Free Let Me Be Your Star by Rachel Shukert Page A

that
Louis is Miranda, and Joe and Harper is what would happen if Carrie and
Charlotte were forced to enter into a same-sex marriage, like one of those talk
radio hosts we’ve all tacitly given ourselves permission to no longer learn the
names of is probably suggesting the Obama administration plans to make us do.
Roy Cohn is Mr. Big. Is there some sort of abbreviated way I can let you know
I’m aware I’ve gone off on a tangent, without interrupting the flow? We need a Dayenu- like
safe word. “LuPone,” perhaps? But will she know I mean it as a compliment? Nah,
never mind. You’ll just have to bear with me.)
    Tony Kushner, still holding my arm, was talking to me.
    He was telling me how much he loved my recaps of the
television show Smash . And then everything went black.
    No, I’m just kidding. It only felt that way. I
honestly have no memory of what I said. I’m sure I thanked him and told him I was
a huge fan and all the other things you say when you’re trying not to seem to
obsequious or impressed, even though you are quietly going out of your mind. He
took his seat, and I fled to the public (in a park!) ladies’ room at the side
of the theater, barricaded myself in a stall, texted my father, and burst into
tears.
    A few days later, a friend who knew I was going to the performance
that night called to ask me what I thought of the framing device that the
entire show was going on in the head of an imaginative and possibly disturbed child
runaway, much like the series finale of St. Elsewhere.
    I told him I thought it was unnecessary, and left it at
that. I did not tell him that I missed the opening of the show because I had
spent it curled on the fetal position of a park restroom floor sobbing because Tony
Kushner knew who I was because of my Smash recaps, and also that
Tony Kushner knew who I was because of my Smash recaps.
    Slotted spoons don’t hold much soup, but a slotted spoon can
catch the potato.
    This is the story of that potato.
    * * *
    Hello, my fellow members of the orphan chorus and non-speaking
townspeople.
    My name is Rachel Shukert. I’m a wife, I’m a cat owner, I’m
a five-time Annie cast member. First and foremost, I am a Wilderness Girl,
but second and aftmost I was the official recapper of Smash, NBC’s hotly
anticipated and resoundingly doomed experiment to bring the backstage drama of
Broadway to the American masses, for New York Magazine’s famed Vulture
blog. For two full seasons, I wrote, usually between the hours of 11 p.m. and 9
a.m. the next morning, recaps of each of the show’s 32 episodes until its
cancellation this spring.
    My recaps were sometimes delirious, and mostly discursive,
and never less than 2,000 words long. Smash destroyed my sleep patterns,
my workweek, and, I feared for a brief time, my sanity.
    It also changed, and in a certain way saved, my life.
    * * *
    Let’s start at the very beginning; a very good place to
start. And in the beginning, there was Downton Abbey.
    I first got wind of everybody’s favorite soap opera about
the benevolent glory of systemic social injustice the way I get most of my catastrophic
news: from my mother.
    “Are you alone?” she asked breathlessly, when I picked up
the phone one night in early 2011. I said I was. “Good. Turn on PBS. There’s
this new show about fancy British people fighting about how to hold your fork
right. It’s going to blow your mind.”
    My mother is not generally a very enthusiastic person, but
her voice sounded the same as it did when I was twelve and she told me about a
“funny little gay man” who was talking on NPR about being a Christmas elf at
Macy’s in a way that “might change your life.” I wasted no time tracking down
the remote control. By the end of the hour, my mind was not only blown, it was
slowly trickling out my ear and down my neck. The Talmudic parsing of table
manners! The Titanic tragedy being read sotto voce from ironed newspapers as no
tears were shed! The dimwitted,