The comediennes guide to.., p.1
The Comedienne's Guide to Pride, page 1
The
Comedienne's
GUIDE TO PRIDE
HAYLI THOMSON
“While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die—whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness.”
—GILDA RADNER, It’s Always Something
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Page Street Publishing Co. ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
For Mum,
who has always loved Lucy
From: Taylor Parker (debbie.downer04@gmail.com)
To: Jane Lincoln (jane.lincoln@nbcunicareers.com)
Subject: Re: Congratulations! Finalist Announcement for the Emerging Writers’ Diversity Award
Sent: November 1, 2016, 8:34 p.m.
Hi Jane,
I was really excited to receive your email. This is literally the best thing that has ever happened to me.
I’m sending this reply because I need to ask something of you. It’s kind of humiliating. I don’t want to come off as ungrateful, but I need to request that you don’t include my name on the finalist list on the NBC site. The thing is, I’m not exactly out of the closet. I realize that I should have thought about the consequences before I entered a contest for diverse writers, but when I submitted my entry all those months ago, never in a million years did I think I would actually be selected as a finalist. Now I’m in a bit of a pickle—you’ve selected me as a finalist for this fantastic opportunity because I’m a lesbian, but it’s actually something I’m hiding.
All I’m asking is that you keep my nomination on the down-low until the winner is announced. By then, I’ll make sure I’m out (not that I think I’ll win or anything … but just in case). All I need is a little more time. I need the news to come from me, not a social media announcement, you know?
Anyway, if you absolutely have to put my name down on the finalist list, that’s still cool (well, it’s not really cool, but I’m the one who got myself into this situation, and I’ll get myself out of it—see what I did there?). In no way am I forfeiting my nomination. Seriously, Jane. I was born to be a sketch writer. I mean, I’d rather you come into Gay Narnia and drag me out kicking and screaming than I would give this up.
Whatever you decide to do, I can guarantee that you’ll have my finalist submission sketch by Thanksgiving Eve, because if there’s anything worth coming out for, it’s the chance at winning an internship at Saturday Night Live. I need whoever is behind this screen to know that there’s a seventeen-year-old girl living in Salem, Massachusetts, who takes her future in comedy as seriously as Trump takes his fake bake.
So, in conclusion … thank you.
Kind regards,
Taylor Parker
From: Jane Lincoln (jane.lincoln@nbcunicareers.com)
To: Taylor Parker (debbie.downer04@gmail.com)
Subject: Re: Re: Congratulations! Finalist Announcement for the Emerging Writers’ Diversity Award
Received: November 2, 2016, 11:21 a.m.
Hi, Taylor,
Your email made me smile. How about I go ahead and put you down on the finalist list as “Anonymous, Massachusetts”? I assure you that we won’t release your name to the public until the winner is announced after Christmas.
I hope these next couple of months aren’t too hard on you. You certainly sound like somebody with a fighting spirit, and I wish you nothing but the best.
Good luck writing your finalist submission, and once again, congratulations on your nomination.
Jane Lincoln
NBCUniversal Careers
ONE
I hadn’t always lived in Salem. We relocated from Virginia when Mom had the bright idea to open a bed-and-breakfast on Essex Street. Conveniently, since 2010, we’d been direct descendants of Bridget Bishop, the first woman in Salem hanged for witchcraft. The lodgers always ate it up when Mom told them “our story” and “upgraded” them to the Bridget Bishop Suite. Most of the gift shop owners farther down Essex did the same thing, especially the pedestrian street “psychics,” who charged two dollars a minute and sold rosemary-filled apothecary bottles for twelve dollars a pop. It was a twisted little thing about Salem, Massachusetts: more than three hundred years after the witch trials took place, most people still claimed some sort of connection to the hysteria.
I was eleven when Mom sat me down and made me watch The Crucible. “Taylor,” she’d said, “if you’re going to grow up in this town, you’re going to need to know what Salem is all about.” I think my mother actually believed that what went down in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was the honest-to-god true story—that seventeen-year-old Abigail Williams had an affair with thirty-year-old John Proctor and that when he dumped her, Abigail tried to send Proctor’s poor pregnant wife, Elizabeth, to the gallows for dancing with the devil. Soon after, I found out that in real life Abigail had been eleven and John had been sixty—most likely, nothing had ever happened between them. The truth was that the hysteria had been ignited by a bunch of bored eleven-year-old girls who’d decided to play a very dangerous game. At eleven, I could sympathize. I knew what it was like to be bored in Salem without electricity—we’d once had a power outage, and without screen time I’d had no option but to keep myself busy by shaving everything from the waist down until I looked like I’d fallen pants-less into a bramble bush.
Out of everyone involved in the witch trials, I always felt kind of bad for Abigail. From my place on our newly delivered leather couch—on my third rewatch of The Crucible—the whole thing just seemed like an unfortunate accident to me. I was sure Abigail didn’t mean to send half the town to the gallows (in hindsight, my judgment might have been clouded by Arthur Miller’s choice to cast Winona Ryder and her perfect face as Abigail Williams).
There’s one scene where Abigail meets Proctor in the woods. It’s the first time in the whole movie that the bonnet’s gone, her hair’s down, and Winona’s looking like a goddamn Pantene commercial for the Mayflower pilgrims. “You will never cry witchery again!” Proctor threatens, and a vengeful Winona just glares up at him with her huge brown eyes and grins seductively. My eleven-year-old body flared up—I was burning at the stake of Desperate Longing right there in my living room. “Isn’t he dreamy?” Mom said from the other end of the couch. I think I nodded, but as far as I was concerned, Mom could have Daniel Day-Lewis—watching Winona Ryder claim that Elizabeth Proctor’s spirit had come into her bed “in the middle of the night” and “bitted” her breast was the single most exciting thing I’d ever seen.
So even though I didn’t really have ancestors of the Puritan kind—of the gallows kind—I could trace the origins of my lesbian proclivities through a single person: Abigail Williams.
For the second time since I’d received the finalist notification, I ventured over to Salem’s Museum of Witchcraft. Like a professional stalker, I drifted into the theater on the tail of the line and disguised myself among the November tourists in the back row.
I didn’t want to think about how obsessive I was becoming. I didn’t want to think about why I kept the museum’s flyer hidden in my nightstand drawer. I was so unbelievably tired of thinking. Almost two weeks had passed since I’d been named a finalist, and I hadn’t told a soul. What I had done was think and stress and think and stress while November ticked by like a time bomb.
The curtain pulled back. The spotlight switched on. There she was. Abigail Williams was fake hyperventilating downstage left and I was low-key actually hyperventilating. As Abigail pointed her finger at Elizabeth Proctor and accused her of witchcraft, it all came rushing back—my eleven-year-old theoretical affair with Winona Ryder, my blind sympathy for Abigail, my complete and total disinterest in Daniel Day-Lewis. There was that hot, familiar feeling when Abigail went to slap Elizabeth Proctor in court, but stopped, brushed her fingers over Elizabeth’s cheek before recoiling, shrieking that her fingers burned. I wanted it to be my skin that burned Abigail’s fingers, but in a good way, and I still wanted it ten minutes later when Abigail sent another hundred villagers to the gallows. It was happening all over again. Abigail’s phantom touch was reaching all the way to the back row of the theater and strangling the lingering breath of heteronormativity right out of me.
But it wasn’t Abigail Williams who seemed to have her hands around my neck so tight I couldn’t breathe. No. It was Charlotte Grey. Charlotte Grey, head to toe in Puritan costume. Charlotte Grey, who’d lived the first decade of her life in Salem and returned from Maine last year just in time to start her junior year and turn my entire universe upside down. Charlotte Grey, with her heart-shaped face and wide eyes, who was just as alluring as Winona in that bonnet. Charlotte Grey, who was bound for way better than the Museum of Witchcraft’s Saturday reenactment and walked in and out of every one of my Advanced Placement classe
I knew what was coming next. Upstage, five dilapidated mannequins were preparing to plunge to their death from the museum’s papier-mâché Proctor’s Ledge to the tune of Chopin’s funeral march, but it might as well have been “Bridal Chorus” because Charlotte Grey was fainting downstage right like the Oscar-caliber actress she was, and I was falling in love all over again for the first time since I was eleven. I wanted Charlotte Grey—I wanted everything about her.
After taking her bows with the rest of the cast, she pushed back her bonnet. Her gaze danced across the sea of wool hats. “Any questions from the audience?”
My fingers curled around the edge of the pew. Marry me? Outside the museum, I checked my phone.
Mom: Just got home from Walgreens and Jen has already checked in. She’s asking where you are!! This is the second time in a row you’ve done this the day she’s arrived! Don’t be such a
Really, Mom? An eggplant emoji?
I took the long way home through Salem Common. Snowfall hadn’t come yet, and it was colder without a blanketed ground. I really wasn’t dressed warmly enough in my leather jacket, but it didn’t matter—I was on fire.
As excited as I was to see Jen, I was also a little bit terrified. I felt the same way each time she came back to Salem; I always wanted her to like me more than she had the time before. In every way imaginable, she was exactly the kind of person I wanted to be—sure of myself. The summer I was thirteen, I’d seen her take a woman into the Proctor Suite late one night. I’d known what it meant. I’d only ever heard Jen call herself a lesbian once; she was one of those progressive lesbians who obviously thought their sexuality was the least interesting thing about them, but even though she was quiet about it, you could tell she was really proud, too, because she’d show it in little ways—an extra thumb ring or a fresh undercut or how she’d gesture for our female guests to take the stairs before her like she was an extra on Downton fucking Abbey. And she loved her community, too—this past summer, the morning after the Orlando gay nightclub shooting, she’d gone out to drink coffee with a guest on the porch, and when she’d come back in, her eyes had been bloodshot.
As for me? I knew there was a reason why I dialed the rotary phone at least three nights a week thinking about how pretty Charlotte looked in her sandy-colored sweater, but my sexuality was still Amelia Earhart-themed—I had no idea where it was going to end up. I’d been questioning for a long time. The year before, when I was sixteen, I’d even tried to go to a PFLAG meeting at Prides Crossing Community Hall, but I hadn’t been brave enough to push open the door and figure out how I fit in. You should have it figured out by now. You should be able to feel it in your bones…. I knew there wasn’t a single guy at school who’d ever set my heart racing, but it wasn’t like I was drooling over every girl who passed my locker, either. Just one. Just one with dark hair and blue eyes and a cleft chin and dimples deeper than the Hoover Dam. What if I was just really, really gay for Charlotte Grey?
Leaves crunched under my Timberlands. What if Jen took one look at me and saw the uncertainty written all over my face? What if she pitied me? After what had gone down between us last summer, this time the rumbling low in my chest was a whole lot more intense….
I followed Jen out onto the balcony of the Proctor Suite, where she’d always smoke and I’d always pretend it didn’t bother me.
The June heat lingered after dark, washed over my bare arms as I sat up on the railing.
Jen took a long drag of her cigarette and watched my bare feet dangle. “Don’t fall.”
“Don’t smoke.”
A grin trembled at the corners of her mouth.
“Honestly, Jen, the whole mothering thing doesn’t look good on you.”
“Honestly, Taylor, I wouldn’t want it to.” Her gray eyes matched the ash drooping from the end of her cigarette. “Not my style.”
Down below in the garden, cicadas sang out.
Jen blew smoke into the night. “Have you told anybody?”
My legs stopped swinging.
“Maybe when I come back this Thanksgiving,” she said, “you’ll have told your mom.”
At the front gate of the inn, I stopped. On the highest landing, the light was on in the Proctor Suite. A tall silhouette shifted. Pulling at the neck of my sweater, I squinted. It didn’t look like Jen. I mean, the way she held herself was bolder than seventeen-year-old Jodie Foster telling an interviewer she didn’t have a steady boyfriend because she didn’t “have time,” but this silhouette … it wasn’t rakish the way Jen was. Or slender. It was taller, and beefy. Maybe she was wearing heeled boots, her coat, too.
It had to be Jen. Mom always reserved the Proctor Suite for Jen. She was entitled to it because she’d been our first ever guest. We’d met her six years before, when she’d stayed with us for two whole months, even babysitting me a few times when Mom worked night shifts at Walgreens while she struggled to get the inn on its feet. Since then, the mid-thirties doctor of fine arts would stay with us twice a year—in the summer and over the holidays. After Jen managed whatever exhibition the Peabody Essex Museum assigned her here in Salem, she’d head back to New York City.
Instead of getting out my keys, I rang the bell.
With Jen upstairs, I expected Mom to open the door.
But she didn’t.
“Well, well …” Jen pressed her side against the open door. “Taylor Parker has finally arrived.”
My heartbeat fired against my chest. I’d forgotten that we’d been the same height for two years, that our eye lines matched.
Her fair hair had grown a few inches since the summer. It curled around her ears softly, prettily, as though it had always done just that. And her gray eyes? They glowed. I say glowed because, even though she was wearing a thick sweater, I could make out the swell of her pregnant belly.
I nodded at her middle. “When were you diagnosed with that?”
TWO
Mom had made dinner reservations for the three of us at Jerry’s Boathouse—Jen loved their pistachio-crusted salmon, Mom loved that she had an excuse to wear the pearl earrings Dad had given her after Affair Number One, and I loved that I didn’t have to eat Mom’s cooking. When we arrived at the hostess station outside, Mom had to change our reservation to accommodate the Impregnator.
Widowed Wanda had waited tables at Jerry’s Boathouse longer than Nathaniel Hawthorne had been linked to the House of the Seven Gables. As Wanda ran her leathery finger down the reservation list, her expression twisted. “You want to change your reservation to three? It already says three, honey.”
Wanda didn’t see me lingering behind the three of them, trying not to pass out on the dock from the fumes of the Impregnator’s aftershave.
Mom ran a hand through her long blond hair. “No, my daughter, too.” As she turned to usher me closer, her six-inch heel slipped into a crevice between the pier planks. Tearing her hands from the pockets of her oversized coat, Jen grasped Mom by the arm. Oh god, Mommy dearest.
Mom continued. “We have a reservation for three. We just need to add another—”
The Salem Fast Ferry’s horn blasted across the harbor, swallowing up the Boathouse. Wanda stretched her stooped frame across her lectern. “You say you’re waiting on another person?”
The Impregnator reached for Jen’s hand like a panicked toddler. I bit back a grin. Well, this is wicked fun.
The restaurant was full of lingering tourists eager to Instagram Salem’s rotting jack-o’-lanterns, so Wanda switched us from our regular window table. “Seriously?” I murmured to Mom as we followed Wanda to a booth in the corner. “The whole point of going to the Boathouse is the view. We may as well have ventured over to the Olive Garden in Danvers with its view of I-95.”
“Taylor, don’t be a whiny little b—oh, there’s Claire Wilson!” Mom grinned so wide, her underbite disappeared. “Go ahead and sit with Jen and Ryan, and I’ll be right there—”
