Читать книгу Colors Insulting to Nature - Cintra Wilson - Страница 7

(A Depressing Young-Adult Tale)

THE DAYS OF THE CAMP were drawing to a close, and the girls were beginning to get excited about auditioning for the musical. Chantal Baumgarten, everyone knew, was a shoo-in for Liesl, and Desiree for Louisa, the next sister down; Liza, because of her loud voice and nepotistic connections, would probably be cast as Brigitta. Smaller girls would play Kurt, Friedrich, Marta, and Gretl, the younger Von Trapps.

Neville, disappointed by being unable to play Maria, busied himself by inventing directorial privileges and casting himself in various walk-on roles: the Von Trapp family butler, the Mother Abbess, and Herr Zeller, a monacled and codpieced Nazi. He ran out immediately to buy his costume at the Army Surplus store so that he could admire himself in uniform.

“That thing…,” said Peppy, puzzled, pointing to the codpiece over Neville’s jodhpurs. “Isn’t that from, like, the Victorian era or something?”

“Just trust me,” said Neville, with a slitty-eyed grin.

Neville convinced Mike to play Uncle Max Detweiler.

“What the hell! I’m practically the weird gay uncle of all these kids anyway,” responded Mike.

“Aren’t we all,” said Neville.

The only actual teen boy suddenly became a viable commodity.

It was no surprise to anyone but Ned that he was drafted to play Rolfe, the Hitler-youth boy who sings “You Are Sixteen Going on Seventeen” with Liesl.

“But I’m not really a singer,” Ned pleaded with Peppy.

“You will be in a couple of weeks. Sink or swim.”

“But I’m only fifteen.”

“You’re big for your age. You think you’ve got problems? Where the hell am I going to get a wig as boring as that ‘Maria’ helmet? And all those lederhosens? We’ve all got sacrifices we have to make, around here.”

Peppy resumed scowling her way through a “Frederick’s of Hollywood” catalogue, dismissing all of Ned’s further efforts to weasel out of the role as “stage fright.”

Lalo had been living in the Royal Buccaneer, a men’s residence hotel in Corte Madera. He was convinced, after two schnapps-injected hours of Peppy billowing at him over her kitchen table about “conserving creative energy,” to move, for the duration of the production, into a windowless room behind the theatre basement that Peppy preposterously dubbed her “in-law unit.” Since there would be no rent, Lalo reasoned that he would be able to buy a lot more weed.

Lalo had never seen The Sound of Music, its twee, colorized aura of exuberant chastity disturbed him as he viewed the Betamax tape in Peppy’s living room, stoned. Liza and Ned watched with the weary faces of children accustomed to hardship as Peppy snuggled against his thigh in a pair of saffron-colored sateen pajamas, conscientiously refilling his glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream. Mike, Ike, and Neville were conspicuously not invited; Noreen was safely down the street at a Presbyterian bingo game.

During the “Lonely Goatherd” number, Lalo began to fidget from the richly hellish psychic discomfort that only a stoned man can experience when his wilting Venus Flytrap of an employer/landlord is showing him a G-rated musical with lascivious intent, her fingernails are slowly stroking his lower spine, and she is whispering hair-raising propositions in his ear, in front of her staring children.

“Oh, I don’t know, Paippy, man, these guy, the Capitan… how you call it, when singing OOOO-LEEE-EO, he has to do it? I cannot do that theeng,” Lalo would mumble, his forehead suddenly sweating like picnic cheese.

“The Captain doesn’t have to yodel, Lalo.”

“Oh.”

Lalo sunk back into the couch in defeat.

While Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews were singing starry-eyed pledgings of troth to each other, Lalo was inventing a bookshelf of excuses to get out of sleeping with Peppy, knowing that he would need an excellent lie virtually every night of his stay.

“You kids go to bed,” Peppy slurred as Lalo bit his cheek.

“It’s not even our bedtime,” Liza glowered.

“We don’t know if the Nazis win or not,” Ned pouted.

“You’ve seen it a million times. They skippety-shkip away to Switzerland. Good night!”

“Paippy, man, I gadda go too.” Lalo sighed, yawning dramatically.

“But I was hoping we could block out a couple of the songs…”

“No, no, thenks, eet’s late, I gadda get some slip.”

“Boy, you wear out early, don’t you.”

Peppy punctuated her dismay with a double-barreled nostril-blast of cigarette smoke. Lalo practically stepped through the coffee table trying to escape, knocking over the near-empty bottle of Harvey’s, and a lit candle shaped like a Siamese cat that Peppy had owned but not burned since 1979 for purposes of decor. The burning cat head indicated that the night was special to Peppy in a way that Ned and Liza assumed from experience would probably fuck up their lives, somehow—it was only a matter of degree.

On the night of the last day of the theatre camp there was a party.

Parents and brothers milled around in attendance, giving the girls something to scream and giggle over.

There was a small performance for the visiting families wherein the kids, in cheap costume top hats and white-tipped canes, sang the song “One” from A Chorus Line. Liza did the performance fuming with the acrid smoke of jealousy, because while she was shouting to the music from the far right of the stage, wearing a fake mustache, Chantal Baumgarten was dancing a solo, center stage, wearing a white dress and toe-shoes, having been cast as the “One” in question. Everyone else was reduced to the sorry status of Dancing Boy except for Desiree Baumgarten, who got to wear a black wraparound skirt and do a featured solo in high-heeled silver tap shoes.

After the performance, Liza went to congratulate Chantal and Desiree, who were standing with their movie star-like parents. “Good job, Chantal,” Liza stammered.

“Thanks.” Chantal offered a clammy handshake and smile that turned down at the edges. “You too, Desiree.”

Desiree pretended not to hear her; she was busy talking to the cutest boy in the room, a French foreign-exchange student who had come with one of the other families.

“So I guess I’ll see you guys in the production.”

“They cast you?” Chantal asked, looking genuinely shocked that anyone would want Liza for any reason. “Well I guess, I mean, I live here.”

“Oh! Right,” Chantal corrected, remembering who Liza’s mother was. She turned her back on Liza abruptly to be congratulated by some of the other parents.

Liza, in bed late that evening, decided to finally write in the pinkly padlocked unicorn diary that Ned had given her for her twelfth birthday.

Dear Diary:

Hello. I am Liza Normal, age 14.

(Anne Frank possibilities swirled through her head; she saw her diary published in twelve languages and English teachers everywhere extolling the depth of her youthful prose. “A literary power and wisdom well beyond her years,” they would say.)

Chantal Baumgarten, is the biggest bitch in the, world. If success is the-best form of revenge then I’d better get famous real fast and the only way to do it is to go to the High School of Performing Arts and really nail the audition. Also it would be great if there was TV involved. Hopefully I’ll be famous within 8 or 9 months. That would be cool. Because the Baumgartens suck so much.

I HATE CHANTAL BAUMGARTEN AND ALL

BAUMGARTENS!!!!! FOREVER!!!! FUCK. C.B.!

GOD PLEASE MAKE ME FAMOUS. Love,

Liza Normal, Singer, Dancer, Actress Lizette Normale, Liza LaNorm

Ned’s and Liza’s audition pieces, Peppy decided, would be Sound of Music— based, since she was damned if she was going to pay for more sheet music.

Ned began studying for the role of Rolfe. His acting was relatively OK, for a kid, but in his tone-deaf singing, he felt he should imitate Liza, compensating for what he lacked in ability with sheer, yowling volume.

YOU WA-AAIT LITTLE GIRL

ON AN EMPTY STAGE

FOR FATE TO TURN THE LIGHT O-ON,

“Oh shit, Naid.” Lalo would laugh, lighting another Camel short. “You sound like some donkey get his balls catch in the Nazzi war machine, man.”

The dancing section, for Ned, was the worst nightmare: twenty minutes alone with Barbette, daily. The first week, Barbette worked through clenched teeth and Ned was sullenly obedient, to the best of his abilities. On week two, Barbette could resist her natural cruelty no longer: “Ned, if you keep bouncing on your toes like that, you’re going to need a brassiere.” Ned was morbidly sensitive about his pudgy boy-mammaries. The low blow shamed him so deeply he momentarily lost his mind. Ned was slow to anger, but when it came, it was of the shrieking, breaking objects, and locking-self-in-bathroom variety.

Lalo and Ike, who were smoking a joint in Lalo’s subtheatre cave, heard his cries and ran upstairs. They soothed him through the door with tender words. Ned finally emerged twenty-five minutes later, red and damp with mortification.

“Don’t tell your mom I say, but Barbate is really mean beetch, man,” whispered Lalo.

Ned’s wet eyes looked at him gratefully. Ike gave him a manly hug around the shoulders.

“Yeah. Screw her,” he said, bringing Ned great comfort.

Peppy greeted the news with an exasperated “What now?”

She knew she couldn’t afford to let go of Barbette; she was already too enmeshed in the production. Peppy ran to Barbette to apologize for Ned’s behavior and gave her the rest of the day off.

“He’s going to have to learn how to take criticism if he wants to be an artist,” Barbette said. She shrugged, her lizardine eyes half-open.

“You’re going to need to be able to dance,” Peppy told Ned, sternly.

“I can’t do it. I hate dancing, and I hate Barbette. Look at me! I’m not the dancer type!” Anguished tears sprang into his eyes again.

“What are you going to do, give up?” Peppy heard the TV-movie of herself asking, in appropriate cliché-speak. “If you can’t pull your jazz shoes back on and march right back onto that stage and give it your everything, what kind of hero will you be when meow meow meow (ad nauseum).” What she actually said was: “Ned, nobody’s asking you to be Rudolf Nureyev, all Barbette wants to do is give you a little bit of movement—”

“I’m NOT DOING IT!!” Ned yelled, blood pounding in his neck.

“So you’re quitting, then? Is that what my son is? A quitter?” said the TV Peppy, tapping her foot, trying to get Ned angry so he’d dig in and fight while the real Peppy struggled with feelings more complex and less virtuous.

She looked her miserable son over and tried not to reveal her cold disappointment. Peppy had been so taken with her vision of the vital young danseur trapped inside Ned’s blobby adolescence, she could not forgive him for willfully sabotaging the future Christmas she envisioned wherein he was a tin soldier in the Nutcracker, with round red cheeks, and she sat proudly in the audience in a fur coat, smugly grinning at the other mothers.

Peppy left the room. Ned could hear the suction of the freezer door in the kitchen, the crack of the ice tray, the tlink of cubes bouncing in the tumbler.

“I’m throwing my tights into the alley!” Ned yelled through the wall.

“You do that,” murmured Peppy.

Ned heard pouring liquid cracking ice, Peppy swirling the glass, schlick.

He stuck his tights on a protruding nail in the wall and ripped them into cobwebs, feeling a sick hole of shame over being graceless. Who doesn’t want to dance? He cried again, soundless and exhausted, deeply suffering his incurable lack of talent.

“You’re out of the production,” Peppy yelled abruptly from the kitchen.

“Good. Thank you,” Ned yelled back, regret crushing his chest.

“And I guess you’re not auditioning for the High School of Performing Arts,” Peppy yelled back.

“I guess not,” shouted Ned, sensing for the first time, from the pain in her voice, that the whole Fame fantasy was more about Peppy than it had ever been about him or Liza.

Noreen was broilingly furious at Peppy for trying to bully Ned into being something he wasn’t. There was a loud fight, after which Noreen stormed down the street and bought a local newspaper, then got on the phone and immediately signed Ned up for the first summer course she could find at the local community college, in order to get him out of the theatre and redirect his energies toward something she knew he’d be good at.

“Glassblowing for two weeks, then welding.” Noreen was firm.

“ Glassblowing?!”

“Then welding.”

“Nobody every won a Tony Award for welding,” said Peppy.

Ned began his summer school course the very next day. He went every morning on the bus and found within a few days that he liked glassblowing a lot.

Peppy, in the meantime, went into overdrive trying to find a replacement Rolfe. She placed an ad, offering a “Featured Role for Talented Boy 16–18.”

They were auditioning a lusterless collection of weedy, sebaceous youths when Roland Spring came in.

Roland was a fifteen-year-old half-black kid, with big black nerd glasses and a pilly hand-knit stocking cap. His general dishevelment and concave posture suggested an unusually vibrant intelligence. Liza glanced at him and didn’t smile or say Hi; his shabby brown pants, shredded deck shoes, and unspecified race placed him even lower on the teen totem pole than she was (and as you well know, Reformed Teen Reader, no juvenile of low status misses an opportunity to flaunt their position at someone perceived to be even lower).

Roland came by himself, with a large plastic putty-tub and some drumsticks. Peppy, Lalo, Neville, and Barbette watched him from behind a foldout table as he took a smaller putty tub out of the larger one and sat on it.

Then he began. He wasn’t a drummer so much as a human beat-box; his act had been honed in front of movie lines all summer and involved singing, mouth noises, and agile finger gymnastics with the sticks. His head began to nod, his eyes rolled up into his head. His mouthful of large teeth began smiling hugely as he warmed up; raw joy began to spill from his heart in wild currents, filling the room, as he sang:

You got shoes! I got shoes! All God’s children got shoes!

Liza was nailed to the floor; watching Roland Spring, it felt like all of her hair was being pulled out slowly and easily, like worms from holes; her stomach caved in with something like starvation; it felt like she would simply die of deprivation if she could not eat Roland Spring’s real and unquestionable talent, gyrating like a top on its own inexhaustible power. Roland Spring’s drumming was the most singular thing Liza had ever witnessed; a world-shattering miracle under the lame, staple-gunned proscenium. Liza knew immediately that Roland Spring was rare, supreme, and without context; a zebra born in an abandoned grocery store, King Tut’s golden head suddenly materialized on a rec room ping-pong table. He was, as her mind spelled out in miles of bursting neon, the REAL THING. She couldn’t even look at him, his presence was so euphorically blinding. When he finished, Lalo gave him a standing ovation. Liza, unable to breathe, slipped out of the room.

She ran into her bedroom, locked the door, and cried in gasping, appalled sobs. She could not articulate why, but the feeling was one of resentment that she had, all her life, been deprived of something more important than food, love, or breathing. Roland Spring had shown all the frayed holes and cheapnesses in her, like direct sunlight through bad curtains. He was undeniably special in a way that impaled her, and she could feel all the cells in herself grasping hopelessly at his divine quality. In the Normal family lexicon, she had just glimpsed her Golden Stag.

“What about Roland Spring?” Liza asked later, when Peppy and the instructors were reviewing the candidates.

“Well, I don’t think the audience will buy a mulatto Hitler Youth,” scoffed Neville.

“You mean we’re not going to use him??”

“Liza has a crush on him,” Ned smiled.

“I do NOT!” she said, but she knew it was true the moment Ned said it with the clamor of a thousand anvils being dropped. She didn’t have a crush on him, she was consumed by a bonfire of love for Roland Spring that approached holy reverence.

“Maybe you let heem make some music wiz me,” Lalo suggested.

“You’re going to be onstage,” Peppy reminded him.

Over the next week, the Normal Family black box was transformed into Salzburg, Austria, in the last Golden Days of the 1930s. Roland Spring, who had called the theatre repeatedly, hoping for any part in the production, was finally assigned to the lowly position of set painter. Liza thought this an outrage, but at least he’d be around for her to stare at. She was already jealously plotting, trying to figure out how to keep him hidden from the Baumgarten sisters and, more crucially, the Baumgarten sister hidden from him. The thought of Roland Spring approving of Chantal and Desiree or God Forbid liking them was too dismal to bear. Liza’s mind roamed unbridled through romantic fantasies; she concocted three main scenarios that were almost plausible enough for her to believe that some strange turn of fate might let them happen. Liza rolled these over her brain like lumps of mental ice cream:

A. SCI-FI: The entire theatre suddenly vanishes, leaving nothing but an oily black rectangle on the charred lot. Roland and Liza, absent at the time of the theatre’s sinister demolition, are now primary suspects and forced to flee. Their love erupts over a period of weeks as they realize that they “only have each other now.” In the zenith of this fantasy, they are sleeping safely in each other’s arms on a Greyhound bus to Mexico. The plot, though unclear in Liza’s mind, involves their love being the force that keeps a nebulous paranormal evil at bay.

B. SUSPENSE: Liza is abducted by a traveling gypsy circus when they hear her singing and decide to exploit her talent for their own gain. Roland, the only witness, tracks the caravan relentlessly, trying to save her. After a whip fight with a swarthy snake charmer for whom Liza nearly develops a Patty Hearst-like affection, she is rescued. In the end, Liza and Roland make a deal with the gypsies and become hugely successful international circus stars, traveling Europe in a colorfully decorated private train-car with Lady, their trained ocelot.

C. ACTION (The favorite): Peppy is murdered. Liza emerges from her room after the funeral a changed girl; her hair seems longer, and she wears only black leather. Her sadness has given her a savage, catlike beauty. Liza purchases weaponry and embarks on a quest for Revenge. When Roland sees how dangerous the undertaking is, he insists on accompanying her. Their love germinates as Roland is more and more impressed by Liza’s fearless passion for justice and deadeye marksmanship.

In real life, Roland watched the rehearsals longingly while slathering green tempera paint onto cardboard hills, with which The Sound of Musk would eventually be “alive.” Since it was too big a job for one kid, Peppy took a suggestion from a parent who worked as a juvenile correction officer, and got her theatre chores dubbed “community service” by the local juvenile court system. This way, she gained the slave labor of two delinquents: Misty-Dawn, a girl who, the theater girls were quick to comment, dressed “like an even bigger hosebag than Liza,” and Barren, a boy from the all-black side of town who had the blankly terrible, violence-deranged eyes of a hurt shark. The girls quickly redubbed Misty-Dawn as “The Mastodon”; Barren, they decided, had a mother that couldn’t spell Baron and that’s where his troubles began.

The girls naturally assumed that Roland was also a juvenile delinquent—“the nice fuck-up,” they called him. Liza didn’t correct them; in this way she hoarded Roland’s golden identity for herself.

Nobody besides Liza seemed to notice Roland’s burning to participate onstage; Lalo, Roland’s other ardent supporter, had his own problems.

Lalo’s English, which was interpretive and impressionistic in the best of times, proved to be a hefty obstacle when it came to memorizing his part. The line “There are rooms in this house that are not to be disturbed” became, in Lalo’s sensuous Brazilian mouth (which slurred everything, as if he was oozing out each word like a wet mango pit), “There some room in dez houze to please do not desterb.”

“Orderliness and decorum” became “Odorynez and decoral.”

He and Neville began to clash on issues of personality and professionalism.

“Lalo, do you really think that Captain Von Trapp would wear a midriff T-shirt with parachute pants?”

“Iz not dress rehearzal, OK?”

“And truthfully, I wouldn’t care that you’re stoned, but would Captain Von Trapp be stoned? A very serious, retired officer of the Austrian Imperial Navy? On pot? In the thirties? I just want you to bring the character some truth.”

And so Lalo stopped coming to rehearsal stoned, and started coming drunk.

To his credit, Lalo did try to employ some method-acting techniques after reading a Marlon Brando profile in a Brazilian magazine. Near the end of the play, after the Anschluss, he would gaze at Peppy, scratch his stomach and drawl, “We gadda get oud of Owstria, man.”

“Stop calling me ‘MAN'!” screeched Peppy.

Barbette, due to her regal and condescending demeanor, was cast as the glamorous Baroness Schrader, to whom Captain Von Trapp is engaged, previous to falling in love with Maria. Peppy couldn’t stand to watch the two of them in rehearsals. When Lalo was sweet and courtly to Barbette, even in character, Peppy would stomp and fume.

“You not going to have de goberness no more,” Lalo announced magnanimously to the Von Trapp children, placing a warm arm around Barbette. “Zhou’re going to have some new Mother. We oll going to be bery hoppy.”

“All right, everybody on your feet,” Peppy shouted. “We’re having a fire drill.”

“What, now?” Barbette whined. Lalo’s teeth could be heard grinding.

“Yeah NOW.” Peppy rose from her folding chair, clapping. “Fire drill! Ding ding ding ding ding! Everybody outside! Let’s go!”

Liza’s one consolation for the fact that The Sound of Music was becoming a Baumgarten-showcase vehicle was the dorky freak-boy that was eventually cast as Rolfe. Brigham Hamburger was a six-foot, 119-pound ectomorph whose parents were Christian Evangelicals from the Tiburon seminary. Brigham had been a featured singer in his church’s “upbeat” teen group, The Jesus Christ Experience. Chantal Baumgarten took one look at Brigham—the concave chest, body odor, food-filled braces, oily, bumpy forehead, knobby white arms five inches too long for his armpit-stained shirt, and the cheap, drugstore sneakers generally worn only by people with Down’s syndrome—and pretended to be sick for the rest of the day.

She’s going to have to kiss him. Liza wriggled with ecstasy, listening to Brigham Hamburger belt out “You Are Sixteen Going on Seventeen” with all the formal, nasal resplendence of a young Jim Nabors.

As Liza kept wandering over to the set painting to try to be near Roland Spring, the Mastodon looked at Liza’s orange spandex pants and halter top and thought she saw a friend. Nobody had ever gone out of their way to befriend Liza so sweetly: “You sing real nice. I wish I could sing pretty like you,” the Mastodon shyly confessed to Liza.

“What were you in juvie for?” Liza replied, asking the one question about Misty-Dawn she had any interest in, and cringing internally at the inevitable coldness she was going to have to employ to freeze the Mastodon’s unwanted friendship like a growing wart.

The Mastodon recited her oft-told tale in a run-on sentence of select highlights:

“Me and my ex-boyfriend stole my stepdaddy’s Trans Am and took it to Oxnard and when they pulled us over there was two Walther PPKs in the trunk but they didn’t belong to us they belonged to my step-daddy but they put Thumper on trial as an adult coz he had a juvenile record for possession and I was strip-searched twice.”

“Your boyfriend’s name was Thumper?” asked Liza, when she was really wondering, You call your mom’s husband your stepdaddy?

“He’s Mexican,” said the Mastodon, by way of explanation. “Do you like REO Speedwagon?”

“No,” said Liza.

Ned, in the meantime, found he liked welding even more than glass-blowing. He loved the welding pit, the smithy, all the macho rudiments of hard matter. The chemicals and tools possessed superhero qualities—a hydrogen flame was invisible, an oxyacetylene cutting torch could slice steel —yet they were controllable, if one was careful and had the know-how. He fancied himself a Hephaestus-like figure: soot blackened, a little tragic—fatness and a lazy eye having the same alienation quotient as a clubfoot among teenagers and show people, who always demand perfect beauty from their ranks. Escape from the feathery, jealous, and fickle world of the theatre was a great relief.

Peppy had her work cut out for her as the “black sheep of the nunnery.” She obtained, from the Montgomery Ward’s catalog, some rather shapeless dresses, but she -immediately browbeat one of the sewing moms into giving them plunging, cleavage-fructuous necklines.

The wig she chose, one of the more conservative hair-mounds from the Eva Gabor Collection, was a short platinum flip with spit curls and a row of plastic daisies stapled behind the bangs. Behind the daisies, the hair boosted upward in an aggressively teased look, which required that the nun’s wimple be bobby-pinned precariously on top. It made Peppy’s head look curiously oblong, but she liked that it added considerable height.

Since Liza’s tiny role as Brigitta Von Trapp was dumb and thankless, she concentrated mainly on perfecting her High School of the Performing Arts audition piece, deciding on a bossa nova version (with Lalo’s taped accompaniment) of “Climb Every Mountain.” Barbette gave up trying to get her to do a ballet piece and decided to work with Liza’s natural movement abilities, which fell somewhere between modern jazz, dodgeball, and stripping. Neville backed out of coaching Liza, citing his numerous directorial responsibilities.

“Just sell it, honey, sell it” was his only contribution.

The play began to take shape, as plays miraculously do over a period of weeks, like a poster of chaotic squiggles that eventually reveals to the viewer, due to some trick of depth, color, and cross-eyedness, a 3D rabbit on a unicycle.

At first, Neville had been sweating bullets, trying to figure out how to make Peppy, with her cigarette-trashed voice, seem like a plausible nun.

“I can’t seem to stop singing wherever I am!” Peppy-Maria complained, in her 3 a.m. Reno rasp.

“Could you do that line, maybe, a little more falsetto?” asked Neville.

“It is what it is, fancypants,” said Peppy, irked.

Neville eventually gave up. “You can’t rebuild virginity with a vinyl repair kit.” He sighed.

Peppy had always considered herself musical, but she was actually tone-deaf and incapable of hearing musical cues such as the beginnings and endings of choruses or bridges. Forgoing melody completely, she would shout out lyrics tunelessly, and in a random tempo, but with knee-slapping, beer-stein-waving enthusiasm:

I HAVE CON-FI-DENCE IN CONFIDENCE ALONE! I HAVE CONFIDENCE IN ME-E-E!

Lalo, the first time he heard it, turned visibly pale. Neville was open-mouthed.

“You might try doing the song that same way every time, at least,” suggested Neville.

“Talent is consistent, genius is inconsistent,” argued Peppy (who heard Neville say that once). “And by the way, I think I could be juggling in this number.”

Neville spluttered. “You’re a NUN! What are you going to be juggling? Bowling pins?”

“What about crucifixes?” asked Peppy, innocently.

Neville looked at her for a moment as if the top of her skull had swung open on a metal hinge, and a metallic claw holding a live eyeball had craned out and stared at him.

“Woman, if you can juggle four crucifixes, what kind of fool director would I be if I tried to stop you?”

“Meu deus,” moaned Lalo, clutching his head.

Lalo’s heavy drinking began to infuriate Neville.

“Lalo! If you’re going to wear those horrible sandals at least don’t shuffle across the stage like you’re going to vomit all over Gretl.”

Lalo exploded, finally. “Fock you, man! You are not arteest! You are not a men! You wear the dress for nuns and these faggot theeng on you pents!” (He was referring to Neville’s controversial codpiece.)

“Lalo, if you’re too stewed to act professionally—”

“You don’t look at me!” Lalo stuck an outstretched finger threateningly close to Neville’s eye. “You are s-s-some kind flat worm that suck blood out of shit!’

“Go to bed! If you ever come to rehearsal drunk again you’re out of the production!”

“A puta que pariul”

“Heeeey!” shouted Peppy, establishing the theatre hierarchy with a mighty bray.

“You can work with this?” screeched Neville, pointing a shaky finger at Lalo, who was hiding behind Peppy, grabbing his pants-crotch and jiggling his privates toward Neville in an offensive manner.

Peppy thought the whole thing was outrageously funny.

“OK, we’ll stop for today,” she snorted, advancing to her nylon cigarette pouch.

“You guys don’t get it! This scene is a mess!”

“Quit worrying,” Peppy said, grabbing Neville’s lapel. “We’re all going to go upstairs and have a nice little drink, smoke some herb, whatever, and make nice. I know my lines.”

“He doesn’t!” Neville shrieked.

Lalo wagged a long red tongue at Neville.

“He’s a natural.” Peppy beamed, looking lovingly upon the booze-flushed Lalo as he lurched upstairs, cursing and swinging his arms at invisible gnats.

Forty-five minutes later, the three could be heard singing “My Favorite Things” with filthy lyrics in Peppy’s kitchen.

The Whelan-Zedd Agency notified Peppy of as many as two “cattle call” auditions a week. Liza would groom herself outrageously beforehand, spending hours with her crimping iron, Aqua Net, and eye shadow palette, always hoping to emerge from her room and totter down the theatre stairs at the serendipitous moment when Roland would happen to be walking by. When he saw her Olivia Newton-John-in-Grease-like transformation from Mere Young Girl to Ravishingly Sophisticated Woman, Liza knew that Roland’s jaw would drop and their lives would braid into each other’s.

The day of the OtterWorld Fun Park spokes-child audition, Liza’s stomach was throbbing with comets, because Roland, Barren, and Misty-Dawn were right in her path, stapling yards of cheap black fabric onto scrim frames. Liza, surging with the power of spangled femininity, floated down among them in a sinus-conquering mist of Jontue.

“Woah,” said Roland, looking up with a smile. “Whatcha lookin’ like that for?”

“I’m going out for a gig,” Liza said in a casual voice throatier than her own, her heart hydroelectrically feeding lightbulbs for Ferris wheels and boardwalks.

“Whatchu auditioning for? Miss Universe?” Roland teased. Barren giggled, a strange, girlish giggle.

“Oooh! You look fine” gushed the Mastodon.

“You should take some of that makeup off,” Roland told her, not unkindly. “You’re a young girl, you don’t need all that.”

“I like a girl don’t have all that shit in her hair,” Barren told Roland, staring disapprovingly at Liza’s shellacked canopy of crimp-ripples.

Roland nodded. “Yeah. All soft and blowy.”

Liza stood like the remains of a sand castle after a fatal wave, silently chastising herself for not predicting that Roland would be a fan of the Clean and Natural Look.

“Liza!” Barren called to her as she slunk away.

“What?”

“You look like Brooke Shield.”

“I do?!”

“Psych,” Barren hissed, then giggled.

“Aw, that was cold.” Misty-Dawn laughed, high-fiving Barren. Liza noticed ruefully that Misty-Dawn had instantly abandoned any solidarity with her to suck up to Barren, her new crush.

As Liza slunk into Peppy’s Honda, punctured by her failure to hypnotize Roland Spring, her feminine guile did take one victim, skewering his good Christian heart like a shish kebab. Brigham Hamburger was parking his moped and removing the white plastic football helmet his mother insisted he wear when the cosmetically amplified vision of Liza torpedoed his repressed hormones, causing that biochemical system to gush its special poisons and set off submolecular chain reactions throughout his entire nervous system. As the Honda drove away, Brigham Hamburger had to crouch down and put his head between his knees, for he felt the same palpitations, sweatiness, and dizziness that had always previously meant he was about to faint from exertion. When the blood slowly returned to his extremities, he knew he was In Love.

All of the nuns in the production ended up being men. Neville, who eschewed color-blind casting but had no problem ignoring gender, recruited several drag queens; the nuns soon had a great deal of Three Stooges—esque comedy “business”—Nun A would crouch down behind Nun B, and Nun C would shove Nun? backward over the bent body of Nun A, all with a lot of black sleeve-flapping and polite falsetto “Ooofs!” and “Eeeks!”

“This isn’t exactly what I had in mind as a religious community,” Peppy remarked with distaste.

“You ain’t exactly Julie Andrews, Miss Snuffleupagus,” countered Miss Vonda Pleasance, a six-foot-four transvestite with shaved eyebrows who had been cast as Sister Margaretha.

“Let’s just not get too koo-koo with the slapstick, ladies.”

“Ma-ria’s not an asset to the a-a-abbey,” the sarcastic men would sing.

There has never been an opening of any production without panic. The moment the ads came out in the paper, everyone writhed under the sudden knowledge that the flailing and bleating they had been doing in a half-assed manner was going to be starkly judged by an audience of strangers in just a few days. At this point, a stage production quickens and takes on unplanned flavors of its own; the latent idiosyncrasies of the cast and crew suddenly surge into growth from seedlings into prehistorically huge, steaming jungle plants—these can end up wholly obscuring the landscape of whatever text the group is abusing in the name of art.

Barbette, who wanted to focus exclusively on her role as the Beautiful Baroness (feeling sure the role would earn her a few dates with wealthy divorced fathers), was engaged in a new hell: getting Brigham Hamburger to dance was exponentially worse than trying to bully grace out of Ned; Ned, at least, had some pliable sensitivity to exploit. Brigham was intractably pious, thickheaded, and possessed of jerky, primitively bolted erector-set limbs. No amount of shame Barbette could dish out had any effect on Brigham. He would simply look down at her, smiling with the infinitely smug, pitying look of someone who knows that he is going to heaven, and you aren’t. Ned, catching sight of Barbette biting through the filter of her cigarette as Brigham made his palsied stork-hieroglyphics across the stage, felt gratified.

Liza began to rejoice in her tiny role, solely because she didn’t have to do any scenes with Brigham Hamburger. Chantal Baumgarten had been forced to buck up with a level of professionalism well beyond her years; Brigham’s breath was apparently so unbearable she had taken to buying him cartons of Velamints. “My father gets them free,” she lied.

Liza sat in the back of the theatre near Roland, Misty-Dawn, and Barren, who were hot-gluing fabric remnants as Chantal and Brigham rehearsed “You Are Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” Liza silently gloated to herself, watching Chantal squelch all of her revulsion and act madly in love with a boy who was an icon of world-class adorkery, taking his hand and flirting desperately with him while he chastely sidestepped her romantic zeal. It made Liza alive with a burning sensation of wrongful happiness.

“It would’t never happen like that,” Barren muttered as he looked on. “No girl that fine would have no problem gettin’ that motherfucker’s attention.”

Misty-Dawn’s shoulders bounced as she laughed noiselessly.

The rehearsal ended abruptly when Lalo’s accompaniment tape spit in squealing loops out of the aged reel-to-reel. Brigham turned toward Liza from the stage and gave her a terrifying metallic smile.

“Oooh. He like you,” whispered the Mastodon, who had recently taken to speaking like Barren.

“Shut up. He does not.”

“Look. He comin’ this way.”

Roland and Barren stifled snorts of hysteria and looked down at their work, so as not to interfere with the flow of whatever Brigham intended to do, now that he was advancing toward Liza, blazing with some sort of naked intention.

“He want you,” giggled the Mastodon.

“Shut up!”

“Liza?” squeaked Brigham, with a frightfully assured look on his face. “Would you come outside with me for a second, please?”

“Why?” asked Liza, horrified.

“I’ve got something for you.”

Roland, Misty-Dawn, and Barren were barely containing geysers of hysteria.

“I don’t want to go outside.”

“Just come with me a minute. I think you might like it.”

“Don’t leave the man with his ass hangin’ out in the air, shit,” encouraged Barren.

Liza shot a look of fury at Barren, who widened his eyes and gave a dramatic, deadpan shrug.

“I’ll come outside with you for ten seconds, but that’s all.”

“That’s all I need,” Brigham intoned with an excess of courtly confidence.

Liza shuffled out the door with Brigham, who seemed to be seven feet tall at that moment, such was his enthusiasm. As soon as they were on the other side of the doorjamb, Liza heard the set builders splutter into floor-beating hilarity.

“I noticed you leaving in the car the other day, and I thought to myself, wow, who is that beautiful lady? And then I was like, no way, that’s Liza,” Brigham confessed with the pride of someone convinced that what they’re saying is exactly what the listener is dying to hear.

“Thanks,” said Liza flatly, trying to come up with her escape route.

“I got you this.” Brigham reached into his backpack and pulled out a small porcelain teddy bear in an angel costume, the stand of which read Bless You! in cursive.

“Oh, God, Brigham,” Liza moaned, trying to impart to him in the least hurtful way that he was an Olympic-level dork, light-years beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings of purebred, championship dorkhood, but that she did not hate him for it.

“I know you’re hurting,” Brigham began emotionally, taking hold of Liza’s shoulder. “Your mother… I know this is going to sound weird to you, but her vanity and lust are bringing you down, but you deserve better—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Brigham,” Liza spat out, beginning to hate him.

“No, listen, I’m totally sincere, I wouldn’t be asking you to go with me if I didn’t think that you were the type of girl I’d want to marry someday….”

Liza was seized by the image of herself in a white bridal gown, age eighteen, advancing down the aisle of an ugly modern church to organ music, toward an unthinkably terrifying future as Mrs. Liza Hamburger. She aggressively pushed from her mind the nightmare of Brigham’s trembling virgin dork-fingers exploring her nudity on their wedding night.

“I’m not taking this,” said Liza, handing the bear back to Brigham as if it was teeming with bacteria.

Brigham looked shocked.

“But I got it for you.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want it. Take it,” Liza said, holding the diabetically cute thing out at arm’s length.

“Are you gonna go with me?” Brigham kept at her, unable to realize he was being shot down, such was his faith in prayer.

“No!”

“Wait, wait, wait, let’s talk about it. I don’t think you know what I mean when I say ‘go'—”

“I don’t care what you mean when you say ‘go,’ “Liza stammered, suddenly aware that Misty-Dawn and Barren were watching them with glowing eyes through the slits in a rotten clapboard.

“Just get to know me—”

“I don’t want to know you! Take this goddamn thing!” The noxious figurine began to embody all of the cooties of a nude Brigham Hamburger. “TAKE IT!”

“… come to my church with me, and I’ll….”

Liza wound up and slammed the china animal with great force onto the sidewalk, where it crashed satisfyingly at their feet into several dozen shards, one of which ricocheted off the concrete and lodged itself in Brigham Hamburger’s right eye.

Peppy, alarmed by the sounds of pain, hustled her fleshy legs past the painting crew as fast as she could motor them; Barren was flat on his back, laughing so hard his limbs were twitching like a bug.

“Yuk it up, Barren. That act will get you a one-way bus fare back to junior jail.”

“Bitch,” Barren whispered, his face downshifting to its usual wrath.

Peppy looked at Liza with eyes of purest freon as they drove the sobbing Brigham to the emergency room.

“Hold his hand,” Peppy hissed with layers of threat.

“I don’t want to,” muttered Liza.

“Jesus let me not be blind in this eye,” gasped Brigham.

Liza felt the stone-deep feeling of time, in a horrible circumstance, becoming composed of heavy individual minutes that one must chain-drag over one’s shoulder alone. She noticed, out of the car window, something darkly ironic that would tattoo itself on her mind forever: an aged and peeling mural from a defunct drive-thru of an anthropomorphic hamburger with a talk-balloon that said, in letters nearly too faint to read, “BITE ME!”

Brigham’s punctured cornea meant that Roland Spring was immediately installed as Rolfe, to the overwhelming approval of everyone but Liza. Chantal’s portrayal of Liesl’s puppy love became thrillingly believable. “They’ve got some chemistry, those kids,” chuckled Peppy, watching Roland make Chantal blush.

Barbette pronounced Roland “a physical genius” and rechoreographed the number into an adorable modern pas de deux. Roland turned out to have the silky, relaxed vocal quality of a young Nat King Cole; “You Are Sixteen Going on Seventeen” became the high point of the entire production.

Liza’s intestines twisted into sausage links. Her worst fears had come to pass; the blood was on her hands. This turn of events in no way resembled her wish-mantra, in which Chantal and Desiree Baumgarten both broke legs in a car wreck (Desiree being Chantal’s natural understudy, by birthright) and Liza took over the role of Liesl. As the final cherry-on-the-insult, Liza was forced to send a get well card to Brigham.

Heartfeft Wishes… for a Healthful Recovery

“You bet your ass you’re going to be sweet to that boy. His people could sue our pants off. Good thing they’re Jesus freaks or we’d be living in a bush already,” Peppy said irritably while cutting Maria’s wedding gown so that the long skirt could, via Velero, tear away to a minidress (a last-minute suggestion of one of the mustachioed nuns).

And suddenly, like a beast in a tree, it pounced upon everyone:

OPENING NIGHT!

A spirit of high frenzy possessed The Normal Family Dinner Theatre; trembling hands drew on liquid eyeliner, dogs barked, things fell down and were hurriedly righted. Hems were stapled, furniture duct-taped. Scenes were cut at the last minute (the “Lonely Goatherd” number, among them—Peppy’s take on yodeling evoking crude disembowelments to the human ear), eleventh-hour decisions were made by any available human, and projects were carried out unsupervised.

In answer to the main question that ticket buyers had been asking over the phone, a cardboard sign with adhesive vinyl lettering was thumb-tacked to the door reading:

TO NIGHT THERE WIL L BE NO DINNE R SERVED AT THE NORMAL FA MILY DINNER THEA TRE S Or r Y FOR THe INCOnVENAinCE

(The sign would never be removed.)

“We’ll give them popcorn and beer,” Peppy reasoned, that particular menu being dinner enough for her, most of the time. Neville realized that there was some wisdom in filling a hungry audience with booze.

Everyone at the theatre was punchy and sleep deprived from the ten-hour cue-to-cue two nights earlier, during which Ike and Ned designed the lighting.

Ned was exhilarated by the emotional power of lights—a blue wash plunged the stage into mystery and spookiness, pink brought actors vigor and beauty, green inflicted disease, a red gel created heat and sin. It was perspective-altering, and Godlike.

The doors were opened. Seats filled with parents and a few denizens of the local press. The apiarylike noise, to the actors, was nerve-racking but euphoric. Girls kept peeking into the audience to glimpse how many people there were; Misty-Dawn saw Brigham Hamburger arrive in an eyepatch.

“Look,” she whispered to Liza, beckoning her over to peer through a hole in the backdrop. “There go your boyfriend.”

“Shut up!” Liza yelled through gritted teeth.

Backstage, everyone wished each other Broken Legs. Peppy glued on two sets of false eyelashes, donned fishnet tights, and rouged her cleavage. Neville and the nuns did bleating vocal warm-ups. Chantal and Desiree Baumgarten arrived at the theatre with their hair professionally salon-curled into perfect ringlets, which gave them otherworldly, nineteenth-century naiad looks.

Liza was so jealous she attacked the crimping iron with renewed fervor and made herself up, despite her role as an eleven-year-old, utilizing the full weight of Peppy’s makeup box.

“I didn’t know children wore aquamarine glitter eye shadow in prewar Austria,” Desiree Baumgarten sniffed.

“Now you know,” Liza spat.

Roland was wearing his lederhosen in the hall, joking with Barren and the Mastodon, who were teasing him for resembling an “alpine faggot.” Liza walked up under a patio umbrella of kinked hair.

“You don’t look like a kid!” squealed Misty-Dawn.

“This is how they told me to do it,” Liza lied. “Break a leg, Roland,” she offered, smiling bravely with her shiny purple mouth.

“Thank you,” he said, his teeth dazzling. “You too.”

“You’re not wearing your glasses,” Liza gasped, noticing that Roland’s eyes were an unlikely greenish color, adding extra torture to her longing.

“I can’t see shit, either. I’m probably going to fall on my ass.”

“They have to airlift you to Faggot Mountain Hospital,” said Barren, laughing.

At that moment, Ned walked by carrying a mostly dead ficus tree (to add to the “hills”) and a large flashlight, by which he and Ike would read their lighting cues.

“What are you juvenile delinquents doing?” joked Ned with a coplike shout, shining the light on Roland.

Liza saw the flashlight’s beam illuminate Roland Spring with the ficus tree casting a shadow on the wall behind his head—for a heart-stopping split second, Roland had a perfect set of radiant antlers.

Backstage, everyone held their breath, preparing to plunge into the hallucinatory waters of focused group attention. The music came on (from a new reel-to-reel machine, purchased by Noreen with her meager pension check as an opening-night gift, because she couldn’t stand the idea of the old one cacking out midnumber), the lights came up, and the stage effloresced into bright life. The chords swelled, and Peppy jogged out onstage, wig bouncing, breasts heaving. The eyes of the audience grew wide. Husbands and wives nudged each other.

THE HI-l-I-ILLS ARE ALI-I-IVE! WITH THE SOUND OF MU-U-U-USIC!

Thighs were grabbed in an anguish of vicarious embarrassment.

(Peppy’s slummocky nature simply did not lend itself to the sexually astringent role of Maria, a role more suited to actresses like Julie Andrews or Sandy Duncan, whose panties naturally seemed to be full of Borax.)

When the enormous nuns appeared onstage, the audience of parents began to get the idea that the show was not the standard young-adult vehicle they thought it would be. Nonetheless, they were Marin County-ites and thus sophisticated (or so they told themselves) when it came to a little harmless decadence.

How do you find a word that means Ma-riaaaa A flippety gibbet, a willow-o'-the-wisp, a dooooum,

… the nun-boys trilled.

“I ‘m afraid you don’t look at all like a sea captain, sir,” Peppy yelled when she had arrived at the Von Trapp family mansion. Snickering was heard in the audience because, in fact, he didn’t. Nobody had gotten Lalo the proper shoes, so he wore rubber flip-flops; he still had his handlebar mustache and shoulder-length blond hair, his jacket was buttoned incorrectly. Plus, he was visibly drunk.

“And I ‘m afray zhou don’t look bery mush like a goberness.” A wave of giggles escaped from Neville’s friends, because indeed, Peppy’s Maria looked like the kind of governess who would get the children really loaded and let them watch late-night softcore on cable.

The Baroness Schrader was supposed to be a dazzling creature; a stylish Viennese beauty. Ike looked the other way while Ned designed her lighting—he backlit and underlit Barbette in the starkest way possible, creating a Bride of Frankenstein—type effect. When Barbette delivered one of the Baroness’s sarcastic lines, the audience, feeling thus cued, actually hissed at her. Barbette, unaware she was a villain, was shocked to the roots. Her voice cracked, her hands shook. She looked old, frightened, and ghastly.

Ned and Ike high-fived each other silently in the lighting booth, but Ned vowed to himself that he would change the lights the next night; his revenge had been too easy and too damning. It took so little to reveal her pitiable frailty, Ned couldn’t believe that seconds previously, he had thought Barbette such a powerful foe.

Mike’s star turn as Max Detweiler, with pencil-thin mustache and Tyrolean hat, added a much-needed anchor of intelligence and relative maturity: “I must explore this territory,” he exclaimed, happily. “Somewhere, a hungry little singing group is waiting for Max Detweiler to pluck it out of obscurity and make it famous at the Salzburg Folk Festival.”

(This, Critical Reader, is one of the criminal bits of logic that corrupts mankind’s expectations. How simply Max throws around the idea of bestowing Fame upon those who charm him. How easily these drab, voiceless children will leapfrog into being prodigy songbirds, capable of bursting into spontaneous, complex, Mills Brothers-style harmonies. The children are passively led into instant celebrity. This is the necrotic root of the prevailing dead-end dream: If only the right mentors will produce me, direct me, refine me, and discover me! Many a starry-eyed girl or boy would climb into the back of a mysterious big black car for the promise of adequate pop “coaching,” because such wishful egoporn has always been tossed into screenplays without caution.)

Roland sang, like sweet coffee:

Your life little girl Is an empty page That men will want to write on….

Women swooned, men admired him.

I’m GLAD to GO-O-O, I cannot tell a LIE-I…

… bellowed Liza in her power-voice during her one big solo moment, as audience members wondered why she was wearing high Lucite heels with her nautical infant dress.

I flit, I float I flick-I-flee-I fly-?…

… purred Desiree Baumgarten, adding a ballet stag-leap to her pretty exit as Liza clomped offstage.

“You were blushing in his arms tonight,” remarked the Baroness, after Maria and Von Trapp are caught doing an Austrian folk dance.

(Hisss, went the audience.)

“I was?!” screamed Peppy, grabbing her cheeks.

(Cackles.)

“Goodbye Maria,” sneered Baroness Barbette, “I’m sure you’ll make a very… fine nun.”

(Howls of mirth.)

Maria’s return to the abbey was the cue for Neville’s big scene as Mother Abbess, during which he sang “Climb Every Mountain” in an unctuous pseudo-operatic falsetto. Audience members found themselves checking the program:

Neville Vanderleeg (Mother Abbess, Herr Zeller, Franz the Butler) is the last of the living castrati tenors, his testicles having been removed in the service of the Royal Latvian Boys’ Choir at the age of nine. His precious instrument has since been destroyed by cigarettes.

After marching down the aisle to “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria (Reprise),” Peppy ascended to the altar (a podium draped in gold lamé) and tore her wedding dress down to a white micromini. Gasps were audible. As she began to juggle four sizable wooden crucifixes, the audience sat in goggle-eyed shock. Several parents pondered lawsuits, others considered storming the backstage and rescuing their teens from Act II.

Brigham Hamburger stood and exited, nostrils flaring in outrage.

Peppy threw a wild cross, tripped over her dropped skirt, and sprawled onto her stomach, inadvertently exposing the hygienic cotton crotch of her nylons to the aghast spectators as crucifixes bounced and smacked to the floor.

Ned and Ike wisely plunged the room into total blackout.

~INTERMISSION~

(“This is the best thing Neville’s ever done! It just pees all over everything sacred!”)

(“Should I go backstage and get Tiffany?”)

(“Can you believe that all they have is generic beer?”)

Somehow, the parents were too intimidated by the magical “Fourth Wall” to disrupt the proceedings, and the rest of the show came off without incident. Perhaps, for the actors, it was muscle memory that brought it off. More likely, it was the well-known story itself that insisted on being told, as it was lodged midsneeze in everyone’s mind at that point.

Lalo, who had been fortifying himself throughout the night with a bottle of Bacardi 151, had worked up a lather of self-pity. It was with raw feeling that he delivered the Dramatic Pivot Point, when Georg Von Trapp is “requested,” via telegram, to join the Nazi Navy: “To refuse them would be fatal for all of us. And joining them would be unthinkable,” goes the line.

“Refuse these is to be fate for uz… to join the… unzirgismol,” Lalo moaned, dropping the telegram to the floor, plashing large tears to the stage as Peppy vigorously stroked his chest to comfort him.

He was in such an ecstasy of grief by the time the Von Trapps performed at the Salzburg Folk Festival that before singing “Edelweiss,” Lalo struck a few aggressive gypsy chords and emitted a wild flamenco cry like a murderous orgasm. Several of the mothers in the audience felt a dizzying larceny in their hearts as they crossed their legs. A few imagined a mirrored-ceiling’s eye-view of their fingernails plunging into Lalo’s naked buttocks. Several of the men liked it too.

The show ended, and the audience clapped, breaking up the dream-time and returning all participants to Fairfax, CA.

As Chantal and Roland held hands and advanced downstage for their curtain call, the applause explosively quadrupled in volume. The whistles and whooooh shot like poisoned blow darts through Liza, making her wonder: Why can’t I stand here in a prom dress, covered with blood, and burn this place down with my mind?

Her throat filled with the Drano-sensation of repressed sobbing. As she watched Chantal Baumgarten casually hijack every life dream she possessed, Liza got the overwhelming impression that the Gods that ran this Popsicle stand of a fucked-up universe just might be trying to tell her something. A message.

And that message was: “Ha ha ha ha ha. Psych.”

The parents collected their children quickly afterward, not wanting to let them steep in the weird, electric aftermath of such a depraved opening night—everyone was light-drunk and giddy with the ancient powers of stage energy. A few of the kids, bewildered by the audience response, felt like they were in trouble for something they didn’t understand; others felt a vague, blurry sense of having been morally tarnished by their affiliation with something they now understood to be somewhat raunchy. Kids are naturally prudish, and a few of them cried that night. Their mothers would have long discussions with them the next morning about how “The Show Must Go On,” all the while having whispered phone conversations with other mothers discussing what, if anything, should be done.

The Baumgartens gave Roland a ride to the bus station in their black Mercedes. Liza watched, waving goodbye as they drove away, their laughing, beautiful heads elegantly framed by the chrome windows of the shiny black diplomat car, the luxury of which seemed to transport Roland to another, better world as surely as a spaceship.

As the taillights glided away, Liza caught her own reflection in the window of a parked Dodge Omni. Under the streetlights, she realized she looked ridiculously trashy; in her quest to look more glamorous, she had inadvertently made herself into a kind of underage sex clown. She shuddered with self-loathing.

Peppy and Neville were extremely hopeful. They went out drinking with Neville’s friends after the show while Ned, Ike, and Noreen cleaned the theatre and replaced all the props.

The next day’s afternoon paper yielded their first and only review (page eight of the Weekend section of the Marin Gazette, no photo):

‘SOUND’ OF TITTERS AT ‘NORMAL’ THEATRE Cabaret Review by Pat Morgenstern

In a production that might be obscene if it were not so clearly inept, the recently opened Normal Family Dinner Theatre has unintentionally shown Fairfax what Rogers and Hammerstein’s ‘Sound of Music’ would look like if it were performed by criminally insane prison inmates under the direction of the Marquis de Sade.

(That was a pull-quote that Neville would put at the top of his résumé for years to come.)

In the words of Susan Sontag, “Camp taste… relishes awkward intensities of character, finds success in certain passionate failures.” This failure might be considered a little too passionate, by some, but it is unquestionably entertaining, if for all the wrong reasons.

“ ‘Unquestionably Entertaining’ is what we’ll put on the posters,” said Peppy.

Director Neville Vanderlee (who also plays a screamingly funny Mother Abbess) seems to be exploiting the inexperience of his ‘actors’ to facilitate his own twisted prank. Maria, played by Peppy Normal, would be more appropriate covered with boiled eggs in a John Waters movie. One of the Von Trapp children looks as if she should be soliciting tourists in Times Square. Lalo Buarque’s Captain Von Trapp seems to have fallen prey to the alcoholism that has tarnished many a naval career—method acting? I doubt it.

“Who the hell is this ‘Pat Morgenstern'? I’m gonna cut his ears off!” shouted Peppy.” ‘Screamingly Funny’ is what we’ll put on the posters,” glowed Neville.

The sole redeeming element of the show was the charming “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” number, played by the poised and luminous Chantal Baumgarten (no stranger to the Marin stage—she was a favorite Clara in Marin Ballet’s ‘Nutcracker') and the wildly talented Roland Spring, whose name we will surely see in lights someday… just as soon as he gets out of this tawdry production.

On night number two, as everyone nervously prepared themselves for some unforeseen doom (there had been phone calls; a “meeting” was scheduled for that Monday with a group of parents—an ugly crackdown was anticipated), the cast was amazed and delighted to see that fifteen minutes before the box office opened, there was a thick queue so long it wrapped around the corner, composed primarily of gay men and college students, all carbonating with glee and anticipation. Several of the men were dressed like Peppy.

“It’s a smash hit!” exclaimed Peppy, unable to believe her eyes.

“You did this,” Neville lied, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

Liza had an entirely different makeup scheme the second night—she put her hair into two tight braids, eschewed eye makeup entirely, and wore sensible shoes; she looked the part. Neville was disappointed. “No, no! Go back into the dressing room and do that fabulous Francesco Scavullo disco nightmare thing you did last night!” Liza sadly complied.

Neville quickly located all of the possible innuendi in the script and instructed his actors, as they prepared, to “punch ‘em up.” That night, lines that weren’t supposed to be funny had a new sleazy tinge to them:

Nun #1: “Maria is missing from the abbey again.”

Nun #2: “Have you checked the barn? You know how much she loves the animals.”

The Peppys in the audience made barnyard noises, baaaahing and oinking enthusiastically.

When Neville, as Herr Zeller the Nazi, came onstage with a codpiece twice as large as it had been the previous night, shaped like a giant erect fang, the parents in the audience who had any doubt whether or not to shut down the production were firmly convinced.

Lalo was furious to be, what he considered in his Latin mind, the laughingstock of the area homosexuals. After the intermission, he refused to come out of his dressing room.

Ned was dispatched to plead with him; he could hear Lalo angrily mumbling to himself as he knocked on the door.

When Lalo finally kicked the door open, Ned was hit by a rolling cumulus cloud of pot smoke; the smell of toasted skunk wafted into the audience and alarmed several parents who were intimately familiar with the aroma.

Lalo was stripped to the waist and had painted large, black, Uncle Fester—like circles around his eyes with a stick of greasepaint. He was staring hauntedly at himself in the dressing-room mirror and mashing a black, Manson Family X in the middle of his forehead. Ned was frightened.

“You have to get dressed and get onstage, Lalo, please,” he begged.

Hearing Lalo’s cue, Ned threw the captain’s jacket over Lalo’s shoulders and hung a pair of sunglasses on his face, concealing the blackened eyes but not the X. There was no time to button the jacket; he wrestled Lalo out of the dressing room. Ned noticed as he shoved Lalo onstage, where he lurched and staggered in his war paint like a dying Zulu, that there was a bullwhip in his back pocket (a gift Neville had received the previous night). Lalo glared at the audience and hollered a spit-drenched hail of Portuguese invective at them; some laughed nervously.

Forty minutes beforehand, behind the theatre in the backyard, Love had flourished. Misty-Dawn and Barren, who had been growing closer over the last three weeks, were making out with famished teen intensity, pawing at each other’s bodies in a spray of hormonal friction-sparks.

“Let’s go upstairs,” panted Barren.

“Where?” whispered the Mastodon.

“Peppy bedroom.” He smiled.

The wrongness of the idea felt vastly erotic. While the backstage was swirling with chaos, they snuck up the stairs and stole through the door to Peppy’s room. The waterbed and its poly-satin sheets stretched fantastically before them like the moonlit Nile.

“I think we bein’ watched,” giggled the Mastodon, referring to the dozens of staring wig-heads as she struggled out of her airtight pants.

During his rant, Lalo glimpsed Neville’s blurry black-and-white nun form creeping onstage from the wings.

“Bem chato, you faggo bidje mozsherfugge,” Lalo growled, shoving Peppy away from him. He grabbed the bullwhip, let out a fearsome battle cry, and began trying to crack it at Neville; the tail flapped around in harmless loops. Everyone watching made a mental note: the best weapon for a really fucked-up man to have is a bullwhip.

Neville’s brawny convent shuffled onstage, trying to gently corral Lalo like a spooked horse. Ike, unsure of what else to do, dimmed the other lights and bewildered Liza by suddenly illuminating her in a full spot. Liza gaped for a moment in starkest terror, thinking she might have forgotten a major cue. The bossa nova accompaniment for her High School of Performing Arts audition began to blare over the main speakers.

Oh God. This can’t be happening.

“Liza! DO IT!” Neville hissed in his loudest whisper, shielding himself behind the wide shoulders of Sister Margaretha.

In a daze, Liza walked to center stage. She took a deep breath, and unleashed her loudest, biggest, most vibrato-heavy voice…

CLI-I-I-I-IMB EV-ERY MOUNTAI-I-I-N FO-R-R-RD EV-ERY STREEEEEAM… FO-LLLLOW EV-ERY RAINBOOOOOW ‘TILLLYOU FIND YOUR DREEEEAM…

Her volume nearly drowned out the “Ooofs!” and whomps of bodies hitting the hollow wooden stage behind her. The audience was baffled. Liza began fearlessly ripping into the number with a confidence and majesty she only prayed she could summon for the audition.

A DREEEAM THAT WILL NEEEEEEED ALL THE LOVE YOU CAN GI-I-I-I-I-IVE…. YEAH! EVERY DAY OF YOUR LI-I-I-I-I-IFE FORAS LONG AS YOU LI-I-I-I-I-IVE EVERYBODY!

Liza shimmied her shoulders, stalking the front of the stage. A surge of happiness engulfed her when the audience began singing exuberantly along with her:

CLI-I-I-I-IMB EV-ERY MOUNTAI-I-I-N! FO-R-R-RD EV-ERY STREEEEEAM!! FO-LLLOW EV-ERY RAINB…………

Everyone stopped as a great spinal FFFFZZZZZSSSST and spray of sparks made all of the lights and music electrically short out, plunging the room into total darkness as a cascade of warm, plastic-scented water began sluicing down from the ceiling, into the lighting booth and onto the petrified audience.

Queen-size waterbeds contain approximately 160 gallons of water; Barren and Misty-Dawn were amazed, in their postcoital exuberance, at the sheer amount of liquid they could force out of the long slits that Barren had gleefully carved into the mattress with a kitchen knife, as revenge for his various grievances against Peppy.

When the fire trucks came, Liza wandered outside, her makeup in streaky lines down her cheeks. Misty-Dawn was being pointedly asked by two cops as to the whereabouts of Barren, who had bolted into the night. Von Trapp children stood on the sidewalk with their coats over their shoulders and expressionless, traumatized faces as their parents hollered at Peppy, who looked small and meek. Ned appeared next to Liza; she grabbed his elbow and held it.

Chantal and Desiree had collected all of their belongings from the backstage by flashlight and were loading them into their parents’ car. Roland Spring jogged out of the theatre in his street clothes, past Liza, to hug the sisters. Liza watched as Mr. Baumgarten held Roland warmly by the shoulder and presented him with his business card.

“Let’s say goodbye,” Ned said, nudging Liza. “We probably won’t see them again.”

Liza began to cry.

Ned shuffled up to the Baumgarten contingent and began shaking their hands.

Liza waved goodbye at them, unable to move from her spot. Chantal and Desiree barely glanced at her; their parents shot Liza looks of pity.

Ned returned a minute later, bringing Roland Spring with him. Liza thought she might swallow her tongue.

“Hey, you brought the house down!” Roland teased gently, making Liza cough through snotty tears.

“Here,” he said, producing a folded handkerchief from his pants pocket. “I didn’t use it, it’s clean.”

Liza accepted it, smearing it with her runny face. “Thanks,” Liza forced out, wetly.

“You shouldn’t sing so loud, next time. You could have killed everyone,” Roland joked. Liza tried to laugh.

“Well… I guess I’ll see you around,” Roland said, sticking out his hand.

Liza flung her arms around his neck and clung to him direly. “Woah!” Roland exclaimed, suddenly supporting her whole weight. “You’re amazing,” Liza choked, wishing she could chain herself to Roland Spring forever.

Roland gently pried her off of his chest. “Thanks. You too, Liza. You’re… truly unique.”

Liza stared at him, her eyes bleeding moons of wretched love.

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

And Roland Spring, Golden Stag nonpareil, sprang past the twirling red lights and away from the Normal Family Dinner Theatre.

“You told him I liked him, didn’t you?” Liza cried, turning viciously on Ned.

Ned stared at the rubber toe guards on the front of his sneakers. The thought of never seeing Roland again was molten torment. Liza ran into the backyard and grieved in hard, hyperventilating sobs, clutching the stained hanky, its sweet laundered Roland-smell cracking her heart in half.

•AFTERMATH •

Two weeks later, Peppy was still “sleeping it off.” She rarely emerged from her room; Noreen brought in bowls of canned soup. She refused contact with everyone, even Mike and Ike, who offered again and again to work on the electrical box and restore basic light to the house. Since “the disaster,” the family had been living by candlelight, cooking on the gas burner and keeping things cold in a Styrofoam cooler.

Lalo had been picked up by cops that fateful night and put in the drunk tank; it was discovered, while processing him, that he’d been in the country illegally for the last six months. He was deported back to São Paulo.

Neville was gone—he and his nuns became a cabaret show in the city entitled Neville on a Sunday. Barbette quit; she wouldn’t be associated with what was now considered, around town, to be the lowbrow and hazardous nature of the theatre. Liza practiced her audition routine in front of the mirror, with no accompaniment, alone in the dark theatre on the sticky floor.

Liza was watching Brady Bunch reruns on the TV in a local electronics store when the ad for the OtterWorld Fun Park came on. Desiree Baumgarten was laughing, holding a handful of Mylar balloons. “Come join the fun!” she beckoned, smiling at Liza in a boundlessly friendly way she never had in real life. Liza left the store and slowly walked home, feeling like a mugger had just taken her lungs at gunpoint.

The school year was quickly approaching. Liza knocked on Peppy’s door.

“Mom?”

Silence.

“Mom?” More knocking.

“ Whaaaaat?!”

“Can I come in?”

“Do you have to?”

Liza opened the door. The place was a shambles—Noreen had been picking up the food trays, but clothes and wigs lay everywhere in dark piles, like melted witches. Peppy had been sleeping on a heap of blankets inside the empty waterbed frame ever since her bed was “murdered.” Liza sat on the edge of the frame and looked down at her. A brimming ashtray sat near Peppy’s head.

“Did you get the tickets yet?”

“What tickets?”

“For New York. For my audition. For the High School of Performing Arts.”

Peppy started laughing an awful, cracked laugh. Then she started coughing. Then she lit a cigarette.

“Oh. That.”

“Yeah that,” said Liza, her stomach filling with hot tar.

“Ah, Liza… you’re too much, baby. You’re a real killer.”

“What do you mean?” Liza asked, knowing but refusing to know.

“Look around you, kid.” Peppy gestured to the dark walls with her cigarette. “What more could you ask in the way of theatre experience?” Bitter, sick laughing again.

“Where am I supposed to go to school?!”

“You and Ned will go to that school over there, whatever it is… you know.”

“Miwok Butte?! Oh, GOD! I can’t go to MIWOK!!”

“Oh, come on, it’s just a high school. How bad can it be? Maybe next year, we’ll get that New York thing together.”

“I hate you,” Liza curdled, looking down at the dark, polluted trench her mother was coiled in and having a vivid idea of exactly how bad high school could be.

“Yep, I suppose you do.”

Liza felt a rising disgust; the smell of unlaundered nylon, old cigarette butts, and beer-marinated carpet made her suddenly gag. She ran from the room.

“Close the door,” Peppy grunted from her floor-nest.

It slammed, leaving Peppy in the dark.

A hole the size of a garbage-can lid had just been blown out, below Liza’s rib cage. She wandered zombielike onto to the abandoned stage. The late, cold afternoon gloom tinted the mess a dead blue, making it look even filthier. Liza shivered. An intact can of generic beer lay on its side near a pile of waterlogged and mildewing curtains; Liza opened it and took a sip. It was warmer than she was.

“Liza?”

Ned’s voice came from what used to be the lighting booth.

“What?!” She expected her brother to hassle her about the beer.

“You’re perfect there. Stand up.”

“Why?”

“Just stand up!”

“Why?” Liza rose to her feet. “Are you going to throw something at me?”

She heard a pouf and found herself in a blinding flood of sharp, greenish white light, the color of glow-in-the-dark bones on Halloween skeletons.

“Ha HAH!” cackled Ned, delighted.

“Whooo!” Ike’s voice came from the back of the theatre. “Man! Is that beautiful! It’s looks like she’s standing on the moon!”

“Liza! Do you know what you’re standing in?” Ned was tickled. “A light?”

“A limelight. A real one… I made it! You look amazing!”

“Sing something!” enthused Ike.

(It should be explained that Ned did make an actual limelight, with Ike’s help and resources pilfered from the community college glass-blowing and welding departments, based on this diagram of “Mr. Goldsworthy Gurney’s Blow-Pipe,” from The Boy’s Playbook of Science by J. H. Pepper, London 1860:

Ned was able to replace the “bladder of mixed gases” with a decent oxygen/hydrogen welding torch; for the lime itself, which in the olden days was constructed like a spool, Ned covertly chiseled a small chunk of limestone off of the staircase to the community college admissions office. From there, all that was needed was to empty the scorched bulb out of one of the blown-out PAR cans, fashion a wire holding-device for the limestone, and shoot the oxy-hydrogen flame through the can at the rock-chunk. “The hardest part,” Ned would say later, “was stealing the gas tanks from the school”)

Liza’s pale face squinted. She looked at her arms; it was like being a ghost, or in a black-and-white movie.

“You’ve only got about one minute to do your thing,” said Ned. “Yeah, make the most of it!” yelled Ike. “You’re probably the only person you’ll ever know who’s been in actual limelight!”

As if the glare had bleached out all of the color contrast inside her skull, Liza’s mind drew a complete and total blank, like the joke about the “drawing” on a white sheet of paper— it’s a polar bear, standing next to an igloo, in a snowstorm, eating marshmallows. See?