“You’ve got to project your voice,” my mom instructed. “Otherwise no one will be able to hear you.”
At the audition the next day, I got up on stage and screamed my lines as loud as I could. I genuinely thought I’d nailed it, so I was devastated when the call sheet got posted and I saw that I’d only made it into the chorus.
But like any other good seventh-grade actor, I was determined to make myself stand out even in the smallest role. And it was a pretty small role: I had one line of my own—except that it wasn’t so much a line as it was a single word. And technically it wasn’t even one word. It was spelling out one word—Mississippi: M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I. It was so random, but damn if I didn’t make it count. No one has ever spelled that state with more gusto, and no one ever will.
When I finally got to high school, there was a drama club called Dessert Theater, and aside from the jocks, the kids in that group were the most popular in school. They were respected, and I was determined to become a part of them.
Dessert Theater put on three thirty-minute plays a year. There were core members of the group, but anyone in the school could audition for their productions, even little nobody eighth graders like me. But I knew I was low on the social ladder (even with all of Nicole’s support), and so when I auditioned for their first play of the year, I didn’t expect anything to happen—especially after I showed up and saw that I was the youngest person on the stage and my feet didn’t even touch the ground when I sat in the chair they provided. I also forgot that I was supposed to speak to the audience and spent the entire audition talking directly to the guy from Dessert Theater who was running lines with the prospective actors.
When the cast was announced the following Monday, a huge crowd formed around the posted list. I tried to act casual as I strolled up, waiting until there was a space for me to move forward instead of elbowing my way to the front like everyone else. When I finally had the chance to see the list, part of me couldn’t believe the sight of my name up there and felt a huge rush of relief and nervous excitement. But before I could get any closer to see what my role was, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Hi, Joey,” a girl said. “My name is Kristen. I’m the director and just wanted to say how excited we are to work with you. We thought you were so cute and funny, and I knew we had to have you!”
I was in such a daze that I could hardly understand what she was saying. She said she’d see me at the first table read later that day, after school, and then I floated away to my next class. It wasn’t until I got to the reading that I realized I’d been cast in the lead role. I was thrilled out of my mind, but also a little intimidated by how many lines I’d have to memorize.
The play was a student-written piece, “Life of the Party,” and the plot was really freaky. Basically there’s this little kid whose older sister is having a slumber party. He gets jealous that no one pays any attention to him, so he puts sleeping pills in their drinks and knocks them all out. He’s also obsessed with a country western star, so I had to speak with a deep cowboy drawl (although I would forget and slip in and out of it constantly), wear a giant orange cowboy hat, and jump around the stage on a stick horse.
The character seemed like a budding serial killer to me, but I gave the performance my all and got great reactions from the audience.
The experience gave me the confidence to try out for the spring musical, Anything Goes. The problem was that my voice was changing and I sounded like a squeak toy, so I didn’t make the cut. I was mortified. Dessert Theater was my escape from home life. I got to be around fun, cool kids, not stuck at home all the time with a sad, drunk mother. I desperately wanted to continue to be a part of it, and not getting in crushed me. Without a performance to rehearse, I needed both a distraction from my mom and a new creative outlet. Which is around the same time that I met a girl named Brittany Joyal.
We had in fact been in the same kindergarten class and were friends back then in that way that everyone in kindergarten is forced to be friends with each other—like, “You two are little. Play!” I recognized her when she showed up in my health class that year and the two of us were paired together by our teacher, Ms. Merritt, to do a project on addiction. Now that I think about it, maybe I can thank Ms. Merritt for my entire career, since she’s the one who set us up. But the truth is that Brittany and I would have found each other in some other way regardless—especially since we shared the same totally bizarre sense of humor. Our debut performance together is a perfect example. We were assigned coffee as our addictive substance to study. It seemed like such a boring subject, and that made me want to do something extra special so it would stand out.
“I really like acting,” I told Brittany during our first brainstorming session. “What if we did some sort of skit showing how bad coffee addiction can get?”
“I love acting too!” she said. “I can make myself cry on demand. Wanna see?” And suddenly right there in the middle of class, tears started streaming down her face. I knew right in that moment that this girl was insane—and that we needed to be best friends.
In retrospect, there are a lot of different ways we could have acted out how coffee can have negative effects. We could have pretended to act really hyper, like Jessie Spano in that one episode of Saved by the Bell where she gets addicted to caffeine pills. Or we could have pretended we were having massive, painful headaches brought on by coffee withdrawal.
Instead, I decided to play a maniac who became incredibly violent when he drank too much coffee, which of course is not actually a thing that happens, as far as I know. (If that were the case, every office in America would be a war zone!) But we also wanted to show that in moderation, coffee could be quite helpful in some situations. So we developed a scene where Brittany was inside her house drinking one cup of coffee, while I hid outside her window, guzzling tons of cups of coffee. I then climbed inside and pretended to beat her up, but she saved herself by pretending to throw her single cup of hot coffee in my face. Symbolism! Humor! Success!
Okay, I understand that the scenario seems pretty lame from the outside. But Brittany and I had lots of fun. We almost didn’t make it through our skit because we were laughing so hard. The students in our class had no idea what to make of us. I think they were a little weirded out, but we got an A on the project, and after that, we were bonded for life.
Brittany and I were constantly messing around with my camcorder on weekends and after school, making up stupid skits and short films. They might have been considered cute if we had been in fifth or sixth grade, but by the time we were freshmen in high school, everyone around us was experimenting with dating and drugs and alcohol, while we were still playing kid games like “secret agent.”
Here’s a typical plot from one of our films. Brittany and I are hanging out in my attic, pretending it’s our Secret Agent Headquarters. We get a call from The Chief (clearly my voice), who says that we’re urgently needed in the lab. We suit up, attaching our secret agent equipment (small balloons, dead cell phones, and fake plastic laser guns) to our special secret agent belts. We rush down to the lab, which is my bedroom. You can hear my mom and stepfather—they were back together at the time—loudly chatting away in the next room about what to have for dinner, but we just ignore them and exclaim, “The Chief is missing!”
But wait—I see a clue. Someone has drawn an arrow pointing to Italy on my globe! So we rush off to Italy by getting into our flying car (A.k.a., my mom’s gray Chevy Suburban; her old silver clunker had finally died by that point. Thank god.). We press a bunch of fake buttons on the dashboard and the car takes off into the air. You can tell because our bodies fly back into the seats due to the force of the liftoff (even though it’s absolutely clear in the video that the car itself isn’t even moving). We exit the car and are now in “Italy,” which is just another area of my attic. We don’t find The Chief, but we do find a rare gem (a piece of costume jewelry snagged from my mother’s dresser) and for some reason decide that we need to blow the plac
e up. The movie ends with us falling onto the grass from the force of the explosion. Cut.
I don’t know what we were thinking. The whole thing made no sense, but it didn’t matter. We were having a blast, and I’d found a friend and partner, someone who loved playing around in her imagination as much as I did. It was basically an anything-goes creative environment. The stuff we produced didn’t necessarily have to be good; the important part was that we were having a blast and cementing a friendship that would end up launching our lives into places we didn’t even dare to dream about back then.
We had another friend who sometimes appeared in our early videos, a girl named Amanda with dark hair and freckles. I’d met her in history class when I saw her putting Bugle chips on the end of each of her fingers and waving her hands around like she had claws. I cracked up and whispered that I did the same thing when I ate them, and from then on she and Brittany and I were the three amigos. She was fiercely loyal to Brittany and me and gave the best death stares to anyone who bothered us in school. Amanda was super into art and just as big a geek as us—she loved anime and video games. Brittany and I hung out with her at her house on the weekends because she had a huge living room, as well as a swimming pool that was featured prominently in many of our first minimovies.
In addition to making friends, another important early high school development was my discovery of music. In the years leading up to this point, I’d never paid much attention to it. Maybe it’s because I was obsessed with video games and making my own videos—there was already so much stimulation in my life that I didn’t feel like I needed anything else or that anything was missing.
But that all changed when I discovered the Veronicas.
I was hanging out at my friend Alison’s house after school one day. Alison was one of the prettiest and most popular girls in school—very all-American, with blond hair, perfect skin, and big green eyes. She’d decided that she liked hanging out with me. I guess I made her laugh or something. I didn’t care what the reason was; I was just happy to be at least orbiting the cool kids’ group. The rest of her friends were nice to me, but Alison was the one I really hung out with the most, and she was a separate friend from Brittany and Amanda—not for any real reason except that that’s just how high school works sometimes. You have friends from different groups, and trying to combine them can get weird. It wasn’t a big deal.
Anyway, we were at her house one day when we grabbed a handful of Oreos from her kitchen and went up to her bedroom. I immediately noticed a new poster on her wall.
It was a portrait of two girls, the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. They looked eerily alike, and both of them were made up pretty emo, with tons of black eyeliner, dark red lipstick, and blue and black nail polish. One of them had long black hair, and the other’s was shorter with blond streaks. They had fishnet stockings on their arms, tons of jewelry, and looked all-around badass.
“Those are the Veronicas,” Alison said. “They’re twin sisters and have a band together. Here, check them out.”
She went over to her computer and clicked on their MySpace page. We watched a video for their song “4ever.” And then I made her play it again. And again. And again. I was obsessed. The song was fun and catchy (“Come on baby, we ain’t gonna live forever / Let me show you all the things that we could do!”). I couldn’t get it out of my head. As soon as I got home, I looked them up online and printed out every photo I could find of them. I taped the images to my walls while listening to their songs on repeat until I’d memorized every lyric.
I learned all I could about their personalities. Jess is the older twin, by one minute, and she’s a little edgier and darker than Lisa, who in my mind came across as sweet and kind in interviews. I decided that she was my favorite and the one I should have a crush on.
I became a hard-core fan. Every day after school, I’d spam the hell out of their MySpace page, writing about how much I loved them. I hoped that if my comments showed up the most, then they’d notice me. Basically, their entire MySpace page was just me geeking out, raving about them and begging them to post on my own page, but I never got any sort of response. (I find this extremely funny now, because some of you reading this have done the exact same thing to me on Twitter. You know who you are!) So when I found out they were playing a concert in Worcester, only about half an hour away, I just about died. I was determined to meet Lisa.
Alison’s mom drove me, her, a girl named Rachel (a childhood friend who I’m pretty sure knew about my home life situation without my ever telling her—she was just intuitive like that), Alison’s older sister, and two other friends to the show. I insisted that we get there early so that we could be right in front of the stage, but there was already a line by the time we got there. I ran as fast as I could when the doors opened but there was still a crowd about three people deep ahead of me and no more room for me to elbow people out of the way.
There were two opening acts that night. I don’t remember who the first band was, but the second was a bunch of kids nobody had ever heard of called the Jonas Brothers. (Ha!) I stood there with my arms folded, glaring at those geeks because all I wanted was for the Veronicas to get out onstage. I eventually loosened up a little bit and grudgingly had to admit that the Jonas Brothers sounded pretty good.
After they finally left the stage, a guy walked out to introduce the Veronicas. It took me a second to recognize him, but realized it was Ricky Ullman, the star of one of my favorite Disney Channel shows, Phil of the Future. I started screaming uncontrollably, and I might have been hyperventilating a little too, because the whole world seemed to slow down and advance forward frame by frame, like I was watching a movie by hitting the Pause and Play button over and over again.
Lisa and Jess strode out onstage, grabbed the mikes, and launched into a song. I was jumping at least a foot off the ground in time with the music, pumping my fists in the air and shouting the lyrics along with them. And even though I wasn’t in the very front row, I focused my eyes on Lisa, willing her to see me, and she did! I didn’t care if I seemed like a crazy stalker; I was in a euphoric state of pubescent delirium. I had borrowed my mom’s good camera and stopped dancing and singing only long enough to snap a few photos before starting to shriek again.
Midway through the concert, all of my insanity paid off. They ended a song and Lisa locked eyes with me, pointed, and spoke into the microphone: “We’d like to dedicate this next one to . . . YOU!!” She and Jess launched into their song “Speechless,” which is exactly what I was. I could hear all of my friends screaming my name and freaking out around me, but I was frozen. I saw Lisa and Jess reach their arms out to me, and the crowd parted. They pulled me onstage and continued to sing. “Feels like I have always known you. And I swear I’ve dreamt about you.” I stood there like an idiot, swinging my head back and forth to look at each one of them. They were even more beautiful up close. I looked out into the audience and saw my friends below practically clawing at their faces with excitement. I’d stepped into an actual waking dream. I felt hands on my arms and realized they were leading me back down off the stage so I hopped off and turned around, finally standing at the very front.
They finished the song and Lisa leaned down and pointed at the side of her face, mouthing something that I couldn’t hear but what looked like Give me a kiss. And so I kissed her cheek. “No,” she said into the microphone so everyone in the auditorium could hear. “I asked what’s your name?”
Everyone roared with laughter.
“Joey,” I whimpered.
“Ooooh. Joey’s cute,” Lisa said and then she winked at me before standing back up and starting a new song. The thrill of what had just happened quickly overrode any embarrassment over the kiss, and for the rest of the show I felt like I was still up there onstage with them, dancing my butt off.
There was a meet-and-greet upstairs at the venue after the show, but since we were so close to the front of the stage, it meant we were near the end of the line by the time we go
t up there. We stood there forever, too excited to be impatient, and at one point Joe Jonas walked by and spotted me. He rushed over and exclaimed, “How cool was that, to be pulled up onstage!”
Obviously I had no idea that he would one day be as famous as he is, and so I couldn’t have cared less about talking to him. “It was pretty cool,” I answered, and then turned back to Alison to continue gushing about the experience. (Hey, Joe. Feel free to talk to me now. I promise I’ll be nicer!)
When it was finally our turn at the Veronicas’ table, they broke into huge smiles when they saw me. “Oh my god, it’s you!” Jess said.
“We love you,” Lisa added.
“I love you too. Will you sign my poster?”
“Of course, sweetie,” Jess said, and they scribbled all over it—not just their signatures but things like “marry me!” and “you’re awesome!” They both hugged me and I took some selfies with them, and it was basically the best night of my life up to that point.
It’s crazy: they follow me on Twitter now, and we keep in touch from time to time. It was my first experience with a celebrity. I know a lot of people say that you should never meet your idols, that you’ll be disappointed. But the Veronicas showed me how to treat a fan. If someone has invested the time to pay attention to your work and appreciate what you do, I think you owe it to him or her to show appreciation back. I will always treasure my experience at the Veronicas concert, but I value what they taught me that night even more. I had no clue just how important that lesson would be in my future.
Ten Bands That Will Always Be in My iTunes Library
The Veronicas
Marina and the Diamonds
Lana Del Rey
Panic! At the Disco
Ellie Goulding
Walk the Moon