Read Let Me Be Your Star for Free Online

intended to be, it seemed
like everybody who had ever hoarded a few old Playbills wanted to talk to me
about Ellis’s many-gendered make-out scenes or Debra Messing’s bizarre costuming
choices that made her look like a Buddhist nun who had mistakenly wandered into
a Renaissance Faire or the way the eating and/or preparation of salad always
seemed to presage a terrible betrayal, much like the presence of oranges in the Godfather movies. I suddenly had twice as many Twitter followers and a
whole slew of new Facebook friends, some of who eventually turned into real friends. Young, three-named musical theater luminaries — Lin-Manuel Miranda,
Celia Keenan-Bolger, Jason Robert Brown — started hitting me up on Twitter. (If
it sounds like I’m name-dropping, it’s because I am. Finally.) FunnyorDie.com
asked me to write a Smash- themed video short for them to promote the
second season (although sadly, we didn’t get to make it for reasons too
complicated — and litigious — to list here; after all, I had just gotten the
fucking chicken soup people off my back). Joanna Gleason, AKA the original
Baker’s Wife in the original Into the Woods sent me a Facebook message
asking if she could take me out to lunch, making me seriously wonder if I was
dying and concerned friends had secretly enrolled me in some sort of adult
Make-A-Wish program. Frank Rich had been sending my recaps around to people, I
was told, and I heard more than one whisper that Sondheim himself was, if not
reading them, vaguely aware of them. (I have since chosen to disbelieve this,
for my own sanity.) Every day it seemed there was another little Facebook poke,
another little mention from some name of names. The people I had dreamed of
from afar suddenly knew who I was. It was a whole new world. I felt like the
part of the movie where the newspapers start spinning and you see me, in
clothing of increasing elegance, going from burlesque to vaudeville to the
Ziegfeld Follies, and then at the end I’m famous and can finally live the
ultimate show biz dream of drinking myself to death in a giant art deco
penthouse high in the twinkling sky of the Manhattan night.
    Except that I was sobbing on the bathroom floor of a public
restroom in Central Park, because Tony Kushner had spoken to me, and cementing forever
my inescapable identity as the Elizabeth Gilbert of the Marie’s Crisis set. At
least it’s a lot cleaner than it used to be. (The Central Park bathroom, that
is. Not Marie’s Crisis. I’m trying to make it through another year hepatitis
free.)
    I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and this why I
think I was crying that night. Some of it was from being overwhelmed by the
fact that a person I admired more than almost anyone else in the world thought
I had done something good, or at least, something amusing. But it was also
because my recognition had come from someone else’s misfortune. I was the
figure skater that won the gold medal because someone else had fallen on her
ass at the Olympics.
    * * *
    Here is a compilation of everything I called Karen Cartwright,
the character who played everyone’s second-favorite McPhactress (the first is
Jack MacFarlane, even though it’s spelled with an “F”) over the course of two
seasons. Are you ready?
    Karen Cartwright.
    A Joseph Cornell box absent
any hint of psychosexual tension. A “Looks 10, Dance 3” kind of situation… like
she’s trying to do the Balanchine infinite line thing but just winds up looking
like Charles Nelson Reilly. Incontrovertible proof that the know-nothings have
at last succeeded in completely subverting the American empirical experiment. Dead
below the waist. Mamie van Doren. Friends with your roommate freshman year,
until she decided to transfer to the University of Colorado, where people were
“real” instead of “fake” like you, you self-involved bitch. Inspector Javert of
the Forever 21 set. Limp little Kleenex wad of a person. The human equivalent
of an abandoned