Music Man, Community Children's Theatre, Peoria Players, 1992 opening night

Pam talks to God.

At the beginning of every performance at Peoria Players’ Theatre the crimson lip of the stage curtain is down, occluding our view of the stirring audience milling above the prow of their cushiony thrones. Prior to the production Pam talks to God. There are almost 80 kids. Pam has each of us hold hands in a circle. The circle is lopsided and parabolic and slightly reminiscent of the brick-laid junior college where I conjugated French verbs. A still -life with a bowl of friut hush licks across the stage. We are each holding hands, on the precipice of the nineties, four months away from a minted presidential election, we are holding hands, locking the lids of our eyes like automated garage doors, cleansing our mind, learning to focus in consolidated harmony, passing energy and vibes through the pliable conduit of each others fleshy wrists, intrinsically each of us, talking to God, forming a human crop circle of energy and light.

Pam talks to God.

From overhead the circle we are forming looks more like a corrugated rhombus with  amputated siding. 

We each bow our heads. When we pray in church we verbally barter and chant certain creeds and if one has the audacity to poke his head in periscopic fashion assaying the churned shoulders of the congregation it looks like every third tithing member has his/her eyes  pinched open assaying the laces on his/her respective shoes.

Pam has her eyes scrunched into her cheekbones. She is looking up in the direction of the rafters.

And she is talking to God.

Pam tells us that some of us may be Jewish. The many of us stem from various Christian denominations of faith. That some may practice Buddhism or Islam or some dual syllable sounding religion that starts with a B that I have never heard of before.

She says that some of us may have our own individual views on spirituality.

“Whatever background you come from there is a belief in a creative force. In something greater than ourselves whom we call God.”

Pam then starts to talk to God.

She takes several more deep breaths. Twice I have opened my eyes and twice I have seen Pam flanked by Miss Jana and the actress playing Zaneeta, the lids of their eyes repressively welded shut. I look around for Stacia and discern her rather ironically dashed between Couri and Jenny, her  twin nemesis. Jenny has a look on her face like lets get this over with. Stacia looks like she is auditioning for a part of the truthful trollop in GodSpell.

 Pam continues to take several deep breaths. She is talking to a universal creativity-bestowing entity stating that we are each blessed to be made in his image. That we are stewards of this inexplicable energy chauffeuring us with the courage to create. That we are all somehow spiritual beings; that we are each individual reflections of this inscrutable light which  vis-a-vis grants us the ability to perform, to create, to love, and to give.

That when we act we are illuminating the wicks on an overhead chandelier proffering laughter and light to our fellow brothers and sisters in the audience.

Pam takes another deep breath.

 She is asking God to bless each of the fine young men and women  and  give them strength  and courage to give an amazing performance. She takes another deep breath. Several of the 12 year old adolescent males snicker.

 We punctuate our ritual by flexing our elbows while   raising our clenched fists as if performing remedial calisthenics . We then squeeze three times in a row as Pam states that we will have a beautiful show.

Afterwards there is applause

The applause of children.

The sprinkling of a lost summer rain.

.
                                                                 ***

For the second night I sit in front of the long elongated mirror dotted with light bulbs. For the second night in a row I scowl at the make-up lady with the side ponytail and the jock boyfriend whose '91 class ring she has placed on a chain and wears like an talisman around her neck signifying some kind of  cemented relationship. 

As I sit down for Make-up she lets out a growl.


"Here, you can have my friend." The snooty girl with the side pony tail says, pointing to her cohort, the girl with the frizzy short blonde hair I fortuitously bumped into last night after dress rehearsal who has a maraschino cherry hue to her lips. Being a gender wielding card carrying genital dangling heterosexual male I can't discern how Anthony as well as the Aiken's brothers are able to somehow sit down and apply there own make-up to the traces of their individual countenances.

I can't sit down in front of the mirror without tittering.


The lady is daubing me with makeup. She is older than I am. She is telling me to relax. She is telling me that this is only going to take a few minutes than I am practically free to grouse. 

“Hurry up,” I tell her with a diva-like aura of impetuousness. I want this done.

She looks at me She jilts her head in a certain quizzical way as if she is scrutinizing a splotch of ink discerning the profile of an Uncle who sexually abused her.

"I'm sorry she says," looking down again. She is wearing fashionably upended jean shorts like Andrea used to wear in French class. I wonder what I did to offend make-up girl #2.

"I'm sorry I don't mean to sound invasive but has anyone ever told you that you look exactly like that kid from Blossom?'"

"What?"




"That guy off of Blossom. The TV show. Not Joey Lawrence. The other guy. Blossom's older brother. The alcoholic."

I tell he that I've never seen the show but that I've heard the comparison before. I tell her that the cast upstairs used to say I looked like Harry Connick Jr. but it was mainly the hair."

The make-up lady bites her lips as if she is constipated before making nodding her chin several times saying that she guesses she can see that. She is more gentle when she applies the cosmetic to my cheekbones and lips.

"No, but you really look just like that guy off of Blossom. You could be his stunt double or something. It's weird."

I have no clue what she is talking about. She is holding the make-up and coloring my face like a little kid coloring in the lines during Sunday school.

“You have a nice face, even though you look like the kid off of Blossom and are the purported villain of this production.”

“Yeah, I’m the villain. You should probably watch out.”

The soccer mom begins to call out places. I get up and thank the new make-up lady. This is opening night. This is what we have been working on.

I look back. The make-up lady with the frizzy hair who just adorned my face is smiling.

We begin to walk up the stairs into the direction of the stage. The orchestra is beginning to belch in brass octaves siphoning into what passes for the preamble.

One of the overweight soccer moms looks into her clipboard and yells out places, actors.

It is time.

                                                                              *** 

Almost exactly one decade later I will be drunk fumbling in the catacombs of my parents' basement a week after my father's demise, sifting through plastic storage tubs that could be used to suffocate household pets, pillaging through a nest of domestic errata when I com across a heap of expired VHS cartridges, my father's veiny handwriting on the side, a label reading DAVID'S MUSIC MAN '92.

As if   watching the lips of the dated VHS give head, I blow into the slit of the moribund mortar board shaped machine inserting the tape, watching myself through the perennial VHS home-video latitudinal fizz, watching myself ten years later on a stage in an amplified theatre realizing that I am witnessing the performance again somehow for the first time, realizing certain tautologies about this production that I have found myself a retrograde participant, lost in the drizzle of chords realizing that everything is somehow new again. As if I am breathing the play all over again for the first time, remembering that there is nothing halfway about the Iowa way to treat you if Iowans choose to treat you which they (meaning said citizens of the corn husk state of Iowa), due to their innate stubbornness, simply may not chose to do at all.  Meaning treat you. That still even though the hoi poloi may not ever speak with you again you really ought to give the good ol’ Hawkeye state of Iowa a try.  That, according to Mrs. Eulalie Shinn, the esteemed portly wife of often politically disconcerted Mayor Shinn the Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam is a quote “smutty” book.  That most youth of turn of the late 20^th century Americana simply has no clue what a livery stable is or was ever used for. That fellow Pikadilly lady and keen love interest of devout cohort Marcellus Washburn, Ethel Toffelmelmier is simply one hell of a player pea-anne-'er, player. That the Pikadilly lady with long swaying auburn hair named Stacia practices her dance moves back stage and scowls at the on-stage antagonist Charlie Cowell worse than his nemesis do on-stage. That one should never retract the dire lifelong ramifications of billiards on the wayward youth of America. That it is simply impossible to have Six steelies, eight aggies, a dozen peewees, and one big glassie with an American flag in the middle in your pocket without making an emanating clack. That there is nothing anti-Semitic whatsoever in the phrase Mandolin picks perhaps and here and there a Jews Harp. That (also innately) is a special Iowan chip-on-the-shoulder attitude veering on cultural xenophobia that they (again meaning Iowans) have never been without that they can recall.

That there was no Gary Conservatory class of aught five because the town wasn’t even built until aught-six.

That all the great coronet players were in fact, actually Irish.

That when Mrs. Shinn alights her foot and graces bitches about a bunion she unwillingly pliés.

That there are (contradictory to the initial popular belief) rather redeeming qualities in the work of Chaucer , Rabelais and Balzac, which, if you scrutinize closely, you will find what the gentlemen ferrying the suitcase outside Widow Paroo’s house during Amaryllis off-kiltered piano lesson probably  wanted.

That certain numbers that the director the ebullient Miss Pam Tucker-White deems as being to “adult number” such as “A sadder but wiser girl for me” and “Shipoopi” are being lovingly omitted from the Children’s Community Theatrical production for being too mature for the bulk of the cast, which, due the high volume of unfledged and lovingly innocuous 8, 9 and 10 year olds taking part in the chorus as part of the Peoria Park District summer theatre, the avg. age of the ensemble as a whole is just under 13 years of age. That part of the reason Shipoopi also got canned was because the assistant choreographer just found it a bitch to choreograph.  That during the perfunctory Head shoulder knees toes warm  up it is nearly impossible, if being an adolescent male and stationed at the back with fellow incumbent members of the all-too vicarious River City band, not too get a hardon due to the blithe calisthenics of the late-teen Piakdilly ladies bending down like folding chairs 15 inches from your respective purlieu, That accompanist Miss Jana has skin so white is looks like unblemished snow on Christmas morning in televised feel-good coffee commercials and is a looker and a Christian and goes to area school and youth conferences talking about Chastity with dignity and grace that somehow makes her even more attractive.    

That our esteemed Mayor Shinn harbors and almost overt propensity for both malapropisms and the Gettysburg address and that I think he means peep. That it is unclear if the firecracker wielding ‘wild kid ya’ ruffian Tommy Dijilas may go blind either from masturbating or inventing a music holder for a marching piccolo player or both. 

That Misses Shinn as being a fervid leader and spectacle of the Wan Ta Ye girls of the local Wig Wam Heeawatha clan is rather adept at counting to twenty in the Indian tongue  

 That the actress Summer Sanders playing the female lead Marian Paroo sings off-key and has admittedly never acted before and this is her professional stage debut and is really, when it comes right down to it, is kind of a bitch in the operatic diva-sense when you get to know her. That the actor playing Harold Hill real name is Jumanee and that he really does have bona fide look-out-Broadway talent. That Molly who plays Misses Paroo is also one of the Washington crowd and her Irish accent is so alluring it makes you want to order a verboten Guinness and talk about the potato famine while laying brick.

That during seventy six trombones the method in which the vicarious trombone players’ pantomime  marshaling their instruments looks more like they are firing air-rifles then sliding brass stanzas.

Either that or making the obvious masturbatory gesture, which is way too obvious.

That Keats would probably fall down in fits of unadulterated ( in a La Belle Dans sans Merci) inverse laugher if he saw Middle Aged Portly women clad in bed sheets ode to a Grecian Urning on stage.

That it just sounds more politically correct to curse then to bellow out YE GADs for a lot of reasons.

That, because of the brass fracas ensuing on the lip of the stage, it’s almost nearly impossible for the audience to fathom that swaying brass opera emanating from the mimed instruments is (intrinsically, in real river city time) just hoodwinked shuffling across the stage. That the audience is taken aback when Mayor Shinn swivels to school board quartet stating that he bets his band against band west Chicago and Marian the Librarian simply says what band dispelling the fantasia in a snap.

That there is something incommensurable about the verifiability of the purported Think System when in interiorly conducted through intense mediation on the minuet in G.

  That the ladies dance committee meets Tuesday night in the high school gymnasium.

That I am still, on the first night of the performance during the Rock Island prologue, in a way, madly in love with Stacia.

That Stacia has her hair rolled up in an auburn knob on the top of her head for the first scene.  Even though she is a Pikadilly lady and she is adorned in a spring drape for the bulk of the production, even though  she has placed my heart in a mason jar of Formaldehyde and left it to molder on the pining eyelids of the protagonist.

That there is something turn-of-the century bourgeois in the way Stacia is seated even though she is supposed to be a fellow traveling salesman, even though I am juddering my shoulders in huffs and intermittent spasms pretending to be internally jangled by the endowed passenger turbulence of the make-believe train.  

That  To give the semblance that the train is in perennial motion we shimmy our shoulders

 That Throughout the entirety of the Rock Island number Harold Hill remains with his back facing the audience, slapping down playing cards, not saying anything until I complete my harangue about how Hill has given a colloquial raspberry-seed-in-the wisdom tooth’ of the Traveling Salesman vocation for too long.

That credit is no good for an anvil salesman.

That what the heck, you are welcome. We are glad to have you with us even though we will undoubtedly never mention the likes of it again.   

That after our first scene  will come up and try to talk with her again and try, as if ruthlessly in vain, to tell her simply how I feel, to which first I will sling my glasses off and walk up behind her and unassumingly pinch the back of her right shoulder in a flirtatious pinch and then duck only to have her snap, saying What Charlie. What do you want?

What Charlie, she is saying.

What.

                                                                      ***

That  something rather profound is about ready to happen indeed.

                                                                     ***

You can talk you can bicker you can talk you can bicker you can talk talk talk talk bicker bicker bicker you can talk all you want to but it's different than it was.


                                                                           ***

She is backstage. With my glasses doffed I have a hard time making out  her forehead. I walk closer, through the inky ballet of youth casting shadows. It is the make-up lady. She is all by herself. She is wearing one of the traveling salesman’s hats.

She is walking as if underwater in my direction.

I still have a hard time discerning  who it is.

She says hello. I reply uttering the same sound.

We are conversing in the elongated drape of silhouettes the size of  jigsaw continents. Light from the stage is screeching in our direction. There is peeled whisper in the yawn of the backstage, fleshy beakers of youth  reverberating in vacant echoes breezing from the center.

I walk towards her again.

eternally the three Dawns...

“Hey, you’re the make-up lady.”

She smiles.

“Actually my name is Dawn Michelle,” She says, extending her hand, “and you’re that kid off of Blossom.”

I respond by stating so they tell me. She smiles back.

“So you are the vitiating antagonist in this production. The vile anvil salesman."

 I tell her again that that’s what they tell me. I ask her what vitiating means. She says it means bad.

She is well read and intelligent although you can tell she doesn’t flaunt her intellect in your face. 

There is something almost skeletal in the method in which the stage curtain pulleys heckle and squeal as Scott  makes long church-bell heaving motions with his limbs, coercing the ruffled burgundy of the curtain to biblically part, availing a dioramic breath of early 20^th century small town Americana to fill the  audience in a single blink.

 The staccato decrescendo of stuttering keys accompanying the prologue to Trouble. The brass wail emanating from the well of the orchestral pit during 76 trombones.  This is the first time Dawn has witnessed the show close-up She is smiling. She is saying that the actors are adorable.

 “Except for you. You are vitiating. Plus there’s a rumor circulating on the character is out to somehow foil the theatrics of Harold Hill."

I nod in acknowledgement. I say that is me. 

 “Have you ever acted before?” I ask Dawn  Michelle.  She says that she mostly does interpretive dramatic monologues in Speech.

“Although when I was like 12 I did perform here in Charlie and the Chocolate factory. I was Veruca Salt, the brazen faced snooty British girl. They cast me at the time because I could do a really convincing British accent.” 

“Do the accent,” I say. Dawn looks into the direction of her knees.

“I can’t right now. I’m coy.”

 “Coy,” I say to myself. Another word I have never heard.


                                                               

                                                              ***

The performance continues. I continue to talk with Dawn from backstage. Purportedly it is a full house. There was a raucous applause after Trouble and 76 Trombones. The low-key slightly melancholic sway of Marian the Librarian ends in an overhead arpeggio of yelps from the audience.

Every time Zaneeta hiccups and says Ye gads the audience is floored.


We seem to be pulling it off.


I am witnessing all this with Stage hand Scott and cool make-up lady Dawn.  I am witnessing the nest of bodies undulate in accolade haunting tempo to the almost fourth-of-July sparkler- three-corner cap patriotic score. 

There is laughter foaming from the audience even though the dialogue isn’t all that witty. From certain facets of stage it is impossible to see past the third row although Pam’s laughter can somehow always be heard, which, whenever a line is delivered with intent, sounds like she is laughing at the germinal production of the show the first time.

There is a striking pain in my left thigh as if someone is punting a football on fourth and long. I swivel into the musky costume hangar womb of backstage darkness. My glasses are not on.  I pull a 360. Nothing except the townspeople and chorus dancers of River city anticipating their cue from the soccer mom on the polar edge of the stage.

I look back for Dawn. She has momentarily dissolved downstairs.  I walk towards the table where we have been seated., engaged in perhaps the most intellectual conversation I have engaged in since I started this show.

There is another kick to the opposite calf followed by a stream of hi-pitched giggles.

I say hello.  There is more hiccupping giggles. As if trying to waltz I slovenly  perform another 360. Still nothing. On stage Anthony is pontificating to Marcellus about how the only dame for him is a sadder but wiser girl sans breaking into the number. The close human is Scott who has his fingers tethered around the thick reins of the stage curtain pulley as if he is anticipating swinging from a glen. There is another kick. It feels like a shuffle-ball-chain and then an assault on the back of the thigh.  This time I yell out hey sounding like I need a substitute for straw in the Livery stable.

There are more giggles. They seem to bubble. I look at Scott, He makes a conductor-like notion with his nose insinuating that I need to look.

There is more laughter.

“What’s your name?”

“Thyme Thetsy.”

“I say her name again and then I realize that she lisps and she is saying Betsy.

She has a lisp. She looks like the size of a push mower. She is dressed in a derby cap.  She is wearing a gray suit with knickerbockers.

“You th’uys are really thute.”  She says, I ask he isn’t she suppose to be next to the soccer mom preparing for the next number. She swipes her head and says no.

Thyme a th'end of Thawns.” Says the girl with the lisp. She is eight years old. I forget that the majority of cast members in this production are the size of a water fountain.

“Aren’t we all.”

I bend down on my knees so that we are appx. the same height. For some reason she is wearing a derby cap. She is one of the townspeople of rivercity, the bulk are between the ages of 8-12.


" Hi, I'm Charlie." I say, talking to her like she is a little kid.

She tells me that she knows. She tells me that she has been watching me the entire production.



She is smiling at me and before I know it she has completely dissipated.


                                                                                ***

“ Hey man, that chick you were flirting with backstage...” Scott inquires, shortly before intermission.

I tell him I don’t know. I tell her she's kind adorable with her lisp. Scott says not Lolita, the make-up chick. 



 I tell him I didn’t think I was flirting.

“Dude, I know her. Her name is Dawn Michelle. She’s like the state speech champ. She like kicks ass in every event she enters."

I nod my head.

“Last year she did this performance dialogue where she was a thirteen year old rape victim and everyone in the audience was just moved to splinters and tears.”



                                                                     ***

                                                           

It is just before  I loll the Wells Fargo Wagon on stage  There is a kick accompanied by an almost splash of giggles.

It is Betsy.

When I look at her she gives me a little wave.

“I  thought thoo thwould be thith Thawn.”

 “I gotta roll out the Wells Fargo Wagon out. If we don’t roll the Wells fargo wagon out none of the kids of Rive r City will get their instruments.’”

Lil Betsy is continuing to smile. She asks me something which sounds like do I think Dawn is thirty and then I realize she is inquiring if I think Dawn is pretty. I pose a la Grecian urn.

“Yes, I think she is as radiant as the color of a sunrise, the syllables of her name.”

Besty is blushing.

“Thew two thike her???”

I look down. The bumbling staccato of the opening chords of Wells Fargo is falling into place like accelerated Tetris blocks.

‘Yes, I say. I really like her a lot.”

                                                                                      ***

 And the play proceeds.

Somehow I manage to mock kiss Summer w/out slipping the tongue.She has grown on me. A week ago I learned that Stacia is Summer’s understudy and that Summer, although she still can’t sing worth shit, delivers a riveting soliloquy when she talks about what the soon- to be convicted Harold Hill what he brought to this town.  There is a beauty as the creature who hates me because I slipped her the tongue and can tell you that the inside of her mouth tastes like an apple Starburst.

And the play proceeds.

I can hear Pam alone laugh when I point my hand deeming Marian the Librarian as trollop stating that she hasn’t heard the last of me, addressing her as girly-girl.

During the fight scene as Harold Hill pummels me I fall back with a thud, harder than usual, aiming for aesthetic verisimilitude, knocking my head, taking one for the team.

And the play proceeds.


On stage the protagonist and Marian the Librarian are swooning goodnight my someone goodnight. There is applause and there is joy and a feeling that we might actually be able to somehow pull this all off as a group.  Betsy is next to me and she is smiling. I still have not had a chance to properly tete-a-tete with Stacia. It seems weird that after almost two months of rehearsal I have now found new friends Dawn and lil’ Betsy and that pining after Stacia almost seems to be a thing of the past.

I break on stage. My arm is quavering as if I am leading a cheer. I am informing the good honest people of River City in between intermediate gasps that there isn’t a band. That there never has been a band. That there ain’t never will be a band and that two-bit no-good thimble rigger swindle you all out of your money. The townspeople are calling for tar and feathers. Mayor Shinn who detests Van Halen and pronounces their last album sans the acronym is stating that I told you all along get his credentials. Someone stirring in the hoi polio point their finger in the air and says after him.  Someone says Tar and Feather. The moment Mayor Shinn says wells after him a montage of chase music begins to emanate from the pit.

Bodies  flap across the stage like broken windshield wipers.  They are hunting after Harold Hill with lampoon and vigor.  The constable will run brandishing his night stick in the direction of Tommy Djilas. The school board turned Buffalo Bills barbershop quartet sprint across the stage in tonal perfection, followed by cohort Marcellus who swipes his head across his brow prevaricating that Hill went the opposite direction followed by a grade school pandemonium  hauling ass in the opposite direction. The Pikadilly ladies scuttle across the stage like high-estrogen inebriated hens. Everyone is searching for Harold Hill. Everyone is gunning to bring the ersatz director of the River city boys band to justice before riding him out of town.

 The audience seems to be mesmerized. They seem to be cheering for Harold Hill to escape.

Even while being excessively goaded by Marcellus (who refers to HH as Gregory) and love interest Marian the Librarian and an almost jig-toting Mrs. Paroo and a teary-eyed Winthrop to get the fuck out of dodge Harold Hill allows himself to be voluntarily captured explicating in almost soliloquy-like form to  the audience that for the first in his life he finally got his proverbial foot caught in the hinge of the metaphorical door. 

There is something Christ like in the way Harold Hill walks into final scene, his hands voluntarily cuffed in imprisonment. The crowd is a livid surf of wielding arms.  Mayor Shinn is insinuating talk of tar and feather.

Harold Hill is being tried in the same high school gymnasium where weeks earlier he promulgated hope of forming the immortality of the river City Boys band.

Since the director of the pit band is also the director of the marching band in the high school I will be attending in two months, the RiverCity Boys band is clad in oversized petit freshman Manual Rams band uniforms, many of which are feminine sizes to accommodate with the youthful frame of the lads on stage.

The sound of the band farting the epitaphic Minuet in G sounds like a craggily elephant releasing its bowels midway through the Canadian Brass quartet Christmas extravaganza. It is off-key. It is abrasive and searing to the inner ear. Harold Hill is not conducting. He is flapping his arms in such a fury as if he thinks he can develop quills. Everything is 4/4 time. This is the final scene. Since I first witnessed this scene I have deplored it. I’ve despised how the musical is punctuated. There is no closer. There is simply a brassy cacophony of clanging notes jousting at each other off-key somehow, barely resembling the orchestral outline for the  Minuet in G, like a portly aunt sneezing out the overture.

Yet there is profundo-basso. There is acknowledgement from the on stage that the boys, however inept, however eternal.

The book of Genesis breath, the gnawing of valves and the splintering of reeds, all somehow, coalescing in a fracas of light.

The curtain drops as if it has just been shot and then raises back up again.

 The audience before us breaks into a welt of applause as if it has just been cut.

The audience is clapping along in tempo. The principals are being introduced. I walk out with Mrs. Paroo and Winthrop and the three of us individually bow before skirting to opposite side of the stage when Marcellus comes out of the theatrical ether and bows individually before the audience rises like they are performing the wave at a high school pep rally as Marian the librarian shoots out from one end and Harold Hill dalliances out from the other, as the hold hands and each individually bow. Somehow we can feel the energy that Pam was talking about at the incipience of the performance when she was calling on a higher power greater than ourselves to assist us in our thespian plight. Somehow, after scattered weeks of rehearsal ennui and pubescent histrionics we have accomplished something together.

As was previously choreographed  we all turn the same direction and point a splayed hand into the direction of the orchestral pit before resuming our original posture clapping in tempo with the orchestra taking one final bow before Scott nods and reels the stage curtain south like a moat, from the opposite side the house lights illuminating, adults talking and murmuring about the performance as they idle out of the theatre sounding almost like white noise.

I look off stage. I can see Dawn smiling. The audience has risen as if there is a gospel reading in Church. The applause sounds like hundred overweight adolescents are pogoing up and down on aluminum foil.  There is energy. Off stage Scott the poet looks stoned.
 

As I bow I look towards my left even seeking Stacia even through the vertical blinders of bodies shifting, acknowledging the pit. As I look I see Dawn off stage clapping, shouting. The house lights blink into cognizance and I see my grandmother and my aunt and Uncle and My parents, knowing that my grandma will insist on taking my cousin and myself out to Lums afterwards to celebrate, telling us that we worked hard, telling us that we did a good job.

I look again, my neck craned like a periscope searching for Stacia. Everyone else is half-bowing. 

 I look down. There is another kick in the shin. It is Betsy. She is standing next to me. Her derby cap barely nodding above my waist. She is smiling. She claps three times in a row very jittery and then she pogos up and down and then she claps again.

There is more applause. Even with my glasses off dawn seems to be smiling right at me. Scott looks stoned and tugs at the pulley from the opposite direction at first

 With the curtain closed I get down on one knee as if I am to propose to Lil’ Betsy.  I hold out my palm awaiting a hi-five. Instead, without saying anything, she turns around and kicks me again, before running off stage.

I look up. I am next to Harold Hill. Although the heavy merlot curtain has thwarted us from the audience applause is still spasmodically ricocheting throughout the theatre. I swear I can still hear Pam clapping, clacking her hands, the director, screaming out the names of the leads, screaming that we all were brilliant.

“Hey man,” I turn to Harold Hill.

We give each other a little hug.


Somehow we have done it, even though we didn’t know the territory.

Somewhere in the audience Pam is talking to God.

Somewhere in the audience she is thanking Him.