Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

She began to headline in places with air conditioning, and graduated to concert halls across the country and to venues in Chicago and New York, where people bought tickets with her name printed on them. She crossed over into TV, into film, she crossed over and over and over. She merged feminism with humour, she merged being out of the closet with being in the mainstream, she merged and merged.

It helped that she was used to moving.

Jack and Mimi saw many of her shows. Jack saw most of them. She wished her brother could have seen one.

Propelled by the feeling of juggling, of entering a time-space continuum where she could see thoughts coming and pluck them from the air the way Superman plucks speeding bullets; by the revelation that everything is connected — start anywhere, go go go, you will inevitably wind up back at this spot, because space is curved and so are thoughts, a thousand boomerangs — she couldn’t focus on one thing, so she focused on everything.

She did it where it was safe: on stage, in front of many strangers who had paid good money and expected a good time. In person she remained shy well into her twenties.

If Madeleine stopped: all the balls would drop. The atoms would disperse. She would look down, see the void beneath her feet, the precipice just out of reach; hear the tin-can sound effect of feet racing for purchase on thin air— Mother! — and zoom straight down to the Wile E. Coyote bottom with a powdery pok!

She arrives at the faux-rustic double doors of the Pickle Barrel Family Restaurant and pushes them open. The reassuring aroma of ketchup and fried food greets her, along with a blast of “Crocodile Rock”—all oldies, all the time. She spots the others at a big round table loaded with beer, nachos, burgers and wings. This is After-Three TV. She, one other woman and four men, all thirty-something, have been together for seven years. A combination of Second City alumni and renegades. When they first got together, they realized that each, at one time, had been the “bad” kid at school, the one required to remain “after three.”

They are crowded around the table with Shelly and two of their regular directors, who look as though they haven’t slept in a week, along with an even more haggard-looking script editor and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the Pretty Department — hair and makeup Überfrau — who just broke up with her boyfriend and doesn’t want to drink alone. Hands criss-cross the table, helping themselves to every plate but the one directly in front of them. At a distance of a table or two, the group looks perfectly at home up here in the land o’ malls. They don’t appear bohemian — even if Madeleine’s personal style tends toward urban-lesbian-warehouse chic. On the whole, they resemble nice generic white people; a Judeo-Christian cross-section of North Americana, somewhere between university student and middle management, and there, but for a small yet crucial quirk, went they all.

When you look closely, however, you can see that they all have the thing in their eye. The result of an accident or a gift. Perhaps God dropped each of them on the head before they were born. Light seems to reflect at an odd angle from their irises — the visible effect, possibly, of information that, having entered the brain obliquely, exits the eye at a corresponding tilt. Something, at some point, smote or stroked them. Each lives in genial terror of being found out and exposed as a fraud. Each is fuelled by a combustible blend of exuberance and self-loathing, informed by a mix of savvy and gullibility. None was cool in high school. Denizens of the great in-between of belonging and not belonging; dwellers in the cracks of sidewalks; stateless citizens of the world; strangers among us, familiar to all. Comedians. These are Madeleine’s people.

She starts toward them. She is not the only one to harbour a pool of perfectly black water at her core, still as onyx, unreflecting of any light at all, whence, if comedy occasionally bubbles up, it is either hysterically funny or just plain ill. Or right on the line — like Maurice.

Ron waves, Linda makes room, Tony asks if she got lost again; Madeleine adjusts her balls and says, in Tony’s voice, “I stopped on the way to drain the peg,” and they laugh. They have been meeting here for over a year and she still can’t find the place. Someone pours her a glass of draft.

This watering hole of choice is loud enough for them to be able to hear themselves think. Madeleine squeezes into the banquette and yields to a bone-crusher from Tony, who outweighs her two to one. Good for a laugh, better than hours of therapy. Tony could make a fortune. He almost has; so have some of the others at this table — like Madeleine, poised at the brink.

“You’re not finished that wing, eat that wing,” Maury says to her.

“I ate it.”

“You didn’t, look at all the meat you left, here, give.”

“Take.”

“I’ll show you how to eat a wing, you’re so obviously a goy, eating a wing like that.”

Early thirty-something existential moment of truth, when you first realize that not everyone you worked with in your twenties is a genius, that some people are “wild and crazy” and others simply have a substance problem, that the alluring sexy-sad people are just depressive, that depression is rage slowed down, that mania is grief speeded up. The first great winnowing.

Ron says to Linda, “The haunted house bit was funnier the first time—”

“It was shit.”

“No it was funny when you came on after I did the—”

“When you do that thing with the lamp, it screws up my—”

“No, you got a laugh!”

“That was not my laugh.”

“Shelly, she got a laugh, am I right?”

These are the last immortal days, racing toward that next great good place, Your Life. Last days of travelling light, before slowing, turning and, with a hand shading the eyes, espying the moving van heaving into sight with all your stuff on it, finally being brought out of storage. Stuff you forgot you owned.

They drink and eat and talk all at once; the men talk the loudest because they have bigger larynxes and millennia of entitlement. The women tell them to shut up and they do, chastened like terriers but, like terriers, only briefly. No one ever resents Tony for hogging a scene because he somehow seems generous even when he’s pulling focus; everyone knows Ron is a genius but Tony is the only one who can really deep down stand him any more, and everyone is in love with Linda. She has a strange beauty and is severely gifted at coming in under the radar, but her brand of comedy is easily trampled by a Ron. Maury is solid, especially in drag, Howard is the Art Carney guy, Madeleine walks a tight rope between writing for the company and taking too much space with her low-staus characters that nonetheless command centre stage. The six of them love one another, are suspicious of one another, can’t stand one another — they are a company. They can anticipate who’s going to bite whom next and how hard.

“We should take Linda’s newlywed thing and—”

“We should make a sequel—”

“We should do the sequel first —”

Out of this come the sparks for next week’s show, charted by Shelly on a tablet of lined paper in the form of squiggles and diagrams. The boxes and arrows remind Madeleine of her father. There is method in this madness. A map for improv that will lead to a script that will remain fluid until past the final take. Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead. Tonight, among the munchies, the beer and the noise, writing is what they are doing.

“Someone should write this down,” says Howard — someone always says this at some point.