I gathered the papers and piled them neatly, placed the pencils meticulously in the desk drawer, and slipped out the back stairs.
As I skipped through the park, I felt that one of my many fantasies could in fact be coming true. I was in a different country; I could be anyone. Kitty Kat would be my new name. The next day I took off to Italy with ten gay men, which proved a lot more educational than any internship. I went from viewing John Singer Sargent watercolors to statues of nude Roman men. And going from being alone in a windowless room at an auction house to watching my impeccably groomed traveling companions frolic in the waters of Lido Beach in Venice is eye-opening in its own way.
Chapter Eleven
What Color Is My Parachute?
W hy does everyone drink through college? I would think the time to intoxicate is when you’re in your forties, have a mundane job, are beyond baby-bearing, and life just isn’t going to change, give or take a few peaks and valleys. But when I was in college, in the apex of youth and promise, everybody was wasted from 6:00 p.m. on. There were these incredible guest writers, artists, and inventors who would sacrifice their SoHo lofts or Marin County houseboats to guest teach, but the student body was either too drunk or too hungover to care, much less show up for a lecture on quantum poetry. Look, I can understand a few beers after the opening of the play or after ten hours in the library, but total intoxication from sunset to sunrise? I really took offense when my college boyfriend got so drunk he peed all over my stereo. Why not the pile of clothes a foot away? Or, dare I say, the damn toilet?
My senior year at Bard, I rented a church with two other people I had never met; with not enough Methodist followers in the area, it had been leased out to college students. My room was in the sanctuary; my bed stood where the altar had been, which made for fascinating dreams and a chaste semester. When my alarm went off in the morning, I would open my eyes to a pensive John the Apostle looking down at me through a prism of colored glass.
I spent my time at the theater with men who wore duct-tape ballet shoes and armless sweatshirts and pirouetted across the cement quad to class. And drama girls who were overly earnest with pale skin and ponchos, always trying to ignite theater games like Accepting Circle and Fast Food Stanislavski. And then there were my friends; one was writing her thesis on the question, “If Hitler had been successful as an artist, would there have been no war?” Or another who spent all day pouring paint on enormous canvases to signify the frailty of the human condition. They lived on Red Stripe beer and stir-fry tofu. It was very hip to be poor and scrappy. Even if you had an allowance from your parents or worked part-time in the admissions office, you still bought wholesale blocks of cheese (lunch for a month) and clothes from the local Goodwill and drove the rustiest, smokiest Dukes of Hazzard dump that could (hopefully) make it through one semester.
And that was how I spent my twentieth year, wearing blousy dresses discarded from relatives of dead women and choking down tempeh. If I had some extra change for maybe a new towel or a steak, I kept it on the down-low. I never out-and-out lied about my background, but my classmates somehow got the impression that I was raised with my siblings in a VW bus traveling around Peru.
It wasn’t performing a completely different person so much as tailoring the truth. I found in college, as I would in Hollywood, that my upbringing was irrelevant to who I was, and that less was more when divulging facts about what made me, me. I couldn’t be an artist because my parents paid full tuition? I have enough change for laundry, so I’m not grunge? Even though nobody fought it when I treated everyone to gourmet hazelnut coffee beans and real maple syrup.
T he only other time in my life I chose not to accurately represent my
As I skipped through the park, I felt that one of my many fantasies could in fact be coming true. I was in a different country; I could be anyone. Kitty Kat would be my new name. The next day I took off to Italy with ten gay men, which proved a lot more educational than any internship. I went from viewing John Singer Sargent watercolors to statues of nude Roman men. And going from being alone in a windowless room at an auction house to watching my impeccably groomed traveling companions frolic in the waters of Lido Beach in Venice is eye-opening in its own way.
Chapter Eleven
What Color Is My Parachute?
W hy does everyone drink through college? I would think the time to intoxicate is when you’re in your forties, have a mundane job, are beyond baby-bearing, and life just isn’t going to change, give or take a few peaks and valleys. But when I was in college, in the apex of youth and promise, everybody was wasted from 6:00 p.m. on. There were these incredible guest writers, artists, and inventors who would sacrifice their SoHo lofts or Marin County houseboats to guest teach, but the student body was either too drunk or too hungover to care, much less show up for a lecture on quantum poetry. Look, I can understand a few beers after the opening of the play or after ten hours in the library, but total intoxication from sunset to sunrise? I really took offense when my college boyfriend got so drunk he peed all over my stereo. Why not the pile of clothes a foot away? Or, dare I say, the damn toilet?
My senior year at Bard, I rented a church with two other people I had never met; with not enough Methodist followers in the area, it had been leased out to college students. My room was in the sanctuary; my bed stood where the altar had been, which made for fascinating dreams and a chaste semester. When my alarm went off in the morning, I would open my eyes to a pensive John the Apostle looking down at me through a prism of colored glass.
I spent my time at the theater with men who wore duct-tape ballet shoes and armless sweatshirts and pirouetted across the cement quad to class. And drama girls who were overly earnest with pale skin and ponchos, always trying to ignite theater games like Accepting Circle and Fast Food Stanislavski. And then there were my friends; one was writing her thesis on the question, “If Hitler had been successful as an artist, would there have been no war?” Or another who spent all day pouring paint on enormous canvases to signify the frailty of the human condition. They lived on Red Stripe beer and stir-fry tofu. It was very hip to be poor and scrappy. Even if you had an allowance from your parents or worked part-time in the admissions office, you still bought wholesale blocks of cheese (lunch for a month) and clothes from the local Goodwill and drove the rustiest, smokiest Dukes of Hazzard dump that could (hopefully) make it through one semester.
And that was how I spent my twentieth year, wearing blousy dresses discarded from relatives of dead women and choking down tempeh. If I had some extra change for maybe a new towel or a steak, I kept it on the down-low. I never out-and-out lied about my background, but my classmates somehow got the impression that I was raised with my siblings in a VW bus traveling around Peru.
It wasn’t performing a completely different person so much as tailoring the truth. I found in college, as I would in Hollywood, that my upbringing was irrelevant to who I was, and that less was more when divulging facts about what made me, me. I couldn’t be an artist because my parents paid full tuition? I have enough change for laundry, so I’m not grunge? Even though nobody fought it when I treated everyone to gourmet hazelnut coffee beans and real maple syrup.
T he only other time in my life I chose not to accurately represent my
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