A Little Bit Wicked (7 page)

The music didn’t come from notes and lyrics; it came from life and mileage. From love. When I was doing that Oklahoma Kids competition, I won with a blow-the-doors-off rendition of Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” Yeah, I know the song became an icon for schmaltz, but it’s a sweet melody, and then the key modulates, the chorus swells for a big, big finish. I knew every word of that and many other love songs, but I may as well have been singing in Italian for all I understood them.

Then one day I sang the national anthem for a baseball game. The game started, and out onto that pitcher’s mound walked a great big, gorgeous uniform full of blond, blue-eyed Oklahoma. I caught the name Shawn Bryant over the loudspeaker just before they started blaring “Wild Thing,” which was his theme song because they never knew if his pitching arm was going to be laser scalpel or spaghetti. That day he was a laser scalpel. Amazing. Baseball is my game, and he personified everything I love about it: skill, strength, an unshakable commitment to a craft, blended with an unflappable spirit of fun…and really tight pants.

A few days later, I came out to a parking lot to discover I’d locked my keys in my car, and you’ll never guess who strolled over to help me. He did the make-a-hook-out-of-a-hanger thing, popped the lock, and handed me my keys.

“You were really good at the game the other day,” he said.

“Thanks. So were you.”

“I’m serious. We were all talking about it. It’s hard to be inspired by a song you hear every day, and…you, um…I don’t suppose…would you want to go out on a date sometime?”

“I would.”

“Okay. Awesome. How about—”

“Actually,” I said, scribbling my phone number on a piece of paper, “before I commit to the logistics, there’s one quick thing I need to take care of.”

I jammed my keys in the ignition, ripped over to my boyfriend’s
house, broke up with him, and zipped home to wait for the Wild Thing to call.

Oh,
what
.

“All’s fair in love and war,” right? I didn’t make that up. That’s Shakespeare. Or maybe it was Ben Franklin. Or Barry Manilow. In any case, who am I to argue?

So that was Wednesday. Shawn and I had dinner at Chili’s on Friday. I had a burger, fries, and a Coke. He smiled his gorgeous smile across the table.

“Wow. You eat a lot for a little girl.”

“Yup.” I smiled back at him, thinking,
Oh my gosh, he thinks I’m a pig and I am a pig and he’s never going to ask me out again. Don’t be a pig, don’t be a pig, don’t—

“I like a girl who eats.”

We went to a party later. Nothing rowdy. Talking and dancing.

“You want to go to my house and watch a movie?” he asked around ten o’clock.

“Yup.”

Shawn lived with his parents in Oklahoma City. They’d remodeled the garage into an apartment for him. We sat on the couch, and he plugged in a videotape of
E.T
.

“It’s my favorite movie,” he said.

I was in love.

My dad’s job took him and Mom to Puerto Rico for a while right around the time I graduated OCU with a degree in musical theatre. Exhausted after five years of constant study and performing and not exactly sure what I wanted to do next, I went with them and spent a month lying in the sun, reading books, listening to music, daydreaming about this wonderful guy I’d found, imagining myself in New York. I spoke frequently with Ms. Birdwell, who wanted me to come back and get my master’s degree in opera.

“Kristi,” she kept nudging, “I need you to come back. You’re not ready.”

“I don’t know. It’s a lot of money and—”

“We’ll get you a scholarship. Whatever you need. Come back to me.”

My father agreed with her. “Get the master’s, Kristi. It can only help you. Can’t hurt. And you’d be the first person in our family to do it.”

Denny and I went to Tulsa and auditioned for jobs on a European cruise line. Small World Syndrome: the auditions were held at none other than the Runyon School of Ballet, and Denny was hugely amused by the old recital photos that showed me moving through my most knobby-kneed “I want to be Carol Burnett when I grow up” phase. We were both cast by the cruise line, but I decided to stay in the United States and pursue my master’s degree.

My first year in grad school, Shawn asked me to be promised, and the president of my old sorority invited me to do the traditional promise-ring ceremony. It’s such a lovely tradition. Southern as sassafras and sweet as a Moon Pie. All the girls stand in a circle and pass around a pillow with the ring on it. No one knows whose ring it is until it gets to the girl who’s promised, and she takes the ring and puts it on, then there’s lots of cooing and hugs and tearful congratulations followed by tiny sandwiches and punch. It’s a darling custom. Quaint as crinolines.

Shawn was the quintessential knight-in-shining-armor sort, an excellent First Great Love. We adored each other, loved each other’s family, and made an unbearably cute couple. The promise turned into an engagement, and though I was in no hurry to get married, I did enjoy the nebulous idea of being his wife…someday. I was thrilled for him when he was drafted by the Cleveland Indians, but I missed him horribly when he went off to spring training. I was up to my neck, working through a two-year master’s degree program in three hefty semesters and wouldn’t have had the money to fly over and visit him even if I’d had the time.

One spring morning in 1993, I was getting ready for school and something on the TV caught my ear: “…Cleveland Indians…pitching staff killed…” I ran to the next room. A headline at the bottom of the screen said
Spring Training Tragedy.

“Oh…oh, God…” Every bit of oxygen went out of my blood. “Please, God…”

My hands were white and shaking as I dialed Shawn’s mother.

“He wasn’t with them. He’s okay,” she said the moment she answered, but I couldn’t breathe again until I heard his voice on the phone. He told me he’d had a migraine headache and was home sleeping when the boat carrying Steve Olin, Tim Crews, and Bob Ojeda slammed into a pier. Ojeda was badly injured; Olin and Crews were killed. Shawn was understandably devastated, and I didn’t know what to say to him other than “I love you” because selfishly, in my heart, all I could think was
Praise God for migraine headaches.
We talked for a while, and it was heart-wrenching to hear him so shattered. More than anything, I wanted to be close to him right then, but he was where he was, and I was where I was, and all either of us could do was our best.

Every song I sang that day—in fact, all the songs I sang for a lot of days that followed—were filled with a different level of love and longing. One day during master class, Ms. Birdwell asked me to sing “My Funny Valentine,” and when I finished, she was visibly moved.

“You see that, everyone? That’s
it
. She has
it
. You can’t teach that.”

I’d come into the song, I realized. Six years earlier, I’d walked in this door a precocious belter; now I was a classically trained coloratura soprano. But beyond that, I was growing up, understanding more about love and life, and it showed in the music. Ms. Birdwell kept nudging me to change my major from musical theatre to opera. And she suggested I change my name.

“Not your last name,” she hastened to clarify. “But you already
look like a
Kristi Dawn
. You already have that to fight against. You need to be a
Kristin
. Insist on being taken seriously when you open your mouth to sing.”

I resisted the idea at first. Some names don’t fit the person. Such as my dad’s middle name: Morris. “Morris the cat,” I used to tease him when I was little. He is so very not a Morris. Mom and Mark and I called him “Jeremiah Johnson” sometimes. And Mom was “June Bug.” We called Mark “Marcus Welby,” and he called me “Christopher Robin,” but Kristi…

“That’s
me,
” I said. “That’s who I am…isn’t it?”

I didn’t make the connection at the time, but rolling down the highway in my rental car, traveling the familiar road to OCU, I’m thinking of a sermon my friend gave in church a while back. She talked about Jacob, who was sort of a mama’s boy until he went on a grand journey, fell in love, and wrestled with an angel.

“They struggled until morning,” she said, “and the angel hurt him. But Jacob held on, saying ‘I won’t let go until you bless me.’ So the angel blessed him with two things: the vision of a future and a new name. The angel called him Israel. Not because he was stronger than an angel. Because he was stronger than Jacob.”

Everything Rodgers and Hammerstein said about Oklahoma is absolutely true. The fragrant wheat fields. The wind behind the rain. There’s enough winter for a healthy snowman or two, plenty of summer for homegrown tomatoes, and in between, during spectacular spring storms, the sky turns green, tar-paper sheds and tin roofs go flying, and you might even get to see a funnel cloud. You half expect to see the cranky, old neighbor lady sail by on a bicycle. The drive from Broken Arrow to the shady campus at OCU has changed very little since my father took me there that first time. Hard-tamped red-dirt hollows, trees hung with kudzu and mistletoe, yards hung with tire swings. On the outskirts of town, old sofas and rocking chairs furnish the front porches. Mom-and-pop businesses mix with modern
fast-food chains. It no longer feels like home, but that’s probably because I’ve changed more than the old neighborhoods have.

Florence Birdwell’s studio is as warm and eclectic as ever, and now there are a few photos of me on that wall of favorite moments along with Susan Powell, Lara Teeter, and Kelli O’Hara, who’s just gotten a Tony nomination for
South Pacific
. I have no idea how old Ms. Birdwell is; it’s a closely guarded secret. But I notice she has a hearing aid now, and this is a good thing. Better to hear her students with, those lucky children.

“Florence Gillam.” I call her by her maiden name because she looks so girlish today.

“Kristin.”
She calls me by the name she blessed me with. “Your grandfather. Sweetie, I’m so sorry.”

She puts her arms around me, enveloping me in all that flowing fabric. Those
sleeves
. No one carries off a kimono sleeve like Florence Gillam Birdwell. We sit in the corner with the wicker chairs, sipping tea, talking about my family, her family, work, school, and a recent concert I performed at the Met. Bette Midler was there. I was so nervous, my knees were knocking. She’s one of those performers I’ve looked up to since I was a kid.

“I wasn’t happy with the first song,” I tell Ms. Birdwell.

“I know, dear. Neither was I.”

I sigh a deep but not unhappy sigh.

“But once you got there,” she offers, “you were there.”

“Yup.”

“I knew I’d never have to teach you how to sing a song. You were a diva,” she says with an grand gesture. “But I had to make you ready. I had to toughen you up.”

W
e should have dinner at Mudfuckers,” says Mom. “They have every kind of burger you could possibly want.”

“I think you mean Fuddruckers, Mom.”

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“You said
Mudfuckers.
”

“What? I would never say
Mudfuckers
. Jerry, I didn’t say
Mudfuckers,
did I?”

Now, let me say here, my mom is an intelligent woman, so perhaps this is some kind of verbal dyslexia or just a matter of not sweating the small stuff, but in her personal lexicon, I play “Olive Shnook” on
Pushing Up Daisies
. Other credits include
Dames of the Sea
and
Steel Peers
. Suzuki piano method is remembered as “Yamaha lessons.” “Achy Breaky” becomes “Yucky Ducky,” and Puerto Vallarta turns into “Porta Kolache.” Thank goodness, she doesn’t even try to say “Cunégonde.”

I must have been having a Junie moment during the Miss Oklahoma pageant. I’d rigorously prepared for the interview segment, cramming my head with current events and state history, but at the moment of truth, the judge asked, “What do you think of
60 Minutes
as a television program?”

“I think…that’s about the right amount of time,” I said in all sincerity.

Now, I know that sounds like the punch line of a blonde joke, but—well, it
is
about right, isn’t it? Just enough time for character development and a healthy story arc, allowing adequate commercial interruption to accommodate both capitalism and bladder concerns. I’m every bit as smart as Mom (shut up, Mark), but I take things literally. When asked if my glass is half-empty or half-full, I want to know what’s in the glass. Kool-Aid? If so, my glass is empty with a quickness because I love Kool-Aid. Depending on the color. And if it’s summer. And if I just brushed my teeth, because if it’s not Kool-Aid—say it’s orange juice—well, you don’t want to drink orange juice right after you brush your teeth, in which case the glass remains full. Pageant questions are way too ambiguous for my inner Stanislavsky.

Aunt Ginger ran a charm school in Noble outside Oklahoma City, so she knew her way around the pageant circuit.

“Don’t try to be a spelling bee,” she coached me. “It’s a pageant. They’re looking for poise. Speak from your heart and don’t get caught up in facts and figures.”

The toughest question for me was “Why do you want to be Miss [insert shopping-mall opening title here]?” Because the truthful answer was “So I can sing on TV and get an agent.” Obviously, I had to come up with some altruistic, 501(c)3, banner-sanitized answer, and because that didn’t feel completely honest to me, I always stumbled on it a bit. A professionally trained actress should be a better liar, wouldn’t you think? But no. I am pathetically underachieved in that area. I can think of a great lie. I’m plenty imaginative. But before the words are
even out of my mouth, there’s a weird tickle of unease in my armpits, a horsefly of guilt lands on the back of my neck, and before I can stop myself, that gassy little bubble of truth belches out.

The interview segment trips up many a contestant (probably by design) because she’s standing up there, holding her stomach in, horribly nervous, completely exhausted, desperately trying to convince this guy who’s been ogling her chest all week that feeding the hungry children of Botswana is a far larger issue in her life than visible panty lines, despite that if she does indeed have visible panty lines—or if she answers this question wrong—she’ll be held up to public ridicule, when all she really wants is enough scholarship money to get her international studies degree so she can actually
do
something to help feed the hungry children of Botswana.

My dad is a self-made man who came up from nothing and did well for our family, but as with any family, our fortunes rose and fell, and the only way for me to attend an expensive private university instead of a state school was on scholarships. I auditioned for and got that first singing scholarship, and Aunt Ginger suggested the pageant circuit as a way for me to make up the difference.

My aunt Ginger, you gotta know, is a lioness. Beautiful. Courageous. Not to be messed with. She’s tall and slender—still gorgeous at seventy—a former model who could have gone even further than she did if she’d had the opportunity. She’s ambitious and hopeful and has three wonderful kids who are like surrogate siblings to Mark and me. Aunt Ginger has class and God on her side, and she’ll tell you so. My grandpa Smith, the father of those six fabulous girls, was everyone’s favorite guy. His little daughters thought he hung the moon, so when he was killed in a motorcycle accident, it rewrote the landscape of their lives. Mom was seven or eight, so I guess Aunt Ginger would have been in her early teens. Their mom ran a restaurant to make ends meet, so Ginger became the mama bear, bringing up the rest of the girls, working farm jobs and town jobs, bird-dogging their homework and boyfriends, making sure everyone was happy and fed. She was
married for a while to a man named Jimmy, who was a great guy, but she was a good Christian lady, and he was—well, he was a bit of a rascal. We were all around the dinner table one time, and Uncle Jimmy said to Mark, “If you don’t stop smacking, I’m gonna tear your leg off and beat you with it.”

All us kids were horribly impressed by that. Apparently, Aunt Ginger was not. Divorce was a big drama in this Christian family, but she came through it with her head held high and is now married to my uncle Ben, who is a pharmacist and so good to her. Not the type to tear your leg off one bit. And my uncle Jimmy is still my uncle Jimmy; I stop by to see him whenever I’m in town. Anyway, Aunt Ginger’s given me a lot of great advice about my life, and I knew she could help me win that pageant money. I’d been watching her and my cousin Cheri Lynn do the pageant thing all those years, and secretly I’d always wanted to do it because I always wanted to do anything that involved performing onstage.

Aunt Ginger felt I’d do best on the Miss America track, as opposed to the Miss USA track, due to the fact that Miss USA has no talent. The pageant, I mean. Miss USA as an individual has talent oozing out of her immaculately refined pores, I’m sure, but you’d never know it by the Miss USA pageant, in which there is no talent competition. Both Miss America and Miss USA pageants at the local, state, and national levels offer young women an opportunity to score big scholarship bucks if they’re willing and able to negotiate an obstacle course of push-up bras and backstage jitters, but Miss USA is a straight-up beauty pageant, and as of this writing, the shortest woman ever to win it is Tara Conner, who stands a not-so-diminutive five foot five. If we ever see a Miss USA under five feet tall, I will hickory-smoke my Louis Vuitton trolley bag and eat it with hot sauce. You have to decide right out of the gate which track you’re on by vying for Miss Hooterville or Miss Hooterville USA. Clearly, I had a more realistic shot at the Miss America pageants where I could score points singing.

The first thing Aunt Ginger did to prepare me for the Miss Broken
Arrow pageant was take me to the mall and make me walk up and down the stairs in high heels with a book on my head. Horror. Humiliation. All those people I didn’t know. And worse yet, all those people I
did
know.

“If you can’t do this,” said Aunt Ginger, “you can’t be Miss America. Be glad I’m not making you do it in a swimsuit.”

Mom had a dress made for me, and I had a swimsuit that would do. For my talent, I sang “Matchmaker” from
Fiddler on the Roof
. Yes, I know I don’t exactly look like I just fell out of the kibbutz-mobile, but that number is a charmer, and Aunt Ginger figured I could knock it out of the ballpark. And I did. I won talent…and got second runner-up.

(Sound cue: a big fat tuba fart.
Fwaugh fwaaaaugh.
)

Second runner-up is actually third place. Even if Miss Broken Arrow were to meet with a terrible accident—say someone tried to whip a stick out of her mouth or something—the second runner-up still ain’t doing any ribbon cuttings.

“This stinks,” I wept on the way home, but after some thought, I decided to be undaunted.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, honey. Miss Oklahoma City University gets to compete for Miss Oklahoma, too. So I entered Miss OCU, and
kerbingo!
—I won that sucker, which paid for a major chunk of my undergraduate degree and got me onstage at the Miss Oklahoma pageant. Miss Oklahoma always kicks butt in the Miss America pageant. The Miss Oklahoma pageant show-horses seventy-one perfectly toned, teased, and Galindafied contenders, and these are Southern girls, daughters of debutantes and oilmen; if you can sashay to the front of that pack, you’re a force to be reckoned with. If I won Miss Oklahoma, not only would I have enough scholarship money to get my master’s—I’d get to sing on television in the Miss America pageant and be seen by agents and producers on both coasts. My plan to conquer the world was coming together nicely. I arrived at the pageant buffed, waxed, and ready for action.

I won talent. I won swimsuit. I won…second runner-up.

Fwaugh fwaugh.

What can I say? It makes a good story on the talk shows now. Meshed well with all of Letterman’s double-entendre breast humor. (“Paul, we should have Kristin play ‘Will It Float?’ next time.” Hilarious stuff like that.) The
60 Minutes
anecdote always gets a good laugh. Sometimes I demonstrate the pageant waves: Screwing in the Light-bulb, Washing the Window, Wrist-Wrist-
Pearls
-Wrist-Wrist-
Pearls
.

“And this is when you see somebody you know,” I throw in with a comical good ol’ girl howdy-do. “I don’t know how you win talent
and
swimsuit and not win, but—hey. I’m not bitter.” That always gets a good laugh, too.

They said I lost it in the interview, but when I told Aaron this years later, he said, “What do you have to do to lose it in the interview after winning swimsuit and talent? Seriously. Did you set the interviewer on fire?”

Funny stuff. I’ll have to use that.

At the time, however, I was not laughing. I made my way to a quiet corner, where I hoped no one would see me, and—not gonna lie—I was crying. My wonderful acting teacher at OCU, Erick Divine, found me and gave me a hug.

“I don’t know what else I could have done,” I said. “I thought I did everything right.”

“You nailed it, Kristi. But sometimes you nail it—sometimes you’re the best—and you still don’t get it. Whatever you do as a performer, you have to do it for the performance. You can’t do anything with the expectation of winning an award. It’s best if you learn that now.”

And I did. The pageant experience was good for me in a lot of ways. I got used to getting up in front of people, getting judged, getting rejected. And I discovered an untouchable kernel of confidence instilled in me by my mom when I was too little to know or care about any other point of view. You do your best out of respect for yourself, not to make someone else feel less, and when you know you’ve done
well, no one can take that away from you. At an audition now, I never compare myself to the other girls. It’s me and the character. Do we fit? Another girl’s performance doesn’t change the answer to that question.

The fact is, I knew I wasn’t going to win as soon as I heard my name called for Miss friggin’ Congeniality. I didn’t mean to be nice; I couldn’t help myself. The girls were all so terrific, I loved every single one of them. But Miss Congeniality never wins. (Why, God,
why
did you have to make me so dang
congenial
?) I won’t say the winner wasn’t good, but she was a repeater.

“Sometimes they make you go for it more than once,” Aunt Ginger explained. “They want you to
want
it.”

“Come back next year,” the pageant director told me. “It’ll be your year.”

I’m sure I nodded and smiled, but I’d walked that dog and picked up the crap; I had no intention of covering the same territory again. Little did they know, these poor fools who thought they could stand in the way of my ultimate world dominance, that my parents had recently moved to Pennsylvania, which made me eligible to compete there. I entered the Miss State Capitol pageant in Harrisburg and (please join me in a full-arm overhead
snap!
) I won it.

Only seventeen girls were vying for the title of Miss Pennsylvania, and I was stoked for the competition. I’d sculpted my body with diet and exercise, crammed for the interview as if it were the bar exam, perfected my talent with every extra hour I could grab in Florence Birdwell’s studio. I was doing a rambunctiously great song by Victor Herbert, “Art Is Calling for Me.”

To sing on the stage, that’s the one life for me. My figure’s just like tetrazzini. I know I’d have fame if I sang
La Bohème,
that opera by Signor Puccini!

Funny but operatic. The vocal equivalent of a high-diving horse act. Ms. Birdwell came up with extra trills and frills that made it even
harder. So I was feeling pretty confident the week of the pageant. I kept hearing about a certain girl being the one to beat. I’ll call her Tessa Von Plotz. I scoped Tessa out, and sure enough, she was cherry-bomb beautiful. But her talent…not s’much. I wish someone had told her to do anything other than sing. Twirl a baton. Pull fire out of your butt.
Anything
. She sang “You’re My World,” which a former Miss America had sung and won with, and, Lord, we’ll never get those two minutes back. I’d never heard someone sing sharp
and
flat at the same time. And her platform was “America’s Veterans,” about which she didn’t strike me as super articulate. (I mean, if you want to pick a cream-puff platform that no one disagrees with—“Blankets for Poor Babies,” “Crutches for One-Legged Nuns,” “No Puppies in the Microwave”—okay, fine, but you should at least be able to talk about it intelligently.)

As the week went by and we worked our way through all the preliminary stuff, I got more and more excited. One of the events toward the end of the week was a photo-op sort of deal with contestants playing minigolf with organizers and sponsors and I don’t know whom else. I was teeing up to hit the ball into a clown’s mouth when a gentleman came over and asked me if I was excited about the pageant.