Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [23]
I also knew what little girls want to talk about, which is boy bands. Haley and I would talk for hours about which member of ’N Sync we’d want to marry. After long deliberation, the answer was always J. C. Chasez. Joey Fatone’s last name was going to be “Fat One” no matter how great he was, and even though they didn’t know at their age that Lance Bass was gay outright, they sensed he’d make a better good friend and confidante. As for Justin Timberlake, well, JT was the coolest and hottest, but too flashy, so we couldn’t trust him to be faithful. J. C. Chasez was the smart compromise. We would talk like this, in complete unironic seriousness, for hours. The reason I was better than other babysitters was that I would never rush them. In me they had an open-minded listener to every pro and con of spending the rest of their lives with each band member of ’N Sync. I may have gotten more out of it than they did.
When the kids went to bed, the real fun began: me turning on Showtime at the Apollo in their tricked-out den and going to town on all the kid-friendly snack food in the house. Kid-friendly food is the best, because kid-friendly simply means “total garbage.” I ate frozen chicken nuggets shaped like animals, fruit chews shaped like fruit, and fruits shaped like cubes in syrup. I discovered that kids hate for any food to resemble the form it originally was in nature. They are on to something because that processed garbage was insanely delicious. I spent some excellent Saturday nights watching Mo’Nique strutting onstage at the Apollo while I ate a handful of children’s chewable vitamins and wrapped myself up in my boss’s cashmere kimono. I did it so much that it became a problem. One evening after her bath, Haley pulled me aside, wracked with guilt: “Mommy wanted to know who ate all the turtle-shaped bagel pizzas, and I knew it was you, but I lied and said it was me.” She burst into tears. I hugged her and told her, “You can never tell her the truth.” And then I let her stay up an extra hour watching Lizzie McGuire. Bribes and boy bands. That’s all you need to be a babysitter.
Babysitting did not pay the bills or give me health insurance, which I guess is good, because otherwise I would probably be an au pair somewhere right now. I needed to get a real job.
NETWORK PAGE DREAMS
The page program at the network TBN is very prestigious, and famously harder to get into than Harvard. No, TBN is not the real name of the network, but there is an old saying, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” which applies here. The TBN page program turns ambitious, overeducated twentysomethings into friendly, uniformed butlers. I wasn’t sure it was really my style, but it seemed like the first rung on the ladder to somehow working in TV. Young television writers all aspire to be TBN pages, in the hope that a late-night talk show host like Craig Ferguson or David Letterman will eventually overhear them uttering something witty while leading a tour, and then say, “You’re brilliant! Why don’t you come work for me and be my best friend?” They hire only seventy or eighty pages a year, out of something like forty-two million applicants. I decided the odds were stacked against me, which strangely made me feel like I was going to get the job even more. Sports movies had brainwashed me into the belief that when the chips are down the most, that is when success is the most inevitable.
I’m the kind of person who would rather get my hopes up really high and watch them get dashed to pieces