The second performance in a row Pam talks to God. The second performance in a row the almost 90 members of the cast form a whale-shaped bubble clasping arms and elbows on stage, for the second day in a row, after make-up and vocal warm-ups with Miss Jana, Pam tells all of us to take several deep breaths and to close our eyes and to feel a purple energy hovering over us, for the second day in a row Pam says hi to God like they are old drinking buddies, addressing God with a capital G as the Creator, thanking him for the gift of immanent life on stge.
For
the second day in a row we each squeeze the hand of the cast member next to us
tight and then hug each other and wish each other a good show.
For
the second day in a row we configure a human halo by linking our wrists and
closing our eyes and taking several deep breaths. There is a collective
plosive sigh sounding almost like a sneeze when Pam tells us to release the
breath in unison.
For
the second day in a row there is a sort of energy, a tingle, several of the
younger kids will claim that hey hear a tingling or see people in white walking
around backstage.
Some
of the soccer moms are calling the group meditation before the performance a
“low key new age ritual” We do make-up. We do vocal warm ups.
We
prepare for the show.
She does my make-up again seated in
front of me like she is giving me a lapdance.
There is a different feeling when
she is putting on my make-up.
I hate this but I don’t mind
you touch my face.
Dawn smiles.
The
portly soccer mom with the clipboard is caroling out places, holding her
clipboard next to the side of her mouth as is she is trying to register an
echo. Dawn smiles at me.
“You
gonna be back on stage left again? I mean, I really enjoyed talking with ya
yesterday.”
Dawn
smiles. She tells me that she shouldn’t miss our verbal dalliance for the
world.
Dalliance.
While
I am walking upstairs I note a recent copy of TIME magazine loafing in a half-scrolled
crease next to the coach in for whatever purposes constitutes the green room.
As I hold and unfurl it Ross Perot’s bulbous and billionaire forehead pop-up as if in a children’s book. I have
not paid ort to the news in the last week, consciously avoiding the headlines
in the ink-scroll I deliver every
morning. Apparently Ross Perot has dropped out of the race even though early
June polls showed him with a substantial lead over both Bush and Clinton. As I open it up and peruse the article I am flooded with images of the bespectacled lad
who always wore the Ross Perot t-shirt in French class reading the article
exploding in a nest of tears.
Ross
Perot is no more.
“Charlie!!”
I head a voice. I am being summoned again
My
train for River city is leaving.
The
second night of our performance is about to begin.
***
***
The backstage of Peoria Players
theatre is convex-shape slab of cement heavily graffiti’d with past Plays and the years they
were produced. There
is Cats in ’84 and Oklahoma in ‘91. Little Shop of Horrors in 1989. There is
Bye Bye Birdie in ’87 and Godspell just last spring. The mural is an elongated
jigsaw frieze of collecting narratives, a hodgepodge blockade, a plume of theatrical
shows past. There is something kaleidoscopic and almost nostalgic about staring
at the tombstones of past productions; knowing that the cast and company worked
their ass off, stayed up late memorizing line, monopolized hours choreographing numbers
lasting only five minutes, spent weekend constructing stage props that would
later be dismantled and abandoned, wore make-up, fell madly in love, all in the
same stage you are currently performing, on in the attempt to deliver a
production for strangers in a mid-sized town, granting them 3 hours of
entertainment and then, gone.
Downstairs
there is always a 10 gallon water jug of powdery orange drink for the cast to
sip between intervals awaiting on-stage cues.
For the second day in a row I spent the majority of the
production on stage left talking with Dawn. For the second day in a row Dawn is
telling me that I look exactly like that kid from Blossom, adding that it is
weird.
For
the second day in the row I become mesmerized by Dawn’s prominent features. Her face is
ivory, almost chalky flavor to her forehead. For a second day in a row I am awed by Dawn’s
scholastic well-readness.
Dawn’s scent is different from that of Andrea’s. You can tell that Dawn spends more time occluded in a geometric carrel of the school’s library then she does basking beneath the overhead brow of the mid-July sun. There is something overtly pallid and vitamin deficient in the locution of her limbs that in a way is sexy.
Every
time Dawn says that I look just like the older brother off of Blossom I almost
expect her to pull a Zaneeta and say ye Gads.
On stage the Pik-a-little talk-a-little bit is
punctuating. It is our second day together. Dawn and I sit far stage
left. Scott looks like he just smoked something green and extremely rolled as
he awaits the cue for the stage curtain. We are making small talk. On stage 76
trombones is ready to begin with a school board harangue about keeping our
young boys pure.
Today we are talking about music. Dawn is
wearing one of the round ragtime hats the members of the school board slash
barber shop quartet wear. She is crouched in fetus posture with her fingers wreathed
around the caps of her knees.
Scott is still looking at us and just nods as if we are transgressing. We are
talking about Music. We are talking about sounds that moves us. Dawn is talking about bands I have never heard of before.
Bands with synthetized emotional allegro attached to their
avant garde label. Bands whose name evokes European vowels sunbathing under the
oscillating strobe –lit electronic sun next to an aluminum sea. Bands with
names like Oingo Boingo and Concrete Blonde and XTC and New Order and Midnight
Oil. Bands with names like Yaz and
Erasure and the Cure.
Bands
that are not played on main stage radio.
Bands
that are considered alternative whatever that moniker happens to mean.
Bands I
faintly know of thanks to sampling David Best’s older brother Ben’s cool music
collection.
It astounds me that dawn doesn’t listen to KZ93
except on Sunday night when they have a British DJ and are known as Channel Z
and play quote modern rock alternative.
She
tells me that she is into Vinyl albums. She tells me that she has spent the
last three months listening to Jesus Christ Superstar on vinyl.
“It’s a
rock opera. Performed by members of Deep Purple.”
I have
never heard the term rock Opera before.
Due
to the refraction of light splintering off stage left in individual holy water
flecks there is a chiaroscuro valence of silence dripping over our
conversation. It feels like we are milking out our individual personas seeped
in recursive film noir. I can make out her smile. I can make out the
nuanced sail of her forehead. Sometimes our shadows separate and sometimes
our shadows briefly coalesce and sometimes it looks like our shadows form
ancient hieroglyphics splatters across Hello Dolly ’79.
I tell her that I mainly listen to Gangster rap cause I stem
from the hood. I tell her that if she likes, I can quote the opening stanza
from N.W.A’s straight outta Compton about a crazy mother fucker named Ice Cube.
Dawn states no, it’s okay. Really.
“Oh and I listen to alotta thrash metal too. Suicidal
tendencies and Metallica and Guns-n-Roses.”
Dawn smiles as if she has just sipped something sour. I feel
I can’t compete. I have never heard of any of the bands whose glory she is
espousing.
Somehow I see the furled TIME magazine lounged like a flaccid
telescope near the staircase. I think about Ross Perot and about French class
and about Madame Breton and Depeche Mode.
“Depeche Mode!!” I tell her, stating I really have culture
even though all I have is VIOLATOR at home.
Dawn Smiles. I ask her if she likes Depeche mode.
Dawn Smiles.
“I used to go out to Stage Two all the time only I wouldn’t
dance. I would just sit there when my friends danced. The only song I would
ever dance to is Just Can’t Get enough.
When Just Can’t Get enough would begin to play I would just lose it. I
couldn’t control myself. I would go crazy on the dance floor.”
I smile. I am on a roll even though I have only heard Violator.
I have never heard Depeche Mode’s earlier stuff.
I decide to stick to the British Isles, although I venturing
a tad west.
“Yeah, and there’s his Irish singer named Enya. It’s kinda
weird. I listen to alotta Gangsta rap
and alotta thrash metal and then there’s Enya.”
Dawn looks at me like a doe stunned by a Taser.
“I love Enya.” Dawn says, alluding that she has a beautiful
voice.
“I really don’t know how I got into her. My best friends
older sister used to come home late at night and play her first album at two in the morning.”
Dawn asserts again that Enya has a beautiful voice. She says
that she is familiar with her music from two movies I have never heard of
before.Midway through our conversation Dawn leaves and helps Anthony with him
two second change before Marian the Librarian number. I continue to lose myself
in the names of expired shows. Amadeus in ’83. The Best Little Whorehouse in
Texas. My Fair Lady. I wonder if the cast and company of the shows experienced
the unity and joy and the histrionics and the love that our cast has discerned.
She has been gone for less than a minute an already I miss Dawn. I miss her
voice. I miss how every time I talk to her it feels like my ACT vocab will go
up three points.
From
behind me I can see Dawn assisting Harold Hill with his change. Hill is
stripping. He is practically naked clad only in his briefs and Dawn is
assisting to dress him with fellow make-up ladies.
The
look like they are decorating a moving Christmas tree with slacks and tinsel.
I lounge against the warren of props culled
from the dissected remnants of past
shows. When I look behind me she is there again, almost like a
leprechaun.\
It
is Betsy. She is gigging.
“Hey
munchkin.” I tell her, trying to get rid of her.
“I
have a question for you Tharlie?” She
asks. I smile. She lisps worse than Winthrop.
“When
you are with Th’arion the thigh pharian on stage and you kiss her
do you really th'iss?”
I
smile. She is eight. Part of me wants to ruffle her hair beneath her derby cap.
“It’s
kinda of a fake kiss.” I say.
“A
thake th’ist?”
“Yeah,
you see, we just sort of hold each other real close and then tilt each
other a certain way and overlap our chins so it gives the audience the
perception that we are actually making out, when in actuality we are barely
touching each other.”
Betsy
giggles. She is holding both of her hands together close to her chin as if
in prayer.
"Th'ome of the th'adults were thaying
that you th'actually thist her the other night and thit th'was
th'inappropriate."
"Hey," I say, Betsy is
laughing hysterically.
'They th'aid you even thist her
thith the th'ongue."
"Aliright munchkin," I
pick her up, she is on the ground with laughter.
'Do you think you will thist
Dawn with the th’ongue?"
"That's enough."
I say, she is on the ground. I begin to tickle her sides. One of the
sexually frustrated soccer moms with the clipboard puts her finger to her lips
and blows like somebody has just finished caroling happy birthday.
The opening chords of Marion
the Librarian plaintively begin to grumble above the heads of the audience. Stacia walks past. When she sees me talking to Betsy she shoots
me a look as if to say so you are flirting with third graders now.
Betsy
quickly gets up and runs to her place off stage.
“Isn’t
it weird I mean, you are dressing him and he is in his underwear and
everything.”
Dawn
just seminally blushes and then gestures her hand like a tossed napkin as if to
say it is really no big deal.
“That kid is adorable,” I tell Dawn,
pointing at Betsy who is performing a dance that looks like she is skipping in
place.
Dawn
smiles and concurs.
“Her
sister is actually the make-up lady you got into with the first night.”
My
lips form what I can only surmise is a look of shock.
“Yeah,
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I’ve known little Betsy all my life since
she was four years old.”
We’ve been friends all through high school . It’s kind of
funny. We are all best friends and our names are all Dawn. We’re notoriously
known in the hallways of Richwoods high school as the 3 Dawns because we are
always together between classes. Since there’s three
dawn’s they call me Dawn-Michelle.
I tell Dawn that I like that. I tell her that my two
best friends are named David and one of them actually has the last name of
Best.
“Their last names are Best and Hale. Love the hell out
of those guys. Would do anything for them.”
“It’ll be really cool then when you guys are all in high
school next year. It'll be just like what we have.”
I pause.
“It’s not like that. We all three go to the same church and
went to the same grade school only Hale and Best will be going to Limestone.
Best is already a year ahead of me. Both of them pretty much grew up in the
south side and both of their parents’ didn’t want their kids to go to Manual.
Didn’t think it was that safe.”
Dawn shoots me a look like she thought I was older.
“My twin brothers are going to be a freshman at
Richwoods and you certainly seem more mature then the respective sum of
both their years.”
Dawn asks me if I am really excited about high school then.
She stated that Manual actually had a pretty decent speech team only the
majority of students are seniors.
“There’s really not many friends from my grade school
attending and the ones who are going I just despise. Can’t stand. I do have an
older friend named Tim who lives down the street and a friend named Pat whose
parents just can’t stand Manual because they think it was a backdrop set from
Boyz in the Hood.”
Dawn asks me if I am doing any plays when I am at
Manual. I tell her I don’t know.
“I’m a runner. I’ve been running road races since I was nine
years old. It’s really all I wanted to do with my life. Last year I went to
state. I almost won. I’ve already trained with the Manual Cross Country team a
couple of times this summer and Coach thinks I should be ready to run varsity
at the beginning of the season.
Dawn looks at me like she is impressed. I tell her again how
cool it is that Dawn likes Enya. Dawn tells me again that she has a beautiful
voice. Dawn uses the word
Diaphanous.
Stacia floats past wearing a drape. She looks like a flower
ghost petal.
“Excuse me,” I tell Dawn, walking into the direction of the
stage.
There is something I need to do.
***
“You can talk all you want to but it’s different than it
was…”
***
I need
to make peace with Stacia. She has been ignoring me the entire production. I
want to tell her that it is all cool. I want to tell her that I really don’t
care if she went all the way with Anthony the other night. I want to tell her
that I more or less just got off from lavishing in the echoed breeze of her
voice when I spent all those nights monopolized on the phone with her.
As
completely corny as it sounds, I want to tell her that she is a special human
being.
Backstage
the Pik-a-dilly ladies are flitting into their drapes to perform the one Grecian
Urn and a fountain line-dance. Stacia has her hair up in a lily pad above her
skull. I walk up next to her as if I am learning how to idle near the curb.
“Pretty
amazing show last night,” I say, trying to remain nonchalant hell.
Stacia
ignores me. She performs a half-pirouette getting ready for her incumbent
number.
“Hey,
I was just wondering if tonight, after the show, maybe I can call you or
something. You know, watch the nectarine fizz of the dawn as it blinks over the
horizon.”
Stacia
looks back at me. I swear her chin elevates in the condescending
holier-than-thou plutocratic manner of Mrs Shinn.
“You
would know all about watching dawns now wouldn’t you.”
“What?”
I say, befuddled.
“Dawn,
the wanna-be make-up lady. She has been drooling all over you. Everyone is
talking.” She says, sounding like Couri.
I’m
shocked. I stand with my mouth lodged open like an open moat gate unable to
swallow.
“The
make-up lady? We’re just friends. It’s cool hanging out with someone since I’m
not involved in the bulk of the show.”
Stacia
says whatever. She performs a fouette en
tourant which looks more like a Bruce Lee jump Kick in my direction.
“Hey,”
I say, grappling her shoulders in an attempt to quell her undulation. She stops
and scowls. She is biting both her lips so that it looks like there is either a
hyphen or a minus sign splayed below the bridge of her septum. She grabs my
arms and pushes me back.
“Charlie
you just don’t get it!!!”
Stacia
is yelling. Misses Graves who is in charge of the costumes is looking at me as
if I am endeavoring to commit statutory rape.
‘Hey,
I was just..”
“Charlie,
no!! I have to rehearse. Why is everything so crazy with you! Go back to your
Dawn. Go back to the make-up girl with the elite vocabulary and who thinks she knows
everything.”
“What
are you talking about?”
“Everything
Charlie!! Everything!! Why can’t you be a normal human being!?! Why do you have
to be all crazy all the time like!! There’s more to life than is happening in
the script behind your head!!!”
I
have my palms pressed out in the universal sign of surrender. When I try
walking towards her suddenly I am yanked back. Paula Graves has her arm wielded
around my torso. Stacia is still erupting. It is like she is breaking up a fight.
I am being pushed off off-stage. Misses Graves is wearing a doo-rag around the
top of her head as is she is auditioning for a role in Harriet Tubman the
musical. Mrs. Graves whose daughter is Amaryllis and who lives in the large
two-story sallow flavored house on my paper rout across the street from
Bob and Frank and exactly seven houses due east from the high school
girl with the cool Irish parents who I think about late at night clad
only in bra and panty whose twin brother died last year after graduation. Mrs.
Graves whose house I have delivered to assiduously and when I found out she was
on my route the first thing she said was, “ Use a lousy paper boy,” which
vehemently upset me at the time.
“Charlie
baby,” She is saying, her arms around me life-persevere fashion, trudging me
toward the stairs.
I
stutter. I ask what is going on. From in front of me I can see Jenny and Couri
making little tssking sounds with their lips
“What!”
“Just
let her be Charlie, baby. Just let her be.”
I
look back. I see Dawn on the far end awaiting for Anthony’s next quick change.
I wonder what is going on.
“Just
let her be. It’s been alotta crazy-ness around here, child. Just let her be.”
Mrs.
Graves is talking to me like it is not my fault. She is talking to me like I am
a friend.
The
Pikadilly ladies float on stage in their togas like the wispy seeds
of a white dandelion slowly becoming aborted in a presence of a uphill wind.
Mrs.
Graves is talking to me like she is Pam. She is telling me that it is not my
fault Charlie baby. That there are some things going on but that it is not my
fault.
“Just
let Stacia be for a while. She’s in a lot of pain. There’s a lot more
going on behind the curtain of the show than you are aware of. Just let her go
baby. It is all good, child.”
It’s
all good.
***
There is something about the
configuration of an anvil. The dual Janus-chinned rhinoceros snout. The
heaviness and girth plummeting like twin fisted gavels. The time signature to a
Wagnerian opera never finished.
There is something about the gravity
of anvils. The still-life intractability of the meted stump of steel. The
immobility of a steel cloud pregnant with oz. of rust. Cornerstone of hurt. Immoveable feast of
pain.
It is all these years later and I am
still the anvil salesman and there is weight. Pounds I can’t slough.
Gravity weighing. Anvils the size of planets coating the interior of my beer
gut, anchoring me at bay, weighing me down, keeping me from taking off in a wished-for summer breeze of hope.
Type cast as the stereotypical turn
of the century anvil salesman wrought with weight and sentimental pounds he
will never shed.
Not in a million reincarnated years.
***
I
hear the Pikadilly ladies hop-scotch on stage. I sit down on a lone prop chair
stationed next to the stairwell leading downstairs. When I look on the
far south side of the stage I can tell that Dawn is making a conscious vow not
to look in the polar direction. With my glasses off it looks like Dawn is
stationed next to a fire hydrant until I squint and realize that she is seated
next to Betsy.
Inexplicably
I am beginning to sweat. It feels like my skull is a disco ball with swear
marbles dappling off the slope of my forehead.
“Hey,”
I
can’t understand why Stacia detests me. I can’t understand why four nights ago
after performing before the fireworks at Glen Oak Park she was imploring me to
hang out with her. I can’t comprehend why less than a week ago it seemed like
we were on the juvenile pledge of something indelible and special.
“Hey,”
A voice croaks again. It is Mrs. Graves. She is handing me orange drink
served in a diminutive upside down triangular dunce cup.
“Don’t
worry about it Charlie baby. Just give Stacia a couple o’ days. She’ll come
around. “
I
want to ask her why. I want Mrs. Graves to be the sociological filter. To be
the talk show mediator. I direly want her to explicate just what I did wrong. I
want to know why, over the course of four waxing lunar shades Stacia is
totally repulsed by me.
Instead
I take another slurp of my orange drink. It sounds like I am sneezing as I
quaff.
I
feel Mrs. Graves palm on my shoulder. She is asking me if everything is
okay.
From
stage I can hear the cartwheeling chords of Wells Fargo Wagon trundle into
place. I know I have to be on the opposite side of the stage to help Scott
sidle the Wagon on to the stage. Someone is singing that they got some salmon
from Seattle last September.
Mrs.
Graves looks at me. She seems to be the first person in the theatre tilling
over costumes. Like Pam she always seems to be inside the theatre.
“Shhhh!!! No more questions baby. You need to help Scott rove the Wells Fargo wagon onto to the stage.”
My
orange drink served in the topsy harlequin pyramid is empty.
There is just one singular question:
How
was that paper of yours I delivered this this morning?”
Mrs.
Graves looks back at me while walking out of the room.
“Charlie
it was wonderful.” She says, with a smile.
***
“You
okay?” Dawn Michelle says, pulling up a chair next to me, the triangular
chalice in which I had previously been sipping my ethos-nourishing orange drink
has been folded into cubist origami and abandoned on the ground.
“It’s
just a crazy show. There’s a lot of kids. A lot of crazy stuff is going on.”
Dawn
Michelle nods her head as if to say ah.
“That
girl. Her name is Stacia. I thought we were pretty close. I mean, I really
thought we had something special and important and timeless so to speak and in
a way thought we had something really romantically going on and the whole time
I was thinking this she was kinda seeing someone else. It’s just weird.”
Dawn
looks back at me and nods in 4/4 time.
“So,
she was like your girlfriend or something?”
I
swipe my head.
“No
it was more like, I don’t know. She was just incredibly flirtatious and
friendly with me when I joined the cast. I kinda thought we had something but I
guess we didn’t.”
I
am trying to digress. I don’t want Dawn to think that I am still madly in love
with Stacia.
In
a way I wish I could call Dawn up tonight and talk with her all night on the
phone the way I used to with Stacia.
There
are cues. The second half is beginning. I am to be on stage in five minutes.
When I am leaving Dawn turns to me.
“Hope you feel better,” She says,
She then cradles her arms around my waist. We are
hugging. She is groping the back of my head digging it into her shoulder. I volley back. It is not like we are trying
to enter each other’s body. It is not like we are trying to slip into the
crevices and hinges of each other’s flesh.
She is reeling me in. I don’t want to let go.
For some reason I feel like biting her shoulder.
She is nourishing me but there is more.
I think about Depeche Mode, one of the two bands we
both have in common.
Somehow all I have ever wanted is stowed, if only
for a moment, cradled in the fleshy bridge of my arms.
***
“She has a beautiful voice,” Dawn
says, alluding to Enya again.
***
At the end of the performance Stacia is in front of
me as I am exiting the stage. I am walking in the direction of Dawn almost as
if in slow motion. When I get imminently off stage I am thwarted by Scott.
“Hey man, I meant to tell you, Pam wanted you to go
to the lobby.”
I say what. I wonder if I am being reprimanded.
“No she just said that you had to go to the lobby to
see something, I’m sure. I was supposed to tell you after the Rock Island
number. I forgot.”
I walk towards the lobby. Past the herd of egressing
patrons forming upside down scissors with their legs.
As I am leaving Betsy
continues to lovingly follow me around like an unwanted shadow.
“Don’t you have friends you own age you can play with?
They are probably wondering where you are.”
I have a few. Betsy says. She is behind me. It seems when I
am not hanging out with Dawn I am hanging out with Betsy.
“My
thither is Th’awns’ th’est th’end.
Dawn used to baby sit us all the time.”
Dawn’s adorable. She’s amazingly well read too.
“Betsy looks down and says pheah. She’s really smart.
Betsy tells me that she has sister named Thawn.
“Your last name is Weatherfield. Your dad is a judge.”
Betsy tells me that yeah, her dad works all the time.
“Sometimes He th’entences
people. I don’t think he th’ikes th’it.
“
Yeah I say.
In the lobby I see
Paula Graves. She is socializing with several board members.
“Pam wanted me to
come out here,” I say. Paula smiles and points. Near the intermission snack
table there is a sign:
It
is being play by David Von Behren. The soccer mom with the Commodore 64 who
made the sign forgot to put the verb play in the past tense.
On the bottom of the sign there is the he ubiquitous happy/melancholic thespian
masks.
Somehow
I am still playing that role in the first person narrative today.
“What is that?”
Betsy
inquires, Blinking her eyes.
It’s a sign. They accidentally forgot to put my name
in the program so they made a sign acknowledging that I played the part.
“That th’eams
th’oo thare Thesial.” Betsy adds.
“What?”
‘Th’ecial.”
Instead of kicking my shin she forms a petite fist
and punches my thigh, hard enough that it evokes a verbal ouch. I feel like I
am having a mystery-meat lunch influenced influenza of Deja Vu as she turn and
runs, dodging through the oncoming traffic of kneecaps, elbows chugging like
pistons.
She wants me to chase her around the theatre until
she gets caught so she can hit me again.
But I can’t.
I am anvil heavy. It is as if there is tautly-round organ play-doughed in my soon
to be fifteen year own flesh is shaped like an anvil, anchoring me down.
I go home and listen to Depeche mode. I think about
the girl who refuses to dance on the floor at Stage Two unless Just can’t get
enough is playing.
A song I have never heard before.
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