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
