Free Flavor of the Month by Goldsmith Olivia Page A

then he was just another stand-up comic trying to get a break and a sitcom of his own. Mary Jane’s best friend, and a guy dying for recognition, he was one of the hungry hordes of New York entertainers trying for a ticket to the big time .
    When Neil Morelli left the scene of Mary Jane’s church-basement humiliation, he went on to work. Maybe someday she’d get wise—and notice the man in her life who really loved her. Now he couldn’t be depressed about it. Bouncing off the elevator into the law firm’s offices on the twenty-eighth floor of the Rockefeller Center skyscraper, he passed the receptionist behind an enormous cherry-wood desk. She sat amidst antique Sheraton tables and English hunt prints on the silk-papered walls, but he raced down the hall to the Word Processing Department. After working as a temp for three years in some of the most prestigious law firms in New York City, Neil had arrived at what he called his Ethnic Inversion Proportional Decorating Theory. He thought of it again as he rushed down the hall—the more Jewish or Italian partners in a firm, the more WASPy the furnishings—laughing to himself as he usually did. After all, a stand-up comic had to be his own best audience. With more than half of the partners here at Minster and Creed either Jews or guineas, the place looked like the queen herself supervised the decor. Yeah, he cracked to himself, but which queen?
    Grinning, he opened the door at the end of the hall and walked into the fluorescent-lit interior, three rows of computer workstations, six stations in each row, spread out before him in the windowless room. The noise level and the Spartan Formica work areas were in stark contrast to the sedate richness seen by clients. Ah, backstage at the law office.
    Well, no more backstage: it would now be a soundstage for him. He had been waiting for this moment for three long years.
    Dana was sitting at the supervisor’s desk in the front, as usual. Neil breezed by her with an airy “Hi,” dropped his backpack on the floor next to his desk, and waved a general hello to his co-workers. He saw Dana lower her glasses to the tip of her skinny nose and beckon him to her desk with an exaggerated curl of her index finger. At that moment, she reminded him of the nun in the fourth grade at St. Dominic’s, Sister Helga. Neil had succeeded in getting his classmates to refer to her as Sister Hell Bent. Once the old crow had stood him up in front of the class and asked him where he thought his shenanigans would land him. “Show business,” he cried, and the whole class laughed. The laugh was worth the beating he got later.
    Now he waited for Dana. Like Neil, she considered herself in show business. Unlike Neil, she was kidding herself. A string of failed auditions did not constitute a career. She’d tried to be an actress, but she’d been both stupid and lazy, and now she was bitter. During his first days at the firm, she’d been warm and the soul of sympathy when he bed over and over. It was only when he kept it up that her attitude changed. And Neil had kept it up, for over seven years now, doing a stand-up comedy routine at every club in town, starting with open-call nights only, midweek. He’d honed his material, worked all the way to weekends in the better clubs, and he had felt Dana’s envy every time she asked him how he was doing.
    If the envy had been mixed with respect, Neil supposed he could have tolerated it. But when Neil got his first paid gig, Dana’s attitude took a turn for the worse. If once they had shared a camaraderie, from the night he got the twenty-five dollars for his bit at a retirement dinner on Long Island, Dana withdrew and seemed to take a perverse pleasure in making his job at the law firm hell. Because, while he’d moved up the club circuit, she’d only moved up the scut-work ladder. Now she was Queen of the Scut Work. Third-shift manager of a word-processing center. Big deal. But it gave her enough power to