Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories

On The Question of My Obscurity: Part 2

I didn’t want to make a big deal about it or anything.  When my mother took my the star-shaped TAG award off the shelf as we packed up my room and began to fold it in bubble wrap, I shook my head.

            “Keep it here,” I said.  “I don’t want the other kids to think I’m a show off.”

            “Are you sure?” asked my mother.

            “I’m sure.”   I didn’t want people to be intimidated, or worse, awed.  If they were going to be my friends, I wanted them to like me for me, not because I was the 1998 winner of the Omaha Theater Arts Guild Award.  All summer long, in fact, since I’d gotten the letter welcoming me to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, it had been the same thing: “Keep in touch!  Don’t forget me when you’re famous!”  Frankly, it was getting a little tiring.  Sure, so I was meant for bigger and better things than the rest of my high school graduating class.  Was that not apparent all along?  I was still a normal person.  I just wanted to be treated like anyone else.  My huge talent would be apparent soon enough when we started class; better to deal with the fallout then.  I’d sift through the resentment, the awe, the petty jealousies, and I’d know who my real friends were. And truthfully, I hadn’t quite felt the same about the statuette since they gave it to me and I noticed they’d misspelled my first name.  R-A-C-H-A-E-L.  It just looks stupid.  The awards chairman had offered to send it out to be re-engraved (at my own expense, naturally) but I told him not to bother.  A mistake is a mistake.  You can’t take it back. 

  “You keep it, Mom,” I said.  “You’re the one who drove me to all those rehearsal over the years.”

            Unexpectedly, her eyes filled with tears.  “I’m really touched.”

            “Can I have the bubble wrap?” My sister piped up.  “I like the sound.”  She grabbed the sheet from my mother’s hand and began popping happily.  She would be starting high school that fall. 

            “Mom,” I said, watching as she rocked meditatively, soothed by the symphony of the bubble wrap exploding and deflating beneath her fingers.  “Has it ever occurred to you that she might be autistic?”

            “Shut up!”

            “Nah,” said my mother.  “If she was autistic, she’d hate that sound.” 

            The first few nights of college started off promisingly.  Beer was drunk.  Pot was smoked.  I borrowed a hammer from the musical theater major next door and engaged in an impromptu sing-along of Sweeney Todd.  New acquaintances were plentiful; yet as the days passed, I couldn’t seem to turn any of those acquaintances to friends.  They all seemed to know each other already, the New York kids hung out with the New York kids, the New Jersey kids with the New Jersey kids, the L.A. kids…well, you get the idea.  No one else was from Nebraska, in a theme I sensed would persist for the rest of my adult life.  The more I tried to engage people in conversations, reaching for common ground on something, anything, the more they pulled away. 

            “Your last name is Friedman?  You’re Jewish?”

            “Um…yeah…”

            “Oh wow!  So am I.”

            “Oh,” said young Friedman.  “You’re not from, like, the Chabad+ people, are you?  Because I’m really not interested.”

            My new roommate, an obscenely well-groomed redhead from Bel Air, was kinder.  “You know, when I got the thing saying you were from Nebraska, I thought you were going to be, like, a hayseed.  Like overalls and tractors and shit.”