A Little Bit Wicked (8 page)

“Oh, totally,” I said. “But I’m really nervous.”

“Don’t be. The crown’s yours.”

“Really? You think?”

“It’s already been decided.” He shrugged.

“Oh…” Something about the way he said it made me uncomfortable. “Really?”

“Wait. Are you—you’re the Von Plotz girl, right?”

Fwaugh. Fffffffwaaaaaaaaaaaaugh
.

Now, let me be clear: I am not saying the pageant was rigged. I don’t know who that guy was. I don’t know what he meant by that or if he in fact had anything to do with the pageant. I’m just saying. That’s what he said.

The next day brought a flurry of controversy when the “story broke” that I was an interloper from Oklahoma, that I had in fact vied for the coveted Miss Oklahoma crown and been defeated. I was clearly the pageant equivalent of anthrax. I’d never tried to hide that I was originally from Oklahoma, never toned down my Southern accent or pretended to be anything I wasn’t. Pageant officials rushed to clarify to the press that I was by-the-book eligible. Nonetheless, some folks didn’t like it.

“So, Kristi,” one of the other girls said, “did you have running water back home in Oklahoma?”

We got to greet our parents after each phase of the pageant, and I was never so glad to feel my dad’s big arms around me.

“Don’t worry about it, Kristi.” He pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “Just go on into that interview and be yourself. They’ve gotta love you.”

When it came time for the interviews, I was called first. The death number. But I was okay with that because in this part each contestant had the opportunity to discuss her platform, which I was excited to do. In this and the Miss Oklahoma pageant, my platform was “AIDS Awareness,” something few people wanted to talk about at the time. Thank God, things are different now, but this was back in the day when residents of Kokomo, Indiana, actually started an alternative school so their kids wouldn’t have to be in the same building as a boy with AIDS. A family’s home was torched when it was disclosed that their three hemophiliac sons were HIV-positive. Those stories hurt my heart, and I felt strongly that people needed to know the facts about AIDS, but it wasn’t a popular platform for pageants. There was something unseemly about it, something sexual, or—worse yet—something
homo
sexual. Why would a nice Christian girl concern herself with a thing like that?

I walked into the interview feeling a little shaken by the whole Oklahoma controversy but rock solid about the homework I’d put into my platform.

The first judge gave me the once-over and asked, “Kristi, what’s the state flower of Pennsylvania?”

“The Pennsylvania state flower is the Mountain laurel,” I said. “
Kalmia latifolia,
a distinctive pink cluster of woodland blossoms that reaches full bloom in mid-June.”

“How about the state tree?”

“That would be the eastern hemlock,
Tsuga canadensis
.”

“State bird?”

“Ruffed grouse.”

“Highest elevation?”

“Mount Davis; 3,213 feet.”

“Lowest elevation?”

“Delaware River, right smack-dab on sea level.”

“Major agricultural exports?”

“Dairy, poultry, cattle, hogs, hay, and gourmet mushrooms served in many fine restaurants throughout the United States and Canada. Our state is a wealth of natural treasures.”

Yeah, baby. Stick that in your
Tsuga canadensis
and smoke it. You better believe I knew my Keystone State minutiae. I’d done my homework on that, too, because (a) I wanted to win, and (b), as corntacular as this may sound, I felt that if I did win, I had an obligation to properly represent the state at the national pageant and at all the Miss Pennsylvania events. The pepper of
Jeopardy!
questions continued until my time was almost expired. Surely, I thought, they’ll take the last few minutes to ask at least one question about my platform.

“Kristi, what are your views on the present situation in Yugoslavia?”

“I would have to say…about the, um…the Yugoslavia situation…”
Crap,
I thought, clicking through the fragmented news reports and dinner-table conversations.
Kosovo? Serbia? Shlomo Milosivosovitch?
I cleared my throat and said, “I’m not as knowledgeable about that as I could be, and I don’t think it’s right to spout an opinion out of ignorance.”

They asked a few more questions that dealt with moral issues, which was aces for me; I was still pure as the driven snow. I left feeling pretty good about it. They never did ask me about my platform, but at least there were no
60 Minutes
moments. When they called the ten finalists during the actual pageant that night, I was dead last. Number ten. Which is actually an advantage because you get the last word in the onstage Q&A. It’s traditional for the finalists to be asked about their platform, and each of the other girls was asked about hers, but when I stepped up, the emcee said, “Kristi, out of your interview, what’s the one answer you’d most like to change?”

“I wouldn’t change anything,” I said. “I liked all my answers. Life is about each moment, and you don’t get to go back and do it over. You can only learn from your mistakes and go on.”

After a polite spatter of applause, they did a really lovely thing; they had the finalists dance with their fathers while the scores were being tallied. (Kudos on that, Miss PA pageant event planner. A very special moment.) My father joined me onstage, handsome and confident in his tux.

“I don’t think it’s going to happen, Dad.”

“Don’t worry, Kristi. God is in control.”

It gave me a little of his strength, the way he said it. Utterly assured.
God is in control
. I tried to hold on to that as they announced the fourth runner-up.

Hang in there. God’s in control. Be patient.

Third runner-up.

It’s yours. In the bag. Wait for it…

“The second runner-up: Kristi Dawn Chenoweth!”

Noooooooo…this can’t be right! You called my name too soon!

Third again. Out of seventeen contestants. I got my fanny whupped by Von Plotz, who sang like a chain saw and didn’t even get to first base at the national pageant a few months later. But it was like a megaphone from God’s lips to my stubborn little eardrum:
You ain’t goin’ to no Miss
America to get no agent, so get over it
. I reminded myself that I’d gotten enough scholarship money to pay for my master’s degree, which is what I’d set out to achieve, and I could get an agent the same way everyone else did. (Whatever that was.) If I believed God was in control when I won, I had to believe that his hand was on me at this moment.

Denny, great pal that he is, couldn’t wait to get his hands on the videotape, and he still to this day enjoys rewinding it to watch me lose over and over. No matter how many times we roll it back, they consistently get it wrong and declare me second runner-up. The camera zooms in on me, my eyes turn up toward Heaven, and you can see me say, “Okay!” My foot kicks out a little, and I walk on over to collect my roadkill roses. Okay, God, I hear ya, loud and clear.

Backstage after the pageant, one of the organizers asked me if I was going to try again next year, and I smiled and shrugged, thinking,
I’d rather get a Pap smear
.

The next day I was required to go to a luncheon, and I went in a cute skirt and ballet flats, not a spec of makeup on my face, my hair in a casual twist. On the pocket of my jean jacket, I wore a little pin that said
NOT!
Somewhere in the night, I’d decided that if you can’t win it by being yourself, it was never yours to begin with.

One more item was on the pageant agenda. A representative from the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia was introduced to award the final prize: an opportunity to audition for AVA, which accepted only seven students per year. Auditions were hard to get, and in the unlikely event a girl’s audition actually resulted in acceptance, a full scholarship came with it. They felt safe offering this generous prize because—c’mon. What are the odds?

The guy said, “Artists from all over the world apply to audition for AVA’s four-year program, and only those with tremendous potential are accepted to the Academy. Very few times have I been truly impressed, and I am now.”

Then he said my name.

“I’m glad you lost,” Florence Birdwell told me the following week. “I’ve seen too many girls lose their vision. And there’s a certain stigma. Winning pageants can actually work against you in the real world, but the opportunity to audition for AVA—Kristin, this is huge, and if you actually get in?
Well!
” She opened her arms as if that meant everything. “That AVA scholarship is like being handed $280,000. And a career in opera. We’d better start preparing.”

Ms. Birdwell outfitted me for vocal competitions the same way Aunt Ginger prepped me for pageant mode. Each year Ms. Birdwell took me to the National Association of Teachers of Singing competition—a six-state thing. Very big deal. At the end of the day, they ask five singers to perform, and my senior year I was thrilled to be chosen to sing “Caro Nome” (“Dearest Name”) from Verdi’s
Rigoletto
. During the dinner break, I dashed home, put on the gown I’d worn in the Miss Oklahoma pageant, and dashed back to the concert hall, feeling beautiful and effusively soprano. When Ms. Birdwell saw me, her face fell.

“Well,” she huffed. “You’ve lost.”

“What?”

“Where’s that dear little blue suit you wore today? Kristi, what’s so great about you is that you’re not one of the women who
goes home to change
.”

Screw her,
I thought, as I walked out onto the stage.
I feel pretty
. But as soon as I started to sing…oh, I wished I were wearing my little blue suit. I don’t know what I was thinking. If I’d been doing “Glitter and Be Gay,” yes, of course, the gown, but this was Gilda, the innocent young daughter of the hunchback jester, singing about the name that made her heart beat fast for the very first time.

“Caro nome che il mio cor…festi primo palpitar…”

I looked down at Ms. Birdwell, and she was looking up at me like…meh.

I got fourth. Out of five. Frankly, I had a better voice than some of those women, but I didn’t deserve better than fourth.

“All of these are lessons,” Ms. Birdwell soothed, putting her arms around me. “All lessons for you to learn, my dear. Go home. We’ll start Monday.”

I blew my nose and gathered the hem of my gown to trudge across the parking lot.

“Put that dress away,” she called after me. “Put it away!”

I finished my master’s program with the thesis concert: all legit music, including a difficult song cycle of Emily Dickinson poems set to music by Aaron Copland.

Emily Dickinson is such a wonderfully obstinate little cuss. I’ve always wondered what it was in her life that so turned her against comfort, company, and faith. An atheist who wrote hymns, a hermit who wrote love poems—maybe she simply didn’t want to be figured out. It took a few years for some of the cycle to sink in, but parts still haunt me.

I sang from Carlisle Floyd’s great American opera,
Susannah;
Schubert and Schumann art songs; Mozart’s “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen”—the queen of the night aria. This was a big, long, hard program. For the written part of my thesis, I decided to present a paper on Leonard Bernstein, specifically three pieces—
Trouble in Tahiti, West Side Story
, and
Candide
—a discourse on whether they were considered operetta or musical theatre. But I let that slide, since I had two years to turn it in, and at the moment I needed to focus on my audition for the coveted fellowship at AVA.

I got it.

Florence Birdwell practically levitated right out of her shoes. Be
ginning with this prestigious program, a promising career in opera opened up like a magnolia right in front of me. I was thrilled, too…pretty much. I’d been focused on New York—on Broadway—since I was a kid. It felt like part of my biology. I was grateful for this tremendous gift being offered to me, but my commitment to the idea kept flickering, like a brownout, when the lights keep dimming and coming back on, teasing shadows at the corner of your eye.

No.

I took myself in hand. It would be insane to turn down this opportunity. And more important, given the serendipitous way it came to me, it seemed to be the direction God wanted me to go.

Looking back on it now, I see that it was.

T
he music at Best Buy in Denver is booming loud and rhythmy. I have to dance.

“Aunt Kristi,” Zach groans. “Must you?”

I explain to him that, yes, I must, and he puts up with the humiliation because I’ve offered to pimp his ride with a new sound system. It’s a more extravagant birthday gift than I usually give, but this is a big birthday. Sixteen. Zach has evolved into a big, ungainly puppy version of Mark, a long way from the tiny little biscuit he was the first time I held him, fresh from Heaven, scrunchy-faced and happy, warm and fragrant as a baked potato in my arms.
Now I get it,
I thought. Up until that moment, I hadn’t had that gene kick in. Looking at him, I felt this enormous swell of love, pride, and protectiveness, and I knew that was only a shadow of what it must be to have your own baby. I kissed his tiny seashell of an ear and whispered, “You’re going to love me.”

Thus began my driving ambition to be the Cool Aunt. And so far so good. Thirteen-year-old Emily is easy; Betsye and I have already begun to train her in the ways of the shopping ninjas. Boys are a bit more mysterious to me, hence the clever blend of loud music, electronics, and cold, hard cash. But he is mine. Oh, yes. He is mine.

“Aunt Kristi, if you don’t stop dancing, I’m going over there.” He points to the video-games aisle.

“Can’t stop the beat, Zach. Da funk—it’s in the blood!”

He edges slowly away, and I swear, his face is scrunched exactly like that first time. I had just finished grad school. Denny was fresh back from his European cruise-ship gig, and that summer he and I did
A Chorus Line
together at a professional theater in Oklahoma City.

Okay, I’m sorry, but I have to interrupt here for one sec.

Denny! Get in here, honey. You have to meet everybody. Everybody? This is Denny Downs. Denny, everybody. Everybody, Denny.

Hi, everybody. I just have to tell you one quick thing. During that show—

It was the last night of the show.

I’ll get to that, but first, you have to know that during the entire run of the show, Kris was complaining about how uncomfortable her costume was. Every night, we’d be standing backstage, and she’d be whining, “This old school leotard is the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever worn.”

You know the dance clothes we’re talking about? Low on the hips, scooped front and back. And the front scoop was way too low. My cleavage was falling out all over the place.

So the last night of the show—

This is the very last night. Last. Show.

We were waiting to make our entrance, and she was tugging at her crotch and fussing with her bust and whining about it like she did every night, and I turn to her, and I go, “Hey—”

He just casually said, “Hey, do you think maybe you have it on backwards?”

And she got this little look on her face like…“Shwah?”…and then she dashed down the stairs. Went sprinting down to the little bathroom or whatever down there, and came back a minute later. “Yeah, this is a lot more comfortable.”

A place for everything and everything in its place, as they say.

Better late than never.

Yeah. Thanks for letting me suffer for six weeks so we’d have this incredibly hilarious story to tell.

Anyway. You were saying?

The very next morning, we loaded up my car—a little Honda CRX—and headed North with all our earthly belongings. Denny had one wrecking-ball-size bag, I had a few little cardboard dressers filled with my clothes, we each had a box of sheet music, and that was about it. Denny was moving to New York to take on the New York theatre world. Apartment hooked up, first audition scheduled—he was really doing it. I went with him to hang out for a few days before I went on to Philly to start my fellowship at AVA. We sang the whole way. Having just finished
A Chorus Line,
we had those songs very much on the brain, but we tweaked them with our own lyrics.

“Everything is beautiful at the buffet…at the buffet…at the buffAAAAAAAAAAY!”

It went downhill from there. May Marvin Hamlisch have mercy on our blackened souls; we had to pull over to the side of the road several times, we were laughing so hard. Denny and I always laugh a lot on our road trips. We sing, we bicker, we kibitz for miles. If Mark’s kids are along, they beg Denny to do the tour-train speech he used to give when he was working at Six Flags.

“All aboard! Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard the Little General. Your tour today is sponsored by Friendly’s, the friendliest stores in town. If you take a look around the left side of the train, you’ll see the sight of the first ice cream cone.” Hand gestures are paramount at this point in the speech, so if I’m not driving,
I have to reach across and take the wheel temporarily. “During the World’s Fair, an ice cream vendor ran out of bowls and turned to a nearby waffle iron for help. Thus the first cone was born!”

We stopped off to spend the night with Zach (with a baby in the house, Betsye and Mark became a pale side attraction), then dropped off the car at my parents’ house in Pennsylvania and took the train to Denny’s place in New York. I won’t be trite and say that I lay there that first night intoxicated with the sounds of the city, but…oh, what the heck—the first night I lay there intoxicated with the sounds of the city. Cue Sinatra and hope to kiss a Rockette; I was in
New York
—mere inches from the Great White Way.

The next day I went to Denny’s audition with him. Interesting people everywhere. The colors, the conversations, artists, musicians, tattered posters, worn dance shoes. It was very
All That Jazz
and all that jazz. The audition was for a national tour of
Annie Get Your Gun,
and since I was there, they let me audition, too. Neither of us got cast, but the choreographer came over to me after and said, “Come back tomorrow if you want to. I’m doing this show called
Animal Crackers
. Like the Marx Brothers’ movie, you know?”

I smiled and nodded as if I did know, and the next day I went back to audition.

“I don’t know if we’ll get to you,” the Equity union rep told me. “If you’re still around after they’ve seen all the union people, we’ll try to find time.”

A few other nonunion actors waited for a few hours, then drifted off, but what was a daily grind to them was like a Fellini film to me. I couldn’t get enough. I was so intrigued by the people who came and went, I hardly noticed the time. After five hours, the union rep came out and didn’t seem thrilled to see me.

“Oh, geez. You’re still here.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m just here for fun, anyway, so I understand if—”

He rolled his eyes, went into the next room for a moment, then came back and gestured me to go into the rehearsal space. The choreographer from the day before sat with a few others at a long fold-up table like one you’d see at a church supper. Another guy sat at a battered upright piano that looked like it just rolled off the set of
Lady Sings the Blues
.

“And you are?” said the guy in the middle.

“Kristi Chenoweth?” My voice went up at the end as if it were in question, but I felt Florence Birdwell over my shoulder and said more firmly, “Kristin Chenoweth.”

I went to the table and handed the man in the middle my headshot and résumé. (Yes, I did eventually learn what a headshot is. And it does not mean the same thing it does in Texas.) I went to the piano and gave the accompanist the piece I’d pulled from my box of sheet music.

“I’ll be singing ‘Somebody, Somewhere’ from
Most Happy Fella
.”

The director shrugged and sat back in sort of a lay-it-on-us-if-you-must posture.

I laid it on them.

After I finished, he stared at the table for a moment. “Do you have an up-tempo?”

“Of course.”

I gave the accompanist the sheet music for “On the Other Side of the Tracks” from
Little Me,
and when I finished singing it, the director asked, “Who are you?”

I wasn’t quite sure what he was asking, since he had an eight-by-ten glossy with my name in big letters right there in his hand.

“I’m just…this girl. I’m on my way to be an opera singer.”

“No, I mean—who—who represents you?”

“Well, I guess you could call my dad. If there’s a problem.”

“Your dad,” he echoed. “This would be the person I negotiate with?”

“Do you dance?” asked the choreographer. “Do you tap?”

“Oh, yes.”

He came over and quickly taught me a little routine, and I did it for them. They asked me to read a little scene, and I read it.

“Who
are
you?” the director asked me again. “What are you doing here?”

I gave him the short version: Oklahoma, Birdwell, AVA, Fellini.

“Look,” he said, “you need to seriously consider what you’re doing here. I’ll tell you, we’ve been looking for three months to cast this role. And I will be calling your father to offer you this part, but you look like one thing, and you’re actually a lot of things that—well, are you sure you want to be an opera singer?”

“Well, of course, I am…not.” Admitting it felt like a deep draw of oxygen.

“You’ll hear from us,” he said in a tone of voice that even I knew meant
you’re supposed to go now
. I thanked them and thanked them and scrambled down the steps to the street. I went back to Denny’s, and Denny was as astonished as I was. The next day we took the train to my parents’ home in Pennsylvania, and Charlie Repole, who was directing
Animal Crackers,
called while I was there.

“There’s apparently some union you have to join,” my dad said after he hung up the phone.

“Yes. Equity. It costs—I don’t know, but I think it’s a lot.”

Dad waved that off. “I got him to agree to pay the fee as part of your deal.”

“Oh, Dad! You’re brilliant. How much does it pay?”

“Five hundred.”

“Hmm.” I bit my lip and did the math in my head. “It would be tough, but I’m good on a budget. I could get by on five hundred a month.”

“No, it’s five hundred a week.”

“Oh, my gosh!”
I shrilled. “Five hundred a
week
?”

I thought I had it made in the shade. And, honey, I did! We get so jaded, don’t we? But that was a fortune for a struggling actor. Still is.

“He’s faxing the contract over for me to look at,” said Dad. “But if you’re going to do this, you need to get a real agent. He said you’d probably be getting some phone calls from people wanting to represent you.”

“Agents. Calling me.” Even through the cloud of elation, I got the irony.

The Lord works in mysterious ways,
Grandma would have said.

“Kristi,” Dad said gently, “you know that no matter what you decide, we support you. But you need to think hard about what you’re giving up here.”

“I know. It probably seems kind of…not the greatest idea.”

It actually sounded like a terrible idea. In Philly, I had a place to live and work for the next four years, stellar training, a wealth of onstage experience. And Florence Birdwell’s approval. If I took the part in
Animal Crackers,
I’d be crashing at Denny’s, earning a few thousand dollars over the next three months, and then…what? I’d basically be out in the cold with the eight kazillion other people who were trying to get the same work I was. Terrible idea. Terribly…thrilling…and exciting…and incredibly, ridiculously blessed.

“What do you want to do?” asked Dad.

Without a flicker of doubt I said, “I want to be on Broadway.”

It was a totally “Thus the first cone was born!” moment.

Animal Crackers
was a riot. Zany Marx Brothers comedy, physical, broad, and lots of fun to work on. I played a singer/dancer Betty Boop sort of character who sang “I Wanna Be Loved by You” and even got to be the sweet half of the secondary love interest in the script. I was having so much fun, it didn’t really sink in until much later what a gift it was to come to New York with that job in place. I need to take a
moment here and thank Charlie Repole for sticking out his foot and tripping me on my way to Pennsylvania; he’s really the one responsible for bringing me to New York.

The Gilbert and Sullivan style of “Hello, I Must Be Going” and Groucho’s signature tune, “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” needled my conscience about that master’s thesis. So did my father. He kept asking me if I was making any progress on it, and I kept telling him I was busy taking meetings with agents, who did indeed come to me with offers of representation. (A delicious footnote to my foiled plan to flag their attention by being all pageantastic on television; as Dad said, God was in control. It all happened so much better than what I was praying for.)

We rehearsed at 890 Broadway—a famous rehearsal space, though I didn’t know it at the time. I was scared of the subway, so I walked miles by daylight and took cabs at night. Other members of the ensemble quickly spotted my out-of-towner quirks and took me under their wings. They walked me down to the subway and rode home with me the next several nights, taught me to read the maps and figure out which line I needed to be on, and helped me get over my general Big Apple intimidation. This was a wonderful, warm introduction to the amazing community of New York theatre. It’s like the song says,
there’s no people like show people,
and there’s nothing like the Broadway family anywhere else on earth. Since I work on the West Coast so much these days, I have to make an effort to meet the new kids. I try to remember their names, to stay connected, and I go out of my way to help, remembering how my big brothers and sisters in the
Animal Crackers
company brought me in and brought me along without hesitation.

My parents weren’t all that surprised by my decision, but I put off telling Ms. Birdwell for as long as was humanly possible. After a few weeks, there was no getting around it. I blurted the big news and waited through a stony silence for her to respond.