A Little Bit Wicked (16 page)

I scootched forward to the cockpit area and said, “Excuse me? Hi, I’m Kristin. Your passenger. Um, I’m sorry to bother you, but I didn’t realize there was no restroom—”

“Oh, sure there is.” The pilot flipped up the lid of a chemical toilet between the pilot and copilot chairs. “There’s a little curtain there you can pull around you.”

“Denny…”

“Actually,” said the copilot, “if you can hold it a while longer, we’ll be landing to refuel.”

“Oh, thank goodness.”

“They’re having some nasty weather tonight,” he added. “You might want to buckle up back there.”

As we swooped in over the mountains of Wyoming or Estonia or whatever it was, the little jet rocked, dipped, and shuddered, and I clutched the armrest in one hand and Denny’s wrist in the other.

“Oh, no. We’re in trouble.
Oooooh
—Denny, did you feel that? That was free fall. We’re going in. We’re going down.”

“Kristi, get hold of yourself. If we die, we’re dying with dignity.”

“Oh, God, please don’t let Denny be
others
. Please let us land so I can pee.”

The landing gear galumphed out, and the plane skidded and slid to a stop. Denny yanked that door open, and we hit the tarmac running. As we loped toward the restrooms, he shouted over his shoulder, “Don’t drink! Don’t drink anything! Not a sip!”

Like he had to tell me.

I peed a reservoir of urine, paced while they refueled, then peed again before we took off in the pitching wind. The rest of the flight was relatively uneventful, so shortly before we landed in Pasadena, Denny said, “We’ll be getting in around eleven, and you have that walking rehearsal at three thirty a.m. Not much time to sleep. You should take your Ambien now so it can sink in before you get to the hotel.”

As someone who struggles with insomnia, I’m not even going to pretend to be valiant about it: Ambien was my saving grace. Because I’m often double-and triple-tasking—juggling a show, workshops, music, and promotional events—it’s not possible for me to function without sleep, and left to my own nature, I lie there with my mind racing, trying to shut down the day, staring up at the ceiling until it cracks. I know Tom Cruise would not approve. “Eat some placenta! You’re on the ship or you’re not!” Well, he can kiss…kiss my…

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

I was soundly out with my head on Denny’s shoulder when we landed. He dragged me down the steps and oozed me into the limo. I vaguely remember the driver calling, “Where to?”

“The Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena,” Denny called back.

“Hmm. Do you know where that is?”

“Well, no. Don’t
you
know where it is?”

“Driver don’t know wha dis?” I said woozily, and I have no memory of anything after that until Denny hitched me out of the limo and schlepped me into the lobby à la
Weekend at Bernie’s
. He got us checked in while I hung on his arm thinking,
Shiny…pretty…where be room?

“Wha me druh?”
I blurted.

“Excuse me?” said the desk clerk. She was being played by Olivia de Havilland. Tiny winged piglets circled her head.

“Spez ma gwan.”

“She’s asking about her gown,” said Denny. (That’s how well we know each other.) “It should have arrived by courier earlier.”

“Oh, the dress. Yes. It’s here,” said Olivia, and the piglets clapped their little cloven hands. So happy for shiny, pretty dress. “I’ll have the bellman bring it to your room.”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

I awoke to a soft pat-pat-patting on my cheek.

“Kristi? Wake up,” Denny said. “It’s three a.m. Time to go to rehearsal.”

“Oh…okay…”

“Sweetie, we have a problem. The dress is gone. I’ve searched from one end of this hotel to the other. It’s nowhere to be found.”

“Crap…crap…” I jumbled myself upright, pushing my hands against the sides of my head. “Denny, what do we do?”

“I don’t know. I’m very upset. All I can think is that some little dip’n’chips is out partying in that red dress.”

“Oh, my gosh…New Year’s Eve…”

Now, please understand that this dress—a fabulous red Emanuel Ungaro gown—was worth several thousand dollars and had been precisely tailored for me as a gift. Not only was it supposed to be dancing down the street on television five hours from now, I fully expected my children’s children to wear it to their weddings and bat mitzvahs.

This was a job for gumshoe John Artez.

I called him while Denny dug through my suitcase and came up with a pair of jeans and a red leather jacket he’d packed for me just in case, then I stood in the shower, which smelled unpleasantly of someone else’s overwarm body.

The winter weather in Pasadena is almost perfect. Not once in its hundred-year history has the Tournament of Roses been called on account of rain. Only one time has there been heavy rain during the parade. This was the time. I stumbled through the rehearsal and did my song-and-dance thing in the parade. Meanwhile, John Artez had made the scene and rattled his saber, and the dress eventually reappeared. After the parade, I went back to get it, looking and feeling like a soggy little rag doll, and determined to tell somebody off.

“Would you let me take care of it, please?” John Artez said, but wearing my
Oh, yeah? That’s what YOU think!
hat, I stormed to the desk and demanded to see the manager.

“What’s the problem?” asked the manager.

“Oklahoma float dress airplane jet pee driver supposed to be a Ritz Carlton where hotel dress dress gown what kind of service dress six thousand dollars out partying with chips’n’dip parade rain and and if you think three in the morning wearing a red dress rain dress hotel gown words words words yab yab yab. And the shower smelled like BO!”

“I’m terribly sorry, Ms. Chenoweth. What can we do to make your stay better?”

“Well….” I said, disarmed by her accommodating smile. “Perhaps a free weekend?”

“No.”

As I swirled into another word hurricane, John Artez reached out his arm and hooked me off the stage like a vaudevillian. In the car on the way to the airport, Denny reached out and nudged my shin with his foot.

“Happy New Year.”

“You, too,” I said wearily. “Listen, it’s silly for you to fly all the way to New York just so you can turn around and fly back home again. You should stay here.”

He agreed quicker than you can say “collateral damage.”

“You sure you’re okay?” he said when he dropped me off.

“I’m a big girl. I’ll be fine. Thanks for everything, Den.”

I hugged him and sent him on his way. The pilot was suddenly being very friendly. I gathered from our conversation that during the layover, someone had schooled him about me supposedly being someone.

“You didn’t tell me you were on TV.” He grinned. “Need to use the ladies’ room before we take off?”

Hardy har har. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

Before we took off, he called back from the cockpit, “We’re going to land in St. Louis to refuel since the weather looks pretty bad in New York.”

That scared me a little, so I called my buddy Anne Nathan and asked, “How bad is the weather? Do you think I’ll be able to land in time for the show?”

“What are you talking about?” said Anne. “The weather’s fine.”

Hmm. I figured the pilot must know something I didn’t. He must have radar or something that—well, whatever.
I’m
the one who should have had my radar up.

“Let’s grab a quick bite to eat,” he said when we landed to refuel, and envisioning a drive-through window, I gratefully said yes. Instead, he took me to a nice restaurant. As “quick” turned into an hour, and an hour turned into two hours, I kept asking if we shouldn’t really be
getting back, and he kept shrugging it off and asking me about movies and TV shows I’d been in and various famous people he thought I might know.

“Do you mind taking a picture?” He waved the waiter over. “I can’t wait to tell all my friends that I took a TV star out on a date.”

“What?
No
. No picture. I need to get back to the airport. I have a show tonight.”

When we got to the airfield, the pilot who flew next to a toilet told me, in all seriousness, “We’re not taking off till I get a picture.”

For the sake of moving things along, I stood like a wooden Indian long enough for the chagrinned copilot to snap the photo, then I got in the airplane, pulled my jacket over my face, and pretended to sleep the rest of the way back to New York, where the skies were sunny and fine.

Grin and bear it,
I told myself.
Your newfound popularity.

P
lease, God, help me be a good prostitute today.

It’s an odd request, but He knows what I mean.

When Ann Luster called my manager, Fireball Dannielle Thomas (actually, my dad calls her Fireball, Ann calls her Dannielle), and asked if I’d be interested in playing a suicidal hooker in writer/director Patrick Coyle’s
Into Temptation,
Dannielle said, “We’ve been looking for something exactly like that!”

From the fireball point of view, it’s an opportunity for me to show my range.

“It’s a risk,” she said, “but we need casting directors to see that you can be serious in one breath and seriously funny in the next.”

The premise is fertile ground: a hooker confesses to a priest that she has decided to kill herself. Coyle’s harrowing script follows the two characters through what might be the last days of this woman’s life. Sounds like a laugh riot, huh?

I didn’t have to be talked into it. I grabbed hold with both hands. But playing someone like Linda, giving her my skin and bones for a time, allowing her to take me to the dark places—it’s been tough. Studying what made her choose to do this, I’ve had to look to my own dark places, and that’s stirring so many ghosts and questions to the surface. This part has put me in a deeply melancholy mood, and I know that when the movie comes out, it might be hard for my family to watch and even harder for them to understand why I chose to play a role like this.

Shooting
Into Temptation
has been like Rolfing—that brutal deep-tissue massage that hurts like hell but gets all the toxins out of your system. There is a misconception about me (and probably about most people you see on Page Six): my life is perfect, I’m always happy, I never have a bad-hair day. But depression is a real thing for a lot of people, and I’ve battled my way through a couple of tough spells.

I’ve come to accept that I occasionally fall in holes. Literally, as in the hole outside the door that grabbed me and broke my ankle during
Strike Up the Band.
Or the hole in the set of
The Apple Tree
—one of the openings that symbolized the unfinished quality of the earth at the time of Adam and Eve. I stepped back, found myself unbalanced at the edge, and basically did the Nestea Plunge. Brian d’Arcy James saw me going over the edge and screamed like a soprano. I landed on my back six feet below the stage, groaning like a baritone. I had to do the run of the show with fractured ribs. (It was still the single most enjoyable theatre experience of my life. That’s how great that show was.) Then there are these rare but undeniable down-the-rabbit-hole kind of holes. Emotional lows that make me feel swallowed, body and soul. Some people say that depression can be defeated solely on prayer, determination, or just a healthy bucket of “get over yourself” (which is easy to say if you’ve never been there), and maybe that’s possible for some people. It wasn’t for me. I got through it with Mom, God, and Zoloft.

While I don’t want to go into all that at great length—because
some things are sacred, other things private, and others just none of anyone’s beeswax—it’s important to me that the young women who watch me know that my life isn’t perfect; it’s filled with challenges and sorrows, highs and lows, just like theirs.

A group of girls from Glitter, my official fan club, waited for me after a concert in Chicago recently, and I was so moved when I saw them. They were so beautiful and vibrant, so fresh on the brink of it all. And let me tell you something, those little Glitter Girls are a force to be respected; they’ve raised close to $100,000 for charity. I love that they’ve chosen to come together, centered on something bright and positive and pink, with the goal of doing good. I’m honored to be the host of our cosmic slumber party.

So I want all you girls to gather round while I tell a little bedtime story. Meghan from Toronto? Where are you? Ah! There she is. Get on over here, you. Let’s all snuggle into our down comforters, plump our ruffled pillows, and gather a few soft stuffed animals. Meghan, you hold Maddie in your lap.

Now, I won’t say where this little story fits on the time line of my life because—you know what? It doesn’t. I didn’t have time for this episode, and, Glitter Girls, neither do you.

Everyone tucked in? Good. This is the story of…

The Princess and the Bogsnart

Once upon a time, a levelheaded type A princess went momentarily barking mad and thought she was in love with a bogsnart. If you’re wondering what a bogsnart is and questioning why, oh,
why why why
do princesses routinely fall in love with them, I’m afraid I must tell you that virtually every woman in the world has been bitten by one of these pernicious ticks. At the very least, she’s been hit on by one at a party. The bogsnart wanders the streets disguised as a perfectly companionable prince, his facial hair impeccably manscaped, his metro
sexual manners as charming as Paddington Bear. But beneath the gym-built shirt-stuffing and pseudo-intellectual patter, an unsalvageable
bogsnart
lurks, and at nightfall he is driven by instinct to skulk like a bedbug toward the nearest warm-blooded host.

The type A princess was fooled by the bogsnart’s clever disguise and invited him to tea one day. But as day turned to evening, the bogsnart’s witty banter turned mean.

“It’s a pity,” snorted the bogsnart. “Such a beautiful evening and I’m stuck here with this ugly girl.”

“I beg your pardon!” cried the princess. “I looked at myself in the mirror just yesterday, and the result, while not perfect, was overall quite acceptable.”

“Please. You’re the homeliest thing I’ve ever seen.”

From his dastardly bag of tricks, the bogsnart drew a mirror that was cracked and de-silvered, spidered with flaws, and smeared with bog offal. When he held it up to the princess’s face, she saw herself smirched and malformed.

“You’re right,” she said sadly. “I’m terribly ugly. How could I have thought otherwise?”

“I suppose I could tolerate your shortcomings,” hissed the bogsnart, “if you give me your treasures. Your golden voice, your ruby lips, the diamond sparkles in your eyes.”

The princess fell into a deep sleep, and in her feverish dreams she danced with a handsome prince. When she awoke, she was alone, and the fever had left her. Looking down from the castle window, she saw the bogsnart scuttling off into the woods. He’d taken her treasures and left the distorting mirror under her bed. Late at night, she would sadly gaze at her smirched and spidered reflection and be reminded how poor and ugly she was.

The princess cried, and she couldn’t stop crying.

Fortunately, the levelheaded queen knew immediately what she was dealing with.

“Bogsnart. Up to the usual tricks,” she correctly surmised, pushing the broken mirror aside. “Look into my eyes, Daughter. What do you see?”

“I see…
me,
” said the astonished princess. “All my treasures—they’re still here.”

“Because the treasure is
you,
my girl, and you are still as
you
as you ever were. The most perfect you there is. The best and only you that God ever made.”

Without making the princess feel young or dumb or judged, the wise queen applied love and chocolate and pharmaceuticals and held the princess’s hand through dark forests and long cab rides until the princess recovered her natural vivacity. Never again was the princess fooled by a bogsnart, and when she saw that particular bogsnart on the street one afternoon, his warty nose pushed against a shop window, she saw how small and today he was, and she actually felt a bit sorry for him. Not sorry enough to resist flipping him the finger. But a little sorry. She continued down the street and lived happily (which is of course a relative term, but usually applicable) ever after.

So remember, all my glittery princesses, we must never allow a bogsnart (or a prince, in fact) to tell us who we are, no matter how handsome his disguise, no matter how needy our own hearts. Our best and truest reflection is found in the eyes of those who love us.

Now, good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bogsnarts bite.