GUEST ESSAY: I thought I’d put it all behind me but then my friend died and I think I got bullied at her wake.
Hi Simplerheads! Today we have a guest essay from the extremely talented writer, dramaturg, and producer Margo Ascher. I’m a big fan of her writing and also we are married. So what? Anyway, here’s an amazing essay Margo wrote about Veal by Jojo Jones, which just closed at A Red Orchid Theatre here in Chicago. Without any further ado, please give a warm Simpler and With More Laughter welcome to Margo. Enjoy!
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You know how European royalty used to poison themselves with Venetian white? It’s a skin whitener that works because it has lead carbonate in it. Yes, your skin will pale, but keep it up and you start convulsing, then your hair falls out and you die. Also, as you’re dying, your skin starts to mottle, and the only thing that evens out the tone is more product.
I was thinking about this when I saw Veal at A Red Orchid last month. The premise is gold: the newly-crowned Queen of North America reunites with her high school frenemies, whom she hasn’t seen in thirteen years. It’s unclear how or why Chelsea has become queen, but the effects are disastrous. Supply chains have collapsed. Food is scarce, medicine more so. Chelsea appears to be unaware of any of this. She reigns from an isolated throne in a nameless city with only an unnamed male concubine for company. She mentions advisors, but we never see them. To be honest, she doesn’t seem all that interested in being queen. She sort of just swans around.
Chelsea's aesthetic is less 16th century aristocrat, more 2000 and late. Pale blue eyeshadow. Colored mascara. At one point she removes a ballgown to reveal a pair of skintight pants in a truly shocking shade of teal. Low-rise Converse are ever-present. A pair of shadowboxes are filled with painstakingly tidy displays of late-aughts accountment. There’s a copy of The Care and Keeping of You (IYKYK), a Webkinz dog, an iPod classic, and a tube of that Maybelline mascara that came in the pink tube with the green cap. Come to think of it, that stuff probably was poisonous.
Franny, Lulu, and Noa (no “h”) come to appeal to their sovereign, and as the play continued, I could have been fooled into thinking Chelsea started this monarchy with the sole intention of reconvening three women she hasn't seen in over a decade. Once they're together, Chelsea begins to lead them in increasingly bizarre reenactments of eighth grade. Math class. Lunchroom. Sleepover. School Dance. Chelsea isn't killing herself with lead: her poison of choice is nostalgia. This obsession careens from pretty funny, actually (who doesn’t silence their phone at a bat mitzvah??) to grotesque. I watched the sleepover scene through the cracks between my fingers.
You read the summary. You know Chelsea was the outcast, the hanger-on, the DUFF. Do you want to see her get her revenge? Is it funny to watch Lulu choke down a moldy Lunchable? To watch Noa flirt with Chelsea’s concubine and be rebuffed again and again? Yeah, kinda. In the way that those brownies that came in Kid Cuisine are kinda good. Remember those? I think if I ate one now I’d just be sick to my stomach.
Franny’s memory fails halfway through a lunchroom scene study. When Chelsea pushes her, she hits back: “We don’t remember this because we became real people.” She says this, and Chelsea’s actions stop being funny whatsoever. What the hell is wrong with her? I thought. Oh, you weren’t popular in middle school? So what?
To be very clear, I was also unpopular in middle school. I think I owned those exact same teal pants. I got picked on for a range of things: my alleged lesbianism, my (admittedly lousy) taste in music, my pixie cut. At one point some twerp in my social studies class told me my parents were voting for a baby killer. (True, this was in 2008, and I was not in the 8th grade at the time, but the anecdote is so strange and sets the tone of my school so aptly I had to include it.) Braces. Body odor. Boys??? I felt like I’d been absent on the day they’d passed out some manual on how to be a person.
I’m an adult now. I have a job I like, and friends I like. I’m married, and I have a mortgage. I think I’m a real person. At the play’s climax, Chelsea insists that she died in eighth grade. Obviously, no, she didn’t, because she’s alive to torture her friends. But in another way, yeah, I think she did. She’s trapped in the past, gnawing like a dog at a sore that will never heal. I don’t want to be dead like this. I don’t want to keep slathering that toxic paint on my skin.
Two summers ago, I got a call from my mom. The girl I’d been best friends with all through grade school had died. She had been sick for a few months and then she got sicker and then she died. I hadn’t spoken to her in, what, at least five years? But I went to the funeral. I saw people I hadn’t spoken to in nearly a decade. Some had gotten married. Some had traveled a lot and done interesting things. One girl turned out to live forty minutes away from where I was at school. We talked about meeting up some time, but we never did.
The funeral was awful, but at least I knew what to do. I hugged her mom. I looked at photos of my friend as a baby, as the kid I knew and loved, as the adolescent who became a stranger, as the adult I’d never met. I listened to the speeches and I cried a lot. I behaved like a person. The wake was worse. It was like a parody of her graduation party. A tent and folding tables set out on the lawn. Cokes and Miller Lites swimming in melting ice. I was nervous and awkward, and I drank one of the Cokes so fast I had to pee, and I went to open the front door of a house I’d been in countless times.
It stuck.
I gave it a little shove, and suddenly everyone at those folding tables was watching me. The door held fast. “Just push it,” someone called. Yeah, right. Like I’m going to be the jackass who breaks this nice family’s door at their daughter’s wake. No thanks. I skulked around to the garage and went in that way.
Twenty nightmarish minutes later, we’re getting ready to leave. My sister is putting on her shoes, and my family is clustered in the hallway when that stupid door squeaks open and a dozen girls women I’d been at school with file by. “See? You just need to push it,” one of them laughed.
What the fuck? Did I just get bullied at a wake? By someone I haven’t seen in years?
I’ve told this story at parties since because it’s so weird. But the more I think about it, the less funny it becomes. Yeah, I couldn’t open that door, but R-—— never will again, and here I am complaining because, what, I didn’t sit at the cool kids’ table at her wake? She’s dead for real, and I don’t want to be dead even a little bit in the way Chelsea is.
Franny leads Lulu and Noa to Chelsea’s throne because her sister is dying for want of insulin. Chelsea uses the promise of meds to keep the trio hostage, and this reversal of power is not dramatically satisfying, but repulsive. Chelsea’s games aren’t funny ha-ha, they’re funny psychotic. She’s hurting real people, and she’s hurting herself. Her obsession is corroding her, and she’s covering the blemishes with poison. She claims she’s dead, but she refuses to rest; she’s a ghost, a corpse risen and shambling always towards the past.
In the end, Franny gets what she wants, and so, I think, does Chelsea. In one final reenactment, Chelsea makes Franny play the wolf she insists killed her on a class trip to a petting zoo. In a fiendishly gory coup de théâtre, Franny beats Chelsea to death, then snatches up the insulin and leaves. The script has danced around the petting zoo incident for the better part of two acts, and I was expecting the girls to have done something really nasty to Chelsea. To be fair, tricking a classmate into a donkey pen, then leaving her there, is not a kind act. It’s bullying, no doubt. But Chelsea claims she was trapped in the pen with a bloodthirsty wolf, which simply cannot be true. Is this the Unspeakable Trauma Gristle she’s been chewing for thirteen years? Well, now Chelsea finally gets the horrible story she’s imagined was in her past all along. She gets to be dead for real, and I, for one, don’t pity her.
Maybe that’s unkind. I understand the pain Chelsea is feeling. I do pity her the misery and exclusion she experienced. Tweenage girls are vicious to one another, and the harm Franny, et. al. caused Chelsea is real. But now she’s adult and the literal actual Queen of North America. There’s no excuse for her to behave like a child.
I like revenge stories. If Macbeth isn’t my favorite tragedy, it’s only because Medea is. But Chelsea’s means are motivated by the stupidest ends I can think of, and this is where my sympathy for her ends. Her feelings are justified; her actions are not. I’ve never taken an ethics class, but I’m pretty sure giving a diabetic the insulin she needs is always the right thing to do. That, and mourning the dead. My friend died, and for a minute I got so busy thinking about how someone was kind of mean to me that I forgot her parents had buried her while I was drinking their Coke. I don’t think a petty, vengeful person should be queen. I think that’s a bad idea, and I think people will get hurt. I’m watching people get hurt. I’m watching people die for real, and I’m fucking sick of it. And maybe I’ve pushed 1,600 words in order to get halfway near “dig two graves,” but I guess I needed to put in writing that I’m trying, if it means anything, to be a real person.
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