When I was a child, I did exactly one cute thing.During the summer of my tenth year, I attended an acting/fat camp on the campus of a local community college. One Wednesday during an extended improv activity about a hijacking on an airplane (very September 10th, I know) in which I played a screaming baby, the crew of a game show that no one remembers now strolled into the back of the classroom to observe us. After we were done with the exercise (the teacher had interjected to suggest that a sleeping gas had been introduced into the air filtration system), they applauded enthusiastically—almost mockingly. Then the instructor had us to line up shoulder-to-shoulder and smile like we were on TV.
Somehow, from the entire herd of round, wide-eyed, hungry girls there, they only chose only me to interview on camera. The more attractive girls—the ones with loving, accepting parents or with a stage presence reinforced by having only one chin to lose—were aghast, and so was I, really.
I almost wet myself constantly as this incredibly handsome, bearded man placed his hand on my shoulder and sat me in a director’s chair in front of a huge colorless scrim. He spent half an hour soaking my brain in a million random questions. Extended Free Association, basically. More questions at one time from an interested adult than I’d heard in the rest of my life combined (maybe even to this day). The corporeal sensations of his interest made my skin tingle like it was dissolving pleasurably into joy. Time passed unconsciously. I would’ve lived in that half-hour for the rest of my life if some genie gave me the choice.
One of the last questions was: Do you have a religion?
I wasn’t sure, but I knew I was Jewish so I said, “I think so.” (This was before I realized, of course, that religion is the Will to Fascism itself.) Then he asked, “What do you believe in?”
For no linear or coherent reason, I said, “I believe in sherbet.”
Everyone—the bearded man, the cameraman, and the acting coach/dietician who only chose me play babies, farm animals or singing furniture—laughed in a manner that I can only call hysterically. It was exactly the kind of child-like invalidation of societal logic that those shows sold. (I’ve found that most of us aspire to ostensible freedom of childhood, thinking it represents some authentic sovereignty rather than the developmental fact of cognitive immaturity.)
I remember blushing like a cherry tomato (I looked down at my own cheeks and saw the cherry red) and let out a tiny dash of pee as I folded into myself, trying to laugh along.
And when they showed that exact clip on TV four months later, the studio audience laughed warmly in complicity. On the screen my chubby image processed the shock of adult reinforcement; it turned red and folded into itself. Then the crowd’s laughter became applause even cheers.
As my mother and I watched the show on our old-fashion-projection-big-screen TV—which made my patchy complexion look like a battleground of a war between primary colors—I just prayed for her to react in some manner that was similar to the way the others had. But instead she frowned, and then focused on the little storm she created by swirling the wine in her glass.
After the episode ended she snapped the TV off with the remote and walked away.
Before she left the room, she turned to the wall and thought for a while.
Then she said, “Ice cream is not a religion,” and left the room.
“For Some Reason It Never Feels Right” is the occasional blog of Linda Weissberg MFT.