Chapter 1
I got the Honeymoon Stage job offer while I was microwaving a Lean Pocket and talking to Celia about one of her customers, who always claimed she’d left the foam off his cappuccino—Is he flirting, she wanted to know, or just a jerk?
We often had trouble telling the difference.
At the time, we were a year and a half out from our college graduations, and naive to the ways of the world.
I had moved to California three months earlier, against my mother’s advice.
She thought I already had a job in television and should stick close to home, just in case.
In case of what, she didn’t elaborate. I could practically hear the air quotes around television, the tutting that I hadn’t chosen a more practical career.
My stepdad, Ron, agreed with her, as he always did.
He basically existed to agree with my mother, which, after what my dad had put her through, she probably deserved.
I’d been working as a booking assistant for a cable news channel in Manhattan, which was close to the job I wanted in the way that JFK-airport sushi is technically the same meal as omakase in Tokyo.
The pay was terrible, and I often crashed at my ex-boyfriend’s place because it was easy and right off the B train.
I knew I’d have to pay my dues, but I didn’t feel like this gig was getting me anywhere other than Josh’s stained futon.
Like many others who had grown up on Tiger Beat and Baywatch, I had always had Hollywood dreams. Specifically, I wanted work in sitcoms. I wanted out of this chaotic city high-rise swarmed by tourists, to be nestled inside the relative safety of a studio lot.
I wanted a tight script with a laugh track.
Steady work for twenty-two episodes and change.
By that August afternoon in my Silver Lake kitchen, talking soy milk with Celia, I’d come to the realization that this dream job would be difficult to find.
Still, I wasn’t ready to give up just yet.
Celia might have been my best friend from college, but television was the best friend I’d had between fourth and eighth grade.
My mother was a single mom who always worked a full-time job, and I’d been the quintessential latchkey kid, keeping myself company with after-school specials—some sitcom mom cooking dinner in the background while I did math homework and waited for my own mom to finish her shift.
My older brother played hockey and mastered AP biology.
I took daily doses of Saved by the Bell.
There was comfort in the structure of network television—its predictable beats, the way even the most distressing B story would be mostly forgotten by the start of the next episode.
I liked how the characters responded to situations in the way you would expect them to.
In retrospect, I probably should have had a good talk therapist, but my mother was parenting alone—that is, until she met Ron.
TV had always been my safe space, though it didn’t escape me how unstable my career prospects were at the time of my Honeymoon Stage offer.
My roommates were at least making strides in the directions they wanted to go.
Celia, the conventionally hot one of our trio, had a gig at a coffee shop that sustained her between cattle call auditions, and Jen, more demure, though no less of a go-getter, worked in accounting for a sports agency.
I’d been doing informational interviews while moonlighting as a dog walker, slowly blowing through my meager savings and ignoring the growing possibility that I might have to move back east.
I hadn’t considered a job in Reality television.
At the time, Reality TV meant mostly talent competitions or game shows—often gross ones in exotic locales.
There was a popular show about a group of random people living in a house together, talking about society’s problems, but I didn’t think that was for me.
“Your phone.” Celia gestured. I didn’t recognize the number, and I froze, awash with hope. Could this finally be my chance? I let the call go to voicemail, but I played it right away and then called back immediately.
Yes, I was available. Yes, I was interested.
No, I hadn’t worked for the network before, but of course I grew up watching it.
A courier would come by this afternoon with paperwork and some clips that would get me up to speed?
Yes, okay, of course. I’d sign whatever they wanted.
I was theirs to command—while, of course, also being my own totally interesting adult person with life experience and taste that would strengthen the show.
As it turned out, Maggie McKee was the reason I got the job.
She was my Aunt Dede’s friend’s daughter and the one person I knew working in Hollywood.
I had known Maggie as a child, gone to school with her in Ohio the year after my dad left, when my mom had dragged us back to her hometown to “get our bearings.” Maggie sat next to me in art class.
She was a dancer. Even then, she had the shiniest hair.
After my mom spent a year in night nursing school and we’d had a few sessions of family therapy, my mother took us back to Philadelphia, where I entered fifth grade.
Maggie entered the national anthem–singing circuit.
She became a useful trivia bit throughout my adolescence.
People love a celebrity connection—the one time they sat next to an actor at an airport or when they shared a college dorm with some politician’s sister.
Maggie was my connection to something bigger, and people always asked me if she was the same in real life as she was on TV.
I didn’t know. Probably? We hadn’t exactly been friends when we were nine.
Likely she didn’t even remember me. We didn’t stay in touch.
When it aired, I’d barely watched the kids’ variety show she was on.
The Tiger Crew cut a bit too close to the vulnerable, effusive part of myself that, even at thirteen, I was trying to avoid.
So I really didn’t know her once she became Maggie McKee up on some marquee.
Aunt Dede, too, lost regular access. But Maggie was my tether to the stars, proof that, although my life seemed ordinary, I’d once played Pretty Pretty Princess with someone important.
Aunt Dede still knew Maggie’s mother, so she dropped my name when I moved out to Los Angeles. When Honeymoon Stage suddenly needed a replacement production assistant halfway through filming Season One, my inexperience was nothing against Maggie’s mother’s recommendation.
Maggie’s team sent me the tapes in a package camouflaged as “Civil War History,” a label meant to deter anyone actually interested in watching two B-list celebrities navigate their first year of marriage.
Celia went to work, and that afternoon I turned on the stringout footage.
I sat there in my sweatpants, one corner of my screen smudged with what must have been my thumbprint, our spider plant dying, our windows in need of a wash.
And suddenly there was the sign that read “Palisades Pines.” The looming house, the white gazebo.
Then came Maggie McKee in a custom wedding dress, feeding Jason Dean a slice of cake.
Her long-sleeved, low-necked lace. Her intricate updo.
The tiniest trace of the girl I half remembered, if I squinted.
Jason looked suave in his tux, broad and handsome as he tucked a piece of hair behind her ear.
He had a thick neck, chiseled cheekbones, and a strong chin—the kind of guy who would have had his looks to coast on, even if he hadn’t been a font of athletic talent.
A close-up of Maggie’s bouquet, a tight pink swirl of orchids and Juliet roses that probably cost more than my rent.
A shot of Jason adjusting his jacket. Essentially, it wasn’t all that different from the photo spread they’d sold to People magazine, a curated collection of moments I’d later realize was, like the show, going to help Maggie and Jason pay off this wedding.
It was extravagant so that it could be sold, and they sold it so that they could afford the extravagance.
Watching this intimate cut, I felt like a guest—or at least one of the cater-waiters.
There was Maggie staring into space, fiddling with a ribbon.
She checked her teeth for lipstick with a finger, turned to a bridesmaid to confirm she was all right.
She rested her arm lightly atop her father’s.
Jason pressed his lips together when he saw her walk through the door.
Then they were sitting on a couch, in jeans and T-shirts, surrounded by half-emptied moving boxes.
Maggie looked very young and thin, and almost orange from her tan, which was something I thought they might want to fix in postproduction.
She had those big brown doe eyes and a nose so pert and straight she might have been a cartoon princess.
Big boobs, supposedly natural. Jason gave her a little kiss on the top of the head, and she giggled.
It wasn’t exactly compelling television.
I thought it unlikely that this would be my big break.
The production assistant before me had supposedly buckled under the demands of the role—she had a fiancé and hobbies and a real life she didn’t want to miss out on.
This would not be a problem for me—an ambitious young woman with no significant other, few local friends, and no money for leisure.
The line producer had described the job as like being on location for a nature documentary, sitting silently in the Sahara, watching for movement.
Occasionally running off to print out MapQuest directions.
Repositioning a sofa. Refilling a bowl of chips.
Getting Dan the director a ginger ale. Hours of nothing interesting, punctuated by high drama.