Читать книгу Colors Insulting to Nature - Cintra Wilson - Страница 6

Penelope “Peppy” Normal, née Pinkney, had been married to Ned and Liza’s father, Hal Normal. Hal had been dazzled by Peppy’s topless juggling act (“Best Juggles in the Business”— Reno Nitewatcher) at the Lady Luck casino in Reno, NV, in May 1965. It was a low point in the life of Peppy, who at twenty-two had been living with her mother following a daring period of LSD experimentation, which culminated with her boyfriend, Chet Borden (who had Seen the Light and changed his name to Blessed Ram Baku), fatally swan-diving off the roof of their Oakland apartment building in a rapturous hallucinogenic brain-rage. A month later Peppy found herself grieving and half-naked before the Reno multitudes. Her act culminated in juggling four pins with tasseled pasties to “Do You Believe in Magic” by the Lovin’ Spoonful. She was a “good-looking chick,” five foot two, freckled and curvy, who was partial to wigs, because she had suffered the charring effects of a bad perm after cutting off her waist-long, ironed hippie locks. Even though her hair (light brown, a noncolor) had grown back, the wigs were easier to put on for work, and they made her feel as if she was in costume or disguise; eventually she wore them all the time.

The “Dentist from Duluth,” as Hal Normal signed the cards on the single red roses he sent backstage (“cheap,” she thought, “romantic,” he thought), seemed to Peppy as good an escape route from her mother as any. He was a good height, anyway, and had most of his hair, and she had always wanted capped teeth. Sharon, a topless, redheaded magician’s assistant whom Peppy had befriended at work, said he looked like a younger version of Karl Maiden. After dinner dates at various Denny’s-esque restaurants every night of his National Dental Workers conference, Hal proposed, and Peppy, figuring she must either escape her current situation or risk murdering her mother with a serrated steak knife in a Southern Comfort-induced tussle, agreed to marry him the next day in the “Little House of Love” twenty-four-hour chapel, a tiny, shingled building built to look like a gingerbread house, replete with footstool-size concrete “gumdrops” studding the Astroturf lawn. It was all over in fifteen minutes. Sharon, who had only known Peppy for four months, had the dual job of being the wedding’s only witness and covering Peppy’s mother’s Ford Country Squire station wagon with shaving cream and novelty condoms. Peppy regretted the marriage with a stomach-dropping certainty immediately afterward, especially during dinner at her mother’s house later that evening, when Hal pontificated at length about the nauseating new developments in hydraulic flossing.

Peppy had insisted that Hal move from Duluth to Reno; he realized the wisdom of this decision, knowing that his Minnesota Methodist crowd would not warm to a new female who looked like the cartoon lady in the champagne glass from Playboy. They moved into a new, three-bedroom tract home in southwest Reno with a chimney pressed together out of concrete and large flat rocks.

The stressful demands of baby rearing while trying to establish a newlywed life were enough to keep the poorly matched couple distracted from the fact that they loathed each other until late 1972.

Edward Norbert Normal had been born on February 17 in 1966 and Elizabeth Lynn on October 25 in 1967 (Scorpios have hot pants, said Grandma Noreen, Peppy’s mother). The photos from the hospital bed of Peppy, smiling her modeling-school smile and holding a pruny red newborn-wad in a light blue or light pink blanket, suggest that she had been in full Cleopatra cat-eye makeup during her entire labor and delivery process, and that her tall dome of red (or ash-blonde) hair also remained unmussed by the primitive bringing forth of life. Other photos showed the new mother (brunette) smiling bustily at the photographer whilst her long brown cigarette hung perilously close to baby’s eye.

By the time Ned was six and Liza almost five, Hal had been permanently barred from the nuptial bed with the white headboard, on which two carved swans kissed in a heart-shaped symbol of lifelong monogamy. Peppy had a new, Osmond-size set of blue-white upper teeth and an impressive aptitude for painkiller consumption. Hal had a string of dental assistants named Kim, Wendy, and Lois, each of whom was persuaded to inhale balloons full of nitrous oxide after office hours and let him have sex with them in the reclining dentistry chair, in exchange for his looking the other way on their moderate embezzlements.

It all came to a head when Peppy was roused from her pill slur at the sight of one of Lois’s hickeys on Hal’s abdomen when he stepped out of the shower. It was the moment Peppy had been waiting for: a True Crime on which to hang the demise of the loveless marriage, which, due to the presence of toddlers, she would have felt too guilty to leave otherwise. Hal lied with loud indignation about the mouth bruise, but it was all over, and both were relieved.

After a hi-speed divorce (forty-eight hours to Nevada residents with children and property, 192 times the length of the marriage ceremony), Peppy was legally free, Hal having expressed virtually no interest in custody of the children, and having agreed with surprising ease to sign over the new family car and the equity on the house in exchange for Peppy releasing all future claims to alimony or child support. The divorce cost $270. Hal paid; Lois was waiting for him in the parking lot with a bottle of pink champagne. “Woo woo, lucky you,” Peppy cracked at Lois, packing the children into the conservative new 1973 Oldsmobile Toronado. Afterward, the children only saw Hal for their annual checkups. They dreaded his guilty nervousness far more than the tooth cleaning, but he always gave them $50 each to compensate for the birthdays and Christmases that he routinely ignored.

The three-bedroom Reno house was rented out; after paying the mortgage, this provided Peppy with a moderate monthly income. Peppy and the kids moved back in with her mother. Grandma Noreen babysat while Peppy played the field, the field being Bil’s Red Turkey Tavern, where Beer Nuts were sold, beneath a mirror covered with Bil’s favorite bumper stickers:

Free Mustache Rides

No Laugh-a, My Car, Eh?

You’re Goin’ To Hurt Its Feelings

HEY PAL, Watch My Tail….Not HERS!

Peppy was often the only woman in the bar, which made her virtually irresistible to the pockmarked clientele.

Noreen couldn’t understand where the daughter had gotten “the Look-At-Me bug,” as she called it. Peppy eventually called it “artistic flair” and claimed it came from the father she’d never known. Noreen had known WWII veteran Clemont Pinkney less than a month when they were married in 1946, and wasn’t prepared to say whether he was inclined toward fits of exhibitionistic dancing and loud show-tune medleys or not, since he was found dead a mere five days into their honeymoon, wearing her store-bought wedding dress and hanging by the neck from a coat hook by a pair of ruined nylons she’d thrown away earlier that day.

Naturally uncomplicated, hardworking, and less vain than her female counterparts of the time, Noreen went back to wearing her wartime combat boots during her pregnancy. She would never wear dresses or girdles or marry again, choosing instead to live modestly off of Clem’s navy pension, and repress the unwanted remains of her sexual energy through vigorous, tight-mouthed housecleaning.

From the moment she could voice her wants, Peppy had always craved tap-shoes, ballet classes, tutus, mirrors, cosmetics, and pink tinselly things. She lit up at the prospect of being photographed and went into swooning deliriums at the movies, moving her lips to the dialogue with her eyes locked on the lead actress, genuflecting weirdly in the dark. Strangers pointed at her, laughing. She didn’t notice. She was a girl who would buy anything advertised with a kiss, and who never questioned the benevolence of Hollywood Magic. The movies were the home of her heart, where she relaxed, opened like a flower, and let any suggestion float into her unchecked. (In short, she was doomed to lifelong consumer slavery.)

In 1955, after weeks of hysterical pleading, Noreen reluctantly allowed her daughter to enroll in Miss Marquette’s School of Photographic Modeling and Acrobatic Dancing for Young Ladies, where Peppy learned the elements of tumbling, baton twirling, and how to smile with her lips slightly parted, her eyes open wide, and her upper teeth freshly glossed with saliva. Noreen had imagined that Peppy would learn how to be charismatically adorable, like Shirley Temple, or perhaps adorably wisecracking, like Jackie Coogan. What emerged instead was a pocket-size version of Gypsy Rose Lee. Like many fatherless young girls, Peppy was man-crazy and through osmosis somehow picked up her mother’s abandoned sex drive from its cold storage locker and sashayed around in that sublimated man-fever like a lynx G-string. Her mother found Peppy’s dance numbers disturbingly burlesque. “Throw a man in the room, any man,” Noreen lamented, “and that child will put on a bathing suit and do exotic backbends.” Confused insurance agents or dishwasher repairmen shuffled nervously as the preening child wantonly grabbed their attention by doing the splits on the area rug; they often gave her a dollar to go away, creating in Peppy a Pavlovian template for her future employment.

Grandma Noreen’s stoic road through single motherhood made her largely unsympathetic to Peppy’s freewheeling, drunk style of child rearing, but she took Peppy’s evening absences at the Red Turkey as an opportunity to carve Proper Moral Understandings and A Respectable Work Ethic into the little kids, who, she secretly vowed, would never want for respectable, nontopless employment. She taught Ned to stuff and lick envelopes, she taught little Liza how to bag groceries, beer cans first, bananas last. The children slept in Noreen’s small sewing room beneath a framed copy of a silent film poster, the 1917 melodrama Babes in the Woods; Noreen had picked it up at a rummage sale to spruce up the bare wall. It was a rather chilling illustration of a pudgy boy and girl, pinkly angelic and barely past the toddler stage, clutching each other at the foot of a large, threatening black tree. The boy is trying to be brave as his little sister weeps tears of terror; the tangled and sinister woods behind them seem to be conspiring to eat the innocent tots like succulent capons. The poster gave Liza nightmares. She did not want to be abandoned in the woods with Ned, who would think it futile to intervene and probably just watch with scientific curiosity as badgers dragged her by the hair into a dark, wet hole.

In 1976, during this period of Noreen’s regular babysitting, the Montreal Olympic Games were on television; the children, now eleven and nine, were mad for them. They tried to reenact various gymnastic events on Noreen’s living room settee; knees were pressed through the cheap pink cloth of nightgowns; rug burns bearded little chins. Liza was especially affected, particularly in her vivid mental moments before sleep, during which she had a rich and ego-gratifying fantasy life. Liza, at an age when every glory in life seemed possible, would beat out Nadia Comaneci, in slow motion, for a gold medal in the floor routine, to the haunting strains of Nadia’s Theme (Theme from The Young and the Restless) every night. The fantasy expanded during the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, with Liza taking to the ice and beating Dorothy Hamill for more gold medals in figure skating. Everyone would be watching—Peppy, Noreen, Ned, her kindergarten classmates, her teachers, the president. Everyone would clap and cry as she swirled beautifully, her legs in the splits over her head in any direction, her arms swanning upward. As adoring fans wrapped her in an American flag, she would drift into a giddy, love-filled, and triumphant slumber. That is what it will be like, when I am fourteen.

Liza’s waking hours, however, were not spent backflipping over gym mats, or gyrating in empty skating rinks. After school, Liza and Ned watched six to nine hours of television each day; a practical hobby in that they could do it almost anywhere.

Peppy would often hook up with men vacationing in Reno, and the children would be taken on long car trips through the desert and into the Sierras, then deposited on atrocious carpets in faceless towns for periods not less than three days (school holidays) but no more than six weeks (summer vacation). There was a multitoned green shag carpet full of pennies and dog hair in Concord, CA, that belonged to Ray Tilper, who ran a drapery cleaning service. There was a coffee and oil-stained pink carpet with large blue roses that sat in the middle of the linoleum floor of the home of Dennis Van Kittelstrom, who ran a certified Bultaco dirt bike repair shop in Williams, CA. There was blood-red carpeting that aggressively complemented the golden couch legs in the TV room of Luigi Fontanesca, who had recently taken over his grandfather’s veal sausage factory in Elko, NV. This rash of brief and unserious unions finally came to an end in 1978 when Peppy fell in actual love, with (and there should be a drum roll):

THE AMAZING JOHNNY BODRONE (cymbal Clash!)

Johnny Budrone had been a promising rodeo bull rider in his youth until a particularly nasty throw crushed one of his vertebrae and tossed the muscles around it into a splintery mélange he called “crabmeat.” Peppy first saw him performing at the Lucky Seven club with his air gun act; with one in each hand, sporting a pair of yellow-tinted aviator-frame glasses, he would shoot a flurry of pellets into large, formless heaps of white balloons, loudly sculpting them into a kind of pneumatic topiary: rabbit heads, hearts, clubs, spades. The rest of the time he drank alone, a lot, to offset his constant back pain. Being another regular at Bil’s Red Turkey, the solitary woman at the other end of the bar, who sometimes had jet-black hair, sometimes auburn, became a compelling enigma. One night Johnny was drunk enough to approach Peppy, who was wearing her Natural Honey Blonde wig, and drawl, “So what’s your hair down there like, anyhow”—gesturing at her crotch with his Marlboro—“Neapolitan?”

It was not the best pickup line Peppy had ever heard, nor was it the worst. The worst was: “You wanna come in the john with me and put Bactine on my stump?” (Dan “Claw” Haverman, June 1974.) Johnny’s line, at least, suggested a sexually viable man with an active, if tasteless, sense of humor.

Apart from the exploded veins, bowlegs, psoriasis, and gangrenous-looking assortment of blurring tattoos, Johnny was a handsome man, and Peppy felt a warm twinkling in herself that had almost nothing to do with the four or seven Fuzzy Navels she had consumed. The subsequent affair with Johnny Budrone was actually the closest she’d ever come to the kind of ovary-squeezing, sublimely unbearable, ice-cream headache-y love she had imagined as a hormonally exhilarated teen.

“That Johnny knew how to treat a lady,” Peppy would sigh, later.

He would pick Peppy up at her mother’s house in a clean gingham cowboy shirt and his newest Wranglers. She would run giggling to the screen door in hanging earrings and a pair of beige high heels. He would smell of Mitchum deodorant and Wintergreen Skoal “chaw,” she of Jean Naté body spray and talc, with a hint of Wicked Wahine Eau de Toilette around the pulse points; a gambler’s whisper of hope for the jackpot honeymoon in beautiful Hawaii.

At around 5 a.m. his Falcon Ranchero would growl mufflerlessly up the street again and they would park carnally in the quiet, the sleeping residential block unaware of their hot bourbon tongues and denim-searing concupiscence.

Forty-five minutes later the car would start again, and the white-steamed windshield swabbed from the inside. Peppy would step out onto the lawn, kiss her fingers and wave, her wig askew, her shoes unstrapped, sighing deep pink sighs.

“That Johnny was a real man,” Peppy would say, later.

Johnny was a man of few words, but he made each child one sincere overture of friendship. Ned was twelve and already starting to display what would be a lifelong proclivity toward introverted lumpiness. Johnny bought him a Daisy air rifle and took him out in the desert to shoot cantaloupes; Ned fainted from the heat and wet himself while unconscious. Ned was profoundly embarrassed, but Johnny was understanding and friendly about it. He bought Ned a new pair of pants, a bag of pretzels, and a Gatorade, and never told Peppy about the mishap, but Ned had a shameful association with the gun afterward and stuck it in the back of his closet.

Johnny took Liza out for bubble-gum ice cream and was not angry when she picked all the gumballs out with her fingers and lined them up, mouth-sticky and bleeding primary colors, on the dashboard of the Ranchero, where the sun baked them into semipermanence; they could not be removed from the aged vinyl surface without ripping it down to the foam. After that, Johnny pretty much figured they were a family.

The children mostly loved Johnny for his gallery of smeared tattoos.

Johnny would lie on the brown and orange-striped couch with a burlap throw pillow embroidered with a yarn owl under his mangled middle-back, and the children would pry his sleeves up and gaze insatiably at the fading wonders: a horse head framed by a large horseshoe, with the name ZIPPO under it. A crudely wrought parrot with a long curlicued tail. A cowgirl in a skimpy fringe dress, with a gun and spurs. Yosemite Sam standing incongruously on a bed of roses. On special days in the summertime the children could see the bull that ended Johnny’s rodeo career—a large blue-black, bucking monster with the unlikely name FEELIN’ GROOVY written on a sash between Johnny’s shoulderblades, over his six-inch operation scar.

“You gotta give credit to the things that crush you,” Johnny explained when asked why he decorated his body with the bull that made him wince through the better part of every day. Ned and Liza were impressed by this philosophy.

The year 1978 was also when Ned and Liza took the bus to see a Saturday matinee and witnessed the cinema phenomenon Ice Castles. (“When Tragedy Struck, Love Came to the Rescue,” promised the movie poster.) This film would lodge itself firmly in Liza’s psyche; it was the pole around which the sprouting bean-plant of her mind would twist for years to come.

Ice Castles is a proto-Coming-of-Age movie featuring doe-eyed and growly-voiced Robby Benson (whose sexual appeal to the seven-to ten-year-old girl crowd invoked national epidemics of pillow kissing), paired up with Lynn-Holly Johnson who plays pretty, blonde figure skater Lexie, a simple country girl bursting with natural ice-talent.

Ice audiences adore Lexie, even though she lacks formal training; the audience is so moved by her rural pluck, they erupt into a standing ovations and hurl red carnations at her whilst Robby Benson swoons in a delirium of love and pride.

(Liza was already being Lexie, soul-crushingly in love with Robby Benson and feeling every double axel on-screen in the muscles of her own pelvis.)

Lexie’s curmudgeonly dad, after a few tearful door-slams, hard truths, and violin music, reluctantly agrees to let a top ice-coach transform diamond-in-the-rough Lexie into a polished Olympic contender in six months (introducing the Ticking Clock, Hollywood Formula Obstacle #1).

“You’ve got all the raw talent,” says the coldhearted new coach, “but you’re virtually untrained. I’m not sure we’ll be able to pull it off…. How much do you really want to win?”

(I want to win so bad I am wetting my pants because I do not want to miss one minute of this film, thought Liza.)

Right as Lexie wins the Big Preliminary Competition, Robby Benson busts her kissing a Fancy New Guy, and runs away from her; she is crushed. (Obstacle #2, plus Ironic Reversal: her Greatest Triumph comes at the same moment as her Greatest Loss—producers love that shit.)

Overnight, Lexie trades her blonde pigtails for a Sophisticated Hairstyle (Hollywood symbol of losing innocence and/or Coming-of-Age) and marvels at her own budding breasts in the mirror, touching her new chest tenderly (with blouse still on, natch, but this is very serious Girl-Becoming-Woman fodder, although no teen girl has ever done that, ever; it has only ever happened in the porn-infected male screenwriter mind).

Frustrated by the shallowness of the big-league skating world, Lexie slips out of a fancy party at the rink, puts on her skates, and attempts the forbidden triple axel. The Ice Castles theme song is played in a mordant, minor key (Warning!).

Lexie jumps, she crashes into a bunch of patio furniture, she goes blind. (The Grandaddy of all Obstacles #3.)

Smash-cut to the CAT scan—Lexie has a blood clot in her brain that may or may not go away, but certainly not in time for her to compete (Ticking Clock redux).

Lexie goes tragically home to Iowa and becomes depressed, self-pitying, and feral, with matted hair. (Probable Producer comment: “She should be having a Helen Keller moment, here.” Screenwriter: “Agreed.”)

Enter Colleen Dewhurst in her trademarked characterization of the crusty New Englander Who Is Gruff and Difficult but Whose Heart Is Golden.

“You wanted to find a way out when you took that jump,” barks Crustbucket, baring her teeth. “Nobody’s going to blame an invalid for giving up,” she sneers.

(The classic “What are you, a Quitter?” speech. The Hollywood Formula pinball machine lights up! Ding ding ding! Extra balls!)

Sightless Lexie tries to punch and kick Colleen Dewhurst, who subdues her in a brutal rasslin’ hold. Both end up in tears à la Miracle Worker.

(“You’re crying,” whispered Ned, amused.

“I am not!” sniffed Liza, embarrassed, wiping her tear-slick cheeks on her sleeve.)

Act III Turning Point:

Nobody can persuade Lexie to get back on the ice, until… Robby Benson returns! Slighted boyfriend to the rescue! With just enough Love and Hate mixed together to berate and abuse blind Lexie back into championship condition, pitilessly barking out stadium dimensions so she can mentally calculate how many feet she has before she smacks the wall.

In just one week of hard work, Robby Benson’s fierce love saves the day. Nobody at the competition even knows Lexie is blind as she takes her final bow until she trips over the carnations that audiences can’t resist hurling at her, and can’t figure out how to stand back up. As she gropes around the ice on her knees, the entire screaming stadium falls into an abrupt, pin-dropping, cricket-chirping silence.

Robby walks out on to the ice and takes her groping hand.

He guides blind Lexie to the middle of the stadium, where the crowd goes wild again for the two of them, holding hands.

“Stay with me?” begs Lexie.

“You bet,” Robby Benson assures.

Roll credits to the sounds of “Through the Eyes of Love,” as sung by Melissa Manchester!

Liza, age ten, was devastated by the film’s beauty and power.

She wanted more than anything to go blind and have Robby Benson restore her, through Tough Love, to athletic championship, in both skating and gymnastics. She began singing the theme song, imitating the large, throaty warble and power-enunciations of Melissa Manchester around the house.

“That’s a hell of a voice you got there,” Johnny would say, and Liza would blush, then imagine herself with long, wavy hair, wearing an all-white fringe ensemble and holding a white tiger cub on her album cover, her slick lips parted, her eyes emanating prismic rays. Her album would be called, simply, Castles.

Johnny and Peppy bought stylish rings and moved with the kids into a condominium complex called The Snooty Fox in Sparks, NV. “Reno is so close to hell you can see Sparks,” went the classic joke. The children had to enter a new school district. Ned had fewer problems in new schools because he’d always been a freak, who eagerly sought out the company of kids with handicaps, harelips, or expansive facial birthmarks. Ned liked finding these people with whom striking up a new friendship was relatively easy.

Liza had more difficulty, socially. The provocative clothing Peppy routinely bought for her perplexed everyone but the black and Mexican fifth-grade girls, who embraced her immediately. The white girls decided that Liza was “a scrounge” and made it their business to exclude her. So Liza “went minority” for a couple of years, much to Peppy’s panic. She sang Michael Jackson songs from the Off the Wall LP with all the wet gasps and carnal hoots, and learned rhythmically advanced, contrapuntal, and pelvic jump rope jingles:

Ain’t yo mama pretty She got meatballs for her titty Scrambled eggs Between her legs Ain’t yo mama pretty

Liza also wrote hieroglyphic notes to girls named “Lil’ Pants,” and “LaFlamme” in an advanced lowrider graffito-font, which was illegible to authority figures, but if you had a Rosetta stone—like alphabet guide sheet, could be translated into several themes:

1. “Keshawn is so fine” (response: ferellfiner but he a dog)

2. “Diane think she so bad” (all flaring that booty in them stanky white jeans)

3. “What do you do if Michael Jackson came in your house?” (!!!! die????)

For the Normals, 1980 was a big year. Shortly before the June date that Peppy had arranged for them to go to the frontier-themed “Chapel-Chaparral” and get married, Johnny Budrone left. It was unannounced and unprovoked, according to Peppy, but it probably had something to do with the fact that he snooped into her bottom drawer and read her turquoise, pink, and lavender diaries and, thus informed, held her entire sex life previous to meeting him against her.

Dear Peppy

Sorry about everything not working out but theres many things a man shoud handel by himself and one thing is his “wife”. Also the back pain is to unbarable and I geuss I am just a Solitary Man by nature. No hard feelings & I hope the kids understand but I just can’t go threw with it. I’m truly sorry and I hope happiness comes your way for you do diserve it.

JB

The spittoon was devoid of black juice. Faded cowboy shirts hung like Mitchum-scented corpses in the closet. He took the burlap pillow with the owl on it, the Ranchero, Ned’s unused air gun, Peppy’s blondest wig. He left $1,600, in twenties, on the table with the note. Peppy was devastated. She made a lot of hysterical phone calls; sea lion orks of guttural despair came out from under the bedroom door.

She was unable to reconcile herself to life without the man with whom sex had been revelatory—a breakthrough connection with The Mysterious, on par with discussing God in sign language with a baboon. Possessing no internal emotional governor or reasonable boundaries, Peppy spun into an unchecked cyclone of outrage, prompting Sharon (the topless magician’s assistant and only witness to her first wedding) to pick up Ned and Liza and take them to Noreen’s house with a stack of Hungry-Man TV dinners. Peppy splintered glass ashtrays against the wall and railed against Johnny’s “chickenshit” emotional cowardice until her fellow tenants at the Snooty Fox had the police knock on her door. Fortunately, Sharon returned from Noreen’s at the right moment and was able to convince the cops she had “everything under control” by having them watch Peppy down two pheno-barbitals with a large glass of water. Peppy’s caterwauling rage finally sank beneath a toxic slumber, on the striped couch where there was still a concave imprint of Johnny.

The next day, awaking to the raw brain-wounds of the pill and grief hangover, Peppy took her Oldsmobile and drove for three and a half hours, deep into the Central Valley of California, near Chico, where she knew of a cliff in a town called Paradise where people went when they wanted to End Things. It was a beautiful valley; a miniature version of the Grand Canyon, writ green and Mediterranean. The whole surrounding area was flat and agricultural; a rich, honey-scented fiesta of almond orchards, rice paddies, and fast, cool tributaries of the Sacramento River, with small farms laid out in green patchwork under high small clouds. The valley came like a surprise: the ground ahead sank down abruptly, a mile-wide crack dipping deeply into the earth, where the trees looked sea blue and compact as broccoli. The place was now an infamous gawking landmark that the local government took no pains to put a guardrail around—the guardrail, they felt, would imply that they were somehow responsible for the ever-growing pile of mangled cars at the bottom of the gorge. Peppy knew about this popular suicide locale from her ex-boyfriend, the dirt-bike mechanic in nearby Williams. Most of the adults in the surrounding areas—Chico, Forest Hills—had considered this route, more than once in their lives. It was akin to the comfort of a handgun in the closet, or a bottle of Seconal in the medicine cabinet—you didn’t need to use it to be glad it was there.

Peppy spent a terrible, drunken half hour staring at the unsympathetically pretty landscape and considering the failures of her life. The children, she reasoned, would go to Hal and Lois or Hal and whatever dental assistant he was currently schtupping, or remain with Noreen, and would be better off. After that thought, she dispensed with thinking of her children and focused on her own woes, in the typically selfish way of the suicide. She opened, with some difficulty, the prescription bottle containing the last of Johnny’s muscle relaxants, and reverently dry-swallowed all five.

Life had not turned out the way Peppy had anticipated. All she had wanted was a little show in a nice hotel lobby somewhere like Lake Tahoe, where she could wear a beaded champagne dress, hold a microphone, and ask people Where They Were From before singing “Alone Again (Naturally)” with a sadly ironic smile; then she would break into a little redemptive tap solo while the small horn-section played tight three-part harmonies, and shirtless, smitten dancing boys in cummerbunds and harem pants would lead her around the stage by the hand. She had wanted men to compete against each other for her backstage attentions, offering her turquoise jewelry and trips to Acapulco and leather trench coats, which she would or would not graciously refuse.

Nobody had ever given her the type of attention, or the amount of it, she believed she deserved. For Johnny Budrone to leave was the final insult heaped upon an unscalable shitload of insults, for despite the fact that she loved him with all of the depth, craziness, and thrilling impurity a dysfunctional, narcissistic, codependent, sex, alcohol, and pill-addicted woman could love, she secretly believed he was beneath her, and that he should have been grateful until his dying day that she had nobly condescended to love him.

Johnny’s pills took hold with a woozy surge of blankness, and with a final blast of “Nights in White Satin” on the eight-track, Peppy revved up the sizable engine, floored the gas pedal, and drove in a blast of shameful glory off the cliff, plummeting into the deep green forever of Paradise, CA.

The 1973 Oldsmobile Toronado was the first car on the market equipped with a driver’s-side air bag, an automotive phenomenon Peppy knew nothing about. After taking the nauseating plunge over the side and falling thirty-plus feet down with a sickening crunch onto the pile of other cars, Peppy assumed, as the pillowy plastic embraced her, that her guardian angels had manufactured the illusion of a painless death, and it was in deep and final relief that she nodded into a shock and barbiturate slumber, which was only disturbed forty-three minutes later when the paramedics interrupted her soft and deathful dreams by chainsawing her door open.

Peppy was taken to the hospital. Her stomach was pumped, and she was held for observation, but she was unscratched; her suicide had resulted in nothing more than a broken Lee Press-On nail. The air bag had cushioned her fall, the wig had absorbed the flying glass, the muscle relaxants had made her as pliable as an ink spot during impact. In short, while it had the best intentions of a real suicide and was clearly not a bid for attention, it was, in Peppy’s words, “an ass-out failure.” A legal hassle awaited her when she got out of the hospital; charges having to do with her willful destruction of the car and the potential endangerment of others (“Endangering who?” Peppy shrieked. “All the happy people picnicking in the mashed cars under my car? Shrub elves? Who?!”). After a weepy trip to the courthouse these charges were converted into a $500 fine, pending proof that Peppy was undergoing counseling.

The brush with eternity shook Peppy. For a few weeks she was a gibbering half-person who stared into middle distance and sprang into tears unprovoked. Her children worried about her. They were especially kind, and this was interpreted by Peppy as a confirmation that she was quite mentally ill. The inexpensive counselor Noreen had found in the Reno phone book was an Earth-shoe-and-gauzy-blouse-wearing Jungian-in-training named Gerald, who was sympathetic to Peppy’s weeping tirades but basically ineffectual, and offered her few tools with which to reassemble her psyche.

During the evenings, Noreen, sweet mother that she was, remembering Peppy’s childhood affection for the magical distractions of the big screen, would drive Peppy and the kids to movies, where the kids treated Peppy like a brain-damaged person, holding her hand and shielding her eyes from the violent parts. As a result of this concern, the children, who normally would have opted for nudity or gore when accompanied by an adult, increasingly stood in line for gentler, PG-rated films. Fame seemed appropriate, given Peppy’s emotional fragility.

The children sat on either side of their mother and enjoyed the movie, but were terrified by the fact that Peppy sobbed through the whole thing.

(Most people seem to have nothing but a subconscious idea that movies are as deep a primordial template for living as the original myths were to the Greeks when Zeus was Sky God. Bad movies full of recognizable clichés are particularly influential. They suggest intrinsic, universal laws and patterns of cause and effect; equations that seem mathematically true:

1 1. Goodness = Reward [both earthly and personal]

2 Believing in Yourself = Reward (both earthly and personal]

3 True Love = Possible for Everyone [via perseverance]

4 Proof of True Love = Personal Sacrifice

5 Want-Something-Badly-Enough = You Can Get It [via perseverance]

6 Rich People = Bad [until they learn the Valuable Lesson; see #9]

7 Poor People = Noble [unless tempted to become rich; see #9]

8 Hard Work = Golden Ticket to Fame and Reward [see #1, #2]

9 Money = Not Everything

10 Good-looking = Good

11 Too Good-looking = Bad

12 Too Good-looking + Rich = Outright Evil

13 Quitters = The Worst

Can we say this logic has not affected our lives? Can any of us say we have not been brainwashed to believe that if we adequately perform the prescribed mambo steps laid out on the Hollywood life-template floor mat, we will earn our heavenly reward on earth?)

Though Peppy could not articulate it, Fame (a Coming-of-Age film, but also the Ur-text of several 1980s “Victory Through Uninhibited Dance and/or Music” gems of the screen) represented a world in which talent obliterated every other worldly inconvenience: genetics, poverty, race, even New York traffic. If you were a dancer, why, you tour jeté'ed out the door and pirouetted down the street to the mailbox, and traffic halted to admire you. Musicians spontaneously played the violin while eating chili in the lunch room. Drama kids expressed unctuously tender Personal Truths without fear of ridicule, singing the Body Electric with gusto and pride. Talent was its own planet, free of barriers, free of shame, where there was no color, no language, only oversexed teenagers in thin body stockings, frayed leg warmers, and shredded toe-shoes, dry-humping to joyous disco music on the roofs of taxicabs: the molten core of life. The truth of it bashed Peppy like a gong: each talented child held a thunderbolt which (s)he could hurl at the world and make it fucking pay attention.

As the movie ended, Ned and Liza stared at their tear-drenched mother.

“Mom?” Ned asked cautiously, touching her knee. “Mom? Are you OK?”

Peppy didn’t seem to hear him; she was fixated on the rolling credits, trembling.

“Mom?” asked Liza, trying to look into Peppy’s eyes. “Is something wrong?”

“Nope,” Peppy said, snapping out of her trance. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just happy, because I know what I have to do now.”

Ned and Liza shot each other looks of dread. Peppy gave them a desperately hopeful smile.

“You kids are going to go to the High School of Performing Arts in New York City,” Peppy sobbed happily, her eyes as loose, intense, and toxically shiny as balls of mercury.

This mania did not abate as the children thought it would in the days that followed, when a film usually loses its grip on the viewer. Noreen assumed it was merely an improper pill combination or a hormonal power surge that set Peppy reeling about Fame, but it didn’t go away. Gerald the psychologist regarded the movie as a breakthrough for Peppy; he told her that in her lost, unhappy, and bewildered state of mind, Fame acted as a mythological Golden Stag that would lead her out of the forest of doubt and misery.

“Golden what?” snarled Peppy, lighting another long brown cigarette.

“Stag. Like a buck. A male deer. The Golden Stag appears to the lost hunter and guides him to safety. It appears in quite a few European and Asiatic mythologies; it’s a symbol of regeneration and virility, knowledge, life beginning anew. Its antlers grow back when they’re broken.” Gerald smiled his smug hippie smile. “Maybe your antlers are growing back.”

The only buck Peppy noticed in the film was Leroy, the hot black dancer guy, who certainly was an inspiration but not of the beacon-in-the-dark-night-of-the-soul variety, per se. Still, Fame definitely suggested a new path, toward art and freedom. Peppy went around for weeks announcing to people,” Fame is my Golden Stag.” But nobody had any idea what she was talking about.

(Curious Reader: The Romanian version of the Golden Stag fable bears an uncanny resemblance to Hansel and Gretel: small children are purposefully abandoned in the woods by weak and selfish parents. The young boy transmogrifies into a Golden Stag and carries his sister to safety.

Coincidentally, Babes in the Woods —the poster in Noreen’s sewing room—was also a retelling of Hansel and Gretel. There is something pan-continentally compelling about the image of little children, abandoned by their parents to the hostile elements in the dark woods. Who hasn’t, at some point in the forced march of life, felt as helpless, and deserving of unqualified sympathy?)

First Peppy put the Reno house on the market, where it quickly sold. With the proceeds, she purchased a yellow Honda Civic station wagon and a commemorative tattoo—her personal “Feelin’ Groovy” homage to the thing that crushed her. Rejecting Yosemite Sam and the bucking bull (“not ladylike,”) she opted for a horseshoe over her left breast, signifying three important life-things:

1 How Johnny stomped on her heart.

2 How she will nonetheless remain emotionally available “to whoever the shoe fits.”

3 How her botched suicide proved to herself she was both lucky and indestructible as pig iron.

During their final session, Gerald the Therapist told Peppy he liked the tattoo a whole lot. Peppy blushed with pride.

Peppy embarked on several car trips along the coast of California, intending to move the kids closer to Hollywood, as a baby step toward New York. She got as far as Fairfax, a town on the outskirts of Marin County, near San Francisco, for it was there that she took a pit stop at the Lady Tamalpais Café/Bar and befriended a gay couple in their late thirties, Mike LoBato and Ike Nixon.

Mike had been a pot-smoking Santa Cruz surfer until the Ziggy Stardust album came out and he was cupid-struck by a love of Glam Rock. When he paddled out into the lineup at Steamer Lane early one morning with high orange hair, silver eyeshadow, and a lightning bolt stenciled on his wetsuit, Mike got the shit beat out of him, which prompted him to hitchhike to San Francisco, where he enjoyed all the wild high life of the gay San Francisco 1970s, eventually working backstage for rock-show impresario Bill Graham.

Soft-spoken, compassionate Ike, who had grown up in a farming community in Sebastopol, had been on the fast track to Franciscan priesthood when he met Mike at the Mill Valley lumberyard. Mike was instantly attracted to Ike’s kind, subtle demeanor and gravitas, while Mike’s black-Irish coloring, swimmer’s body, and leather pants put a halt to Ike’s religious ambitions altogether. Ike left the seminary to help Mike carry speakers for the last leg of Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies Tour, and the two were inseparable thereafter.

Finally exhausted by the all-night, rock ‘n’ roll party lifestyle, Mike and Ike were now freelance handymen, comfortably settled down into a quiet, happy suburban degeneracy.

The funky charm of Mike and Ike, in conjunction with the sleepy wealth and cultural intelligence Peppy perceived in Marin County, was all she needed, along with a few Harvey Wallbangers, to put in a bid on one of the town’s dilapidated landmarks: the old Fairfax fire station, a quaint, large, two-story clapboard structure that had been abandoned and had fallen into disrepair after the fire department was given a larger, new, windowless, popcorn-stucco building that looked like an oversize Pizza Hut.

Her love for the building’s “vibrations” made her rash and impulsive. The firehouse had been subjected to the whims of unchecked entropy—extensive water damage made the ceiling of the top floor sag and peel down in the corners like moldy paper, termites had eaten sections of the joists and the main support girder until it was as spongy as coral, cockroaches and earwigs were firmly entrenched in the marrow of the wall studs. The minimal kitchen was embalmed in dusty grease; the bathroom contained a wall of urinals.

“I dunno,” said Ike, blowing a rich, piney vapour of pot smoke down the hole in the second-story floor where the fire pole went through. “Considering what they want for this crate, you’d think they’d at least throw in a couple of firemen. Black firemen.” He smirked, hugging the pole to his plaid chest and squeaking down out of sight.

“They should have torched this dump. Who’d accuse the fire department of arson? Nobody,” countered Mike, following Ike down the pole.

Peppy didn’t care. Her brain was romping on its wheel. Nobody could tell her this firehouse wasn’t the repository of her future good fortune; the promised sunny clearing after suffering through the dark and predatory woods: the castle of the Golden Stag.

To rehabilitate the firehouse Peppy was going to need more money; she eventually bullied Noreen into selling her Reno house to come live with her in Fairfax. Noreen abhorred the idea of giving up the modest security she had so patiently assembled, but her fear of what would happen to Ned and Liza if Peppy raised them alone outweighed her worry about her own future. With great reluctance, Noreen allowed red-jacketed realtors into her home. “A gem,” they proclaimed it. “I know,” Noreen responded, knowing full well how much elbow grease she had frenziedly rubbed in over the years, keeping it free of rust, grime, and decay, and hopefully, sin. When Noreen saw the chewed-up firehouse for the first time, she was shocked by its decrepitude and cried a little. But she liked Fairfax, a little valley tucked inside round, dark green hills that gave the feeling of a soft catcher’s mitt lying open, cool and snug. The air was piney and quenching. Noreen had forgotten about the appeal of green areas, her yard in Reno having contained only a tendrilled century plant, some small cacti in pots, and a ceramic lawn-burro loitering in a semicircle of decorative pink rocks. “The kind of garden you’d have on Mars,” as Ned called it.

“The kind of garden you’d have on Mars if all Martian landscapers were blind,” as Peppy called it.

“And Mexican,” added Liza.

Peppy rejected three pricey contractor bids and hired Mike and Ike to perform the renovation, boldly tearing up her city work permit and opting to do the construction on the cheap and sly. Mike was a reasonably competent plumber and builder; Ike was a talented finish carpenter and master electrician. Dressed identically in plaid lumberjack shirts, red suspenders, and skin-tight jeans, they filled Dumpsters with sooty lath, plaster, and urinals, sistered a few joists, and hammered up fresh drywall. They left the fire pole and installed, where the fire engine once resided, a stage with a proscenium arch, a respectable theatrical “black box,” replete with a backstage area and rest rooms (retaining an original urinal on the downstairs level, after deeming it “quaint and nostalgic”). In the area before the stage, where future audiences would sit, Mike installed a wall of mirrors and ballet barres. The firehouse was painted bright red. Peppy had a brass plaque made, thereby christening the former firehouse:

THE NORMAL FAMILY DINNER THEATRE EST. 1981

Noreen, Peppy, Mike, Ike, Ned, and Liza posed for a photograph next to the sign. It was May; Fairfax was in bloom with furry yellow acacia. They squinted into the bright, cool day, giving the camera a thumbs-up.

The family lived on the top floor. Ned and Liza slept in the room with the fire pole. Noreen had the other little bedroom in the front, separated from the kids’ room by the staircase.

Peppy claimed the master bedroom in the back, where she hung a dramatic array of hats, masks, and feather boas, arranged all of her wig heads on a long shelf, and installed a waterbed (“You sure you need a water-bed?” asked Ike, jumping up and down. “The floor is a little springy.”

“You bet your ass I want a waterbed, honey, and don’t you dare try and stop me. A girl’s got to get some pleasure between the sheets.”)

Once moved in, Peppy set her sights on hiring instructors. It was her intention to start “The Juilliard of the West.”

Mike and Ike became a part of the Normal Family routine; they loved the whole idea of the theatre, and Peppy’s amusing vulgarity promised that it would be something more rambunctious than the average community stage. Ike recruited Ned’s help, sensing that the boy was lonely and underused, and the two of them purchased and hung all the stage lighting: long fly bars on the ceiling, draped with an array of PAR can-lights and a follow spot.

Ike knew theatrical lighting well; he had been the lighting designer and engineer for a San Francisco cabaret/bar called The Brig, where the drag comedy I Hate You, Hannah Kingdom! had played for a nine-month run.

Ike enjoyed his nerdy, informational friendship with Ned, who had a bright, fifteen-year-old geek’s love for intelligent-sounding trivia.

“Hey, Mom, did you know that ‘PAR’ is an acronym for Parabolic Aluminized Reflector? Those are 1,000-watt Fresnels, see, that one is frosted, and that one is stippled, for a wide beam, and did you know that follow spots used to be actual limelights? They were like these burning jets of oxygen and hydrogen pointed at, like, this cylinder made of lime, that rotated.”

“I don’t want anything burning in here, the fire marshal will be on my ass like last year’s ski pants.”

“They don’t use limelights anymore!”

“That’s good. Don’t use them.”

Peppy had bigger things on her mind. Her plan was to start a school for teens, then cull the better talent from the classes and cast them in a full production that would run for the month of August. She put an ad in the Marin Gazette:

FAMOUS?

Spread some of your stardust Teaching kids 11–18 Actors, Singers, Dancers Needed For New Performing Arts School Full Musical Production Impending Submit photo, letter, résumé

Peppy received around fifty application letters, many with headshots; black-and-white 8 X 10 glossies featuring an idealized full-face portrait of the Actor or Actress. The more expensive versions featured a photo-collage, on the opposite side, of the actor in various “roles,” to show the actor’s “versatility.” The headshots seemed to call out for talk-balloons:

“Ladies, I may wear a leather jacket with no shirt underneath for motorcycle riding, but I can also don horn-rimmed glasses and transform into that English professor you wanted to have sex with, or throw on jeans and get a laugh out of washing my Old English sheepdog with several neighborhood four-year-olds. Am I not the Original Man?”

Or:

“Choosy Mom in curlers, executive businesslally (with eyeglass-stem thoughtfully in mouth), oversexed newscaster or just plain Pretty Lady, why, I am Every Woman to all people, especially you, handsome casting agent.”

Peppy had imagined that there were scores of semiretired Broadway, TV, and film stars studding the hills of Marin County who would leap at the opportunity to nobly pass their glitter batons. What she found were careers that had never made it past the embryo stage: (Bob Loquasto, Professional Air Guitarist; Popo the Children’s Clown—Birthdays, Gatherings, Corporate Events). Many chalked up their failures to bad luck, or a lack of “connections,” or had a story of how they’d been “ripped off” by a celebrity who had stolen and was living their rightful lives, e.g., a jittery, chain-smoking comedian who insisted his “entire schtick” had been stolen by the comic Gallagher: “I was the first guy ever to kill a watermelon with a croquet mallet, at the Holy City Zoo in ‘73, when that asshole was just a busboy.”

Some of the people Peppy met were genuinely gifted but too odd-looking, bizarre-acting, or otherwise unfit for mainstream entertainment.

Among these people, there seemed to be a pervasive sense of denial: none of them could admit that the unrolled blueprint of their lives was the green felt of a craps table. None could believe that if they worked hard, nurtured their talent, and persevered heroically despite crushing opposition, their careers in showbiz might go nowhere anyway. This is an unfairness that many artists can’t swallow, having been raised on the “Real Talent Will Win Out in the End” myth.

According to Peppy’s schedule (and the dictates of her draining bank account), the theatre camp would run for five summer weeks. Rehearsals would begin mid-July for the yet-to-be-named Musical—the more talented kids in the classes would be drafted for the production. The show would run for three weeks until the beginning of the school year. During this time. Peppy reasoned, Ned and Liza would be whipped into triple-threat musical theatre prodigies at breakneck speed by trained professionals (Ticking clock, dramatic Obstacle #1). She would zip them off to New York City, and they would audition for the High School of Performing Arts, slay the judges, and go on to live the heightened, Technicolor life of Fame. If anything happened to obstruct Peppy’s plans, these were bridges she would bulldoze when she came to them.

Peppy hired three instructors out of her twenty-some applicants:

Neville Vanderlee, an acquaintance of Mike and Ike’s—a morosely thin whippet of a man with oversize vintage 1950s suits, a platinum swoop-wedge hair-helmet wrought in mousse, and pointy yellow shoes. He would be the camp drama teacher and direct the upcoming musical. Neville had earned local praise as the director, coauthor, and star of I Hale You, Hannah Kingdom!, the production that Ike had done lights for. Neville had thought the success of that production would bring him more legitimate offers, but they never materialized.

Barbette Champlain, aging former ballerina—a regal, imperious, chain-smoking spider of a woman with long, emaciated limbs who Peppy hired to teach jazz dance, tap, and ballet; she would also be “movement coach” and choreographer for the musical. Barbette was vain and miserable, having found herself needing a job after her husband, an investment banker, traded up to a younger model of her as soon as she hit thirty-five. She was a capital-D Dancer, down to her snap-happy, osteoporosis crayon-bones, a victim of all of the steep trade-offs dancers make early on in life for the privilege of being physically superhuman while young. Her personality was whiny and condescending from getting too much slavering attention as an icy young beauty, her mind was weak and spoiled from underuse, her angry black liquid eyeliner and watertight, face-lifting hair-bun were bitterly nostalgic throwbacks to her Swan Lake days. The aging process was the first betrayal by what had been her faultlessly obedient body; her prime had been devoured like a wedding cake, and she loathed all the possible outcomes of her darkening future. But Peppy was impressed by Barbette’s legitimate résumé (all sylphide and cygnet roles that ceased abruptly in 1972) and by the enclosed black-and-white picture of her, a lithesome feral bird, walleyed and starving, arabesque-ing in better days.

Lalo Buarque was a hangdog-looking Brazilian pianist and guitarist, whose sole function, it seemed, was to keep all women within a fifty-mile radius lactating with a romantic need to save him from himself. He was swaybacked, built with long, slender muscles buttered with just the merest quarter inch of subcutaneous fat. His body was the sun-kissed color and softness of blonde calfskin, matching the dirty gold of his oily bed-head. He was preternaturally relaxed to the point of abject laziness. In his musky, faded T-shirts, handlebar mustache, sunglasses, and bleach-frayed, cock-hugging jeans, his entire visage gave the impression that undersea Venus on the half shell finally got sick of him as a lover and rolled him onto a hot beach for the next woman to frustrate herself over. Lalo sang, drank, cried, and smoked unfiltered Camels with a languid sensuality; grown women who could smell his unwashed armpits bit their knuckles and considered abandoning their families for a chance to lick the salt off his neck.

His letter:

This letter is someting I don’t write good, for to tell you my singing is good is no good, you must hear the singing also piano and mime. You can say good that the starlite on osean is beautiful, but with not see the stars or osean, its is not same thing? It is someting, ART, coming from my soul as a man with love and emotianal joy and sad and phisical not with paper and pensil. See me and I will show you someting, this is like big gift to me, I give it to you and to the childrens also.

Peppy would have thrown Lalo’s letter away had there not been a Polaroid photo enclosed of him in whiteface, shirtless, wearing shrunken cutoffs, smiling rapturously in the sun, juggling four grapefruits. Yep, topless juggling can be a wise career move, thought Peppy, moving the letter to the IN pile, deciding that Lalo could be “musical director” and possibly much, much more.

Each instructor was hired with an explicit addendum to their job description: in addition to teaching the regular students, they would also have to help Ned and Liza prepare their auditions for the High School of Performing Arts—one song, one dance, one monologue. “When I say dance, I don’t mean disco ass-wagging,” Peppy told her new employees, solemnly shaking her cigarette at them. “I want them to think the kids have some class.” Neville, Lalo, and Barbette dreaded this aspect of the job, but none of them were in any position to turn down regular employment.

Young people (girls, mostly) and their mothers arrived at the Normal Family Dinner Theatre by the tens, intrigued by the ad:

THEATRE DAY CAMP FOR TEENS 12–18

Singing, Acting, and Dancing Work with Professional Performers Fairfax Today, Broadway Tomorrow!

These were the miserable children of Marin County parents, mostly the daughters of orthodontists and real-estate agents, at their most horrible stages of adolescence: hateful and lazy creatures with noses jutting out like doorknobs, mouths dark with metal, skin and breasts erupting into sore red boils. Peppy accepted forty new students out of the forty-two that applied—she turned down a precocious five-year-old Suzuki-method violinist, and a very cheerful nineteen-year-old girl in a wheelchair who wanted to be a “sit-down comic.” Most of the boys dropped out in the first three days when they realized how outnumbered they were. What remained was a surly mass of jailbait: thirty-one pouting, slouching, eye-rolling mounds of baby fat and lip gloss between the ages of twelve to sixteen, wearing their ill-fitting bodies like detested school uniforms.

This was Liza’s first encounter with the local teens. She was thirteen, but even the older girls were threatened by her tube top, satin hot pants, flesh-colored nylons, and high, corrugated-plastic-soled platforms that made her look like the child-hooker from Taxi Driver.

There were no other disabled or malformed kids around to deflect scorn from Ned—he was presciently terrified, knowing that it was only a matter of time before the monstrously judgmental girls made his life unlivable.

But both Ned and Liza were floating down Peppy’s plans for them like paper bags on whitewater. The mania of it gave them a strange, hopeful tickle of otherness, which separated and protected them from the rest of their peers (perhaps, thought the bags, we are seaworthy!). Resistance to Peppy’s Master Plan was futile; if their mother believed they could become talented enough to go to the High School of Performing Arts in one summer, well, maybe they could.

Liza, secretly, had already taken the fantasy to its extreme.

Not only would she be admitted into the Fame school, but they would be leveled by her genius. The Fame instructors would be the Redeeming Eyes, her Ideal Audience; they alone would have the proper amount of knowledge and training to recognize the unbelievable talent she knew (as all thirteen-year-old girls know) that she alone possessed. A hush would fall as instructors in other rooms of the building came, like kings to the starlit manger, to witness her song.

Some would be jealous of her, some would weep. Agents would be telegrammed. She would radiate warmly in a bright halo of homecoming.

“I don’t know how to thank you all,” Liza would say in the mirror next to the downstairs firehouse urinal, when she didn’t think anyone was around. “I’ve worked so hard and waited so long for this moment….”

And then she would sing “Superstar” by the Carpenters, a song too sad and personal to sing for anyone but the long-lost family of people who were capable of appreciating her. She would stand in the light of a simple pinspot, wearing a strapless, white leather minidress, white high-heeled cowboy boots, and multiple concha belts slung about her hips.

Yeewur guita-a-a-ar, it sounds so sweet and clear But yew’re not really here, it’s just the radio-o

Don’t chu remember you told me you loved me bab-y Bap-BADDA DAH DAH (Liza would also sing the horn section part) Ya said you’d be comin’ back this way again, bab-y Bap-BADDA DAH DAH Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby,…(she would drop to a whisper) Oh Baby,

A crystalline tear would roll down one cheek.

I lo-o-o-ove you… I ruhlly do…

At 5:20 every evening, on the camp days, cars pulled up and lined the street in front of the theatre, waiting to get their teen talent back. The moms looked expectantly at their daughters, hoping to see them transformed into longer, stronger, thinking people who could enunciate in the king’s English, sing in medieval choral style, and move without looking like they’d been assembled out of water balloons. Day to day, they looked for a change and could see none.

At the beginning of the day, Barbette would lead the class through ballet barre and jazz-inspired floor exercises. She would sit on a tall stool, wearing ginger-colored tights, tan jazz pumps, and a brown, wraparound leotard cut high over her knobby hip bones and low down her fleshless sternum, revealing an abdomen loosening into a gelatinous vodka bulb. Barbette would bang a broomstick on the floor to the beat and berate the resentful girls, disgusted by their clunkiness.

Ned, the only boy, seemed to draw all of Barbette’s dislike of males in general.

“Ned, was that a grande battement or were you trying to shake blood into your foot before it died?”

The girls snickered derisively.

“For God’s sake, Ned, pull your bottom in, you look like you’re trying to dry it over a campfire.”

The girls tssssed and eye-rolled cruelly.

“Ned, pull in your gut, we aren’t doing ‘Dance of the Maytag Repairman.’”

Ned went crimson with shame every time but pretended not to care, and obediently danced on through the rest of the forty minutes even though a crying jag was sitting in his throat like a lump of lye. Since Barbette, an Authority Figure, was mean to Ned, it was perceived by the worthless girls as tacit license to be fiendish to the limit of their abilities. They decided Ned smelled of urine and wouldn’t stand near him. Within days, to be looked at by Ned in class was tantamount to courting disease.

“Eeeu! Ned, your gross eye is looking at me! Stop it!”

(Girls congratulating the insulter sotto voce: “Oh my God! That was so tight.”

“That was so fully harsh.” Giggles.)

Even Liza was helpless to put a stop to their unchecked viciousness; she was on the ropes already, with the crueler girls. They tortured her in the dressing room. Despite Liza’s provocative dress-style (which she was unaware was provocative), being the child of a woman who was essentially a nudist made Liza neurotically modest. She always wore thick underwear under her leotard and tights. (“What are you wearing under there, a diaper?” hissed Barbette.) She hated puberty, hated what her chest was doing, couldn’t abide pubic hair. She used the extent of her flexibility to contort in and out of her leotard in a way that would conceal her nudity from the other girls. The other girls were hip to this, and since they were already outraged by Liza’s clothing, they began to taunt her by belligerently frolicking naked in front of her.

“This is the NBC Nightly Nude with Dan Rather,” one would scream, and the others would enact squealing, raunchy ballets, kicking over Liza’s head and singing in falsetto while Liza hid her eyes. Sometimes girls would put her platforms on and pretend to hitchhike, as Liza, naked and gyrating.

“Are you going to wear that tube top to school when you go to Miwok Butt?” Desiree Baumgarten once asked Liza with a sneer in her nose, referring to Miwok Butte, the local public high school.

Liza was ashamed and furious.

“I’m not going to Miwok. I’m going to the High School of Performing Arts in New York,” Liza snapped, exiting the dressing room to a chorus of” Eeeeeeeuuuuu! I’m Liza! I’m going to the High School of Performing Arts! In my wildest! And I’m wearing a tube top every single day! Because I’m special and unique!”

You will all see me and cry, thought Liza.

Barbette saw that Liza was going to be a hard case: she knew that Peppy had a vision of Liza as a willowy little ballerina, waddling backstage at great concert halls with turned-out feet fetishistically clad in pink toe-shoes. The fact of the matter was that Liza, while she had a slim, proportional body, had no organic dance talent whatsoever. She was uncoordinated and abnormally bad at memorizing step combinations, being unable to determine “right foot” and “left foot” with any reliability. Her limbs turned inward, her hips were inflexible, and she had no sense whatsoever about what to do with her arms, which hung in a palsied fashion like the wings on a baked chicken despite Barbette’s constant abuse. But Barbette knew that Peppy would fire her if any mention were made of Liza’s lack of ability; also, it being Marin County, there had recently begun to be mention of lawsuits threatened by the parents of children who had been told such things by dance instructors. “What do you mean Mindy isn’t prima ballerina material?! How dare you limit my child by discriminating against her body-type!”

The word discrimination, Barbette mused, once meant the educated ability to determine and appreciate subtleties of taste and value—now, she sighed, it meant she was a Nazi. “It’s the French revolution,” Barbette groaned, when discussing American culture in general. “Anyone with enough refinement not to shit in their own armchairs is getting their head cut off.”

Liza, in the meantime, was only aware that she was not as good as some of the girls, but not as bad as Ned.

The teen girls were confused by Lalo; they didn’t understand the complicated flavor of his crimson adult sexuality (being Children of the Television, they only consciously responded to boys who dressed in the fashions prescribed to their demographic), but their bodies knew something was afoot with the pheromone-blizzard surrounding Lalo, and they acted squirmy around him as they sat in folding chairs around the rinky-dink upright piano.

Lalo led the girls through warm-up scales, which they mumbled through tunelessly (“Scales are so gay”). Once those were completed, Lalo boinked out remedial accompaniments of his favorite songs, all of which were invariably about sex or God (Lalo’s two big topics), e.g., “Day by Day” from Godspell, Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” and “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison; songs that sounded weird and unwholesome when sung by a chorus of nasal little girls.

The last section of the class was arranged so that a few girls, if they wanted to, could sing a solo. For the first week there were no volunteers. In lieu of any takers, Lalo would sing them one of his own compositions: swirling, watery songs of tormented passion, in Portuguese, that involved a lot of mushy pedal work. The girls would watch Lalo pour out his carnal grief with confused doll-eyes, fidgeting and discomfited by any form of emotional exuberance. Ned liked it. He could tell that Lalo was a hypersensitive person (like him) transformed into a Real Man—he was cool, and he was kind to Ned. Whenever Lalo smiled at him, Ned’s bashful blood rushed hotly into his cheeks.

“Why do none of you want to seeng?” Lalo grumbled, the second week. “You, Liza, you do this. I know you like to seeng, I hear you seeng in the battroom sometime.”

Unbeknownst to Lalo, Liza had been lying in wait for this moment—she was dying to sing, but her tenuous social position made it impossible for her to volunteer. Liza sprang to her feet and thumbed through Lalo’s Easy Rock Hits of the 70's music book and found Melissa Manchester’s “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” splayed it open on the piano, then turned to face her rude and lumpen audience.

Lalo plunked away at the opening bars, and Liza, with no hesitation, opened her throat and hollered the song at top Melissa Manchester concert-volume, wailing into the first vibratos…

“Baby cried the da-a-ay the circus came to towwwn ‘cause she dii-dn’t want thah parade to go pahs-ssing By Her…”

The girls were shocked. None of them could believe Liza’s cringe-inducing brazenness, being too repressed, swinish, and conservative themselves to ever do anything that five or more of them couldn’t do simultaneously, to avoid individual embarrassment. At first the girls flashed each other grimaces of mock horror at Liza’s voluminous performance, the power of which was blowing their bangs straight up.

But as Liza roared great, artless lungfuls of lite pop balladry at them, a curious change came over the girls; their opinions shifted, as only the opinions of teenaged girls can, in sudden, collective whiplash U-turns like a school of guppies.

“DON’T CAH-RYEEE OUT LAH-OOOOOUUUD Just keep it in-sah-eeed And Learn how to hide your Feelings FAH-LYYYYE H-I-I-I-GH and PAH-ROOOOUD And if you should fa-a-a-all Remember You almost Had it A-A-A-A-A-A-L-L-L-LLLLL…”

The girls, who began that day collectively opposed to Liza because they were all vaguely disgusted by her, whipped around in an eyeblink, and were now collectively opposed to Liza because they were all grudgingly jealous of her.

When Liza stopped and all of the girls, their lower jaws agape and dangling from their upper jaws by orthodontic rubber bands, actually dapped for her, it was the biggest Ice Castles-swirling-Olympic-moment of her life. Her eyes went watery from the bright shards of happiness shooting from her heart.

Her glory lasted about six seconds.

The heroic display cracked the code for the other girls, and they all instantly figured out how to sing, or rather, they figured why they should stop not singing, and they became ruthlessly competitive. A riot of plastic-braceleted hands went up to sing next when Liza took her seat. From that point on, Lalo’s class was all-out, pop-chanteuse-wannabe warfare.

The next day, it was apparent that mothers had been marched to the music store, checkbooks fluttering. Glitter fingernails crammed glossy sheets of new music in front of Lalo’s dog-eared fake books. Lalo had to put a sign-up list on the wall; the girls elbowed, cheated, and snaked one another in efforts to get there first. Liza was kicked away from the list like a dog from groceries. The girls fatally attempted “Memory” from Cats and “Tomorrow” from Annie; they hatcheted songs from A Chorus Line and Evita into bite-size teen emoto-chunks. As painful as many of the girls were to listen to, Lalo was overjoyed that they had all snapped awake from their dismal comas of peer pressure.

Lalo was accompanying fifteen-year-old Chantal Baumgarten and singing the Barbra Streisand/Barry Gibb duet “Guilty” when Peppy walked by the music room on her way to buy cigarettes. Witnessing Lalo and the underage woman-child trying to harmonize with each other on the wonky, pseudo-operatic lovemaking duet and nearly succeeding, Peppy was stopped cold by a uterine pull of savage yearning. Her black, French-looking “Lulu” wig became warmer as her mind began to ferment with a bacteria of plots.

While the girls respected but disliked Barbette and were perplexed by Lalo, they loved Neville; he was their favorite. They gravitated around him, gushing compliments on him. Many of the girls had crushes on him, knowing little of homosexual lifestyles (only using the words gay and fag as a means of lite derision). Neville drilled the class through drama exercises of dubious worth and improvisation games, where all the girls crusaded to impress him with their individual wit by making off-color jokes, at which he would smirk and make a “naughty, naughty” gesture with a long finger. He did nothing to discourage their carrying on in this blue vein unless one of the mothers or Peppy was around, because it made him less bored, and, he reasoned, it “loosened them up.”

Nobody could say that Neville didn’t know where his bread was buttered. He favored Liza shamelessly in class, much to the writhing envy of her classmates, and made it a point to befriend Peppy, watching old movies with her on nights when he was too broke or hungover to go out “whoring in the city.” Mike and Ike would often join them, bringing over buckets of chicken.

If Liza could no longer get any solo song action in Lalo’s class, Neville was glad to give it to her after hours. He made her watch old Streisand films and listen to Julie London, Shirley “Goldfinger” Bassey, Cher, Nancy Sinatra, and Eartha Kitt records, teaching her all the grotesque showmanship affectations he so loved.

“Raise your hand when you draw out a long note with your fingers splayed out, like you’re pulling a baseball-sized wad of gum out of the audience’s hair,” he’d crow, and Liza would do it, to Mike’s and Ike’s laughing approval.

“… and when you sing the word ‘love’ flip your hair around like you can barely stand it.”

“… and when the audience claps, pretend like you’re surprised and like they’re teasing you, then shoo them away, then throw your head back and stretch your arms out straight like you’re trying to hug them all, because you just can’t believe how much they love you.”

Mike, Ike, and Neville would pick up strange, flashy dresses for Liza that they’d find in thrift stores; she was their Barbie doll. It was funny to them to have a girl her age imitate the unintentionally self-satirizing mannerisms of aging show-women on the brink of career death.

Peppy, being a very literal-minded person, had no gift for irony and was just delighted that the boys had taken such a special interest in Liza’s burgeoning talent. It was Neville who taught Liza to say strange, showbiz things, during nights in Peppy’s living room, drunk on jugs of Gallo table wine. Noreen didn’t like it.

“They’re making Liza grow up too fast,” she’d whisper to Peppy.

Peppy was mildly worried that her daughter was becoming a “junior-high fag-hag,” but then again, the attention was wonderful, and everyone was having relatively innocent performance-fun, and it was, after all, a theatre, and they were “theatre gypsies,” in Peppy’s romantic mind. Eventually Peppy would pour herself another goblet of wine, abandon all hope of moral quality control, and shoo her mother off to bed.

The giddy nights when Liza would don a powder-blue chiffon gown, false eyelashes, and one of Peppy’s long wigs, and belt out “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves,” standing on the coffee table while Mike, Ike, and Neville laughed, smoked, drank, and deliriously yelled out new, over-the-top performance tips and absurd stage patter were some of the Normal Family’s happiest moments. Liza was dizzy with joy from the attention, absorbing all the boozy input like a sponge cake.

All of the camp classes were dominated by the talented Baumgarten sisters, Chantal and Desiree, the only children of one of the county’s richest orthodontists. The remote, demure sisters, both svelte beauties, were classically trained dancers who had recently quit the Marin Ballet Company (and its annual production of the Nutcracker, where Chantal had locked up the role of Clara two years running) in order to more seriously pursue acting (their mother, the elegant Serena Baumgarten, had found the Normal Family Dinner Theatre “wonderfully bohemian,” imagining that its low-rent qualities suggested an uncompromised devotion to pure thespian artistry). Liza was half-wild with jealousy over them; she couldn’t understand how any benevolent God could let the exquisite Baumgarten sisters exist in the same world with her, exposing Liza, by comparison, as a loud, inferior clutz and dooming any chances she had to be singled out for starring roles, even at her mom’s theatre.

Peppy, through Serena Baumgarten, arranged for Liza to meet Colette Whelan-Zedd, the local children’s casting agent for commercials, TV, and film in the area. The Whelan-Zedd casting office was in the quaint top floor of a small clapboard Victorian on one of the small commercial streets in Sausalito. Its floral chairs were cobwebbed with the sheddings of two white Persian cats.

Colette, a zaftig “Giorgio”-perfumed woman in a yellow bouclé suit, burst out to meet Peppy and Liza like a large, blousy tea rose. Then she took one look at Liza: her padded-shouldered bolero jacket, fuchsia eye shadow, aggressive lip liner, fishnet tights, black miniskirt, and white pumps that she couldn’t quite walk in, and her whole body snapped into a disproving pucker.

“Wow, if this is you at 9 a.m., I’d love to see your night look.”

“That can be arranged,” said Peppy, smiling, missing the vibrational shift.

“Roman Polanski’s not casting around here, as far as I know,” Colette cracked, her eyebrows arch and high. The comment sailed over Peppy’s wig.

“Liza’s got a great singing career ahead of her. Would you like to hear her do ‘Diamonds Are Forever'?”

Liza shifted her weight uncomfortably, looking at the headshots of thirteen-year-old girls framed on the wall. Unlike her, they were all wearing coveralls, smiling guilelessly with daisies tucked behind their ears, cuddling puppies. There was an especially precious shot of Desiree Baumgarten, her collarbones framed by a white leotard, smiling prettily at the camera, sunlight pouring through her teeth. Peppy pulled a small tape recorder out of her purse, and the speaker fritzed out Lalo’s twangy piano arrangement. Liza snapped into action, spread-eagled on the Berber rug, wailing extremely in the little room. One of the cats leapt into Colette’s lap in fear.

Colette opted not to represent Liza “at this given time” but offered to clue Peppy in to a few upcoming commercial auditions that Liza could try out for, “Just so Liza can get her feet wet.” Colette provided this service in exchange for Peppy agreeing to give “special consideration” to the Whelen-Zedd agency kids when casting productions at the theatre. Peppy didn’t bother to tell Colette that the Baumgarten sisters hardly needed this extra push.

Peppy drew the instructors together for a meeting about the full-production musical. Neville, who had been thinking a lot about a production that could best serve his own whims, suggested a musical version of Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte with Peppy playing the decrepit Bette Davis role, incorrectly assuming that Peppy would, at first, be flattered and agree, then abandon the role when she figured out it had no sex appeal, and then he’d have to step in heroically and play Charlotte himself. Neville had no idea how misguided his plan was. Peppy rejected Charlotte outright for being “camp trash” and announced that the premiere performance of the Normal Family Dinner Theatre would be “a real family wing-ding, something to give the Nutcracker a run for its money…”

They all thought for a moment, then Peppy’s face popped into brightness. “I know, I got it, it’s perfect… you ready? Brace yourselves. The Sound of Music.”

Everyone looked at Peppy, who was suddenly varnished with satisfaction, and realized she was not joking.

“May I ask who you are thinking of getting to play Maria?” asked Neville, suspecting the worst.

“Me, dummy,” Peppy said sternly. “And Lalo? You’re gonna be Captain Von Trapp!”

Peppy turned to Lalo, her eyes twinkling with anticipation at the thought of kissing him every night onstage while people clapped. Lalo smiled weakly, being hungover and sexed-out from the previous night, in which he had been voraciously entertained by two EgyptAir stewardesses. He had no idea what Peppy was talking about; her coral-painted lips were moving, but all he could hear was the warm buzz saw of sleep in his toxic blood.

Peppy was delighted by her plan, and with her own strain of pathological single-mindedness, lock-clamped on it.

“The only way you’ll get her to drop that idea is to hit her in the head with a brick,” moaned Barbette, later.

Neville secretly hoped that Peppy would realize she was not cut out for the demands of Maria and he’d have to step in, heroically, and play the Julie Andrews role himself, and kiss Lalo every night onstage while people clapped.

“ Innocent fancies can become sick delusions,” Neville said of Peppy, with a sigh, quoting his favorite line from Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte.