Chapter 8: Karaoke

How my drive for attention led to musical impressions, and how this went exactly how you probably think it went

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve had one weird talent:I do an excellent impression of the band, Creed. Yes, yes, I know that lots of people do Creed impressions but I’m a woman and I feel like that gives me some extra legitimacy because it really sounds a lot like Creed. The fact that I have an entire podcast of Trump impressions hopefully drives the point home that I’m actually pretty decent at this.

Nick has always been supportive of my talents, whether it’s work, cooking, writing, or trolling Reddit. This is obviously much appreciated, but there are times when his support verges on that of an overbearing stage mom in bedazzled skinny jeans mouthing “SMILE” from the audience at her five-year-old daughter Keighleigh’s Thanksgiving pageant. Even when it gets to this point, I consider it endearing if not downright adorable, but the problem is that it inevitably enables my worst instincts. Notably, my evergreen desire to be the center of attention.

Nick and I had been together for several years before he realized I did a good Creed impression. We were in our early twenties at a house party in San Francisco, and someone at a party played Higher on their iPod speakers. I jokingly started singing along to Nick, he thought it was funny, and began corralling people to listen to the impression. Given that it was a spontaneous little joke, people enjoyed it. Nick and I, however, thought this was my big break into the booming Creed Impression Industrial Complex.

From there, Nick and I would go to parties, and he would predictably “ask” me to do a Creed impression “out of nowhere.” People were drunk and every time it seemed like it was totally spontaneous, so generally they enjoyed it. This escalated to the point where after I did the Creed impression, he would prompt me to do a series of other impressions, at which I was also inexplicably very good: Sarah Palin and Kiera Knightley, the latter of which always involved a comical jutting outward of my chin and a posh, slightly upset affect. “Give her any topic and she’ll do the impression!” Nick would say. People would almost always select “Russia from my house” for Sarah Palin, which I absolutely hated (I would have vastly preferred to do a routine where Sarah Palin complains about arcade tokens getting stuck in the machine or something completely irrelevant to her career), so I revised this routine to include the jovial opening line of “Do not ask me to say ‘Russia from my house’” as if I was doing these partygoers a massive favor and this was my only condition. 

Although we were both quite drunk for all these interactions, my hazy memory is that people generally liked them. Nick and I were high on our own imagined fame, touring house parties where nobody knew us (usually we were invited by an invitee, which I think makes this a bit worse) absolutely killing it with these uncanny impressions, and then leaving suddenly.

While I enjoyed doing the impressions, and I’m a narcissist obsessed with getting attention, I’m surprisingly not a very good actor, nor do I enjoy acting. I did theater in high school, mostly because I was convinced it would be a great way to meet lots of hot straight guys. In any event, my theater “career” consisted of playing the occasional extra role, and then senior year writing and directing my own play, where I prided myself in being the “cool director” and letting the actors play “warmup games” during every practice until I realized at the dress rehearsal that nobody actually knew their lines and had a massive meltdown where I yelled at all the actors for taking advantage of my fun aunt status.

Despite my spotty history with acting, Nick told me I should consider “going on SNL.” I’m just going to give us both a pass here again because as delusional as this was, this was an era where we were perpetually drunk. My biggest concern about going on SNL wasn’t the fact that I wouldn’t be any good, or more realistically, that I wouldn’t even be able to get an audition--it was that I wasn’t sure I wanted to move to New York. I was afraid performing every Saturday night would negatively impact my favorite night to go to dive bars in bodycon dresses and get trashed with Nick and our friends. I was also concerned that I wouldn’t enjoy the fame, because I might have a stalker who would try to murder me. And what if people who didn’t know my name, but who wanted to refer to me, called me “That beaked up mid broad on SNL with the giant chin?”

Around this time, Nick and I had a good friend named Joe who was twenty years older than us. Joe was Nick’s old roommate (they’d roomed together while I was still in college). Nick lied to him about being twenty-eight when he was twenty-two to secure a room. After developing a friendship with Joe, Nick finally came clean after Joe discovered his actual ID. But it didn’t really matter to him, and Joe wound up being one of our closest friends. Joe had a daughter my age who was also my friend, named Nina, but they had a rule that we couldn’t hang out with both of them at the same time. In hindsight, this was kind of an alcohol-fueled version of a Disney original movie.

One sunny Labor Day weekend, Joe invited us to a house party in Tahoe. There would be a pool, he said, and lots of people. Or as Nick and I liked to see them, a fresh audience. Although Joe was older, plenty of his friends were younger (we were by far the youngest, but it was pretty common for his friends to be in their thirties) and tended to throw pretty great parties. In fact, Joe was the source of most of our medical marijuana. To quote Nick’s mom, “Something is wrong with that man.” I disagreed with her about Joe then and I disagree with her now--Joe was just fun to be around. He didn’t care if you were twenty-five or fifty. If you were fun to hang out with, he would be friends with you. This begs the question why he was friends with me, as I was not fun to hang out with, but I’m guessing it’s because I was part of a package deal with Nick.