Let Me Be Your Star by Rachel Shukert Read Free Book Online

she’s not the one who winds up majoring in theater and barfing in the
bathroom of Marie’s Crisis four times in six months. That’s the girl who played
the Baroness. Maria sells real estate in Fort Worth and has a perfectly normal,
perfectly health-insured life, the fresh-aired Alpine bitch. The “magical”
Karen Cartwright may enjoy doing musical theater. But she doesn’t need it
like the Ivys of the world do, and it’s my suspicion that McPhee doesn’t quite
need — or understand — musical theater either. That somehow, Broadway is a word
that still lurks at the fringes of her subconscious as Simon Cowell’s most
cherished insult.
    I believed this wholeheartedly, and it was my job to point
it out.
    But I still felt like shit. Was I a bully, kicking a
beleaguered show — a show, I should add, I would have dropped everything to go
and write for, if only they would ask me — while it was down?
    “You must be so excited,” an acquaintance of mine smirked,
not altogether pleasantly, when the revamped second season premiered to dismal
numbers, and it became clear we were now dealing with a case of keeping the
patient as comfortable as possible and wait for the end, now that the
chemotherapy (symbolized by the new character Jimmy Collins, an inexplicably
hostile young Turk of a songwriter, who, as played by Newsies heartthrob
Jeremy Jordan, seemed to occupy a strange and disturbing territory between
Mickey Rooney and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) had stopped working. “You hated Smash, and
now it’s dead. Just like you wanted.”
    “But I didn’t want that,” I bleated, hands out, the
betraying courtier horrified to realize the king doesn’t intend to pardon the
friend I handed over after all. “I didn’t want that at all.”
    Smash was imperfect, but it was an imperfect thing
about something I desperately love. When my recaps were lumped in with and
linked to the small but vocal contingent of self-proclaimed “hate-watchers”
heaping scorn — some of it deserved; some vastly overstated — on the show, I
would get upset to the point of panic. I’ve never hate-watched anything in my
life except the Republican National Convention, and even that turned into a
delightful exercise in high camp when Elaine Stritch unexpectedly stormed the
stage dressed as a cowboy and did that thing with the chair. Picking something
apart is easy; putting it together — you’ll forgive me, but we’re nearing the
end and Lord Sondheim’s breath is cold against my cheek — even if it’s bad, is
really fucking hard. Yes, I was often critical of the show, but look, my
husband can be a real asshole sometimes too, and I don’t love him any less for
it.
    But salvation came from an unlikely source. It came from the
people involved in the show itself. Not just from Marc and Scott, but from the
writers and producers and actors and crew members who, emboldened perhaps by
the freedom of being terminal (just like Laura Linney in The Big C) began
to quietly reach out to me. Somehow, that meant more to me than anything. Marc
Shaiman and Scott Wittman are hugely successful and are going to be just fine,
with or without Smash, but the featured players? The low-level writers
hoping for a stepping stone to bigger and better things? I don’t flatter myself
that anything I did make an iota of difference to Smash’s renewal or
cancellation (for the record, I doubt Theresa Rebeck was one of them, although
the time I saw her, shortly after her firing, stomping through Times Square
while eating Cold Stone Creamery with Marsha Norman will be my Number One celebrity
sighting until the day I die), but to be able to send a nice note to someone
who has been relentlessly making fun of the thing you were counting on to help
you put your kids through school and keep you in WGA insurance is another level
of class.
    “I’m just so happy you don’t hate me,” I told one of them
finally, a writer I had known casually in another life. “I don’t understand