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,
