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
