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
