Some of you know about my obsession with doing impressions from my variety of Trump impressions on Substack. (I also do Elmo.) Others found out about this bizarre hobby through the Search Engine episode about my difficulties getting people to attend my parties (ie: difficulties getting people to like me) where I not only jumped into a Trump impression two minutes in, but had friends confirm that my unsolicited impressions may have harmed my party turnout. One of my friends volunteered a story about routine Iggy Azalea impressions and a disruptive Lana Del Rey impression that apparently drowned out the conversations of everyone else at the party. Were her stories true? I plead the fifth.
Of course, I learned long ago that my impressions are not a congenial way to begin a conversation, or even something that 98% of people want to hear at all. “Long ago,” however, does not equal “at an appropriate time in my life.” I don’t know when an appropriate time would have been, but probably at some point before I turned thirty. Ah, well, better late than never.
So this is the story of how I started doing them, and why I continued for so long despite ample evidence that I was annoying the pants off everyone.
Technically, the seed of impression obsession was planted much earlier than my twenties. My dad and I—who have always bonded primarily over humor—used to parody the songs of the band Creed when we were driving on long car rides, back when I was in grade school. And eventually, this tendency leaked out of the car rides with my dad and into my adult social life. And I have to place at least some of the blame on my wonderful husband (and chief enabler) Nick, who witnessed the whole thing and, instead of alerting me to the fact that I was freaking everyone out, shouted, “Encore!”
Nick has always been supportive of my creativity, whether it’s my writing, sewing or trolling Reddit. I consider it endearing if not downright adorable, but the problem is that it empowers my worst instincts, especially my evergreen desire to be the center of attention and receive nothing but praise from my adoring (and probably captive, if not bound and gagged) audience.
Nick and I had been together for several years before he realized I did a good Creed impression. We were in our early twenties at a house party in San Francisco, and someone at a party played “Higher” on their iPod speakers. I jokingly started singing along to Nick, he thought it was funny, and began corralling people to listen to the impression. Given that it was a spontaneous joke, people laughed (I know it’s possible they thought it was weird even then, but my memory of the moment was that people were not bothered). Nick and I, however, were under the impression (no pun intended) that this was my big break into the booming Creed Impression Industrial Complex, and things quickly spun out of control.
From there, Nick and I would go to parties, and he would predictably “ask” me to do a Creed impression “out of nowhere.” People were drunk and every time it seemed like it was totally spontaneous, so, at least from our vantage points, they seemed to enjoy it. (Again: unreliable narrators.) This escalated to the point where after I did the Creed impression, Nick would assume an sequel was requested and prompt me to do a series of other impressions, at which I was also pretty good: Sarah Palin and Kiera Knightley, the latter of which always involved a comical jutting outward of my chin and a posh, slightly upset affect.
“Give her any topic and she’ll do the impression!” Nick would say. People would almost always select “Russia from my house” for Sarah Palin, which I absolutely hated (I would have vastly preferred to do a less obvious routine—what absolute plebs!) so I revised this routine to include the jovial opening line of “Do not ask me to say ‘Russia from my house!’” as if I was doing these partygoers a massive favor and this was my only condition.
Nick and I were high on our own imagined fame, touring house parties where nobody knew us (usually we were invited by an invitee, which I think makes this a bit worse) absolutely killing it with these uncanny impressions, and then leaving suddenly. I still consider myself extremely lucky that I somehow found the only man on Earth who enjoys this type of behavior and just so happens to be my type, but the downside of this miraculous strike of luck is that there were zero checks or balances on my histrionic antics.
There’s something else you must know. While I enjoyed doing the impressions, and I’m obsessed with getting attention, I’m surprisingly not a very good actor. This is why I take great issue with being characterized as a “theater kid.” I am not a theater kid. At best, I am an improv kid. I actually did musical theater in high school, mostly because I was convinced it would be a great way to meet lots of hot straight guys. After this foolproof plan failed to work out, my theater “career” consisted of playing the occasional ensemble role. My only real theater accomplishment was during my senior year when I wrote and directing my own play. During rehearsals, I prided myself in being the “cool director” and letting the actors play improv games until I realized at the dress rehearsal that nobody actually knew their lines and had a massive meltdown where I yelled at all the actors for taking advantage of my groovy aunt status. (I later discovered through my younger brother that one of my cast members later wrote and performed a monologue about this harrowing experience.)
Despite my spotty history with acting, Nick told me I should consider “going on SNL,” figuring I could be the white female Jay Pharoah. My biggest concern about going on SNL wasn’t the fact that I wouldn’t be any good, or more realistically, that I wouldn’t even be able to get an audition--it was that I wasn’t sure I wanted to move to New York. I was afraid that performing every Saturday night would negatively impact my favorite time to go to Marina dive bars in bebe bodycon dresses and get trashed with Nick and our friends. I was also concerned that I wouldn’t enjoy the fame. What if people who didn’t know my name, but who wanted to refer to me, called me “That beaked up lower-mid broad on SNL with the giant chin?” (Little did I know, I’d eventually get micro-famous without ever showing my face or leaving my house, and people would still call me ugly all the time, because I’m a woman on the Internet.)
Around this time, Nick and I had a good friend named Joe who was twenty years our senior, and the liaison for almost all our last minute friend-of-a-friend party invitations. Joe was Nick’s old roommate (they’d roomed together while I was still in college). Nick lied to him about being twenty-eight when he was twenty-two to secure the room. (His Greek ability to grow a full beard if he hasn’t shaved in the past forty minutes certainly helped.) After developing a friendship, Joe discovered Nick’s driver’s license, and he confessed his real age. But by then, it didn’t really matter, and Joe wound up being one of our closest friends. Joe had a daughter my age named Nina—an adopted stepdaughter of whom he eventually gained full custody, long story. It was an odd, Disney original movie type premise that Nina and Joe would live together as adults. To keep things as normal as possible, they had a rule that we couldn’t hang out with both of them at the same time.
You might be wondering why we were so close with a man so much older. Problematic age gap friendship! To quote Nick’s mom, “Something is wrong with that man.” But I disagreed. Joe was not the creepy uncle type. He was just an extreme extrovert who had no age restrictions on who he would befriend. He didn’t care if you were twenty-five or fifty, rich or poor, an acroyoga performing hippie or a nerdy engineer. If you were fun to hang out with, he would be friends with you. This begs the question why he was friends with me, but I’m guessing it’s because I was part of a package deal with Nick. That said, Joe always made me feel welcome, and unless he was a very convincing liar, which I admit was possible, he appeared to enjoy the impressions.
One sunny Labor Day weekend, Joe invited us to a Labor Day house party in Tahoe, hosted by one of his friends. There would be a pool, he said, and lots of people. Or as Nick and I liked to see them, a fresh audience. Time to practice my vocals. It’s showtime.
I looked forward to the party from the moment I heard about it until the morning I hopped into the back of Joe’s car, like Nick and Joe’s annoying kid sister, ready to make my impact on a bunch of strangers. I knew this party would be a fabulous excuse to get lots of attention for being cool, funny and hilarious. Sure, some people might think I was self-centered, but if I got them to complain about me that would also be attention. I could complain that they were being mean to me because I was so amazing and they were just threatened! And surely, if I was on the receiving end of such blatant bitter jealousy, everyone else would think I was not only funny and wonderful, but a maligned victim of internalized misogyny (plus regular misogyny, if a man complained). I was also very excited to wear a bright yellow eyelet Victoria’s Secret push-up bikini, because despite all the beaches, San Francisco was too cold year-round for such attire to make an appearance. And finally—a pool party outside the city, perfect weather, new people…this was my dream. All eyes would be on me, and if I had my way, all ears too.
On the way to the party, we stopped at a Safeway for beer, and I stood outside because I hated the air conditioning. I was wearing booty shorts and a sweatshirt over my bikini, and perhaps as an omen of things to come, a man in his sixties stopped as he passed by me. I braced myself for him to hit on me, preparing to politely tell him I had a boyfriend, but he shook his head with disgust and said, “I would never let my daughter out of the house dressed like that.”
I chuckled to myself. What a world! What a wild thing to happen! This story would absolutely be a hit at the Tahoe party! I would just have to find a way to shoehorn it into conversation.
When we arrived at the party, I immediately whipped my sweatshirt off like an opening Chippendale’s act, ready to jump in the pool and be the most fun person at the party. But immediately after stepping onto the porch, I realized this wasn’t the usual Joe crowd of Burning Man hippies, MILFs who went on girls’ trips to Bali and divorced coke-addicted tech bros. There were a bunch of parents, and only a few people who seemed like they were remotely intoxicated. There was a pool but nobody was swimming. People were dressed like they were about to go to a Little League game. There were dogs everywhere.
There was one exception to the PTA vibe: a Brazilian woman in her forties with espresso mermaid hair, who kept lifting her sarong up and mooning everyone with her bikini bottoms still on. Nobody seemed to be responding to her. She seemed like the only person at the party who would be fun, so I went over and introduced myself. She promptly mooned me. We took a shot together, laughed for a while, and then I began meandering around the party looking for people to alienate. (Big mistake here: I should have stuck with Senhora Lua—she was my kinda lady!)
Nick and Joe were off playing foosball inside the house and I couldn’t convince either of them to keep me company. Nobody else wanted to talk to me. After a while, I started to see double because of all the Mike’s Hard Lemonade. By the end of the party, I had cornered a woman, held her dog (perhaps against the will of both her and the dog—it’s hazy now) forced her to take a photo of me holding said dog, and then held the dog hostage while making the woman listen to a listless Lana Del Rey impression (while I’m not proud of this interaction, I am extremely proud that I made it through the entirety of Summertime Sadness, including the bridge.)
We drove home from the party, and I had a vague sense that I had done something wrong, but I dismissed it. After all, I’d probably never see those people again, and at least I got a great bikini photo with the dog. That would do numbers on Facebook among my mom’s seven friends from her photography workshop.
I had started to wonder if perhaps these impressions were annoying, but I kept telling myself that anyone who didn’t like them was either jealous or boring. But Nick and I hit our low point shortly after the Tahoe party when we went to a friend’s birthday party. This particular friend, Charles, was a work friend of Nick’s. He was vehemently anti-marijuana and his girlfriend was a Republican. I’m not talking about a fun wacky 2026 Republican who showers with beef tallow and worships Norse gods or whatever, I’m talking about a 2012 Republican who wears Vineyard Vines.
Despite the fact that this gathering was definitely not the right crowd for any kind of tomfoolery, Nick and I didn’t care. Nick asked Charles if he could put a David Guetta music video on the TV. Charles turned off the iPod speakers and gave Nick the remote. Bad idea—anyone who knew us probably viewed this similarly to a scene in a horror movie where the dumb babysitter walks into the basement. Nick promptly went to YouTube and picked out a karaoke track for Creed’s Higher. I feigned embarrassment and said “Oh, *here? *No, it’s someone else’s birthday! I can’t!”
Charles shrugged. “It’s fine!” he said.
(I realize it’s entirely possible that some people were relieved that the David Guetta music video was not going to happen, even if the alternative was a Creed impression.)
With that, I busted into an impeccable Creed impression, probably paired with unrelated gyrations, while everyone at the party stood and watched in silence. I couldn’t tell if the silence was true shock and awe because it was such a great impression, or horror that this was happening, instead of a bunch of conversations about Martha’s Vineyard or whatever these types of people talk about. Just as the song was wrapping up, Nick announced: “She also does Sarah Palin! Someone, give her a topic!”
I knew this had gone too far. It wasn’t often that I picked up on people’s discomfort in the moment instead of wondering the next day if I had bothered anyone. But then, I realized there were places specifically meant for this type of behavior: karaoke bars! There, I could be as attention-seeking as I wanted, and it would be totally appropriate because I would be on stage in front of people who voluntarily showed up to listen to strangers sing.
There was a karaoke bar within walking distance of our apartment called Silver Cloud. Although Silver Cloud was known for karaoke, I vaguely recall it being sort of a restaurant, and selling the type of food you might expect to get at a midwestern diner, along with the usual dive-bar-style drinks, like vodka seltzer that tastes vaguely of Pepsi residue. It was also extremely crowded on weekends, which meant a captive audience for my various musical impressions, but also, as I soon discovered, extremely high demand to sing.
The first time we went, I didn’t even get to sing because the line was too long. It took me a few visits before I realized that even with a long line, they randomized who went onstage, so there was a chance that you could put your name on the list and be chosen seconds later. I gave this a try. Miraculously, I was one of the lucky people who got chosen to sing right after signing up. I did my Creed impression and everyone clapped once they realized I wasn’t going to sing in my regular girl voice and was dedicated to the bit. Finally, I could do the impression and it was 100% socia…
