Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [13]
Within the hour we were watching Julia Roberts flushing her wedding ring down the toilet and starting a new life in Iowa under an assumed identity. I could barely enjoy the movie, still stunned by my closest friends’ utter lack of interest in something I loved so much. I had always known, yeah, maybe JLMP wouldn’t be as interested in comedy as Mavis had been, but it scared me that they dismissed it so completely. I felt like two different people.
What happened to me was something that I think happens to a lot of professional comedy writers or comedians, or really anyone who’s passionate about anything and discovering it for the first time. Most people who do what I do are obsessed with comedy, especially during adolescence. I think we all have that moment when our non-comedy-obsessed friends or family are like: “Nope. I’m at my limit. I can’t talk about In Living Color anymore. It’s kind of funny, but come on.”
And more and more, I found that I didn’t want to do what JLMP wanted to do. Like one time Lauren wanted me go to the yarn store in Harvard Square with her so we could both learn to knit. I reluctantly used my allowance to buy a skein of yarn. Who was I knitting stuff for? If I gave my mother a knitted scarf she’d be worried I was wasting my time doing stupid stuff like knitting instead of school work. Presenting a homemade knitted object to my parents was actually like handing them a detailed backlog of my idleness.
And Jana, sweet old Jana, was crazy about horses. Like super-nutso crazy about horses—that was her thing. All her drawings and back-from-vacation stories and Halloween costumes were horses. She would even pretend to be a horse during free period and lunch. We had to feed her pizza out of our hand, and she’d neigh back “thank you.” Now I was getting bored of driving forty-five minutes with her parents to the equestrian center to pretend to care about her galloping back and forth in her horse recital or whatever.
I found myself wanting to spend more time with Mavis than JLMP. I spent the week looking forward to Saturday so I could write sketches with her. I didn’t want her to be my secret friend anymore.
One Friday in November I didn’t go to the Cheesecake Factory with JLMP. I asked Mavis if she wanted to hang out at the mall after school. We had never spent time together outside of our houses. Mavis was surprised but agreed to go. We went to the Arsenal Mall after school. We bought sour gummy worms at the bulk candy store; we walked around Express and The Limited, trying things on and buying nothing. It felt weird being with Mavis in the real world, but good-weird.
The next Friday I bailed on JLMP again so my brother, Mavis, and I could see Wayne’s World together. We spend the whole night afterward chanting: “Wayne’s World! Party Time! Excellent! Schwing!” Mavis and I spent a long time discussing Rob Lowe’s emergence as a comedy actor. (Again, we were comedy nerds. This was exciting to us.) The following Friday we went to her house where Mr. Lehrman showed us how to use his camcorder so we could tape a sketch we had written, which used the characters in Gap Girls, that old SNL sketch with Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, and David Spade dressed up as female Gap employees. Mavis played David Spade and Adam Sandler. I played Chris Farley and all the other characters. Sometime around then, Mavis and I became real friends. Friends at school.
I spent most of winter break with Mavis, going to Harvard Square to see movies and buying comic books. I discovered she wasn’t into going shopping as much as JLMP had been, but I had my mom and Aunt Sreela for that, anyway. I still considered JLMP my best friends, but began flaking on them more and more. Jana’s mom even called my mom to tell her how hurt Jana was that