The Diva Rules Read online

  My parents waited until the moment my mom was of legal age and then got hitched. They spent many disappointing years trying to conceive and finally decided to adopt. I was the lucky baby they plucked out of a foster home. From the moment they took me in, when I was just about three months old, I was theirs and they were mine. Three years later, they adopted my brother, David. As I grew up, although we were a really tight-knit family, I had a sense that, just as I was different from the kids in my school, I was different from my parents too. At least physically. Perhaps the most bothersome difference came when I hit puberty and didn’t get my mother’s massive tits, which were all I’d wanted.

  Now, I don’t know if you’ve always felt like an outsider, but I don’t even remember a time when I didn’t know I was one. My parents explained to me that I was adopted as soon as I could understand. I remember them handing me a picture book called something like, You Are an Adopted Child. Honestly, I was more disappointed with the title of that book than I was with the message. I mean, could no one do better? I would’ve much preferred it be called Your Parents Didn’t Love You Enough to Keep You, or even So, You Look Like No One in Your Family. My high school boyfriend would later tease me by saying my parents won me on the quarter wheel on the Wildwood boardwalk, and the jokes just went on and on and on, usually coming from my dad, which is where I get my relentless, wicked, twisted sense of humor. It ain’t always genetic, kids, sometimes it’s about your environment, and for that, I am grateful.

  Fast forward to my midtwenties, when my music career had stalled (more on that later). I needed to figure out what to do with my life next. But to move forward, the first thing I needed to do was look back. I needed to know where I came from to know where I was headed next. So, I started tracking down my birth parents. My mother, Arlene, even helped me, at first begrudgingly and then enthusiastically. Her attitude changed when her sister, my aunt Harriet, said to her, “Listen, Arlene. You can be upset, but the way I see it, you should be kissing this woman’s feet for doing what she did, because if she hadn’t, we wouldn’t have our Michelle.” Like so many things in life, it’s all about perception. Remember that, my divas.

  The first time I heard my birth mother’s voice, it all just clicked. I was twenty-five years old and I had to jump through some hoops with the adoption agency for them to take the next steps and attempt to locate her. I had to consent to meeting with their in-house therapist, which I did, and after she saw me mentally fit to continue, they were the ones who would do the heavy lifting. When the agency finally located her through social security, after her driver’s license provide to be a dead end, they called me to tell me they had found her and she was very eager to speak to me. They asked me if I wanted to call her or if she should call me. I immediately said that I wanted her to call me. When my phone rang, it was like the world had stopped turning. I knew it was her, and as soon as I picked up, everything just started pouring out of both of us. Joanne was living in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and her Jersey accent had taken on a soft Southern twang. She’s Irish-Hungarian Catholic, and she got knocked up the moment she lost her virginity at nineteen years old to a guy named Lewis, who just went by Wiss. (Apparently, as a child, he couldn’t pronounce his full name, and this shorter version stuck throughout his entire life.) I remember saying to her, probably way too early in the conversation, “Oh my God, why do I have no boobs?” because yes, darling, the world does revolve around my tits. I went on, “Why do I have a bump on my nose? Who was my father? Tell me everything.” And she did, and I ate up every word.

  THE

  PEOPLE SPEND A LOT OF TIME TRYING TO FIT IN, hoping to be accepted, because they think fitting in will make them feel “normal.” But it doesn’t make you normal. It makes you average, and average is something a diva never wants to be. You are anything but average, and if you can remember that, you can approach the world from a place of strength, rather than weakness. So even if you feel like a misfit, be thankful for it. It’s what makes you stand out from the crowd.

  The next week, I was on a plane to Nashville to meet her, as well as her verbally abusive, alcoholic boyfriend, whom I hated instantly because of the way he spoke to her, but I digress. Now, with a situation like meeting your birth mother, you never know how these things are going to go. She met me at the airport, and when I saw her, we hugged, but it wasn’t this grand moment where the heavens above opened and a beam of light shone upon us. We had no mother/daughter connection at all—zero—because I already had a mom. I didn’t know how I was going to feel, but in that moment, I didn’t feel anything but grateful—grateful to know where I’d come from and grateful to be able to say thank you. And I did. Now that I am a mother I am even more grateful to Joanne for what she did, especially when you take in account that she was nineteen years old. She gave me the opportunity to have a great life because she knew she couldn’t, and to me? That’s the most selfless act of all.

  rule no. 3:

  YOU HAVE A VOICE. USE IT.

  Divas, whatever you do in life, or whatever you want to do in life, the one thing you have to do first is to get noticed. And you can’t get noticed if you never speak up. You have a voice, honey, and it’s good for more than singing show tunes in the shower, yelling at the TV during RuPaul’s Drag Race (Monday nights on Logo TV, or online at logotv.com, *ting*), or gossiping with your friends about the Duchess of Windsor. Whether your voice comes in the form of song, dance, fashion, art, or being a friggin’ mime for all I care, you need to learn to project, darling, and show the world who you are. Take center stage. Sparkle, Neely, sparkle.

  You already know that my mom Arlene gave me my voice. But before we can get to the part about how I took to the stage and screen and became FABULOUS, I need to tell you about how Belinda Carlisle, my first true love, taught me how to use my voice. Before her, I guess you could say, I did not have the beat.

  I was a radio-obsessed kid, and I’m fully aware of how stupid this sounds, but during the summer before seventh grade, when I was in the full throes of my chubby awkward phase, the Go-Gos saved my life. I was different from the kids at school, different from my family, different from the Jews, different from the non-Jews, and here was this all-girl group, which, for the first time in my life, immediately made me feel like a part of something bigger than myself. When I heard “Our Lips Are Sealed,” and later “We Got the Beat,” I felt connected to them and to the world. They were like me, and I was like them. And Belinda Carlisle, who was thick and curvy and gorgeous, also wore a miniskirt! I literally became obsessed with her. I wanted to feel that free, that powerful. She made me feel like, for the first time, it was OK to be myself.

  Belinda and her all-girl band helped me discover fashion, which became my main form of self-expression. My new uniform was unlike any other sixth grader’s in South Plainfield, New Jersey, and it always involved miniskirts and white Keds covered in felt-tip-markered lightning bolts. By the seventh grade I started getting heavily into punk rock music and even gave myself a mohawk (inspired by the sexy Annabella from Bow Wow Wow, though when I emerged from my bathroom after my self-styled hair-don’t, Arlene was not amused). Dyeing it blue was the pinnacle for me—thank God my parents were cool and knew it was a phase, albeit a pretty long one. The summer between eighth and ninth grades was a huge one for me as we took a family trip to England. My first trip abroad and I literally fell in love. England was the birthplace of punk rock and the home of the Sex Pistols and William Shakespeare alike. Heaven. My mom and dad really went out of their way spending hard-earned wages on my shopping sprees through all of the markets London, provided for better or for worse. I returned to New Jersey a changed teen in many ways, but fashion was a big one. I was really into wearing spiked necklaces, bracelets, and belts, so much so that the kids started calling me “Spike.” I was everything, but nobody knew what to make of me.

  THE

  THOSE EARLY LESSONS that I learned on that football field in New Jersey have stayed with me my whole life. And now, w
hen I look at these kids on RuPaul’s Drag Race, doing their own big reveals, I see myself, because I remember what it felt like to learn how to use my authentic voice. When you live your life in the audience, you start to seek approval from the other people in it, and then you become a giant, predictable bore. But when you’re courageous enough to stand in front of the crowd, and really speak up, you become more powerful. And if you can do that, you’ll never be part of the chorus of someone else’s show. Instead, you’ll always be the lead diva in your own musical.

  In school in the eighties, all the kids fell into different cliques. You had your jocks, your burnouts, the band geeks, the A/V club, and the cool kids, which included the cheerleaders. In South Plainfield, we also had the black kids and the white kids who acted like black kids. I got along with everyone, but belonged nowhere. I was a punk rock theater geek who played sax in the marching band. No one ever gave me a second look until, I swear to you, I sang Liza Minnelli’s version of “New York, New York” (look it up) in the sixth-grade talent show. Then I became The Girl with the Voice, the girl who could sing, and it gave me confidence in myself. I never cared about cliques. All I cared about was being talented and funny, which is why I eventually earned the title of class clown (Or shall I say class humorist, because clowns felt offended by the title. Don’t believe me? Look it up: South Plainfield High School class of ’86).

  By my senior year, I’d become captain and choreographer for the pom-pom squad, which is not to be confused with the cheerleading squad. I couldn’t give a shit about sports. We were responsible for the halftime show at the football games, and I wanted to make ours the best spectacle the school had ever seen. And let me tell you, honey, it was, and still to this day is, the best thing the people of South Plainfield have ever witnessed. Because when I was captain, rather than go out and make pointless pyramids on the fifty-yard line, we did—are you ready?—a full-on striptease, complete with a big reveal at the end. We made gloves that were green on one side and white on the other, colors I still regret, but for the finale, we ripped off our skirts, which we’d cut and Velcroed back together, to reveal our gold-sequined panties underneath. I was doing drag moves before I knew what drag even was!

  rule no. 4:

  GET OFF YOUR ASS, GIRL.

  I know you have a dream. Guess what? Everybody does. And I know you’re special, but guess what? Everybody is. I’m not being mean here. I’m just giving it to you straight. You’ve got some fierce competition out there. And the single most important factor that’s going to determine whether or not you actually make your dream come true, whatever it may be, is not your talent. It’s your tenacity and your willingness to work harder than anyone else to get what you want. You don’t become a diva by sitting at home, watching Golden Girls reruns. If you want to be golden, girl, you’ve got to get out there and make a name for yourself, because let me tell you, nobody else is going to make it for you. You can’t buy your way into the corner office or onto the cover of Vogue. You have to earn it. I learned that lesson the hard way.

  When I graduated from South Plainfield High, I had big dreams. I wanted to be a Broadway star, and in case that didn’t work out, I was smart enough to have a backup plan. I’d just become a movie star instead. I had the talent. I could sing and I could act. My audition tapes were so hot that despite my B-minus average I won full scholarships to join the theater programs at a handful of solid schools: NYU, Syracuse, Ithaca, Rutgers. But rather than go to any of these esteemed institutions, I decided I didn’t want to have to deal with the English lit classes and biology labs that are part of a well-rounded liberal arts education. Instead, I made the asinine decision to attend the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City, which, at the time, was an unaccredited joke of a college, offering two-year, good-for-nothing associate’s degrees, which in all honesty were basically just certificates. (FYI: it has since changed to an actual accredited college.) It was also so expensive that my parents had to take out a second mortgage on their house to pay the tuition. Now, I don’t believe in regret. If you spend your whole life looking in the rearview mirror, you’re going to crash. But Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and Ru, I have a hard time with that one, and I think everyone else does as well. Shout-out to AMDA class of ’88.

  If I squint really hard and try to think of a silver lining to my terrible decision, I can come up with two: The first is that I had one tough lady for a speech teacher, and she taught me how to lose my ridiculous accent. I was a Jersey girl raised by a Brooklyn mother, so just imagine that for minute. Everything was “Let’s have ‘cawwfeee’ and ‘tawwwk’ about the ‘dawwwg.’” My teacher, Barbara Adrian, taught me to practice my speech with a cork in my mouth, and I worked on my pronunciation every single day for two years until my accent was gone (or at least as close to gone as it was ever going to get). The second bright spot: I was in New York City. To me, that was the center of the world, home to Broadway, casting directors, and my favorite fashion designers, especially Betsey Johnson and Patricia Field. It was also a place where I knew I could be free to be myself without anyone looking at me like I was a freak.

  My look when I arrived to NYC was full-on guidette. Think Meadow Soprano with a disco twist. I’d abandoned my punk rock aesthetic when I started hitting the teen clubs and I decided to take it up a notch by frosting my hair and tanning until I was the color of a Louis Vuitton speedy bag. The teen clubs were now my oasis, and I quite literally ruled the roost. My daily schedule went something like this: school, General Hospital, homework, club prep, magic time. My mom, bless her, usually dropped me off. Teen clubs had become my obsession starting at around age fifteen and also a source of newfound uber popularity, but college awaited. As the date of my move to New York City approached, I was practically sick with the twisted cocktail of excitement for the future and regret over missing out on the New Jersey teen club scene.

  I was seventeen years old when my parents dropped me off at the Hotel Beacon on Seventy-fifth and Broadway, which is where I lived during college. And though I’d been coming to New York with my mom twice a year since junior high to buy cheap knock-offs on Canal Street, I was terrified to be left alone. For the first three months of school, I didn’t walk farther than a block away from my room, certain that if I ventured beyond that radius, I’d be jumped, mugged, or raped, probably by a homeless person. I was scared shitless of everyone and everything, especially the subway, and my fear made The Big City real small, real fast.

  I called my mom every single day, and on the first two weekends of school, I bucked up enough to take the train home from Penn Station, all alone, to South Plainfield to hit my usual circuit of Jersey teen clubs. On the third weekend, I called my mom to tell her what time to pick me up from the train station, and she told me she wouldn’t do it. “You can’t come home anymore,” she said. I threw a complete toddler temper tantrum on the phone. I was pissed off, sad, and confused, but she wasn’t having any of it. “You moved to New York City to become a star, and you’re not going to find anything more for yourself in Jersey,” she said. “Go to the clubs in NYC, meet people, network!” I said, “Ma! I don’t know anybody here. I’m eighteen. I don’t even know how to get into a club!” But that was the end of our conversation, and I spent that weekend, sulking in my dorm room.

  A few days later, a postmarked envelope from my dear old mom showed up at my dorm. Inside, there was a note that said, “This should help, sweetie,” and attached to it was a fake ID and a fraudulent birth certificate, which she even had notarized. To this day, I have no idea how she got hold of these scam documents, since there was no Internet back then, but I imagine she found an ad for them in the back of MAD magazine and sent my passport photo and twenty-five bucks off to some pimply kid who ran an operation out of the paneled basement of his parents’ house. She never worried about me becoming a raging teenage alcoholic, because I never drank (and still don’t to this day). My new red-and-white fake ID stated that I was a twenty-one-year-old student named Michelle
Shupack attending the University of Texas. Now, I had no excuses.

  I knew I had to start getting myself out there. My two roommates, Jolie from Marietta, Georgia, and Dana from Swanky-town, Connecticut, already had agents and alleged Broadway connections, because their families had money. I had to become my own agent. Every week, I’d read through a theater newspaper called Backstage, which announced open casting calls, and as I became more comfortable living in the city, I started going to all of them. They were cattle calls, and I’d often stand in lines that wrapped around the block for hours only to hear the casting director come out and announce, “Thank you very much, but we’ve filled the part,” before I even got within a block of the door. I only ever got one booking from an open call. I was signed by a modeling agency called Judith’s Petites, but it turned out to be a scam. I should’ve known. Who the hell hires a petite model? No one. That’s who.

  THE

  IF YOU REALLY WANT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO GO OUT AND GET IT YOURSELF. I know how frustrating it can be when you don’t even know where to start, or can’t even get your foot in the door for an interview, an audition, a date, whatever. But, repeat after me: Do. Not. Give. Up. Put yourself out there: Go online, ask everyone you know, and don’t feel shy about it either. You’re just looking for a lead, not a handout. Every interaction you have is a new opportunity, so don’t waste it by sitting on your ass. Start with things so small that you think they’ll probably be worthless. Put yourself where you know the people with power congregate—at the bar, the café, the restaurant, the pool, the charity—and get yourself noticed. Even tiny things can lead to something bigger. And don’t ever, ever count on anybody else to do the work for you. It’s all on you, and that’s as it should be. Because if you don’t earn your success yourself, I guarantee that it’s not going to last. You’ve got to work it to get it, and then you’ve got to work it to keep it. If you can remember that, you’ll do just fine.