talking, and started walking to the other room to see if she’d follow. In less than a minute, she appeared in the doorway of the side room with her drink and glided toward my table. The PA system was quieter here, the hum of drinkers more subdued.
“I’m Amanda,” she said, sticking her hand out. “I thought you were amazing dealing with that drunk guy, and I wanted to buy you a drink.”
It was as I had suspected; she had watched the whole set but started caring only during the heckling incident. It cast a bit of a pall on the free drink.
“Dana,” I said, shaking her hand. “And thanks. It didn’t win me any Brownie points with the crowd, though.”
“People don’t always like hearing the truth,” she said. “But guys like that need to be taken out.”
Guys like that. It was almost sweet. “You don’t see a lot of comedy, do you?”
Amanda smiled. “No,” she admitted. “I just moved here a few weeks ago.” Whether she meant it as a justification of why she hadn’t seen much comedy or as an explanation of why she’d decided to come tonight, I couldn’t tell.
“Well, Amanda,” I said, “‘Show me your tits’ is like heckler preschool for a female standup. If you can’t deal with that . . .” I shrugged.
“So you get harassed like that all the time?” Her eyes were wide and unbelieving. “And you just have to take it?”
“Hecklers go after everyone,” I said uncomfortably. “It comes with the territory. It’s not really that bad, though. Honestly—” I laughed. “I mean, better a heckler than a creepy comment from the emcee.”
“That happens?”
“Or a bunch of rape jokes in the set before mine. Or, my favorite, when an audience member comes up to you afterward and says, ‘You’re funny—for a girl.’” I’d long since tired of these old “women in comedy” chestnuts and tuned it out when I heard other female comics griping. It wasn’t that they weren’t true, it was just that there was no point in focusing on them. But now, perversely amused by Aman da’s shocked expression, I found myself relishing them.
“You must develop a thick skin,” she said, shaking her head.
“Sure. I used to be a size two,” I cracked. The joke flew past her, which I found oddly endearing. My mother didn’t get my jokes either, but I could never be sure how much of that was the language barrier and how much was a defense against being reminded of my wisecracking dad, who was long gone. Sometimes she chose what she did and didn’t understand.
Amanda was looking at me expectantly, waiting to hear the rest of the story, and with a large sip of my whiskey soda, I resigned myself to explaining further. “All I mean is, you get a knack for dealing with hecklers pretty early on. Otherwise you get derailed.”
“I can’t imagine thinking up an insult that fast.”
“It’s not really about the zinger. It’s about getting through the moment so you can move on with your set. Showing him”—I corrected myself—“no, showing the audience that he’s not getting to you.”
“Really? You didn’t enjoy it even a little? Smacking that guy around just now, making him feel small?” Her eyes narrowed and she smiled conspiratorially. “Come on.”
The whiskey warm in my stomach, I laughed. “Maybe a little,” I admitted. In the moment of zinging the nice-tits guy, there had been a tiny spark of pleasure in imagining him getting hurt. The thought made me uncomfortable. There was something indecent about it, though a lot of comics indulged the impulse. It was time for a change of subject. “You said you just moved here? Where from?”
“Los Angeles,” she said. “I was trying to be an actor.”
Rather than surprise, I felt a wave of recognition. Her combination of naiveté and poise reminded me of certain women I’d met in acting classes, frail women with striking features who’d been spotted in laundromats or plucked out of drugstore lines in their hometowns while waiting to buy cigarettes. Groomed for girl groups and minor roles on soap operas, they seldom made the cut. They had too little imagination and too much reality for acting, and they eventually slipped back into the beautiful scenery of L.A. or moved on.
“I lived out there for a while too,” I said. “Maybe we have mutual friends.”
“I was only there a year,” she said, swizzling her drink. “I hated it there.”
“Yeah, me too,” I lied, suddenly thinking of a pilot idea: Failed actress opens community theater in her hometown. Waiting for Guffman meets Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I fiddled with my napkin, wishing I’d brought my pen. “You probably got there right before I left. Let’s see . . .” I began running through an inventory of places we might have bumped into each other, listing improv theaters, acting workshops, networking events, even the Culver City diner where I’d waited tables. At every name, she shook her head. We’d just missed each other, although as I listed potential sources of connection, the familiar feeling strengthened rather than weakened. “Who did you hang out with there?” I asked.
“No one, really. I lost all my friends when I lost my job in tech.” She saw my questioning look and elaborated. “I was a programmer for Runnr.”
Even I, a borderline technophobe, had heard of the errand-running app that had pushed all the others out of business, though in this gig economy, more of my friends had worked as runners than used the service. My face must have betrayed some of the surprise I was feeling, tinged with shame over my assumptions—girl groups and soap operas!—because she gave me a wry grin. “Yeah, I know. I don’t look like a software engineer. Any more than you look like a standup.”
I flushed. It was true that my appearance—short and brown-skinned and shaped like my mother minus the control-top pantyhose—did not prepare most people for my extracurricular activities. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Let’s just say none of the guys I worked with thought I looked like a programmer either. They made that abundantly clear.” She took another sip. “And that was before my supervisor started sending me dick pics.”
“Gross,” I said. Guys like that. “Is that how you lost your job?”
“Yeah.” She finished her drink, holding the straw to one side and draining it. “Like an idiot, I actually went to HR with it. Two years in the trenches of a sexual-harassment suit got me a little pile of settlement money, sure. But it also got me the cold shoulder from every startup in Silicon Valley. And then there were the trolls—someone on Reddit guessed my name from a news spot. It couldn’t have been hard to figure out. There weren’t tons of female programmers at Runnr.”
“So how’d you end up in L.A.?”
“It seemed like the best place to disappear.” She looked down into her empty drink. “One of them swatted me—you know what that means, right? They sent a SWAT team to my house. I woke up in the middle of the night to a bunch of dudes armed to the teeth pounding on my door. After that, I was a nervous wreck. I scrubbed my online profile so they couldn’t find me again, went to the dark side of the internet. And got out of town in a hurry.”
“Why acting?” I said.
She shrugged.
