Wish You Were Here: For the Love of Kristen Chenoweth

At some point during my senior year of high school, I became convinced (in a “drank the Kool-aid and attempted to serve it to others” kinda way) that there was no need for me to attend college. This was, in my big book of questions that I thought I knew the answers to when in fact I knew nothing, a terrific waste of time.

I hated school. The only class I liked was English and the only reason I was passing it was because it was the year we read The Outsiders (still the one) and, like Ponyboy (minus the violence and gang affiliation), I was intent on staying gold and not wasting my raw, pure, (truly I had none) talent on, um, books, learning and playing hacky sack on a quad somewhere when clearly the Great White Way was calling in the form of a marquee with my name on it.

For the love of Kristin Chenoweth, how I wish someone had interrupted that “quality” programming to bring me this public service announcement: It wasn’t calling. Not even close.

In hindsight, it wasn’t so much that I had these delusions of grandeur, or an inflated sense of self-importance, or even the misguided illusion that I wasn’t actually tripping over my two left feet and could even remotely pull off a jazz square without staring at the floor.

It was that my expectations were oh so very far (think nosebleed seats) from reality.

No matter how hard I tried (and in fairness I didn’t, not really), no matter how many acting classes I took (file under: money my parents will never recuperate) or how many times I swayed with my pretty little petticoat in the back of the chorus, my dream was still just a dream and I was still just barely passing 12th grade.

Oh, cry me a river, right? I’m over it. Truly. But I can’t help thinking about it while I lie in bed one night, listening through the air conditioning (BTW, since when did November become July?) as my younger daughter and hubs launch into some sort of scintillating debate over the expectation to study for a math test — the reasons both for and against, so cacophonously compelling that I consider for a brief moment scooping up my sleeping toddler and checking into a hotel somewhere, if only my car keys weren’t missing.

He tells her she needs to study because she can’t just go in (after not studying at all) and expect to know the information…

“Blah, blah, blah,” she says. She doesn’t want to study. She doesn’t need to study. “Who needs math, anyway?” Not her because clearly, math is for “bank people” and “people with ties” and not tattoo artists or makeup artists (or really she should have included performance artists).

This was turning into quite the show.

She “hates math,” she tells him and “wants to go live with grandma” who she’s sure will not only give her a free pass on the whole homework thing but also undoubtedly has much better food and cable, something we “sorely lack” in this house “and why can’t we have cable anyway?”

Next ensues a lengthy soapbox of an oration from my husband, pertaining but not limited to the evils of advertising, and redirecting her to the task at hand (studying for the test).

As I start to nod off, she’s holding fast to the sum of all things being that she thinks she knows everything, we know nothing and she’s not studying for something she still expects to pass with flying colors … or at least a little help from her friend, Mr. Calculator.

I fall asleep and when I wake up the next morning, two things occur to me: 1) I am not like Ponyboy but more like Two-Bit Matthews (who I think spent the majority of his time cracking jokes and maybe shoplifting?); and 2) my car keys are still missing.

I start to make my coffee and can’t help notice the “aftermath” of what invariably tested my husband’s patience at 10 p.m. and brought my daughter to the brink of many a broken No. 2 pencil, crumpled Kleenex and easily half a pint of Ben and Jerry’s the cat is now lapping off the table.

While I’m about as enlightened as those crumpled Kleenex, I really think the square root of most, if not all, of our “suffering” (blah, blah, blah) is stuck somewhere in the middle (just like where I found my car keys — in the couch) of expectation and reality. Yes, obviously I never made it to Broadway and quite possibly still can’t understand the concept of long division. Yet here I am, a questionably successful adult who mostly knows where her keys are and how to operate the Nespresso, and maybe it’s not so bad, you know, to keep your expectations low so you don’t wake up every morning thinking that somehow, overnight, you were magically teleported to another dimension in the land of far, far away where you maybe have this whole other life in this whole other house with this whole other husband who happens to bare a striking resemblance to Milo Ventimiglia and where you can also, maybe, sing like Kristin Chenoweth and do math in your sleep. A place where the dishwasher is never broken and the cat doesn’t immediately regurgitate the other half of Cherry Garcia all over your daughter’s math papers. A place where your car keys are always right where you hung them and you’re so happy, you could just spontaneously jazz square, without looking at the floor or having flashbacks to that really long number in Carousel where you felt like you were swaying with that damn petticoat so hard that you almost fell off the stage and still you thought, someday (gag, heave, regurgitate your Ben and Jerry’s) they’re going to see my name in lights. Or at least in print. Stay gold.

Columnist Lesley Kirschner grew up quiet, in the woods, and devoid of siblings so her hobbies quickly became reading, writing, and talking to inanimate objects. She also spent a considerable amount of time doing voice-overs for her dolls and watching too much daytime television–channel 3, sometimes channel 8, if the weather was good and the antenna wasn’t acting up. She was in attendance at school, graduated from a very much not notable college not worth mentioning, and was transplanted to Wilton with her husband, Ambler Farm‘s Farmer Jonathan and their (baby makes) three children almost a decade ago. Although she never quite found her calling in life, other than perhaps the doll voice-overs, which in hindsight were eerily convincing, she’s happy to try her hand at writing and is thankful for the support and community she found on Facebook’s Buy Nothing Wilton. Lesley realizes while this is all very exciting, she’s not winning a Pulitzer so she’ll wrap it up and be quiet. She’s had a lot of practice.