A Field Guide to Awkward Silences - Softcover

Petri, Alexandra

 
9780451469618: A Field Guide to Awkward Silences
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0451469615 ISBN 13: 9780451469618
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri shares her stories of awkwardness in this insightful and supremely funny debut.

Most twentysomethings avoid awkwardness. 
Not Alexandra Petri.

She auditioned for America’s Next Top Model. She lost Jeopardy! by answering “Who is that dude?” One time, she let some cult members baptize her, just to be polite. Alexandra Petri is a connoisseur of the kind of awkwardness most people spend lifetimes avoiding. If John Hodgman and Amy Sedaris had a baby. . .they would never let Petri babysit it.

Here, the Washington Post columnist turns her satirical eye on her own life—with hilarious results. And she’s here to tell you that interesting things start to happen when you stop caring what people think.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Some people are born awkward. Some achieve awkwardness. Some have awkwardness thrust upon them. Alexandra Petri is all three. She is a Washington Post columnist and blogger, an International Pun Champion, a playwright, and a Jeopardy! loser, and she’s been on your TV a couple of times. She is also a congressman’s kid, if that will make you buy this book! When she remembers, she does stand-up comedy too.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

FLOPPER


I am afraid of many things. Drowning, fire, the disapproval of strangers on the Internet, that I’ll be hit by a bus without having had a chance to clear my browser history, that one day everyone else on the subway will suddenly be able to hear what I am thinking and turn on me. You know, the usuals.

One thing I’m not afraid of? Looking like an idiot.

See, I knew I was a writer. That was protection. No matter where I went, no matter what I did, I could turn it into a story. Fall through a hole in the sidewalk? Story. Make the worst Final Jeopardy! wager of all time? Story. Anger the lord of the ocean, stab a one-eyed guy, and get very, very lost on my way home to Ithaca? Epic story.

Those were the two things I knew about myself: that I was a writer, and that I didn’t mind looking stupid. Growing up, you fig­ure out pretty quickly which of your friends is the person who doesn’t mind looking like an idiot, and that was me, hands down. I was the one going over to strangers and asking if the mothership had landed. I was the one standing in an airport with a giant foam cow hat on my head, accordion open, ready to greet friends as they landed, and not even because I’d lost a bet. Mortification was a poi­son to which I had built up immunity after years of exposure. Be­sides, it was much less embarrassing to be me than to have to stand next to me and admit you were with me.

And the writer in me had noticed that the bigger of an idiot you appeared to be, the better the story was. Nobody wants to hear, “And everything went smoothly, just exactly according to plan.” Something had to go wrong. You had to trip up. That was where the excitement lay.

I collected experiences the way some people collect old coins or commemorative stamps.

One year, for fun, I called the ExtenZe male enhancement ho­tline every day for a month, with different voices, just to see what would happen. (What happened, if you want to know, was that Phoebe, who worked the dinner shift, got annoyed when I identified myself as Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a fun fact about the ExtenZe male enhancement hotline is that they make you identify yourself before you start your call) and threatened to transfer me to the police.)

All of this seemed to be leading to some kind of grand adventure. I sat there, glumly, waiting for a wizard to drop by the house and invite me to steal dragon-gold, or a wise old man in a brown hoodie to offer to teach me the ways of the Force. But no one showed. I would have to strike out on my own.

What was a field in which a willingness to look foolish might come in handy?

Of course! Reality television.

Like anyone growing up after 1980, I always had the dim, nag­ging sense that I was supposed to be famous for something. A cer­tain measure of fame just seems like our birthright these days, next to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Food, shelter, Wi-fi, and the sense that someone’s watching; these are the modern re­quirements for survival. The only thing more terrifying than the feeling you’re being watched is the feeling that you’re not. Privacy is just an uncomfortable reminder that you’re not a celebrity.

My portion of fame, I knew, was waiting somewhere, neatly la­beled in a holding facility. To claim it, all I’d have to do would be fill out some sort of form and show up in the designated audition city. And until that moment it was my right, as an American, to stare at the television and mutter, “I could do that.”

If I were being really honest with myself, these people I saw compet­ing on television all possessed skills that I lacked—whether on Amer­ican Idol or America’s Got Talent or even America’s Most Wanted. I could hold a tune, but only the way you hold a stranger’s cat: not closely and not long (not to mention the strange yowling noises). I Got some Talents, all right—excellent grammar, for one—but they weren’t the kind of thing that would exactly sing on the national stage. Whenever I tried to “smize,” model-style, people asked if I’d been possessed by an ancient and evil spirit. I had never murdered anyone, to the best of my knowledge, and if I did I would certainly not elude capture for long.

But there are always two ways of making it on the air: to be spec­tacular, and to be spectacularly bad. The second group was more fun to watch anyway. Why be Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood or that one ventriloquist guy whose puppets all seemed oddly racist (get new dummies, Terry Fator! Then you won’t have to sit there with a pained expression while they rant about the people taking our jobs), when you could be short, sweatshirted William Hung, wrangling his painfully earnest way through “She Bangs!” or Leo­nid the Magnificent, dropping his equipment as the big red X’s buzzed above him, weeping profusely and promising that “next time, I will be perfect”? Sure, on one path lay Kelly’s international fame and Terry’s bucket loads of gold, but on the other lay William’s Christmas album, Hung For The Holidays. Now that was what I called a career trajectory. That was a story!

And that was going to be my way in.

I was going to seek failure out— n the national stage, with a glowing neon X attached.

The plan was simple. I just had to become dramatically, unques­tionably, horrifically bad at something. I had to get myself in front of the judges and flop like no one they’d seen before.

Maybe, if I worked hard, I could become just as earth-shatteringly terrible as my idols and wind up on the air. It certainly seemed like my best shot.

My trouble was that I’d had little practice failing. I came up during a very specific era of child-rearing in which everyone seemed to be­lieve that if Little Sally ever failed at anything, ever, she was going to be completely wrecked for life. Dutifully they set about sanding off the sharp edges of existence and childproofing all possible sce­narios against hazards of choking under pressure. Trophies for everyone! A part for everyone in the school play. No failure. No re­jection. You are a golden snowflake. Have a sticker.

For someone who hoped to make a career of rejection, this was a considerable setback.

I had no opportunity to pursue failure in high school either, where, distressingly, I kept succeeding at things. By senior year, I had been appointed president of four clubs and had mysteriously be­come captain of the volleyball team, even though I never left the bench. As a flop, I was a failure.

College was a different story. With a clean slate and thousands of people who didn’t know that I was doing it on purpose, I could be­gin my training for the big bomb.
I began collecting rejections.

There was an art, I quickly learned, to flopping. You couldn’t just be bad. Half the art is knowing how to go too far. You must keep a straight face. If you’re auditioning, you must sing badly, but feelingly. You must put the emphasis on the wrong syllable, read comedy as tragedy and tragedy as comedy. Overact, overgesture, pause for no reason midsentence and open and close your mouth like a bewil­dered carp. You must, in a word, turn in a whole performance.

I began my training in my freshman year, auditioning for plays under a false name. You could be more convincingly terrible, I dis­covered, when you had a backstory, so I crafted a character. Her name was Gloria Nichols. She had recently lost a lot of weight, loved to make bold gestures where no...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0451469615
ISBN 13 
9780451469618
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
BERKLEY
https://www.penguin.com/?s=BERKLEY

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