Unqualified - Anna Faris

Скачать книгу

tonight,” which I know might be said with the best intentions but just feels gross.

      After that interaction, I was done. I’d been at the reunion for all of one hour, but it was long enough for me to feel like I was in high school again, and to be ready to get out. I mean, Green Day was pumping through the loudspeakers. Chris drove down and picked me up, as we’d planned, and it did feel a bit like the lion rescuing the lioness from the hyenas. It was amazing to watch the reaction as he came through the door. I still felt like headgear-wearing, awkward Anna Faris, but when Chris came in, he was all movie star. There was a collective gasp as he whisked me away and, yes, that was fairly satisfying, I guess. I’m human, after all.

      It took me longer than it should have to realize just how important female relationships are in my life. That shift only happened fairly recently, maybe in the last three to five years. It takes vulnerability of spirit to open yourself up to other women in a way that isn’t competitive, and that’s especially hard in Hollywood, where competition is built into almost every interaction.

      Female actresses don’t get to work together very often, so we truly don’t have a ton of face time with one another, though I do like to think that’s changing. With guys—like Chris and Seth Rogan and James Franco—they’re all buddies and do each other favors and appear in each other’s projects. And of course plenty of women do that, too, but sometimes I’m envious of the communities that male actors can establish merely because there have been historically more roles for men in any given project, so they have more opportunities to forge relationships. I have it on my to-do list to host a monthly boozy brunch with a bunch of actresses and no agenda so we can just hang out. Right now, the only times we see one another are at these crazy high-pressure Hollywood events where you’re all wearing gowns and one of you—not me, but the person I’m talking to—is nominated, so she’s distracted and freaked out and in no mood to get into girl talk. Like Emma Stone or Jessica Chastain or Amy Adams, all those stunning women who I never see until the awards shows at which they are, rightly, being celebrated and I’m busy loading up on champagne-infused complimentary snacks.

      But between filming a sitcom and recording a podcast and raising a five-year-old, I bump up against a lot of the same internal struggles that most working moms do. As much as I want to host my boozy brunch, making time for it in my schedule hasn’t been a priority. I can hardly keep up with the friends I already have. My oldest pals constantly give me a hard time for being so bad at texting them back, but that’s because I don’t want to have a texty relationship. I want to spend an hour talking and getting into the good stuff. I don’t have a lot of patience for small talk. I don’t even like the phrase. Why would I want to engage in conversation that people deem small? But that means I don’t text back or pick up a call until I have the time to devote to that person. Which often results in “Are you mad at me?” texts, which just make me want to put off a call even more, because I know the first twenty minutes will consist of apologies instead of conversation.

      I’ve heard the suggestion that I don’t need a tight group of girlfriends anyway, because Chris should be my best friend. But I’ve never bought that. The idea that your mate must be your best friend feels to me like an overused mantra that puts unnecessary pressure on your relationship. I really believe that your partner serves one purpose, and each friend serves another. There’s the friend who you confess things to, and the friend with whom you do the listening. Or this is the person I talk to when I’m feeling lonely and sad, and this is the person I talk to about work shit, and this is the friend I’m still in touch with because we grew up together. To be honest, I think the notion of best friends in general is messed up. It puts so much pressure on any one person, when I truly believe it’s okay to have intimacy with different people in different ways. That’s why I’m so glad I never had bridesmaids. It seems like a tradition entirely engineered toward forcing you to rank your friends, and that really bothers me. It just shouldn’t happen, at least not beyond grade school.

      Today, I’m lucky to have a handful of women I count as confidantes. Allison Janney, my costar on Mom. My friend Alex, who I met when we worked on The Hot Chick together. Meghan, the friend who got out of Edmonds and writes in New York, and Kate, a dear childhood friend and neighbor who, on paper, I have nothing in common with anymore—at least not from an outsider’s perspective—but who totally gets me because, history. Six months ago I called her and said, “Kate! I was reading this article and I think I have this condition called prosopagnosia, where you are totally face blind and don’t recognize people that you’ve seen before.”

      “Oh God, you totally have that,” she said. “Remember that time at the park when you thought your mom was walking across the field and it was really that homeless guy?”

      Confirming that I might actually have prosopagnosia, instead of just saying I was crazy, might be the kindest thing she ever did for me.

      I had my first kiss when I was sixteen and lost my virginity when I was seventeen. It was a busy couple of years.

      The kiss was during my junior year of high school. It was a Friday night and we had just finished a production of You Can’t Take It With You, a Pulitzer Prize–winning play in which I played Essie Carmichael. It was a juicy part. Not the lead, but a good, meaty role that allowed me to show off my acting chops. (I love beef references, dear reader.) After our performance, some of the seniors in the cast rented a hotel room in downtown Seattle. I told my parents that I was spending the night at my friend Stephanie’s (yes, Stephanie was also my alibi during the Stone Temple Pilots concert where Chad and I first hooked up—“staying at Stephanie’s” was a recurring theme of my teenage years), but instead I went to the hotel room and got wasted. It was my first time being drunk, and Kyle, a senior, held my hair back while I vomited, which anybody who has ever been a drunk girl in high school knows is both disgusting and the epitome of romance all at the same time. After I was done puking, we crawled into a bed where Jeff (the same Jeff who I mentioned might murder me) was already passed out. He was lying on the right side of the bed, Kyle was in the middle, and I was on the left. I don’t know how Kyle could stand kissing me after I vomited, but we made out a little bit and then he fingered me right there in that king-size hotel bed for three. (In hindsight, maybe Jeff is right to want to murder me.)

      I had a minor crush on Kyle—he had a huge grin, big dimples, great hair. He was the kind of guy who seemed stoned all the time, but I don’t think he actually was. The fact that he was able to look past my braces and stinky vomit breath and stick his tongue down my throat was a true gift, even if it did feel like there was a slug in my mouth and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Aggressively kiss him back? Passively receive the kiss? I wasn’t sure. (To be fair, I’m still not sure I know how to kiss properly. I always wonder if I’m doing it right. Even though I’m an actress and kiss people in movies all the time, you can’t exactly ask, can you? And even though those are technically first kisses, I also think about the rush of a real first kiss and wish I could have that without all the teenage awkwardness.)

      That night at the hotel was an evening of firsts: my first make-out session, my first finger bang, my first night in a king-size bed. I was in heaven. So much so that I couldn’t wait to write all about it in my diary: I made out and was penetrated! Life is grand!

      The next morning, I went home first thing because I was scheduled to take my driver’s test. My parents—the sweet, supportive people they are—were raving about my performance in the play while all I could think was, I hope they don’t smell the vomit and cigarette smoke.

      Somehow, I passed my driver’s test. It was a major twenty-four hours in my life. But the blissful high of making out and having a license was short-lived. A few days later, my mother found my diary. She read my recap of Kyle’s finger-banging and thought it meant I lost my virginity, and she was furious.

      Here’s the thing about my mother … she wanted me to stay a virgin until I was married. She made that very clear. This always confused me, because my mom is not a religious person. If her views had been based on God or the Bible, I would have

Скачать книгу