Bossypants (11 page)

I buy our formal-night picture from the photo center. That I actually pay for it, instead of just taking it after all this nonsense, is a credit to my parents. Rod and I are looking tan and grinning at the lady pirate between us. What amount of revisionism will be necessary for this photo to be an accurate memento of our trip?

I run into Betty, Bernie, Barbra, and Richard in the cafeteria. Betty and Bernie have officially given up on Bermuda. Richard is ashen. I can tell he is the one who’s terrified to fly. “Did you get some pills?” I ask. “They were out,” his wife answers.

As the ship pulls back into King’s Wharf, local women and children are cheering us in. Little topless boys are waving their T-shirts in the air. Nothing gives you a fear flashback like a bunch of strangers cheering in surprise that you’re not dead.

They put us on a chartered flight back to New York. If you’ve never been on a chartered flight full of people who are afraid to fly who have also been traumatized in the past twelve hours, I recommend it more than a cruise. It’s pretty funny. Everyone is jittery, and when the pilot makes the unfortunate choice of testing the PA system by saying, “Bravo, bravo,” you can almost hear people’s b-holes tighten. A collective cartoon-mouse squeak of b-hole.

What if I told you now that the plane crashed while taxiing on the runway? It didn’t. We made it home, shaken but tan.

The most interesting thing I learned from this trip came when I told the story to my friend James, who had been a performer on a cruise ship years before. When I told him the woman said,

“Bravo, bravo, bravo,” James froze. Did she really say it three times? he needed to know. Then James laid it out for me. Bravo is serious. The more times they say it, the more serious it is. The most times they ever say it is four times, and if they say it four times, it means you’re going down to your watery grave. So “Bravo, bravo, bravo” was not terrific. Interesting fact number two: In the event of an emergency, it is the entertainers who are in charge of the lifeboats. Because the rest of the crew has actual nautical duties, the kids from Fiesta Caliente are trained to man the lifeboats. If you ever have to get on a lifeboat, the person in charge of your safety will likely be a nineteen-year-old dancer from Tampa who just had a fight with his boyfriend about the new Rihanna video. James also told me that each lifeboat has a gun on it and that once a lifeboat is in the water, the performer–lifeboat captain is trained to shoot anyone who is disruptive. This is apparently legal in accordance with maritime law.

About a week later, we get a letter of apology in the mail offering us a free cruise of equal or lesser value as compensation this offer is non-transferable. I’m pretty sure the only people who took that offer were the drunk guy next door, his stripper wife, and those dicks from table twenty. But I shall not cruise again. Luxury cruises were designed to make something unbearable—a two-week transatlantic crossing—seem bearable. There’s no need to do it now. There are planes. You wouldn’t take a vacation where you ride on a stagecoach for two months but there’s all-you-can-eat shrimp. You wouldn’t take a vacation where you have an old-timey appendectomy without anesthesia while steel drums play. You
might
take a vacation where you ride on a camel for two days if they gave you those animal towels wearing your sunglasses.

“What were you thinking when we were holding hands diagonally?” I ask. Jeff says, “I was thinking, ‘It’s going to be so hard for her when she chooses not to get on that lifeboat and stay with me.’

”

I decide I can’t start this marriage with a lie.

“Really?” I say. “ ’Cause I was thinking that it was going to be so hard for you when I got on the lifeboat and you had to stay behind.” He is appalled. I plead my case. “Remember when we saw
Titanic
how mad I was at Kate Winslet when she climbed out of the lifeboat and back onto the ship? I think she encumbered Leonardo DiCaprio. If she had gone on the lifeboat, then he could have had that piece of wood she was floating on and they both would have survived. I would never do that to you.”

I wait for his response, hoping that in the twenty-first century romantic love can be defined as not lying about your plans to get on the lifeboat and remembering to get your partner some pills. He just laughs. With that settled, we begin our married life.

The Secrets of Mommy’s Beauty

I know why you bought this book. Or should I say, I know why you borrowed this book from that woman at your office. You want to know my secret beauty regimen. I learned early on that a woman must master and protect the “Secrets of Her Beauty,” but I will share with you my Twelve Tenets of Looking Amazing Forever.

1) Form Good Beauty Habits Early

“How do you stay so eternally youthful?” “Your skin is so flawless. What’s your secret?” people always ask Sharon Stone. Like my peer Sharon Stone, I have always felt that the simplest products are the best. Sharon credits her good skin to Pond’s cold cream (and maybe a little bit of nature’s own botulism. Wink!). In my youth I washed daily with Ivory soap and Prell shampoo. Everyone knew Prell was the best shampoo because you could also use it to clean a frying pan. I then dried my hair with a Hot Comb. The Hot Comb was a small vibrating, wheezing hairbrush that for some reason my family kept in the dining room credenza. Maybe it wanted to be close to the electric knife, since they were almost the exact same machine.

If I didn’t have the time for the full hot-comb treatment—for example, if I was in a hurry to get outside and choreograph a pretend Pepsi commercial with my friend Maureen—I would stand in front of our giant air conditioner and let it blast my hair dry.

2) The Right Undergarments Are an Essential Part of Your Silhouette

I developed breasts very early, around nine years old. I developed breasts so weird and high, it’s possible they were above my collarbone. At that point, wearing a bra was not so much about holding the breasts up, as clarifying that they were not a goiter.

My mother knew the importance of getting the right fit for a bra, so she took me to JCPenney and tried one on over my clothes.
She tried a bra on me over my clothes in the middle of JCPenney.
I thank her for this. This early breast-related humiliation prevented me from ever needing to participate in “Girls Gone Wild” in my twenties.

3) Skin Care, Skin Care, Skin Care!

Makeup companies like to make skin care seem complicated, but let me demystify it for you.

The Three Secrets of Great Skin are Moisture, SOOTS (Stay Out of the Sun), and Be Italian. The Three Rules of SOOTS are Sunscreen, AWAH (Always Wear a Hat), and DLO (Don’t Lay Out). “Don’t Lay Out” is a mnemonic device for “Do Lots of Omega 3s,” which can be found in SWaWB (Salmon, Walnuts, and Weird Bread).

Consistency is the most important part of skin care, followed by Water Drinking, and both of those are less important than SLEEP (Sleep Like Everyone Else, Please).

At the tender age of fourteen I was already invigorating my skin with a rigorous daily massage. I squeezed and picked at every pore, harvesting any and all goo balls. This, followed by a bracing splash of Sea Breeze, has helped keep my pores large and supple to this day.

By nineteen, I had discovered that Retin-A was a great way to have large chunks of your skin peel off and waft to the floor during acting class.

4) Don’t Be Afraid to Try “Outside the Box” Skin Care Solutions

I spent most of 1990 bargaining with God that I would take one gigantic lifelong back zit in exchange for clear skin on my face. While this never worked out, I do not at all regret the time I spent pursuing it. It’s about the journey, people.

5) The Eyes Are the Windows to Where the Soul Is Supposed to Be

I taught Monica Lewinsky everything she knows… about eye cream. I guess I should back up and explain that. In the spring of 1999, I participated in a secret meeting with Monica Lewinsky,
SNL

producer Marci Klein, and fellow
SNL
writer Paula Pell. Marci called and asked how quickly Paula and I could get down to her Tribeca apartment. Monica Lewinsky was coming over and we three were going to convince her to appear on
SNL
. This was before Ms. Lewinsky’s infamous Barbara Walters interview aired. None of us had even heard her speak before. She was still that enigmatic girl in the beret who didn’t get to the dry cleaners very often.

We spent the afternoon drinking wine and eating wasabi peas. (We didn’t even buy the girl lunch! Who did we think we were, presidents?) Monica was bright and personable and very open with us—maybe too open for a person in her situation. I’m just saying, Linda Tripp might not have been the intelligence-gathering mastermind you thought she was.

We talked about thongs, Weight Watchers, and Brazilian bikini waxes. (But you probably knew all that when I said it was
1999
.) When the topic turned to eye cream, I wanted to talk, so I shared the one piece of information I’d retained from the mean woman at the La Mer counter in Saks. “You’re supposed to gently pat it on with your ring finger.” I demonstrated. “Oh, really?” Monica asked with a level of interest and gullibility that explained a lot. To this day, I think of Monica whenever I apply my eye cream. And I’m sure she thinks of me.

6) Space Lasers

As you age, you may want to pay someone to shoot lasers at your face. If you are a fancy lady and live in a fancy urban center like New York or Dallas–Fort Worth, you go to a fancy dermatologist and they cover your eyes and point various machines at your face to “promote collagen production.” If you live far from a city, you can simulate the experience at home by having a friend hide your wallet while you sit close to a space heater. It will work just as well.

For a while I was getting my “laser money removal” done by a fancy doctor on Park Avenue. One day I went to see about some hormonal acne that wouldn’t go away on my jawline. The doctor eagerly injected the spot with steroids, and within a day or two the blemish had shrunk down to normal.

Unfortunately, the steroids caused the spot to keep shrinking, and by the end of the week I had a divot in my jaw through which I could feel the bone. I was furious and complaining about it in the makeup chair at
SNL.
“My face is already pretty banged up and now I have
another
scar to deal with?!” Amy Poehler called to me from across the room, “The difference is… now you’re
paying
for it.” She was right.

I really had made it. We high-fived about it later.

7) “A Woman’s Hair Is Her Crowning Glory”—the guys who wrote the Bible

Beauty experts in the 1970s declared the shag the “most universally flattering haircut.” The short layers in the front framed the face while irregular longer pieces in the back elongated the neck. I think this picture proves them right.

Finding a hairstylist you trust is key. For many years I worked exclusively with the students at the Gordon Phillips Beauty Academy. The sign out front said it all—“Gordon Phillips Beauty Academy, London, Paris, Upper Darby.” Always on the cutting edge of beauty, I believe this haircut was executed by folding my face in half and cutting out a heart. Of course I must be honest; this is clearly a professional photo taken on “picture day.” I didn’t look this sleek and pulled together all the time.

8) Q: But Tina, Most of Us Don’t Have Constant Access to a Hairstylist. What Do

We Do?

A: First of All, Don’t Speak to Me in That Tone. Second of All, You Must Learn to Tame Your
Own Mane!

I first found a system that worked for me in the mid-eighties. Once or twice a week I would set my alarm for six A.M. so I could get up and plug in the Hot Stix. Hot Stix were heated rubber sticks, and you would twist your hair around them and roll it up. After about fifteen minutes, you took all the sticks out, and your hair was curled up in tight rings (with dry raggedy ends). I would study the curls in the mirror, impressed with both the appliance and my newfound ability to use it.

Then, without fail, at the last second before leaving for school, I would ask myself, “Am I supposed to brush it out or leave it?”
Why could I never remember?
That feeling of “I’m pretty sure this next step is wrong, but I’m just gonna do it anyway” is part of the same set of instincts that makes me such a great cook.

On some level I knew I wasn’t supposed to brush it out, but I couldn’t stop myself.

My hand—gripping the brush like it was a hand transplant from a murderer who hated beauty!—brushed through the curls, turning them into a giant static-filled mess. By the end of homeroom it was pulled into a ponytail, which really works on me, so there you have it.

Right after I graduated high school I decided to cut my hair off. This was my chance to reinvent myself before college.

After a harsh disagreement over the ideational hollowness of sausage curls, my mother and I had ended our artistic experiment with the Gordon Phillips Academy. We were now getting our hair cut by my classmate’s mom, who was also a professional Ann Jillian look-alike. Yes, the feeling you’re experiencing right now is jealousy. The whole family was glamorous that way. I always envied their lives because they seemed like they were living in a sitcom. They were all blond and good-looking. The mom cut hair out of her basement salon and Ann Jillian–ed part-time. You could sell this show to CBS just with that! The dad ran a restaurant. Their uncle was our school’s “cool” English teacher. The oldest son was a young Bon Jovi type who was the star of our high school choir and went
all the way to New York
once a week for private hard-rock vocal coaching. The middle son was a brilliant, funny, cuddly giant who drew sardonic cartoons in the margins of things, and the baby of the family was the Jason Priestley–level adorable kid who, clearly, the producers of the family had added in the last season to boost ratings. I mean, just looking at this family, you knew they were going to make it to syndication.