Is My Bow Too Big? How I Went From Saturday Night Live to the Tea Party (11 page)

How was I going to carry on a conversation with her if I was Lacey? If I was Lacey, I wouldn’t even recognize her or know her. If I was not Lacey, the famous Kasdan would fire me, and I wanted to be a movie star!

I saw Hurt tell Phoenix a joke. I couldn’t tell if the joke was “in character” or not, so I quietly slipped out the door and told my relatives it wasn’t a good time. They looked confused. I took photos with them and they left. I glanced around hoping Kasdan hadn’t seen. I could imagine trying to explain it:

“Uh, Mr. Kasdan, Larry… My relatives, I mean Lacey’s, I mean mine, uh, showed up on set. I know you haven’t invented them yet, but they exist… in that other world that I’m not supposed to be living in right now…”

So the next day we were rehearsing one of my two scenes. Kasdan said, “Okay, take your clothes off.”

Kasdan said, “Okay, take your clothes off.”

I started hyperventilating. “I… can’t… act… when… I’m… naked.”

He said, “What?”

People were moving props and lights around. Time is money.
Tick. Tick
. He stared at me blankly. I stuttered, “Well… I-I can’t be naked because… I’ve got scars on my breasts from my breast reduction and augmentation surgery.”

Kasdan and Kline look at each other. “How can you have reduction
and
augmentation surgery?” Kasdan says.

I took a deep breath. I would do anything to stay in the movie and not be naked. “Well, first they were lopsided a little. Then I had a baby and they went from a 36-A to a 38-DD, and then I breast fed, and then they were hanging down like National Geographic. But I was only twenty-six, and one side was way bigger than the other. Then I got my first movie, and my mom is a nurse and saw breast surgery all the time, so she encouraged me to get them fixed. And so the guy cut them and lifted them and took one pound of flesh out of one of them to make them equal, and then they were swollen, but they looked better. Then a year later, the swelling went down and they were small, but kind of hanging, so I figured since I already had scars I might as well because… they sure have changed a lot… I have pictures of all the phases… nudity clause… but I’m a Christian, so… I don’t really think they should be seen naked in a movie. Do you want me to show you?”

Stunned, they looked at each other again. Like a medieval knight chivalrously removing his jacket and placing it over a mud puddle so the princess could cross and stay clean, Kevin volunteered to be the exploited one. He said, “Well, I’ll be naked.” He whipped off his pants and underwear and we shot the scene the whole day with him bottomless and me in a baggy blue men’s T-shirt. I still adamantly believe that the audience would have known we were “having sex” even without anyone disrobing.

When it came to
Casual Sex?
, I read the script and was more attracted to the character of Melissa than any movie character I’d ever read. Other roles I had turned down had been surfer chick, tramp, naked-tramp-in-slasher-flick, ditzy-tramp, and ditzy-naked-surfer-chick-tramp-hitchhiking-in-slasher-flick. Melissa was a nice girl who really wanted to get married and have babies. She was sexually inexperienced, not because of religious convictions like me, but because of shyness or something. But, when I read the script, in my mind, she was a Baptist. There was a bedroom scene, but I figured the sheet would be up to my neck because it was in every other PG movie. There was a nude beach scene, but since my character was so shy, I knew she would be clothed or covered in some way while she gawked at the other beachgoers. I figured that if I could get this part and do a good job, the movie industry would be at my feet, a natural step in my so-far accelerating career.

I had about four or five “call backs” for this role—that’s when they make you return to audition for the same role again, maybe in a different scene, maybe with a different actor to judge your chemistry. They just had to make sure that I was the right choice.

The auditioning process is excruciating. I sat in a waiting room that looked like a dentist’s office. I pretended to have confidence. I looked at all the other wonderful actresses in the room. I compared myself to them. They were prettier. I psyched up. I prayed. I relaxed. I sweated. I went to the bathroom and checked every eyelash again. I paced. I looked at the script again. I knew it so well I couldn’t see the words anymore. I hadn’t eaten. I wasn’t hungry. I had worked out extra hard at the gym. I wasn’t tired. I had almost run out of gas and gotten in an accident on the way there. I heard my name called just like at the dentist’s office. I did a double take. My name sounded strange, like a death sentence. I swallowed my fear, smacked a smile on my face, and entered the inner sanctum where five fake smiles glinted in a row back at me. They nodded. I performed. I left. My veins coursed with adrenaline.

I looked for my car in the parking garage. I turned the key. I was on auto-pilot. I paid my parking ticket robotically and drove home in a trance. My mind was back in the inner sanctum. I didn’t see streetlights or stop signs. I saw each line I had said, each gesture, and each chuckle from the strangers’ faces. I saw the colors of the room, of their thoughts, and of my heart. It felt right. I paced back and forth next to my phone with a glass of wine in my hand. I cooked spinach, gave two-year-old Scarlet a bath, and filled up the doggie’s water bowl perfunctorily with a glazed look on my face as my mind relived each moment of my performance yet again. I bit my nails. The phone rang.

My agent said, “They want you back.”

I said, “Why?”

My agent said, “I don’t know,” and hung up.

The phone rang again. “The director, Genevieve, wants to have lunch with you.”

“Why? Did I get the part?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is she having lunch with me to tell me personally that I got the part?”

“I don’t know.”

I walked into this fancy restaurant wearing a miniskirt dress that had a stretchy black top, a poofy white bottom, and a huge hot pink bow around the waist (this dress was later worn in the movie by my character, Melissa—she must have liked it). I pretended to have a lot of confidence. Genevieve was so beautiful, and rich, and poised,
and
she had a French accent. She was a little older than me and married to the most successful man in LA: Ivan Reitman. Driving home from lunch, I finally released my abdominal muscles and realized she had never mentioned whether or not I had gotten the part. Finally, the phone rang.

“Hello. Victoria Jackson?”

“Yes?”

“Hi, this is the wardrobe department for
Casual Sex?.
We need your sizes.”

I got the part

I was thrilled. For three months, twelve to fifteen hours a day, I was primped and plucked and fussed over. I had lines. Lots of lines. Usually I had five lines. Now I had hundreds.

One day, we started to rehearse our bedroom scene. Genevieve told me, “Forget you’re a Baptist.” She was just being nice, and reminding me that I wasn’t playing myself (I was playing Melissa), but I snapped back, “Baptists have sex!” I hadn’t really prepared for this scene. I had mentally erased it from my script, knowing, of course, that I would have the sheet up to my neck, so who would care what embarrassing words I would have to say for fame and money? Genevieve gently told me, “The crew will be minimal.” She was very aware of how sensitive this subject was and that under the blanket all I’d be wearing were panties.

I was so petrified lying in the bed next to Jerry Levine that I couldn’t remember my three lines: “Wow, I did it. I’m great in bed! Let’s do it again.” On the verge of tears, and not in control of my faculties, I finally sputtered it out. Genevieve said, “Now jump out of the bed without the bloomers to answer the door. Only your derriere will show.”

I began to panic and think:
Would a Christian let her character fornicate? Wait a minute. I didn’t invent this character. Where is Dr. Frankenstein? Where is he? Okay, Vicki, don’t be a hypocrite. You had sex before marriage. Well, it was only with one guy, who I married, but still, it was premarital sex. Why do you expect Melissa, who isn’t even a Christian or a real person, not to do it at least once? Okay. That justifies this scene. It’s real life. But should art imitate real life?

When Genevieve said, “Action!” I jumped out of that bed and ran out the door so fast, even creeps who push pause on their recorders will only see a blur!

The massage scene was exploitation. I tried to explain to Genevieve that people are not naked when they are massaged, especially when their character is shy and it’s her first massage. The nude beach was another stressful day. I had just given in by then. The makeup artist was applying body makeup with a sponge to an area of my body my mom’s never even seen.
Just be Melissa,
I told myself.
Turn your brain off. Deal with your hypocrisy when the movie ends.

Hypocrisy is what is wrong

with the world today.

Everyone does a different thing

than what they preach or say.

They drink and deny it.

They drug and they lie.

They say, “Oh,

now I’m a crispy, clean guy.”

They lust after a woman

while abstaining from adultery.

They proclaim their purity,

while wearing something sultry.

Oh, hypocrisy, what shall we do?

Don’t ask me. I’m a hypocrite too.

Nudity isn’t a problem anymore. Now that I’m fifty-three, nobody asks.

Falling in Love with Your Leading Man

Weird Al Yankovic picked me to play his girlfriend in his cult classic,
UHF
. Of course, I developed a crush on him. He was the leading man. I was the leading woman. He has a charming childlike quality. One day I asked Scarlet why she thought he put his foot behind his head all the time, like a strange yoga pose. “Mommy, he’s flirting with you!” One time we went jogging together on this professional track at Harvard-Westlake, a fancy private school buried in a little valley in the Hollywood Hills. As an attempt to kill three birds with one stone, I invited my friend Howie (who has Tourette’s Syndrome), and Weird Al to join me and three-year-old Scarlet for a two mile jog. What a sight we were. Weird Al was jogging backwards with a big smile on his face, every few yards changing from jogging to hopping with one leg behind his head (I think he’s double-jointed). Howie was stifling curse words, as usual. I was shuffling along, humming show tunes, and Scarlet, in complete reverie, was dancing across the football field in her fairy princess outfit. In the building next to us were the rich young students: the heirs of people like Randy Newman. And surrounding us on all sides were the Hollywood Hills, overladen with lush foliage, dogwood trees, maples, evergreens, neglected roses gone mad, sweet-smelling jasmine, palm trees, bunches of Jacaranda, and big globs of shockingly pink Bougainvillea. All this was sprinkled around mansions and nonmansions built hodgepodge on the cliffs, where bright blue pools and cocaine-sniffers, has-beens, wannabes, writers, and artists (who were painting masterpieces and birthing novels that may or may not be celebrated) were avoiding the sun. A.F.K.A.S., my husband at the time, was home, of course. Depressed fire-eaters don’t exercise. It makes you too happy.

So I was in Tulsa falling in love with Weird Al, and trying to figure out whether or not it would be a sin to go to the movies with him. I mean, it’s just a movie, but I am married. So I wrote a song about it:

Where Do You Draw the Line?