Peppy had imagined that there were scores of semiretired Broadway, TV, and film stars studding the hills of Marin County who would leap at the opportunity to nobly pass their glitter batons. What she found were careers that had never made it past the embryo stage: (Bob Loquasto, Professional Air Guitarist; Popo the Children’s Clown—Birthdays, Gatherings, Corporate Events). Many chalked up their failures to bad luck, or a lack of “connections,” or had a story of how they’d been “ripped off” by a celebrity who had stolen and was living their rightful lives, e.g., a jittery, chain-smoking comedian who insisted his “entire schtick” had been stolen by the comic Gallagher: “I was the first guy ever to kill a watermelon with a croquet mallet, at the Holy City Zoo in ‘73, when that asshole was just a busboy.”
Some of the people Peppy met were genuinely gifted but too odd-looking, bizarre-acting, or otherwise unfit for mainstream entertainment.
Among these people, there seemed to be a pervasive sense of denial: none of them could admit that the unrolled blueprint of their lives was the green felt of a craps table. None could believe that if they worked hard, nurtured their talent, and persevered heroically despite crushing opposition, their careers in showbiz might go nowhere anyway. This is an unfairness that many artists can’t swallow, having been raised on the “Real Talent Will Win Out in the End” myth.
According to Peppy’s schedule (and the dictates of her draining bank account), the theatre camp would run for five summer weeks. Rehearsals would begin mid-July for the yet-to-be-named Musical—the more talented kids in the classes would be drafted for the production. The show would run for three weeks until the beginning of the school year. During this time. Peppy reasoned, Ned and Liza would be whipped into triple-threat musical theatre prodigies at breakneck speed by trained professionals (Ticking clock, dramatic Obstacle #1). She would zip them off to New York City, and they would audition for the High School of Performing Arts, slay the judges, and go on to live the heightened, Technicolor life of Fame. If anything happened to obstruct Peppy’s plans, these were bridges she would bulldoze when she came to them.
Peppy hired three instructors out of her twenty-some applicants:
Neville Vanderlee, an acquaintance of Mike and Ike’s—a morosely thin whippet of a man with oversize vintage 1950s suits, a platinum swoop-wedge hair-helmet wrought in mousse, and pointy yellow shoes. He would be the camp drama teacher and direct the upcoming musical. Neville had earned local praise as the director, coauthor, and star of I Hale You, Hannah Kingdom!, the production that Ike had done lights for. Neville had thought the success of that production would bring him more legitimate offers, but they never materialized.
Barbette Champlain, aging former ballerina—a regal, imperious, chain-smoking spider of a woman with long, emaciated limbs who Peppy hired to teach jazz dance, tap, and ballet; she would also be “movement coach” and choreographer for the musical. Barbette was vain and miserable, having found herself needing a job after her husband, an investment banker, traded up to a younger model of her as soon as she hit thirty-five. She was a capital-D Dancer, down to her snap-happy, osteoporosis crayon-bones, a victim of all of the steep trade-offs dancers make early on in life for the privilege of being physically superhuman while young. Her personality was whiny and condescending from getting too much slavering attention as an icy young beauty, her mind was weak and spoiled from underuse, her angry black liquid eyeliner and watertight, face-lifting hair-bun were bitterly nostalgic throwbacks to her Swan Lake days. The aging process was the first betrayal by what had been her faultlessly obedient body; her prime had been devoured like a wedding cake, and she loathed all the possible outcomes of her darkening future. But Peppy was impressed by Barbette’s legitimate résumé (all sylphide and cygnet roles that ceased abruptly in 1972) and by the enclosed black-and-white picture of her, a lithesome feral bird, walleyed and starving, arabesque-ing in better days.
Lalo Buarque was a hangdog-looking Brazilian pianist and guitarist, whose sole function, it seemed, was to keep all women within a fifty-mile radius lactating with a romantic need to save him from himself. He was swaybacked, built with long, slender muscles buttered with just the merest quarter inch of subcutaneous fat. His body was the sun-kissed color and softness of blonde calfskin, matching the dirty gold of his oily bed-head. He was preternaturally relaxed to the point of abject laziness. In his musky, faded T-shirts, handlebar mustache, sunglasses, and bleach-frayed, cock-hugging jeans, his entire visage gave the impression that undersea Venus on the half shell finally got sick of him as a lover and rolled him onto a hot beach for the next woman to frustrate herself over. Lalo sang, drank, cried, and smoked unfiltered Camels with a languid sensuality; grown women who could smell his unwashed armpits bit their knuckles and considered abandoning their families for a chance to lick the salt off his neck.
His letter:
This letter is someting I don’t write good, for to tell you my singing is good is no good, you must hear the singing also piano and mime. You can say good that the starlite on osean is beautiful, but with not see the stars or osean, its is not same thing? It is someting, ART, coming from my soul as a man with love and emotianal joy and sad and phisical not with paper and pensil. See me and I will show you someting, this is like big gift to me, I give it to you and to the childrens also.
Peppy would have thrown Lalo’s letter away had there not been a Polaroid photo enclosed of him in whiteface, shirtless, wearing shrunken cutoffs, smiling rapturously in the sun, juggling four grapefruits. Yep, topless juggling can be a wise career move, thought Peppy, moving the letter to the IN pile, deciding that Lalo could be “musical director” and possibly much, much more.
Each instructor was hired with an explicit addendum to their job description: in addition to teaching the regular students, they would also have to help Ned and Liza prepare their auditions for the High School of Performing Arts—one song, one dance, one monologue. “When I say dance, I don’t mean disco ass-wagging,” Peppy told her new employees, solemnly shaking her cigarette at them. “I want them to think the kids have some class.” Neville, Lalo, and Barbette dreaded this aspect of the job, but none of them were in any position to turn down regular employment.
Young people (girls, mostly) and their mothers arrived at the Normal Family Dinner Theatre by the tens, intrigued by the ad:
THEATRE DAY CAMP FOR TEENS 12–18
Singing, Acting, and Dancing Work with Professional Performers Fairfax Today, Broadway Tomorrow!
These were the miserable children of Marin County parents, mostly the daughters of orthodontists and real-estate agents, at their most horrible stages of adolescence: hateful and lazy creatures with noses jutting out like doorknobs, mouths dark with metal, skin and breasts erupting into sore red boils. Peppy accepted forty new students out of the forty-two that applied—she turned down a precocious five-year-old Suzuki-method violinist, and a very cheerful nineteen-year-old girl in a wheelchair who wanted to be a “sit-down comic.” Most of the boys dropped out in the first three days when they realized how outnumbered they were. What remained was a surly mass of jailbait: thirty-one pouting, slouching, eye-rolling mounds of baby fat and lip gloss between the ages of twelve to sixteen, wearing their ill-fitting bodies like detested school uniforms.
This was Liza’s first encounter with the local teens. She was thirteen, but even the older girls were threatened by her tube top, satin hot pants, flesh-colored nylons, and high, corrugated-plastic-soled platforms that made her look like the child-hooker from Taxi Driver.
There were no other disabled or malformed kids around to deflect scorn from Ned—he was presciently terrified, knowing that it was only a matter of time before the monstrously judgmental girls made his life unlivable.
But
