her, looked her straight in the eye, and put one hand through her spiky hair. I walked away, like a bold idiot, knowing that I had just made the first move. We ended up back at my apartment, drunk, and we fell asleep on the living room floor. In the middle of the night, someone rolled over, and just like that, we were kissing.

As we were making out, I thought, Oh my god, so this is what kissing is. I had kissed a few boys, but never felt anything and never understood what the big deal was or why people bothered to kiss each other at all. But for me, kissing a woman was different. It was the point of no return.

The next day in her apartment, I helped myself to her journal. Why would I do a thing like that? Because it was there, she was not, and I have no impulse control. In a fresh entry, written that morning, she asked of our night together, “Have I opened Pandora’s box?” After I went to the library and found out who this Pandora was (remember, I’m still a C student), I had to answer, “Yes, she has.”

Our relationship proceeded as smoothly as you’d expect between a teacher and a self-hating student who’s having her first-ever homosexual experience. I pulled her close, then pushed her away, then threw myself at her, then despised myself for doing it. I couldn’t stand to see her, and I couldn’t stand not to see her. I was tormented, guilt-ridden, ashamed … and out-of-my-mind excited. And I had no clue how to handle any one of those emotions, much less all of them together.

I hung out in Normal for the summer of my final year at ISU to marinate in the drama of the push and pull of love. To support myself, I got a job detasseling corn with migrant workers in the endless cornfields outside town. I wanted to do something physical and be outside so maybe I could get a tan. What I got was cuts all over my arms because I went sleeveless.

At the end of the summer, I reluctantly left Normal to start an MFA program at Cornell in upstate New York. I had auditioned for a bunch of grad programs earlier in the year, and to my absolute surprise, Cornell had offered me one of their six graduate positions. Cornell wasn’t Juilliard or Yale in terms of actor-training-program gravitas, but they wanted me! I got a free ride and the promise of two more years doing what I loved in the safety of academia. And seeing as I had projected every last ounce of neediness onto the gay teacher lady, I would imagine my exit came not a moment too soon for her.

Now that I had broken my relationship cherry, I finally got the sense to call Chris. It had been four years since I’d sent him the cruel letter that had ended our friendship. At home in Dolton over Christmas break, I got out my folks’ Harveys Bristol Cream, poured myself a mugful, and dialed Chris’s number.

“I’m sorry about that letter,” I told him. “I miss you. And I’m gay now, too.”

“I know,” Chris replied. And just like that, he forgave me. A fan of late sixties easy listening music, I felt such a joy to hear his familiar sign-off before hanging up: “Don’t sleep in the subway, darling.” I had my friend back.

MY MOM ALWAYS SAID THAT IF SHE COULD BUY ME A town, it would be Ithaca. It was perfect for me—woodsy, contained, and quaint. I arrived there via train and bus in the late summer of 1982. Ithaca is a lovely little place, full of old hippies and smarty-pants students. Every street is a steep hill, and all the students had wonderfully toned legs. I would have a pair of my own in short order. I had grown up feeling fat next to my bony brother and sister. They effectively taunted me, calling me “ub”—short for “tub-o-lard.” I had tried all sorts of tricks and fads to become slim and therefore happy. But now that I was finally losing weight, I still felt miserable. Once again, I could hardly get out of bed in the morning. Not only did I have that damn gay secret, but the fact that I had just come from the buckle of the corn belt had never been more obvious. Way out of my element, I made social gaffes at every turn. I actually tried to take out a priceless first-edition book like it was a regular library book. I had never eaten a taco or had Greek food. I had never had a bagel, much less a Jewish friend. Cornell was teeming with Jews, Greek food–eaters, vegetarians, and New York City types who kept hurting my feelings. Unlike these kids, I didn’t give two hoots about grade point averages, and how much I knew about anything was not a point of pride for me (yet). I was very alone and felt stupider than everyone else.

Even though it had a middle-tier graduate acting program, Cornell was an elite Ivy League school. Some kids who had been high school valedictorians found themselves at the bottom of the class when they got there. There were many incidents throughout the years where really good students jumped to their deaths into the gorges that tore through the landscape of this otherwise delightful little hamlet. They couldn’t take their own perceived failures. It was called gorging out. I understood their pain.

I was all on my own here. I had made my decision to travel across the country for grad school by myself and for myself. I didn’t consult my parents; I just sort of presented it to them. I had a long-running fantasy of someone magically appearing to hold my hand and guide me through the building of a life and a career. However, this fantasy was up against a harsh reality: I was going to have to dig deep to find the gumption to make things happen. I had zero belief in myself and would have loved to have been saved from the work of it.

One particularly tough morning, when I was doubled over in existential angst, I called in to school sick and the secretary said, “No one calls in sick to this program. It’s not done. You get yourself in here.” I stayed home anyway. For a self-identified good girl and rule-follower this was an outrageously rebellious act. I spent that day obsessively straightening my bed and blowing and reblowing my hair dry. My insides might be a mess, but damn it if my outsides would be. That night, I called the campus gay and lesbian hotline. I think somehow I knew that I had to feel okay about who I was in order to feel like I fit anywhere, or to make anything of my life.

“I need to talk to somebody,” I said. They told me to go to the Apple Blossom Café, and a volunteer named Alice would meet me there. I loved the ABC Café. It was full of dirty vegetarians and hairy lesbians, so of course I was both attracted and repulsed.

And so I went to the ABC Café to meet Alice. She showed up, and I recognized her—she was a graduate student in the directing program. “Oh, hi,” she said. “I had a feeling you were gay.” We talked, went out and got drunk, and slept together that night. (For a volunteer, she clearly went above and beyond.)

This might have ended up being a happy story of finding new love … but it wasn’t. I liked Alice okay, but she committed the cardinal sin of liking me more. I couldn’t deal with the attention—it made me want to punish her.

So I did. I ignored her phone calls, acted cold when we saw each other, and generally pretended that first night had never happened. It was like the old Groucho Marx maxim: never belong to a club that would have you as a member. I saw her a couple of weeks later, and she was with someone else. I was still a mess.

I LOVED THE CONSERVATORY-STYLE TRAINING AT CORNELL. For a depressed person in her early twenties like me it would become the perfect remedy: up at the crack of dawn with fencing or dancing, working until late at night on rehearsal for whatever play we were doing.

I forgot about myself and I focused on the characters I played. I discovered one of the great, unexpected gifts of learning to act: all the characters ever written are already inside you. It’s just a matter of accessing them and bringing them forward. And having no fear of the dark side.

Seein’ witches as Mary Warren in The Crucible.

Case in point:

Stuart White was an amazingly talented guest director from New York City. I met him early in my first semester. He came to Cornell to direct a Reynolds Price play called Early Dark. He cast me as Rosacoke Mustian, a young girl who loses her virginity when the man she loves violently rapes her. On stage.

This blew my mind. This character was nothing like me. I had never fallen in love with a guy, never slept with a guy, never been thrown around by anyone. I didn’t know what it was like to live in the South during the Depression. I had no idea what it was Stuart White thought he saw in me to make him say, “Yep, she’s the one.” This was also the very first time I had been given the role of a character whose emotional arc was the center of the play. This experience would push me further than I’d ever been pushed.

Stuart probably knew all of this, but he could probably also see the vulnerability I was always trying to hide from the world: my fear of failure and not being good enough. This lined up nicely with Rosacoke’s fear of being stuck in the generational poverty and pain of her world. He believed that if I could dig deep enough, I could tap into what I needed to bring this young girl to life.

Stuart knew what he was doing. He would take me for long walks, and we would talk. I started to confide in him, and when I told him I was a virgin (I hadn’t been with a guy, so I thought the term still applied), he almost cried. “That is so sweet!” He was from the South and these were his people. Stuart urged me to see that depth and virginal innocence in me as something I could use creatively. I just had to be strong enough to allow myself to be vulnerable. Great lesson. For art and for life.

The whole time Stuart was directing us in Early Dark, he was sick. “I can’t seem to shake this cold,” he’d say, just about every week. I didn’t think anything of it until one night when I mentioned it to Chris on the phone.

“Oh my god,” Chris said. “He may have AIDS.”

At that time, the early 1980s, AIDS was this mysterious new illness. It was the first I’d heard of it, though it wouldn’t be long before it would decimate the gay male community.

About a year later, when I heard the news that Stuart had died from AIDS-related complications, I was devastated. What a loss.

I DID A LOT OF DRINKING DURING THIS TIME. I HAD company, because we all did. But at least to me, in my own private Idaho of pain, my drinking was different. Unlike the social drinking my friends did, getting to my “first today, badly needed” was compulsive and all-consuming.

I had all four of my impacted wisdom teeth taken out while I was at Cornell, and I couldn’t drink for a while after the surgery because I was wiped out. I realized then that I had boozed it up every single day since my senior year of high school. I drank specifically to get drunk. I’d think nothing of tossing back a six-pack of Miller Lite—anything to get that merciful buzz. Although sometimes the buzz wouldn’t come and I’d just feel bloated.

I wanted to feel good. I just wasn’t sure how to make myself happy, and I wished someone else would get me there. I started spending a lot of time with another grad student, named Hugh. He was a smart, self-deprecating, easygoing guy. We’d go out for dinner at the ABC Café, and he’d look over the vegetarian menu and then order a “rib eye, medium rare.” The humorless vegetarians and bearded lesbians didn’t find it funny. But Hugh cracked me up.

We’d go out to bars and drink, or we’d drink at home, or on some nights, we’d do both. Hugh had some culture, so I started drinking more exotic beers like Heineken, smoking Turkish cigarettes we rolled ourselves, and drinking flavored coffee. No more Folgers. Hugh was a wonderful friend, and I told him everything, including about my relationships with women. He was cool with it.

Hugh in the blue shirt I wish I’d kept. It looked better on me. With Beth, my roommate.

My roommate was moving out, so Hugh moved in. We became inseparable and even started wearing each other’s clothes. I loved spending time with him, but when he started to fall for me, things changed.

I didn’t really want a physical relationship with Hugh, and if it had been just up to me we’d have stayed close friends. He had reasonable heterosexual expectations and was moving our relationship toward sex. I was curious enough, and in need of affection, that I moved with him. We started having sex, which led me to fear I was pregnant every two seconds. An unreasonable fear since we used protection. No matter what we did (or didn’t do) the night before, the next day I was always convinced I was pregnant. Once, Hugh laughed and said to me, “You’d have to be a goddess of fertility to be pregnant after what we did last night.”

Hugh was as sweet and kind as he could be, so I soon found myself despising him. He never gave voice to these feelings, but I knew he was falling in love with me. How did I know? Because I had helped myself to his journal (yes, it’s a pattern). I’d push him away, but he’d just wait patiently for me to come back, which I always did. I needed the comfort and companionship.

Then I became a real asshole. I started pushing away anyone who showed me kindness. That inner diva who had first reared her ugly head at Illinois State reappeared with a vengeance. I was the worst person to have at critiques. No one could do anything right as far as I was concerned, and I made absolutely sure they knew it. In the haughtiest of tones, I’d demand, “What the hell was that?” “How dare you demean Molière in that way!” “Why are you making that face?” “You’re just showing off!” Everything everyone did was wrong, and I couldn’t let anything go. I was undoubtedly an absolute joy to have around.

Thus began my phase of assholatry, a period that would go on for some years. I just felt like something within me was fundamentally broken. In true Psychology 101 fashion, the crap I spewed at them was the crap I wanted to spew at myself. I was scared to death that I didn’t have what it took. Everyone started to steer clear of me, except for Hugh.

I was at one of my lowest points, and Hugh took the brunt of it. I even came to hate his accent, not that he really had one, having grown up in Southern California. He was like a puppy, loyal and loving, which I found pathetic. How dare he love me? What was wrong with him?

I should say that while all of this suffering was unnecessary, it did make for some good comedy. Years later, with lots of distance, I saw my young self in one Sue Sylvester. Hell-bent on revenge and out to crush the dreams of the innocent, Sue is always looking for the next fight. “Get ready for the ride of your life, Will Schuester. You’re about to board the Sue Sylvester Express. Destination horror!” I was awful in those Cornell years, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to make my ridiculousness funny.

In the midst of my turmoil, I had one teacher—a visiting instructor, actually—who saw what I was doing and tried to help me. Her name was Jagienka Zych-Drweski, and I barely remember anything else about her, but I’ve never forgotten what she said to me.

She shook her head with a mix of pity and frustration and said in a thick Polish accent, “Jane. You have to learn to let things roll off your back!”

I wanted to, but I didn’t know how. Unfortunately for me (and anyone else within earshot), it would be years before I’d figure it out.

Eventually I pushed even Hugh away, but shockingly, we stayed friends, and to this day we call each other on our birthdays.

WHEN I GRADUATED FROM CORNELL, MY MOM AND dad and Aunt Marge picked me up for a little family vacation. I was twenty-four, with an overbearing perm and an attitude to match. We were making our way to New York City, where I was hoping to ply my trade in theater.

We drove all up and down the East Coast, sightseeing, the four of us sharing small hotel rooms. I was in a terrible mood the whole time. I was critical of everything and rolled my eyes so frequently I gave myself vertigo. Soon, everyone had had enough of me. Things came to a head in Boston.

My dad wanted to do the Freedom Trail, a walking tour of historical sites in Boston that’s supposed to be a fun, easy way to learn New England history. But we kept losing the trail. We wandered through Boston with Dad saying, “Where’s the goddamn Freedom Trail?” as I let my parents know exactly how stupid I thought the whole thing was by complaining at every turn. “Oh my god, we walked all that way for this?”

The next morning, I opened my eyes to find my mother sitting at the foot of my hotel bed. “You’re ruining my vacation,” she said quietly. I behaved a little better after that, but my inner bitch was only temporarily muzzled.

When the Goddamn Freedom Trail vacation was finally over, they reluctantly left me at my new home in the West Village, on Christopher Street. It was the day after the Gay Pride Parade and it looked like a cyclone had hit it. In 1984, New York was not the clean, friendly wonderland it is today. Times Square was a giant porno shop, people got mugged on the subway, and Central Park wasn’t safe after dark. I was living in a one-bedroom sublet apartment with a Chinese graduate student from Cornell, so we had to take turns sleeping on the couch because there was only one bed.

The sublet was across the street from the gay leather bar Boots & Saddle, and just around the corner from the Duplex, a piano bar where musical theater wannabes and enthusiasts would sing until the wee hours. Being near the gay bars was a double-edged sword: when I was happy, it seemed like a great place to be; when I wasn’t, it felt decadent, dark, and lonely.

Dad, Mom, Aunt Marge, and me on the Goddamn Freedom Trail trip.

I got a job at a friend’s father’s advertising agency called Creamer Incorporated, which had acquired a PR division called Glick & Lorwin. I had no business being in PR—had no nose for it and no initiative, and basically sat at a desk all day trying to look busy. But for some reason, Boris Lorwin and Ira Glick, the two wonderful older guys who ran it, loved me.

They’d walk by my desk and wave at me and say, “You’re doing a great job, Janie!” To this day I don’t know what I did to make them like me so much, because the one project they gave me, I completely screwed up.

I was supposed to plan a luncheon at a hotel, so I took Boris over to meet the people who were going to throw it. They wanted us to go to the kitchen for a tasting of the planned meal, but it turned into a scene from This Is Spinal Tap. We kept walking through the basement and turning right, then turning left, and wondering, “Where’s the kitchen? Where’s the kitchen?” Boris got more and more frustrated, until he finally barked, “Just forget it!” and we somehow found our way through the labyrinth and back out of the hotel.

I thought Boris would fire me, but instead he just said, “Janie, I love you, but we won’t put you in charge of anything again.” So I just worked on accounts at my little desk—the Crest account, whose reps went into schools and stained innocent children’s teeth to show them cavities, and the Crayola account, for which my job was to cut and paste press clippings onto pieces of paper. I’d take the clippings in and show them to Boris and Ira and say, “Look at all the great coverage we got.” And they’d say, “Good work, Jane!”

But as sweet as Ira and Boris were to me, the rest of New York kicked my ass.

I didn’t have an agent, so getting auditions of any kind was out. I bummed around in a few off-off-Broadway shows, doing things for free with little theater companies—such as a production of Macbeth helmed by an acting teacher who had “disciples” rather than students. She put an ad in the paper, and a few of my Cornell pals and I responded and got cast as spear carriers and the like. But the rehearsal process was so ridiculous and demeaning that all the self-respecting people kept dropping out, leaving us with principal roles. I was one of the three witches, and I almost came to blows with another one who kept pronouncing “hover” as “hoover.” Appropriately, the show closed after about two nights, as most of the audience left before intermission.

Not only was I unable to find a professional home, I couldn’t even find a literal one. When my sublet in the Village ended, I bounced around to four or five other places, always getting kicked out after a few weeks or months, whereupon I would have to move myself and all my stuff on the subway. In one place, the landlord knocked on the door and said, “You know, this is an illegal sublet. You’re not supposed to be here.” So I panicked and packed my two suitcases and headed out. The guy I was renting from actually followed me down the street, saying, “What are you doing? You don’t have to go—he does that to everybody!” But I was a rule-follower from way back, plus that guy had threatened my sense of home and safety. I didn’t have the constitution to withstand that, so I was out of there. I felt rejected and alone.

The roughness of New York City’s streets seeped in everywhere. At that first sublet, my Chinese roommate had invited home some guys who were rumored to be connected to the Chinese Mafia, and they ended up ransacking the place. Another time, a friend of mine named John brought a trick home, and after I’d left for work and John was passed out, the guy rummaged through my stuff, took some cash and my boom box, and for some reason cut the sleeves off my sweatshirts.

Then there was my roommate in Chelsea. He and I shared bunk beds, and late one night he came into the bedroom all excited. “Hey, Jane,” he said, “I just got four hundred bucks for giving a guy a blow job!”

Wide-eyed and shocked, trying not to look like a Midwestern bumpkin, I just smiled and said, “Hey, that’s more than I make in two weeks!”

THE WHOLE TIME I WAS IN NEW YORK, I DRANK NON- stop, gained weight, and felt unsafe everywhere I went. Everything about the city felt hostile to me; it was as if New York itself were screaming, “Get out!”

The Duplex was the only place I was happy. During prime evening hours, the regulars, all of them Broadway musical theater performers, either chorus members or understudies, performed. They were fantastic singers, and I envied how close they were, how witty. I wanted to be one of them.

By around 4 A.M. I’d finally get my chance at the mike. With no awareness of the irony, I chose “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” as my signature song. It massaged my soul to warble it (drunkenly, I’m sure). Then the bar would close, and I’d stumble home to wherever I happened to be living that week.

One night, about nine months after I’d moved to New York, I was fast asleep in a big apartment in Brooklyn that housed an unknown number of other roommates, when two of them came home, drunk. They stumbled into the apartment and turned all the lights on, yelling, “Get out! Get out of here!” Startled by the shouting, I emerged from the bedroom, bleary-eyed, and freaked out.

“Get the fuck out, bitch!” one of them yelled. “Now!” They obviously were not good with my living there.

“But I have no place to go!” I said, panicking. I didn’t know anyone in Brooklyn. I didn’t even know where to catch the subway. This was my fifth sublet in nine months, but my first in Brooklyn—which in the mid-eighties wasn’t the charmingly gentrified place it is today. It felt scary and dangerous, like a no-man’s-land. I was always worried about my physical safety in New York, so putting me out on the street in Brooklyn at three in the morning might have killed me from fright, if nothing else.

The guys kept yelling, and I kept begging not to be thrown out, and eventually they stumbled drunkenly back out the door. It was the cherry on top of the horrible sundae that was New York for me.

The next morning, I got up, dressed for work, and walked to the subway to catch my train. Somewhere between Brooklyn and Midtown, I started feeling sharp pains in my stomach, like I had food poisoning. By the time I got to my stop at 50th Street, it was so bad I was doubled over.

I walked to Glick & Lorwin, but because I was early as usual, no one was there. I didn’t have a key to the office, so I just sat down on a box of paper outside the door, slumped over in pain. I thought my appendix might have burst, so I straggled back to the subway and got on a train heading for the Village, where St. Vincent’s Hospital was.

On the train, hunched over in the worst pain of my life, I suddenly thought, I have to leave New York. I have to get out of here. And my stomach relaxed. I got to 14th Street, stood up, and thought, I’m all right. The pain was gone.

I took the subway straight back to Brooklyn, packed up my two suitcases, and called my mom. “I’m coming home,” I told her. I would miss Boris and Ira (who acted like they were mad at me for leaving and wouldn’t make eye contact). But I couldn’t wait to get back home.

5
The Call of Comedy

I WAS NOW TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD WHEN I WENT back home to Dolton, back to the house where I grew up, on Sunset Drive. When I walked into my old bedroom, still with its green-and-yellow shag carpeting and bedspread, there was a big “Welcome Home Jane!” banner, with balloons and everything. I turned to my mom and, half-joking, half-serious, exclaimed, “You can go home again!”

Mom was happy to have me home as well. “Look, Jane— I organized your books,” she said, waving her hand at the shelves.

“By author or title?” I asked.

“By height.” And there they were, perfectly arranged from smallest to tallest.

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