she needed, along with a few Harvey Wallbangers, to put in a bid on one of the town’s dilapidated landmarks: the old Fairfax fire station, a quaint, large, two-story clapboard structure that had been abandoned and had fallen into disrepair after the fire department was given a larger, new, windowless, popcorn-stucco building that looked like an oversize Pizza Hut.
Her love for the building’s “vibrations” made her rash and impulsive. The firehouse had been subjected to the whims of unchecked entropy—extensive water damage made the ceiling of the top floor sag and peel down in the corners like moldy paper, termites had eaten sections of the joists and the main support girder until it was as spongy as coral, cockroaches and earwigs were firmly entrenched in the marrow of the wall studs. The minimal kitchen was embalmed in dusty grease; the bathroom contained a wall of urinals.
“I dunno,” said Ike, blowing a rich, piney vapour of pot smoke down the hole in the second-story floor where the fire pole went through. “Considering what they want for this crate, you’d think they’d at least throw in a couple of firemen. Black firemen.” He smirked, hugging the pole to his plaid chest and squeaking down out of sight.
“They should have torched this dump. Who’d accuse the fire department of arson? Nobody,” countered Mike, following Ike down the pole.
Peppy didn’t care. Her brain was romping on its wheel. Nobody could tell her this firehouse wasn’t the repository of her future good fortune; the promised sunny clearing after suffering through the dark and predatory woods: the castle of the Golden Stag.
To rehabilitate the firehouse Peppy was going to need more money; she eventually bullied Noreen into selling her Reno house to come live with her in Fairfax. Noreen abhorred the idea of giving up the modest security she had so patiently assembled, but her fear of what would happen to Ned and Liza if Peppy raised them alone outweighed her worry about her own future. With great reluctance, Noreen allowed red-jacketed realtors into her home. “A gem,” they proclaimed it. “I know,” Noreen responded, knowing full well how much elbow grease she had frenziedly rubbed in over the years, keeping it free of rust, grime, and decay, and hopefully, sin. When Noreen saw the chewed-up firehouse for the first time, she was shocked by its decrepitude and cried a little. But she liked Fairfax, a little valley tucked inside round, dark green hills that gave the feeling of a soft catcher’s mitt lying open, cool and snug. The air was piney and quenching. Noreen had forgotten about the appeal of green areas, her yard in Reno having contained only a tendrilled century plant, some small cacti in pots, and a ceramic lawn-burro loitering in a semicircle of decorative pink rocks. “The kind of garden you’d have on Mars,” as Ned called it.
“The kind of garden you’d have on Mars if all Martian landscapers were blind,” as Peppy called it.
“And Mexican,” added Liza.
Peppy rejected three pricey contractor bids and hired Mike and Ike to perform the renovation, boldly tearing up her city work permit and opting to do the construction on the cheap and sly. Mike was a reasonably competent plumber and builder; Ike was a talented finish carpenter and master electrician. Dressed identically in plaid lumberjack shirts, red suspenders, and skin-tight jeans, they filled Dumpsters with sooty lath, plaster, and urinals, sistered a few joists, and hammered up fresh drywall. They left the fire pole and installed, where the fire engine once resided, a stage with a proscenium arch, a respectable theatrical “black box,” replete with a backstage area and rest rooms (retaining an original urinal on the downstairs level, after deeming it “quaint and nostalgic”). In the area before the stage, where future audiences would sit, Mike installed a wall of mirrors and ballet barres. The firehouse was painted bright red. Peppy had a brass plaque made, thereby christening the former firehouse:
THE NORMAL FAMILY DINNER THEATRE EST. 1981
Noreen, Peppy, Mike, Ike, Ned, and Liza posed for a photograph next to the sign. It was May; Fairfax was in bloom with furry yellow acacia. They squinted into the bright, cool day, giving the camera a thumbs-up.
The family lived on the top floor. Ned and Liza slept in the room with the fire pole. Noreen had the other little bedroom in the front, separated from the kids’ room by the staircase.
Peppy claimed the master bedroom in the back, where she hung a dramatic array of hats, masks, and feather boas, arranged all of her wig heads on a long shelf, and installed a waterbed (“You sure you need a water-bed?” asked Ike, jumping up and down. “The floor is a little springy.”
“You bet your ass I want a waterbed, honey, and don’t you dare try and stop me. A girl’s got to get some pleasure between the sheets.”)
Once moved in, Peppy set her sights on hiring instructors. It was her intention to start “The Juilliard of the West.”
Mike and Ike became a part of the Normal Family routine; they loved the whole idea of the theatre, and Peppy’s amusing vulgarity promised that it would be something more rambunctious than the average community stage. Ike recruited Ned’s help, sensing that the boy was lonely and underused, and the two of them purchased and hung all the stage lighting: long fly bars on the ceiling, draped with an array of PAR can-lights and a follow spot.
Ike knew theatrical lighting well; he had been the lighting designer and engineer for a San Francisco cabaret/bar called The Brig, where the drag comedy I Hate You, Hannah Kingdom! had played for a nine-month run.
Ike enjoyed his nerdy, informational friendship with Ned, who had a bright, fifteen-year-old geek’s love for intelligent-sounding trivia.
“Hey, Mom, did you know that ‘PAR’ is an acronym for Parabolic Aluminized Reflector? Those are 1,000-watt Fresnels, see, that one is frosted, and that one is stippled, for a wide beam, and did you know that follow spots used to be actual limelights? They were like these burning jets of oxygen and hydrogen pointed at, like, this cylinder made of lime, that rotated.”
“I don’t want anything burning in here, the fire marshal will be on my ass like last year’s ski pants.”
“They don’t use limelights anymore!”
“That’s good. Don’t use them.”
Peppy had bigger things on her mind. Her plan was to start a school for teens, then cull the better talent from the classes and cast them in a full production that would run for the month of August. She put an ad in the Marin Gazette:
FAMOUS?
Spread some of your stardust Teaching kids 11–18 Actors, Singers, Dancers Needed For New Performing Arts School Full Musical Production Impending Submit photo, letter, résumé
Peppy received around fifty application letters, many with headshots; black-and-white 8 X 10 glossies featuring an idealized full-face portrait of the Actor or Actress. The more expensive versions featured a photo-collage, on the opposite side, of the actor in various “roles,” to show the actor’s “versatility.” The headshots seemed to call out for talk-balloons:
“Ladies, I may wear a leather jacket with no shirt underneath for motorcycle riding, but I can also don horn-rimmed glasses and transform into that English professor you wanted to have sex with, or throw on jeans and get a laugh out of washing my Old English sheepdog with several neighborhood four-year-olds. Am I not the Original Man?”
Or:
“Choosy Mom in curlers, executive businesslally (with eyeglass-stem thoughtfully in mouth), oversexed newscaster or just plain Pretty Lady,
