A Little Bit Wicked (2 page)

S
pread your legs,” the beautiful girl says softly, and I do.

She waves the metal-detection baton between my knees and up and down over my torso while another TSA agent rifles through my bag.

Am I the only one who feels vaguely invaded every time this happens? My heart sinks when I hear that call for “female assist.” It seems to happen every time I fly, and I fly a lot. I don’t feel that I’m entitled to special treatment, but is there really some valid concern that Broadway performers are plotting to take over the world? People, we don’t get up that early. I promise. You have nothing to fear from us aside from the occasional eruption of “He’s Just My Bill” while we stand in line at Starbucks.

“I can’t believe how tiny you are in person,” the TSA agent exclaims. “I mean, you’re like
small.
”

“Yup. I’ve heard that.” I raise my arms to crucifixion posture.

“You don’t look that little on TV. I saw you on the Oscars last month.” She smiles, and I smile back at her. “That must be so awesome. The red carpet and all those movie stars and the parties—oh, my gosh. You were at a party with George Clooney, weren’t you? I bet you went to like a million parties and like partied with movie stars until dawn.”

In truth, I went straight home because I was in the middle of shooting a movie,
Four Christmases,
and I had to be on the set at five forty-five the next morning looking like someone who sleeps occasionally. But partying till dawn with a million movie stars—it sounds so lovely, I don’t want to ruin it for her.

“Wouldn’t be Oscar night without the parties,” I say gamely.

“I like you on
Pushing Daisies,
” gains the young man going through my underwear. “And I saw you in that, um…that magazine. You know.”

“Yes.” I can tell by the color in his cheeks that he’s talking about my itsy-bitsy bikini layout in an issue of
FHM
that is probably still tucked between the mattress and box spring of many a corn-fed all-American boy.

“I got the calendar. It’s
awesome,
” he says earnestly.

“Well, thank you so much. You’re so sweet.” I shine him a Miss February smile because I see him eyeing my fancy-schmancy hair gel. “That’s as close as I could get to travel size. It’s only half an ounce over. Do you suppose…just this once…”

He takes my hair gel, which cost $28, which is worth it if you have flea-fine hair like mine. He takes my tweezers, and I
need
my tweezers. Why, why,
why
do they always commandeer my dang tweezers?

Let me just say right now and for the record that I, Kristi Dawn Chenoweth, do solemnly swear that I will never hack through a Kevlar door and stab a pilot in the neck with my tweezers. I will never seek, nor have I ever sought, to overthrow the government of the United
States of America by force of tweezer. Anyone who knew me back in the eighties can tell you, I am far more dangerous
without
my tweezers. Jimmy Kimmel once whipped out a photo of me from my pageant days, and I thought those eyebrows were going to leap right off the matte finish like a couple of centipedes. I had a whole lotta Brooke Shields going on, except Brooke somehow manages to carry it off, all of which is to say
I need my dang tweezers
.

“Miss Chenoweth, could I please get a picture with you?” asks the female assist sister. “My little girls listen to the
Wicked
sound track like ten times a day. They’ll go crazy when they hear I actually got to wand down Glinda the Good Witch.” She laughs. I laugh. We all laugh. Wand? Witch? Get it? I glance nervously at my watch.

“It’ll only take a second, I swear,” she swears. She whips out her cell phone and shows me photos. They are adorable. Two little peanut-butter-and-jelly princesses.

“Sure. No problem.”

I pose with her, and it only takes a second. And a few seconds more to pose with the young man who loves me on
Pushing Daisies,
and a few more for the passengers behind me in line, who aren’t exactly sure who I am but assume, because the other security people are now asking for my autograph, that I’m famous.

“Y’all are so sweet,” I keep saying. “I really need to get to my gate, though.”

“Ma’am, you have to be at the gate thirty minutes early for first class,” the gate agent tells me when I get there. “We gave your seat away.”

“But…but it was paid for. My father checked me in online. And I was here but—”

“There should be a seat in coach.” She studies her computer monitor with a look of deep disapproval. “Just get on and take whatever seat is available.”

“Oh…okay.” I weigh the time constraint against the possibility
that arguing will get me anywhere. Heavy sigh. “Then you’ll refund the difference for the first-class seat?”

“There’s no refund,” she says curtly. “It’s up to you to get here on time.”

She shoots a no-nonsense glance toward the Jetway, and I dutifully drag my bag on board, passing through the first-class cabin with my eyes forward. It crosses my mind briefly that I could pipe up and ask the dapper businessmen which of them is sitting in the seat I paid for, but I don’t want to come off all
Don’t you know who I think I am?
so I go to a seat facing the wall just on the other side of the magic curtain.

“You need to take your seat, miss,” says the frazzled flight attendant.

“Could you help me with this bag, please?” I indicate the overhead storage miles above my head.

“There’s no room in the overheads. You should have been here earlier.”

“Yes, we’ve established that. I made a mistake. I apologize. But if you could—”

“If that doesn’t fit under the seat, it’ll have to be checked.”

“No. Really. I can’t check it. There’s medication in it, and somehow my checked bags never end up landing the same place I do.”

“Well, here’s a tip. Don’t put medication in your checked bags.”

“I didn’t.”

“You’ll have to check it.”

“I’m not checking it.”

“There’s no room.”

“I’ll find room.”

Her lips go thin as a snapping turtle’s. My grip tightens on the handle of my Louis Vuitton trolley bag. We stand there giving each other the bitch-eye.

“Ms. Noodle?” A voice from the seat behind me blossoms like a
tiny crocus and rises to a shriek. The little girl is spazzing with joy, refusing to be hushed by her embarrassed mother.
“Ms. Noodle! Ms. Noodle! From ‘Elmo’!”

“Hey there, cutie.” I smile at her without giving up one degree of grip on my bag.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” says the mom. “Are you the
Sesame Street
girl?”

The flight attendant looks at me suspiciously, wondering if I’m someone, and quickly letting me know I’m not. “Miss. Please check the bag and take your seat.”

“Ms. Noodle! Ms. Noodle!”

“Could she maybe get your autograph?” asks the mom. “When you get settled?”

“Miss? You need. To take. Your seat. Please.”

“Ms. Chenoweth?” There’s a hand on my elbow. The flight attendant from first class has joined the fray. “I’ll find room for your bag up front.”

I nod. At least Louis will travel in style. “I appreciate that. Thank you.”

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” she says kindly.

Turtle Lips turns on her heel and stalks down the aisle. My bag disappears into the Emerald City up front. Making Miss Noodle faces for the little girl behind me, I sign my name in a Hello Kitty notebook, then sink into my seat, swallowing tears that burn uncomfortably close to the surface. It’s no one’s fault. The TSA agents, the gate dominatrix, the frazzled flight attendant—they’re undoubtedly nice people who would have been gentler had they known I was traveling to a funeral.
A death in the family
. That’s one of those conversational trump cards that makes everyone around the table lower their eyes, but I’m not one to play those cards. Not how I was raised.

My BlackBerry vibrates in my pocket. A message from Aaron. He’s being very sweet. Shortly after the Oscars, he e-mailed me a whole lot
of
words,
and I ended up going to Mexico with him. Cabo is a place we go to find each other. Long story short, Chenorkin is on again.

“That needs to be off,” Turtle Lips snaps on her way past.

“Tell me about it.”

I power down the BlackBerry and close my eyes. I hate flying. My travel karma sucks. Even when everyone is nice—and people usually are—my flights get mysteriously delayed, my bags inexplicably turn up in Toledo instead of Toronto, my heel breaks as I dash down the concourse. It’s always something, and I’m only half joking when I say this might be genetic.

I don’t know much about my biological mother. Only that she was twenty-one when I was born, a flight attendant who got pregnant by a pilot who had a wife and children. That’s the story anyway, and while I’m a curious person by nature, I feel a surprising lack of curiosity about whether it’s true.

My real mom is Junie Smith Chenoweth. Her name is a bright wink to her birthday, the first of June, and she is the best mom in the world. (I’m sorry if you were under the mistaken impression that your mom is the best mom in the world or that there might be moms in Portugal or Wisconsin who come close. That’s not the case.) My mom is this wonderful dichotomy: her breezy, athletic style blends a jeans-and-sneakers spirit with skirt-and-pumps grace. She’s one of six tall sisters, each of whom is uniquely fabulous. When I was little, Mom’s dark, curly hair was sassed up with Frost & Tip and pulled back sometimes in a casually twisted headscarf like Jackie O. She has gorgeous blue eyes and bone structure that works beautifully with her well-chosen glasses. Not everyone’s face works with glasses. Mom pulls it off.

Best of all, there’s not a hint of stage mama about her. She knew nothing about showbiz and cared even less. The home she made for us was all about happiness, the value of a hearty breakfast, the importance of doing what’s right. Instead of pushing me to perform, she taught me to pray, and that made her the perfect mother for me.

Dad also wears glasses. (Come to think of it, I’m the only one in the family who doesn’t.) His thick brown hair has gently grayed over the years, but when I look at his face now, I see the same quiet strength I saw when I when I was barely big enough to climb up into his lap. I’ve always seen him as the gatekeeper. One of those Rock of Gibraltar men who stands on faith and lives by principle. He’s balanced and calm, a suit man until about five minutes after he gets home from work; then it’s Bermuda shorts and shirts, which Mom has to help him match because he’s color-blind. My earliest memories are of my father chasing me around the coffee table, teasing, “I’m gonna get you! I’m gonna get you!” but always letting me get away so I could feel like I won. (In many ways, we’re still playing that game.) We don’t always agree, but he’s the first one I turn to for advice about business and life.

Some people say we pick our parents, but God had to play some jazz to get me to the family where I was supposed to be. If I ever need evidence of the Lord’s hand on me, proof of His plan for my little strand in His tightly woven tapestry, all I have to do is look across the dining room table at Junie and Jerry Chenoweth.

No one ever made a secret of the fact that I was a bonus baby who drifted quite miraculously into the family when I was five days old. Mom was only twenty-four and facing a heartbreaking hysterectomy three years after the birth of my brother, Mark. She and Dad desperately wanted another child. They were prepared to wade through the paperwork and spend years on the adoption waiting lists, but they didn’t have to.

Mom confided in the ob-gyn who was going to do her surgery that more than anything, she wanted a little girl. That’s understandable, right? Join the national average, balance out the Christmas card,
tea for two and two for tea,
and all that. But I think it was more than this
for Mom. She and I have always had a unique connection, and I wonder if, somehow, some part of her spirit knew that I was out there, that I belonged to her, and she needed to find me.

Cue the Mile High Club.

When my flight-attendant birth mama turned up pregnant by a married man, her wealthy family shipped her off to Oklahoma (or so I’m told), and arrangements were made for the expected baby to be placed with a nice Catholic family who were next in line on the long list. But just before I was born, the adopting mother-to-be turned up pregnant herself and offered to allow another family to have this baby girl. She told the ob-gyn, and he immediately thought of my mother. It bugs me when people assume that this woman passed me along because she figured having her own baby was better. I’m certain that this was not only an incredibly selfless thing to do, but also a huge act of faith; a lot can happen in the course of a pregnancy, especially for a woman who’s struggled through years of infertility. Perhaps some part of her spirit knew that I didn’t belong to her. It also bugs me when I hear about “Angelina’s adopted son” or “Rosie’s adopted children”—as if that word will always separate them instead of binding them together. Angelina’s son and Rosie’s kids and I should get a regular apostrophe-plus-
s
like everybody else. I’m “Junie’s girl,” plain and simple, whatever serendipity and string-pulling went into the magic bubble ride that took me from forbidden love to the Chenoweth home in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

“I felt like I had you,” my mom always told me. “I had the surgery, and we came home from the hospital together. It felt just like that newborn recovery period when I had Mark.”

I can’t imagine what my father was going through in the meantime. Sorting through logistics and legalities. Waiting on pins and needles. Mom says they could hardly breathe during the one-year waiting period in which the biological mother could have changed her mind. But the moment of truth came and went, and I was their baby. Signed, sealed, and delivered. Not necessarily in that order.

I am deeply grateful to the three women who brought me into my world: one loving enough to reach out for me, two loving enough to let me go. However, since the question always gets asked, no, I have no interest in contacting or being contacted by my biological mother. I’ve never felt the slightest frisson of something missing in my life, and the whole medical-records thing doesn’t concern me much. I’m vigilant about my health. (In my profession, you’re either vigilant about your health or you’re Janis Joplin.) I do vaguely wonder if my biological mother suffers from Ménière’s disease like I do.