Her Introduction to Fame
She hated her voice. She hated the sound she made when she laughed, the croaking of her vocal chords that sometimes came out as a snort. Her accent was too thick even for the south and the timbre of the words just entirely too masculine. She was too loud, she always had to concentrate on the volume of her voice so that she wouldn’t talk over people and fade them out. She equated the sounds that came out her mouth with that of a diesel truck engine being turned over with an empty tank or a frog that had a cold. She hated her voice.
But that didn’t stop her from doing her job. Though her choice of career had been an odd one at most, she did it remarkably well and was successful to say the least. She wasn’t exactly aware of the fame aspect, she thought she was a little weird for anyone to consider a celebrity. But when she got the call from MTV asking her to host their movie awards, she figured it was safe to assume that she had made it. After that she lined up her own Comedy Central Special, and was asked to the Letterman Show, a spot on Rodney and even a commercial and advertising campaign for Pizza Hut. But that didn’t make her hate her voice any less.
It was the blemish that got her the job, and as a comedian she learned to make fun of her shortcomings and use it to her advantage. But it still ate away at her. She could deal with the fact that she had no father, that her sisters were really her half sisters, that she lived in a trailer with her mother and said sisters, that she was considered a redneck, all of that was bearable. It was her voice that wasn’t.
The people at MTV had been more than overjoyed to get her as the host of the awards show and were wanting her in Miami as soon as possible to start shooting the commercials for the event. She finished up the commercial for Pizza Hut, there were four in total, earning her a nice enough paycheck to move her mother and sisters into a nice house before she took off for the hot and humid streets of Miami where the event would take place in two months.
For the entirety of the two months she would be staying in Miami, filming the commercials for the event, talking to producers and putting on shows at the theater next door to the hotel she was staying at. She was doing three shows every other week, not including the weekends, which included a show on Saturday.
Everything was happening rather fast. She didn’t know how it had happened. One day she had been working as a waitress at a bar, doing her usual set on the small stage, and the next she was asked to perform at a comedy battle and she won. In a whirlwind she’d gone from small town girl with the funny voice to the most popular comic in the state. It was just happening way too fast.
Miami was really different from her small and confining hometown of Mud Hollow Alabama. It was sunnier, hotter, more humid than she thought she could bare. She didn’t fit in with the people, she wasn’t soft and blond and petite and pretty. No, she was tall, buxom, brunette, full, shapely and strong to the point of freakish. She was not dainty, or sweet. Sour, maybe salty covered it all, but she was still not the typical.
The first couple weeks were spent by getting adjusted. Signing contracts, learning the scripts, the layouts, meeting the directors, the other actors and comedians and celebrities she would be doing the commercials with. It was hard to take it all in and she was quite happy to return to her hotel room at the end of the day and hide.
Often she would get out late from a meeting, a dinner, a filming, and if it wasn’t dark already, she’d draw the curtains and the blinds, turn out all the lights and sink into the overstuffed couch with something cold to drink and a rerun of The Golden Girls or some other outdated sitcom. More than once she’d fallen asleep on the couch and would go and take cold showers in the middle of the night for no other reason than she felt the humidity getting to her. She was jolted back into reality when one night she saw herself on the television with one of the commercials she’d done for Pizza Hut. A moment later half her family had called to say they’d seen her on TV.
She missed her family. She really did. They really weren’t that far away, and she could go see them if she didn’t have so many rehearsals and filmings on the days when she didn’t have shows. She could always fly them out to see her, she had the money, but they were busy too. The girls had school and her mother had work, as did the rest of the family. She wasn’t opposed to supporting her mother, even moving them out of Alabama, but they all called it home and didn’t want to leave the large amount of family they had there.
All in all, she was just lonely. She didn’t have many people to talk to, she didn’t know anyone that she was working with well enough to even just get a drink at the bar in the hotel. Some nights when she felt up to it she would sit in the bar with a bottle of Coors and watch the football game highlights or some other sporting event they left on at that time of night. She was often too late to hear the singers that sometimes sang on the tiny stage, but once in a while she caught a guy playing the piano.
He often came late at night, nearing twelve or even later, just to play the piano. He had no fellow listeners, he never sang, just played. She never watched, never knew what he looked like. She only knew it was the same guy each time because he always started out playing the same slow song. She couldn’t place it, but she should know what it was, her mom was a novice with the piano and played all the time when they were kids. She’d once tried to get her to play, but she was never any good at it, music didn’t come easy to her. Being funny did, so that’s what she did. She was funny.
Her newfound fame found her in the oddest of places. When she was picking up Chapstick at the drugstore a young man asked for her autograph. Another talked her up in the bar of the hotel for an hour, while a older woman asked for a signed picture for her husband. She was honored when she met Jeff Foxworthy and he invited her to do an episode of the Blue Collar Comedy Show with him and his friends. Her shows brought down the house on a nightly basis and after her first show the rest were sold out for the remainder of her stay in Florida.
So why did she feel constantly alone? Maybe that was because she was alone. She didn’t really have any high-end friends in Miami, or even low-end friends. She didn’t know anyone and going out was never really an option because she never felt like she fit in. She didn’t really dance, she didn’t really party, she made jokes, and talked, but it was much different being up on a stage instead of beside a person. The one on one thing kind of made her nervous.
Author's Chapter Notes:
It starts out slow, and without much BSB mention, but give it a chance. PS, Kristin is not favored in this story, and no offense is meant to the real Kristin, it is just a story.
