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
