My favorite board game is called ‘Loaded Questions.’ It’s more of a ‘party game’ than one that’s really based in competition. Each person gets a numbered sheet of paper and each round whoever’s turn it is asks the group a personal question that comes from the game’s cards. The questions can be anything from ‘If you were going to get a tattoo, what would it be and where?’ to ‘What is something that you’d rather ‘leave behind in Vegas?’’ After everyone in the group writes down their answer, they pass the sheets around to the person next to whoever’s turn it is and that person then reads out each of the answers in random order. The person whose turn it is then has to guess just who said which answer. It’s a game that really has a way of quickly taking a group of people, be it relative strangers or long-time close friends, and giving them a distinct dynamic.
Often when I play Loaded Questions, my answers are drenched in some combination of sarcasm, absurdity and earnestness. Part of the reason that I’m not straight up with each answer is because it’s fun how much creative license the game gives you; there’s even an element of deception sometimes. But part of it has to do with the fact that I often just don’t know exactly how I feel about things. Right now if you asked to name one award that I’d like to win in my lifetime, my gut answer would be ‘World’s Best Dad (Coffee Mug),’ but there would also be an underlying voice inside me that was yelling in an angry whisper, ‘Stop being so full of shit!’ Yes, my Jiminey Cricket angrily seethes at me to ‘keep it real’ without ever really pointing me in the direction of where that reality might be. It’s no wonder that I always end up finding a group of lost boys to drink with.
The one round of a Loaded Questions game I’ve played that stands out in my mind as one in which I felt instinctively tapped in to what my simplest and most genuine answer was came from the question ‘What is your biggest regret?’ My answer, guessed correctly as being mine by my good friend and fellow Loaded Questions lover Kaitlyn Burch, was ‘my major.’
The biggest factor in my decision to be a film and television major may have been the department’s ample offerings of night classes which took no attendance and spent two of their four hours screening films and television shows that were too easy for my excuse-riddled brain to convince myself to skip out of. The second biggest factor was Tara McPherson. I’ve mentioned Tara before. She was a feminist. She had a dry sense of humor. She wore glasses. She was basically everything I wanted in a woman. Or was she just everything I wanted in a role model? This is where the angry whisper kicks in.
Since Regis was an all boys Catholic high school, there was naturally a lot of suppressed hormones kicking around. Mine were probably so deeply depressed underneath what was probably a nasty battle going on for control of my brain between the wiseass commanders who had reigned supreme throughout most of my youth and the burgeoning sentimental uprising that was beginning to take hold. I was beginning to become so fixated on my story that figuring out just who was going to be ‘my Winnie Cooper’ took precedence over any dormant desires to have some sex in my life. This clearly wasn’t the case for many of the guys around me.
In my four years at Regis, I recall two female teachers under thirty-five: Barbara O’Connell and Michelle DeCarlo. Both had a harem of guys that gravitated towards their desks whenever the fellas had a free period and just happened to be on that side of the building–’So oh I figured I’d just pop in.’ Actually a lot of the guys who had been part of the Ms. O’Connell harem freshman year in the math resource center made the transition over to the Mrs. DeCarlo camp in the computer lab when she arrived sophomore year. Maybe it was Mrs. DeCarlo’s big Staten Island hair that encouraged the jump. But I would pass by these guys and just sort of shake my head. Now I was fond of both teachers, enjoyed chatting with them every now and then and even would develop the hots for one of them as my late breaking puberty started kicking in by seventeen. But there just seemed something sort of pathetic about the transparency of this group of guys sitting around these women’s desks, hanging off the anecdotes they might share about taking a cruise with an old boyfriend or how geeky they used to look when they had a retainer. The guys had no chance with these married (and respectable) women, they knew they had no chance with them, and yet here they were just taking satisfaction in just sharing the air with one of the two sexual beings in the school every moment they could. I just didn’t get it.
Now, flash forward to college and the most reliable place to track me down on a given week my sophomore year was at Tara McPherson’s desk during her office hours. The first semester I had class with Tara so I suppose that I had a reasonable excuse to ask thorough academic follow-up questions such as ‘So what made you and yr grad school friends drive down to Chicago in matching t-shirts for that Oprah clip you showed last week?’ But the second semester I really had no legitimate reason to be there since she didn’t teach any class I was in. Not only that, but her office hours coincided with Todd Boyd’s ‘Race, Class and Gender in Film,’ one of the required courses that Tara knew I was registered in. Halfway through our weekly chats, she would realize that I had cut out of another screening in order to come hang out with her. But she laughed it off and turned a blind eye; it was our little secret. What wasn’t a secret to any of the TA’s or other students who dropped by Tara’s office more than once was that this kid was totally in love with his TV professor. But for some reason the women that I connect to the most are also the ones that I’m able to desexualize. So it was a secret to me.
That second secret semester of hanging out by Tara’s desk was the one where I had to declare a major. I had dropped American Studies (sorry Janeane) because of an 8am class. And sticking around school for more than four years was not an option for me because my scholarship wouldn’t allow it and there was no way my Mom (let alone I) could pay for USC without the aid. I had applied to both the theater school and the critical studies wing of the film and television school and got accepted into both. By that point I had started acting in student plays and my friends’ films they made for class and realized that I was really good at it. I had wanted to be a comedian my whole life and it seemed like it might just be taking shape. So taking as many acting and playwriting and solo performance classes I could have made sense. But what made more sense to me was Tara.
The main reason I wanted to major in American Studies when I got to USC was because that’s what Janeane Garofalo had studied it twenty years before at Providence. I made all these justifications to myself about the path to becoming a great satirist would sensibly require for me to immerse myself in the history of the culture along the way, that that must have been what Janeane was doing. But here’s one of the funny things about me and Janeane: she was never my favorite comedian. Did I think Janeane was funny? Sure. Did she ever blow me away and make me wonder how someone’s brain could dissect present day life the way Dave Chappelle did when I saw him do stand-up for the first time at seventeen? Not once. But Janeane was the one who I set the VCR for every time she was on Conan. She was the one who I swore off every girl I knew senior year for because I was so determined that I was going to get her to go to the prom with me. But if anyone ever asked me why I had such a crush on Janeane Garofalo, my defensive response was that I in fact did not, that she was ‘like a fairy Godmother to me.’
So I chose to study television even though I generally didn’t like writing papers on it or reading people’s essays about it. I majored in critical studies even though I had an aversion to criticism. I told myself that I could teach television some day, maybe at a high school. Because in the back of my mind I thought that eventually I could possibly mean to someone as much as Tara had meant to me.
When I really started falling for Deirdre Curran, I borrowed almost all of her CDs and copied them onto cassettes. That became the music that paved the way for most of what I listened to throughout high school. And if you ever asked me how I saw Deirdre back then, I would have told you quite honestly that I looked up to Deirdre and that I wished she was my best friend.
I’ve been so afraid and felt so unworthy of the women that I’ve loved. The closest I’ve felt that I could get to them is by following in their footsteps, by trying to become someone like who they were. The results have been mixed.
