Yes, My Accent Is Real (18 page)

Women love it when men say words like
adorable
, ideally in an adorable accent. Here is a list of word substitutes that women find charming.

If you like something—call it adorable.

If you think someone is pretty—tell her she's gorgeous.

If you want to talk about your bowels—always use the word
poop.

Don't say you like sex—say you like making love.

Use these words early and often—
moral ineptitude
,
primarily
,
morality
, and
lovely.

But not too honest. Don't tell her too much. On the first date, you don't have to tell her about the time you went skinny-dipping with your mom. But do tell her that you like skinny-dipping in general.

This always works. Always. Whenever the date is going poorly just start asking questions. For example, “How do you feel about kissing on a first date?”

Because liberals and conservatives have traditionally never enjoyed having sex with each other.

I never understood why men couldn't just go up to a girl, ask her name, ask if she was having a good time, where she was from, and if she would like a drink. Instead, they opt for something like this: Walk close enough to a group of girls, order a round of shots, and say, “Yo, son, let's get a round of lemon drops and drop it like it's hot; where the honeys tonight, y'all?”

I'll tell you where the honeys are tonight, my friend: they are hanging out with guys who don't sound like you.

That is not cool. Ever.

It's just the way that I was raised. I once went on a date with a woman who was nine years older than me, and we went to a French creperie. The bill was $28.06. She seemed really into women's
rights and I was trying to be all progressive-like, so we split the bill exactly down the middle and each paid $14.03. Not impressive. If you are going to split the bill on a date, at least round it to the nearest integer.

I know every single advice column in the world says “Wait two days,” but if you wait two days, to me, that means that I'm not important to you. So why wait?

Don't be afraid to bring flowers because of how you're going to be perceived. I've never met a woman who didn't appreciate flowers. In fact, I'm a man and if you brought me a bouquet, I would be impressed.

You know those guys who come by your table and try to sell you roses? Yeah, it's a scam. One night on a date, while maybe a little drunk, I paid a hundred dollars to buy the entire bouquet. Why?

1. I felt bad for the guy working so late on a Saturday night.

2. I thought if I bought the entire bouquet he could stop work for the night and go home to his family.

3. I really wanted to impress my date.

4. Maybe I was a
lot
drunk.

Not ten minutes later,
the same guy came back with an entirely new bouquet!
The ass-clown's car was parked just down the street. He was
driving an Audi. Three Series. The Audi was full of flowers.

He bought that car on the tears of all the men he had duped into buying those damn roses. Me included.

Don't smack your lips when you eat. And girls, when we open the door for you, don't say, “Why are you doing that, do you think I'm too weak—because I'm a
woman
—to open the door myself?” We're just trying to be polite.

If all else fails, call a woman “dude,” repeatedly. It will confuse her, it'll throw her equilibrium off balance, her mind will be blown, and she will sleep with you.

Holi
(
HO-lee
):
n.
Indian holiday known as the Festival of Colors or the Festival of Love.

HOLI CELEBRATES . . . WELL, ACTUALLY, I
don't really know what it
celebrates, maybe something about good and evil, but it's my favorite Indian festival because basically it is when people get together and drink bhang, which is hash in liquid form, and get high as kites. Then we smear each other with dry colored powder and shoot each other in the face with water cannons.

India is always a very colorful country, but Holi is India on steroids. It's an insanely raucous occasion in every city, on every block, a party with frequent, startling, wet explosions of red and yellow and green. You can't leave your home without getting soaked from head to toe with color.

We fought Holi wars (ha) with our neighbors, and I was always a big wussy. One year I tried to sneak up on the neighborhood bully with some guerrilla warfare tactics, lying low on the ground behind him, and when he turned around I squirted him in the face. . . . His eyes grew wide as he revealed a huge water balloon he had been saving to hit me with. He pelted that damn balloon at me,
hitting me right on the nose and blasting green all over my face. I ran all the way home screaming and crying.

“Look at what he did to my face!” I sobbed to my mother, which is hilarious because
everyone's
face was smeared with color.

“What a crybaby,” she said laughing.

She was right.

Holi
(
HO-lee
):
n.
1. Indian holiday known as the Festival of Colors or the Festival of Love. 2. Unofficially, the eve of India's national day of laundry.

WHEN YOU FINISH COLLEGE AND
you're crazy enough to want to
be an actor, you basically have four options:

1. Move to New York and start working.

2. Move to Los Angeles and start working.

3. Stay in your current city and start working.

4. Go to graduate theater school.

I would have chosen options 1, 2, and 3 in a heartbeat, but truthfully, I just didn't feel like I had all the skills it would take to be a professional actor. So I chose option 4. I needed to get better. In the ACTF nationals I had won a couple of awards and caught the interest of a pretty good agent and I felt that I could do a couple of things well. I believed I had a decent command over my comedic timing, but found it hard to connect sometimes with scenes that required me to dig deep and access my emotions. I wanted to expand my range as an actor. I was worried I would become a one-trick pony. I needed to add more tools to my bag.

So when I was a senior I flew to Chicago, where at the downtown
Hilton hotel I would spend an entire weekend of ball-busting auditions for grad school. By analogy, these are roughly equivalent to an NFL draft combine, where the nation's top recruits throw footballs and run routes and wind sprints for NFL scouts, and if you flub your workout you won't get drafted. Except in this one you have
three minutes
to perform.

You perform for three minutes onstage in front of a crowd of forty-six people. Every person in that crowd is the head of a graduate theater department. And in those three minutes, actually, you perform a ninety-second comedic monologue and a ninety-second dramatic monologue. That's it. If you perform for three minutes and one second, you're disqualified and you can kiss grad school good-bye. You so much as blink and it's over.

For my comedic piece I played Moth from
Love's Labour's Lost
, and for my dramatic piece I stuck with what had served me well at ACTF—
Tangled Up in Blue
. It seemed obvious to play to my strengths. I'm always baffled when actors choose to audition with a monologue where they play a rapist, or a child molester, or a serial killer. Or pick a monologue where they spend the entire time screaming at the audience. Why wouldn't they pick something that makes them likable? After all, these theater schools are investing in you for three years, so you don't really want to scare them away.

Casey, the brightest star of our theater program, did her auditions a little before me.

“I sucked, I sucked, I sucked,” she said when she came back to the hotel room.

“I'm sure you didn't suck,” I said.

She handed me an envelope.
The
envelope. This envelope gives you the entire list of schools that liked your monologues and want to
interview you. There are forty-six schools total. Casey was a talented actress, so I guessed that she would be selected by at least seven schools, maybe eight or nine. (Personally, I would have been happy with five.)

Casey showed me the envelope and I saw . . . one. Only one school wanted to interview her.
Are you kidding me?
She was such a wonderful actress. I had looked up to her throughout college.

“Kunal, you're up,” someone told me.

I made my way to the stage, trying to ignore the fact that this was easily the most important three minutes of my life. I remembered what my mother had told me as a child:
Acknowledge the crowd, Kunal.
I knew that the second I said a word they would start the clock and my three minutes would begin, so instead, before I started speaking, I took a long, deep breath, and I smiled a big smile at the audience. This was my way of letting them know that I was happy to be there. That I appreciated the moment.

After my audition, I sat outside nervously awaiting the envelope. It had gone well, I thought. A few minutes went by. I swear I could hear the tick-tock of my wristwatch. Then I heard my name and an old professorial-looking lady handed me a white, legal-size envelope with my name on it. I stared at it, terrified to open it, feeling that sucker punch of anxiety that every high school student experiences when they open the mailbox to find a letter of acceptance (or rejection) from college. I went into the bathroom of the Hilton to open it alone.
^I

I opened the envelope.

Twelve schools wanted to interview me.

Yes!

Shit.

Yes!

Shit.

The good news was that twelve schools is a lot of schools; the bad news was that it was
so many
interviews—all back-to-back-to-back—so as a matter of pure logistics, it would be difficult to attend all the interviews at the hotel without being late. And I'm never late. So with a pen and paper, I drew up a floor plan of the hotel and figured out how I could use the emergency stairwells to avoid the crowds at elevators and optimize all the routes. (Raj would have been proud.)

I made every interview on time. I was most impressed with Temple University, a school that only accepted eight students once every three years.

If
I was accepted, it would mean that I would live in Philadelphia, which is close to New York and might give me a shot at Broadway.
If
I was accepted, it would mean a full-ride scholarship.
If
I was accepted, it would give me another guaranteed three years in America.

I was accepted.

And then I wasn't.

In the same week I received two very different phone calls. The first began, “Kunal, congratulations, Temple University would like to extend an offer of admission.”

Then the second call came.

“Kunal, there's a problem.”

“Okay.”

“The
university is not allowed to give a scholarship to anyone with a GPA below a 3.3.”

“But my GPA
is
3.3,” I said.

“Your GPA is 3.26.”

I had done enough math to know that 3.3 – 3.26 = .04, which is essentially a rounding error, a number so small, so arbitrary, that it's the difference of
one class
being a B instead of a B-plus. I pleaded with Temple's admissions department—and after two painstaking weeks of groveling they finally said, “If you write a personal letter to the dean of the university, maybe they will take that into consideration.”

So I wrote an over-the-top emotional appeal, saying that the reason I didn't have a higher GPA was that I was also a business student, juggling two course loads, taking marketing classes all day and then theater at night. This was the truth. None of the other theater students was doing that. Besides, what did my C in Portfolio Risk Analysis have to do with an ability to play Moth? I had an A in all my
acting
classes, and I was applying to
acting
school. I explained all of this in the letter, and laced it with about a thousand “pretty pleases.”

The letter did the trick, or maybe it was the “pretty pleases”; either way, they waived the GPA requirement and accepted me. (Takeaway: It's not over even when they say it's over. Always write the letter. Always appeal to a human to render a final judgment. We
are
human, after all.)