Chapter One
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Me)Most people turn into complete morons when you put them in front of a camera, and thank God for that.
Today I've got the digital trained on the two guys in my driveway—one on a unicycle, another on a tall bike. They're getting ready to joust. Their pages (pimply dorks with anime brain) hand them their lances (poles made from PVC pipe). Duct-taped to the ends of the lances are huge stuffed animals, an Elmo and a Hello Kitty. The object? To ride straight at your opponent and Elmo him right onto his Hello Kitty. And if you knock him hard enough to cause (a) bleeding, (b) broken bones, or (c) a humiliating, painful, and yet strangely hilarious groin injury, that's even better.
It's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen and I'm so happy. Watching these guys strap on bike helmets decorated with flaming skulls, I have to keep from doing my own moronic dance of joy.
"This is going to rock," Rory says, fiddling with the boom mike he's setting up to catch the walla walla of the crowd gathered in the garage and in the yard. We're shooting for our show, Riot Grrl 16. Our riot girl, Gina, is in full costume: black cherry lipstick, pink and black hair spiked as high as she could get it, striped shirt, and camos. Her feet are bare, but her pants are rolled up so that you can see the tiny tattoo of an ivy vine on her calf. (I told her once that it would be good for the show if she got a dagger tattooed somewhere; she said that the best place for a dagger was my heart.) In this scene, she's supposed to be partying at a tall bike joust when her drug-addicted brother shows up claiming to be in deep with the mob. Instead Gina's busy leveling her patented Death Glare of Obliteration at me. I'm not sure of the reason for this, but since the Death Glare looks good on camera, I don't care.
Rory's still fiddling with the mike. "Are we going to get any sound or what?" I say.
"Keep your panties on, princess." He built a mile-long boom with multiple joints so we can get the thing almost anywhere, and we've never had it drop into the shots. He also built the steady cam. And we have a dolly that he rigged up from the Segway Gina's richer-than-J.K.-Rowling parents bought her, the one they said would help her be a more environmentally responsible human, the one she called "the Dorkway." But today, like most days, we're using handheld, held—of course—by me.
"Okay," Rory says. "We got sound."
"It's a revolution in filmmaking!" I say. He gives me an obscene gesture that he's given me so many times in the last six years it's ceased to have any meaning at all. I blow him a kiss. Joe, who had moved quickly to Gina's side to talk her out of any psychotic breaks she might be contemplating, rolls his eyes at both of us. Joe's the third member of our production company. If Rory's job is the technical stuff, Joe's job is the human stuff. He mostly works with Gina and the other actors, giving them suggestions, motivations, pretensions. He's an actor too, one of those fanatics who believes in immersing himself in roles, the kind of guy who would spend six weeks living in Beulah, Alabama, to deliver one line of dialogue with an authentic accent. For Riot Grrl 16, he dropped twelve pounds he couldn't afford to lose so that he could be more convincing as Riot Grrl's drug-addicted half brother. His face looks like a carved pumpkin. A pissed-off carved pumpkin. I can't understand why he's not more excited about this. It's our ticket. Our big shot.
To quote Matt Damon in Dogma: Somebody needs a nap.
A groupie hovers to my left. She's standing so close I can feel her breath on my arm. She's a junior at my school, but I keep forgetting her name. She's hot, if you like legs that go up to there (and who doesn't)? She's been hanging around our shoots for weeks now.
"It's so cool that you guys are in this contest," she says. "I mean, MTV! Can you believe it?"
Yes, actually, I can. "It's pretty sweet."
"What will you do if you win?"
"We're just trying to make the top five and get on the prime-time broadcast," I tell her. "That's enough visibility for us." This is the standard answer I give so I don't sound too full of myself, even though I think Riot Grrl 16 is the best in the contest and people would be insane to think otherwise.
"Oh, you'll totally make the top five," Groupie says.
"You think so?"
"I know so." Groupie's lips are nice. Puffy and full. Lips you could use as throw pillows. "I've been watching you," she says. "You know your way around a camera."
I shrug. "I should. I've been doing it for long enough."
She nibbles at her puffy bottom lip and flutters her lashes. "I heard you know your way around a lot of other things, too." It's a lame line, but her voice is low and scratchy and hits me right in the fly. I calculate how fast I can hustle twenty-five tall-bike-riding geeks out of my yard.
"Jeez, can you focus for three seconds?" Joe says. Joe doesn't believe in fame, commercial success, or groupies. My mom told me that one day Joe will be forced to do TV ads for foot fungus cream just to have the work and then he won't be so proud.
"Hello?" says Joe, doing that slow-blink thing he does when he's annoyed.
"I'm focused, I'm focused," I say. I can't help it; my eyes are drawn back to Groupie's up-to-there legs.
Joe snorts and whispers something to Gina. Gina is making some kind of snarling sound and jabbing fingers in my direction, so I hurry up and center the shot.
Excerpted from Play Me by Laura Ruby Copyright © 2008 by Laura Ruby. Excerpted by permission.
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