I’ve tried my damndest to move away from Norman, Oklahoma, but every time I nearly stray to chase something shiny, this OU town pulls me back in, haunting me by whispering in my ear at night, things like, “Hey, Leah, it’s Norman here.  Come back and drink in me.”  Or like, “If you come back, you’ll stay young forever.”  Or, “If you build it, he will come.”  (Actually, scratch that last one – I may be confusing Norman with a voice in Kevin Costner’s head.)

Most people go to college, get their degrees, and move on to “the real world,” that special place we all hear about when we’re younger.  They look at Norman and the University of Oklahoma as a minor blip in their past before they became boring and sucky adults that hate fun, like it’s a bus stop in the tedious bus ride that is life.   Then there are people like me who clearly envy those boring people (and who might show that envy by lashing out and calling them “boring” and “sucky”).  I went to OU for four years, graduated, tried to move to Boston, and then moved back to Norman.  I went to OU for two more years, planned to move to New York, then got a full time job at OU’s Fine Arts College instead.  Then, I went to OU for two more years, received my second Master’s degree this past May, and told everyone I knew that by the end of August, I’d be on my way to Boston.  But as you might have guessed, I’m not.  I’m still here in Norman.  I’m stuck here, but as someone who has a potty mouth once said, “There are shittier places to be stuck, Motherfucker.”

Perhaps for those of you reading this, it seems odd to find an article about Norman written by someone suffocating in its boundaries.  Don’t get me wrong; I love Norman.  I don’t want to sound ungrateful for the people I’ve met or the things I’ve learned here.  But it’s precisely my love for this town that makes me so desperate to leave it, and judging by the count at the bottom of the page, I have roughly 2000 more words to try and make you see exactly what I mean by that.

***
On his album Werewolves and Lollipops, comedian Patton Oswalt spends some time discussing Austin, TX, Madison, WI, and Portland, OR, calling each of these places a “magical fairy bubble of sanity in the middle of…shit.”  He advises the people of Austin in the audience to “move away from here when you’re really young, or stay here for life.”  Though Norman is smaller scale than the places Oswalt mentions, I feel like what he says applies here, too.  Norman is, indeed, like living in a giant bubble, encased in a protective wrap from the rest of Oklahoma.  I don’t mean to imply that Norman is better than any other Oklahoma town, but I do believe that it is more culturally diverse, more laidback, and more optimistic than the downtrodden rural areas, the staunchly conservative Oklahoma City, and the vortex of small town life that makes people want to get pregnant just so they have something to goddamn do.

The problem with living in a bubble (other than having to breathe in recycled air all the time) is that when you venture past its outer layer, the world outside beats you down with bitterness and harsh reality.  Recently, someone told me that I didn’t live in the real world, and I got all huffy and defensive about it.  But after a few weeks of anger turned doubt turned, “Oh, shit, I overreacted,” I realized that maybe I don’t live in the real world at all.  I mean, sure, shitty things have happened before in my life, but I’m starting to think that to live in the real world means to have to face those shitty things without my cushion of optimism or my security blanket of the bubble around me.  I can’t speak for anybody else, but for me, Norman has been my sanctuary for the past ten years, an escape from ever having to find out whether or not I will let the bitterness get to me.

To live in a college town means to live in a place that exists in the moment just before that sinking mundane adulthood kicks in, where you can feel the buzz of youthful optimism in the air, where the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of college students roam to tell you stories of their drinking days.  And when I think of Norman as that college town, I wonder how so many people can settle down here.  Why are so many people so happy to live their lives in this college town?  Why, up until now, have I been so deliriously happy here?

I can’t give a simple answer.  When I think of the time I’ve spent here, I think of stories that could only take place here, different scenes with a rotating cast of characters and one constant: me.

***

Here is a Norman story:

My best friend Rockey used to live on Symmes Street, barely a block away from my house on Jenkins.  One lazy Sunday, a bunch of us were hanging out at “The Symmes House,” as we called it, smoking pot and sitting on the large front porch.  I wasn’t listening to the conversation, just staring, half-baked, out at the road, probably stressing about some paper I should’ve started writing, when I saw two girls dressed as fairies dancing down the sidewalk and spinning hula hoops on their arms.

That in itself was not bizarre enough for me to even mention it to my friends.  A few minutes later, however, I watched a skinny boy on stilts hobble by on that same sidewalk in the opposite direction.  Then a juggler came by.  About the time the fifth freak made his way by the house, it occurred to me that this was getting a little strange, so I turned to my friends and said, “Am I really fucked up, or do weird freaks keep coming down the street?”

Before the last syllable dropped from my lips, a guy wearing clown makeup and riding on a unicycle scooted his way by us, and my friends erupted in laughter.

I pointed at him.  “So you guys can see him, too, right?”

About a week later, I ran into one of Norman’s local characters at a thrift store, and he told me that a bunch of Normanites had banded together to start their own circus.  Despite my polite reaction to this information, I was quite skeptical.  I had a lot of questions that I didn’t feel comfortable enough to ask, like, for instance, can you just up and start a circus?  And until you get an elephant or a trained bear, isn’t it really just a freak show?  The next time I went up to Othello’s to perform at the open mic on comedy night, I spent a full ten minutes making fun of Norman hippies and “circus folk.”

Cut to a month later: me and a bunch of my comic friends were heading over to the alley in front of Norman’s skanky strip club, Sugers, in order film a sketch comedy short.  What we didn’t know was that we were filming on the same day, in the same location, as a Norman arts fair.  So on that pleasant Saturday afternoon, my friend Derek Smith and I were both walking around in homemade superhero costumes.  I had on tights, a mask that covered the top half of my face, pleather gloves, a cape, and a giant “O” duct-taped to my chest.  Derek looked ridiculous.

In the middle of filming, the members of the newly congregated Norman circus showed up at the arts festival, spotted Derek and I wearing our garb in the alley, and headed right toward us.  All I could do was sit and shake my head while a parade of fairies, clowns, and 19-year-old girls in gypsy costumes danced their way between us, winking at us and praising us for our costumes.  They think I’m a freak like them, I thought.  But then I looked over at Derek through my hastily-cut eyeholes, took in his glittery Mardi Gras mask and his child’s cape, and I realized that I was indeed, a freak like one of them.  And just like that, Norman had taught me a lesson about judging people, even when they’re really asking for it.

***

In the fall of 2000, I came here as an OU student, but since then (I’d guess somewhere around 2005) I crossed over from the category of “student,” and into the category of “townie.”  When you’re a townie, you know never to drive down Lindsey Street, you look forward to summer and winter break to ease up Norman’s traffic, and you see the students who come in as alien visitors invading your space craft.  (There’s some nerdery for you, nerds.)  When you’re a townie, you spend OU football game days parking cars in your lawn for ten dollars, downing beers in full view of children and Baptists, and watching the game on a big screen outside, the stadium’s south side a scenic backdrop.  Every time OU scores, you see the fireworks and hear the crowd roar just before the cable delay catches up with real life.

When you’re a townie, you don’t feel any fear walking down the street in the middle of the night because you’re home, and home means an absence of fear.  In fact, you’ll probably run into someone you know at three in the morning, taking a drunk stroll that crosses paths with your drunk stroll, and you’ll stop and have a ridiculous conversation that you’ll only remember in blurry waves.  And the next day, you’ll wake up and tell someone, “I think I may have started a Culture Club tribute band last night on the way home,” but you won’t remember who the drummer was going to be.

When you’re a townie, you start to realize that you know half of your friends from college, and the other half because they’re locals.  And you find that you like the people that went to high school in Norman just as much, often times more, than the people that came here to go to college because they’re just more real.

When you’re a townie, and you go to Bill’s karaoke bar on a Sunday night when Rita is working, she drops two mugs of beer in front of you before you even order them, even if you didn’t want them to begin with.  And then you sign up to sing the song that everyone requests, the one you always sing when you go there.  And then you’re singing Billy Joel’s Piano Man to the same people that have heard you sing it a million times, but they all still raise their glasses and toast during the line, They’re sharing a drink they call loneliness/But it’s better than drinking alone.

And when you’re a townie like me, and you’re pushing 30, gulping watery beer from a glass mug while singing Piano Man for the 300^th time, you’re quite suddenly aware of an irony in the words you sing: He said, “Bill I believe this is killing me”/As the smile ran away from his face/Well I’m sure that I could be a movie star/If I could get out of this place.

***

I know that there are many people who are happy living here, and I can certainly understand why—there’s a sense of thriving community here, a neighborly feeling that runs through the thread of this town.  Months ago, I was running up James Garner Ave., and I hit a stop sign at Eufala.  A giant red truck pulled up next to me.  The driver’s side window was down, so I could clearly see the slightly rapey-looking man resting his elbow on the doorframe.

I hesitated to cross the street because I couldn’t see around the truck to find out if there was a car coming, but the man in the truck pulled forward slowly, waving me along with him.  “I got you,” he said.

When I think of that simple sentence, “I got you,” I feel like it should be Norman’s unofficial motto, representing the small town feel that defines the character of this city.  Norman is its people, and just as much, its people are Norman.  So knowing that, why do I want out so badly?  Why do I feel like this town is closing in on me?

I think it’s because I can’t go anywhere without being haunted by the ghost of an old friend.  I can’t go to the store without running into someone I know.  Hell, I can’t even remember how I know them anymore.  Every place I go in this town has some kind of memory attached—the golf course, where John left a pair of shitty boxers during a wine drinking adventure, the Blue Bonnet, where one of the tables says, “Rockey loves Leah,” the parking lot of Ole Blues where I had to hold Lynse up while she peed, the spot on Main Street near the railroad tracks where someone that loved me asked me to marry him onstage in the middle of the Norman Music Festival in front of all of our friends.  I’ve lived on the east side, on the west side, and right in the middle of this town.  I’ve worked as a receptionist, as a teacher, as a personal assistant, as a server, as a manager of a camera equipment checkout facility.  I got three degrees here.  I started doing standup comedy here.  Everything I can remember that has made me the me I am today happened right here.

Lately, I have this desire to go on some new adventure somewhere else, and like any good college town, Norman is telling me it’s time to go.  And maybe the real world will beat the shit out of me, and maybe I’ll give in to its very un-magical reality, but maybe not. My friend told me once that you take home with you.  I hope that means that when I leave here, if I ever leave here, I’ll take with me Norman’s optimism, its seething youthful energy, its kindness, and its easy laughter.

For all the people I love who live here, for all the wonderful and interesting characters who can be happy just by simply being satisfied with your own happiness, I envy you.  Maybe I’ll meet you back here when we’re all old, when I retire from whatever weird-ass life I’ve led.  And maybe we can sit on a front porch together and make fun of all the freaks that walk by us.

But when I travel somewhere to do stand-up, and people ask me how I want to be introduced, I will always reply, “Just say I’m from Norman.”  Because for one thing, I don’t have any real credits, and for another thing, it says everything about me.  Because I am Norman, Oklahoma.  Because you are where you come from.

When I was a kid, I watched a very disturbing and impressionable episode of Growing Pains.  In that show, Ben Seaver went backstage at a cock rock concert to meet his hero, the lead singer—let’s call him Lightning Rod Pants because I can’t remember his name, and that one cracks me up—and the guy acted like a total asshole to poor little Ben.

And perhaps even more memorably, during that scene Lightning Rod Pants said, “Get me a cup.”  Now, a “cup” turned out to be slang for “groupie slut,” I’m guessing, because three big-haired women in mini-skirts came into the dressing room and started making out with L.R. Pants right in front of 12-year-old Ben.  Maybe that’s just one of those weird impressions that childhood twists, but I still remember watching that and hoping maybe I’d understand why Lightning Rod referred to the girls as “cups” when I got older.  I’m 28 now, and it still makes no sense to me.  Regardless, I consider this surprisingly racy episode of Growing Pains the sole reason why I’m afraid of interacting with marginally famous people.

You may be thinking, “Leah, it’s perfectly natural to be nervous around famous people,” and while that’s true, I don’t think the way I react qualifies under the umbrella of what normal people consider symptoms of anxiety.  My brand of “nervous” makes me act, for lack of a better description, completely retarded.

***

Exhibit A: Tracy Morgan

In the spring of 2001, Tracy Morgan came to the OU dorms to do stand-up, and I went to the show with my friends Rockey and Cher.  Morgan wasn’t super-famous at the time.  I knew him from Saturday Night Live, but I had no special interest in him before or after that day until he played Tracy Jordan on 30 Rock years later.  We watched his set, which I thought was pretty hardcore X-rated (now I’d probably label it “family friendly” since I’m all jaded and desensitized), but I remember very little about his show.  In fact, the only thing I do remember is that I liked the guy that opened for him better (good ol’ What’s-His-Name), and that Cher howled with laughter at every single thing Tracy Morgan said, so I thought, Oh, this must be really, really funny when you’re black.

After the show, my friends and I made our way to the backstage area where Tracy Morgan and Other Guy were signing autographs and taking pictures.  We waited in line, and I cared very little about meeting Tracy Morgan, but when we got to the front, and I was actually face to face with him, I freaked the fuck out.  I became so starstruck that I couldn’t talk.  Instead, I just froze and stared at him with my mouth open while he tried to interact with me.  I couldn’t even force myself to move from the spot, so Rockey pushed me toward Mr. Morgan, and said, “She loves you,” which wasn’t really true.  I mean, I respected him, but I liked him about as much as crunchy Cheetos—I’ll eat them when that’s all there is, but if there’s a fuckin’ cheese puff around, I wouldn’t give them a second thought.

Without hesitating for even a second, Tracy Morgan pulled me into a bear hug, kissed my cheek, and said, “I love you, too, Baby.”  That’s right, he’s the shit, and I was still afraid of him.

***

Exhibit B: Dr. Dog

I met the band Dr. Dog a few months after they performed on The Tonight Show and made it semi-big (for an indie band).  I got wasted, marched backstage into their band area, and announced, “I don’t know who you think you are, but you need to go thank my friend Whitney for being such a kickass fan.  She’s the reason you’re even here.”  I think that announcement may have carried much more weight if they hadn’t, in fact, signed Whitney’s album and thanked her profusely just minutes before, all within my line of vision.

This occurred shortly after I made the bass guitarist pose for a picture with my friend April for at least three minutes, the amount of time it took me to realize that no, I wasn’t just suffering from blurry alco-vision, I actually had fucked up the focus of my new camera when I dropped it on the floor.  I remember the mortified expression on April’s face as the guy tried to leave, and I said something along the lines of, “No, no, no, you’re not going anywhere.  Try to stop being so out of focus.”

***

Exhibit C: Doug Benson

In June, my friends put on a special comedy show in Oklahoma City, and they brought in Doug Benson from VH1’s Best Week Ever, Last Comic Standing, and Super High Me as the headliner.  They asked me to open for him, which I pretended they did because I’m funny, but they probably did because I’m the natural choice for anything that has to do with pot.  I wasn’t too nervous about performing—I only had to do ten minutes—but I was definitely sweating the possibility of making a fool of myself again.  I decided the best way to deal with the situation would be not to talk to him at all.  So when Benson and his feature, Graham Elwood, walked into the backstage area, I put on my invisible face and stood in the corner.  And it must’ve worked because I heard Graham Elwood talking to the other opener, Cameron Buchholtz, and saying, “So what, you’re going on, then some girl, then me?”

I tried to stay invisible, but my pride wouldn’t let me.  I walked right up to Graham and said, “Hi, I’m some girl.”

His face flared red with shame.  “Oh my God, I’m sorry.  I don’t even know why I said that.”  He continued to apologize to me profusely for the rest of the night, and I could tell that he didn’t mean anything by the comment.

After Elwood’s embarrassed apology, I told myself to stop being ridiculous.  These were obviously just people like me.  They weren’t that special.  Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to try and network with them.  After I did my set, I entered the dressing room with purpose, determined to strike up some sort of interesting conversation with Benson, but got immediately sidetracked by a vaporizer and some weed by the name of “Whispering Willow” or “Walking Willow,” or something else that sounded like the name of the color of my gay best friend’s draperies.  Now, for those of you unfamiliar with pot paraphernalia, a vaporizer works much differently than any other smoking apparatus.  When you pull from a pipe or a bong, you can feel the smoke entering your lungs, so you can tell when you’re getting a good hit.  However, when you take a hit from a vaporizer, it feels like you’re getting nothing.  So I sucked in vapors for, oh, about 30 straight seconds, while the others just stared at me.

Finally, I handed off the tube, and I coughed, a giant puff of smoke like a cumulus rain cloud hovering in the tiny dressing room.

“You’re gonna be soooo fucked up,” one of the girls who supplied the pot said.

“Really?  Well, shit.”  There went my ability to make small talk along with my ability to verbalize any thought that I might have within the next hour.  And sure enough, ten minutes later, the pot won, and I slipped out of reality into my own mind, a horrible place to hang out when I’m already nervous.

I didn’t attempt to make any more conversation.  Instead, I just watched the others talk and tried to lean against the wall like I think a cool person might lean, you know, with one arm cocked in a gun finger position, one eyebrow raised, and one leg pulled up like a flamingo.  My leg got tired, so I commenced a pacing route from backstage to the dressing room to backstage to the food tray.  I drank two bottles of water in 20 minutes, and then I had to pee.

The problem was, there was only one bathroom available, located right next to where Doug Benson and Cameron were sitting and chatting.  I squeezed between them without making eye contact and went into the bathroom, but when I tried to shut the door, it wouldn’t close all the way.  There was a two-inch gap left between the door and the frame.

Now, I knew Doug and Cameron couldn’t see me, but when I sat down on the toilet and tried to go, I could hear every word of the very audible conversation they were having about comedy in L.A.  I kept thinking, If I can hear them, then…

Now might be a good time to explain another of my many unreasonable phobias: people listening to me pee.  I have no real moment in my life that I can pinpoint as the origin of this fear.  It’s not like I went to the bathroom one night, and six of my friends gathered around the door, pushing their faces against it, their hands cupped around their ears.  Then, while I was washing my hands, they formed a discussion group comparing notes about how I pee.  It’s not like one of them said something like, “I thought that sounded healthy.”  And another said, “Really?  I thought it was a little loud.  I mean, she’s a girl, it should sound more tinkly.  What does she have a penis in there?  I mean, is she elevating herself over the toilet?  What has she got, a garden hose and a well in there?”

Meanwhile, back to more recent nightmares in a lonely backstage bathroom, I heard Cameron walk away and then only the sound of Doug hitting the vaporizer, me with my pants around my ankles trying to pee, nothing between us but a thin door that didn’t close.

I tried rationalizing with myself.  Leah, I thought.  The longer you stay in here, the more it’s gonna seem like you’re taking a huge shit.  And do you want to be remembered as the girl who took the dump in the dressing room while the door was a little open?

It worked, I guess, because I finally started to pee, all the time painfully aware that Benson could hear.  That’s right, Doug Benson heard me pee, and because I was high off some gay-sounding hydroponic pot, I thought it was the end of my world.

Needless to say, I never made any significant conversation with Benson.  You win again, incredible awkwardness that cripples my social interactions.  You win again.

***
After the show, Benson and Elwood went to the lobby to sell merch and sign autographs, but I hung back in the dressing room alone to scarf down as much cheese and crackers as I possibly could.  As I shoved handfuls of food in my mouth, a girl appeared in the doorway of the room.  Her eyes darted back and forth around the space until they landed on me.  “Who are you?” she asked.

She looked exactly like a street rat.  I mean, she was pretty enough, and she was about my age, but her hair was long and greasy, and she had this homeless-girl look about her.  She looked like what the real Aladdin probably looked like before Disney glamorized him in the movie.

“I’m no one,” I said.

She didn’t seem to hear me.  Instead, she walked into the room and started searching every corner of it, throwing open doors, pushing coats and backpacks to the side.  I thought she was looking for Benson, so I said, “Doug went out front to sign autographs.”

This time, she heard me.  “Oh,” she said.  “What, do you work here?”

“Kinda,” I said.  “I was in the show.”

“Really?”  She seemed intrigued, and she sidled up next to me.  The rest of our conversation occurred with five inches of space between our faces.  “You’re a comedian?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Uh, didn’t you watch the show?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“But—”

“Hey, is it tough being a girl and a comedian?”

“Not really.  I mean, I just try not to let it dictate anything—”

“You know I’m really funny.  I want to be a comedian.”

I rolled my eyes.  “Well, I guess we should head back up to the lobby now.”

She grabbed my arm and reached into her fanny pack.  (Yes, you read that right.  Her fanny pack.)  I took a paranoid moment to envision her pulling out some kind of medical instrument and stabbing me repeatedly in the throat and then taking over my identity, but instead, her hand emerged gripping a sack of weed and a small bottle of Southern Comfort.

“Yeah, you’re probably looking for Doug.”  I tried again to whisk her out of the dressing room.  “How’d you get back here?”

She opened the top of the Southern Comfort and took a swig.  “Oh, they were sold out of tickets, but I found this door that was barely locked, and I kicked it in.”  She handed me the open bottle of SoCo, and I took a swallow—I have no idea why, just seemed natural for some reason.

“Can I say something that might piss you off?” she asked.

I sighed.  “Sure.”

“I used to have a giant bump in the middle of my nose just like you.”

Four years of being a comic, and I have yet to get used to the brutal honesty people think they can drop on me whenever they feel like it.  “Oh really?” I asked, the sarcasm dripping from my words.   “Well, how did you possibly live like that?”

She shrugged.  “I got a nose job.”

“All right,” I said.  “Time to leave.”  I grabbed her arm and escorted her out of the dressing room.  She followed me backstage, on stage, through the theatre seating to the lobby where my friends stood, and all the while I responded half-heartedly to the ridiculous shit she kept saying.  Our conversation went something like this:

“I want to be a comedian, but no one thinks slutty girls are funny,” Crazy said.

“Sure they do.  Just yesterday, I laughed at three hookers.”

“But isn’t it hard to tell jokes when you’re a woman?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.  “I mean, I can’t even say a word without thinking about my vagina and how sometimes things come out of it, and sometimes things go into it.”

At this point, we reached my friends, and I pointed to her and said, “Can somebody get this crazy girl away from me?”  As the sentence escaped my lips and I watched her scurry off to find Doug, I realized the irony in my words: it was the exact sentence I’d been afraid that Doug Benson might say about me.

By the way, Doug Benson, you’re welcome for that “cup.”  You’re welcome.