Read Let Me Be Your Star for Free Online Page B

car in the same month without feeling like it’s only a matter of
days until the workhouse. Last night, I had a dream about having a washer-dryer
actually in my own apartment unit, and I woke up with the kind of
anguished yearning you usually get from dreaming about still being in love and
with your college boyfriend who is somehow also Ryan Gosling.
    So they might be onto something, but they’ve got the wrong
person. Katharine McPhee can’t act. She sings fine, if you like that kind of
thing, and she is, of course, a very pretty, very lucky girl. But it’s not
Katharine McPhee that I’m jealous of. It’s Karen Cartwright.
    Musical theater nuns — that is, the kind of women who give
their life over to Broadway, and whatever their actual relationship status, are
spiritually married only to Stephen Sondheim — are a particular breed. We may
belong to different orders, and dress in different habits — the Webberite and
their half-masks, the Larsonians and their mismatched plaids, and who could
forget the Schwartzines, in their long black caftans and dyed green skin,
except for the breakaway Pippennes who dress only in jesters motley with jagged
felt ruffs around their necks, not unlike Kermit the Frog — but for the most
part, we heard the call very early, and it sounded like Ethel Merman singing “I
had a dream.” Or Patti ( not Ruthie Henshall, but maybe Randy Graff)
serving past tense realness with “I dreamed a dream.” Or if you’re a strict
Sondheimian, as I am (we, in my experience, are the most doctrinaire) with
Elaine Stritch toasting the ladies who lunch, and knowing that wasn’t a
compliment, but wanting to be one and insult one at the same time.
    Despite these minor doctrinal differences, most musical
theater nuns have one thing in common: We are not the kind of girls who have
everything handed to them. We are the girls with something to prove. We are the
girls who will karate chop through doors to get what we want, yet somehow are
still our own worst enemy. In high school, the most popular boys might have
hooked up with us at parties, but rarely, if ever, called us their girlfriends
in public. Elaine Stritch is one of us. Miss Piggy is one of us. Patti LuPone
(not in the safe word sense) is one of us. So is Evita, and so is Eliza Dolittle
and Julie LaVerne and every female character from Follies and Fanny
Brice and her American Beauty nose. (Barbra Streisand is also one of us,
although she may have thinks she shed the veil, but as far as I’m concerned,
it’s like Judaism. If Hitler would have killed you, or you can walk into any
gay bar in any city in the country and within fifteen minutes have made
seventeen new friends, you’re one of us, I don’t care how much cashmere you’ve
got on.) It’s a psychology that finds its most dramatic extremes illustrated in
the dramatic aria “Rose’s Turn” at the end of Gypsy, a sort of
histrionic catechism in which the eros of knowing what you’ve got inside
of you and the thanatos of the horrible existential fear that no one
will ever see it, or if they do, they won’t recognize it.
    Karen Cartwright was not one of us.
    Let me put it this way: I have a friend who always says the
main difference between theater people and Hollywood people is their jeans.
(That’s jeans with a “J,” by the way, if you’re blind and listening to this on
tape.) Hollywood people have good jeans, theater people have bad jeans. In the
world of Smash, Karen Cartwright is a pair of size 25 Citizens of
Humanity skinnies. Ivy is an odd Marc by Marc Jacobs cocktail dress you found
at the consignment store and it’s a size too small but it was only $75 and it’s
sort of designer, so what the hell. One of those things is a human being full
of conflict and insecurity and aspiration and story; the other is a picture of
slender thighs on the Barney’s website. Sometimes the captain of the Pom Squad
does get cast as Maria in The Sound of Music. She might even be good.
But