...nocturnal dalliance in the key signatures of lost trombones....

The night after the first performance I sink down into my mattress as if slipping face-up into a hearse and find myself dressed in my Music Man attire staring at the back of my skull as if it is a stage and children from the CCT Music Man production are pirouetting yet we are somehow being pilloried by the audience for being clotted kneecap to kneecap on stage and I find myself all alone on stage right and I am being kicked in the shin by Betsy who for some reason is dressed in a  pied-flavored Jester looking outfit and she keeps incessantly kicking me in my shin until I tell her to knock it off and all she does is smile before kicking me one final time turning around and sprinting into the opposite direction and for some reason the audience is beginning to boo everyone on stage and I chase after  Betsy, down the stairs leading to the basement of Peoria Players, the make-up room where my new found friend daubed and colored the contours of my physiognomy only hours earlier and Besty is nowhere to be found but for some reason the make-up room looks exactly like the bed I am lying stagnant and comatose on right now and as I walk towards my bed I notice that the bottom portion of the bed is hiccupping, giggling like an intoxicated smurf and I  am fairly share that lil’ Betsy is stowed beneath it only when I turn around I see Stacia, directly behind me she seems pissed when I come up to talk to her, to have our long overdue conversation about why she internally decided to  choose Anthony over me she shoves, pushes me to the polar side of the bed.

“Why are you pissed at me? “ I inquire, trying to tell her that for the bulk of the production I was madly in love with her. Stacia shhh’s at me again. She comes to the bed and pushes me further  back towards my headboard which still is riddled from the WWF wrestling stickers I adhered to the headboard when I was seven years of age. Stacia is clad in her lavender Music Man costume and before I know it she is tugging at the bottom of her dress and hiking it over the ashen white knobs of her kneecaps. Her panties are the same color of her smile and she is alighting the dress over the top of her anatomy so I can no make out her face. Her navel seems to be winking at me as if we share some sort of covert secret and I can hear lil’ Betsy from beneath the bed continue to giggle.  I can make out that her bra is a different color from her underwear and that, for her age, she is at least a C-cup. With her dress over her head she looks like handbell or the fleshy stem to an unknown flower and the minute the dress is completely peeled free from her body she wads it in a boll and tosses it gradeschool dodge ball style in my direction.

There are more giggles from beneath the bed.

I try to get up. I try to tell her that we need to be upstairs with the cast who for some reason are getting jeered on stage because there are too many of them and they can’t move. Stacia straddles her thighs around my supine frame. Her panties and waist is completely sprouting out from the center of my torso as if my waist were the freshly palmed root of a  genie’s palsied-limped lamp. She is rubbing up and down. She is smiling. When I try to stop her she pinions my limbs next to my half-peeled Hulk Hogan sticker on my bedframe.

“So he doesn’t know the territory, eh?”

She says, raising her right eyebrow like a barnyard sickle.  

It feels like the center of her body is dripping on top of the center of my body like my grandmother's Bunn percolator.  Stacia then bends her fingers behind her back forming isosceles triangles with her crooked elbows and forearms.  She is tugging at the back of her bra like she is tying to unlock a combination to a high school locker.

“Do you want to see more?” She asks, doing the eyebrow arcing thing again.

There are more giggles beneath the bed. My limbs are still inexplicably handcuffed near the peeled stickers sporting the appellation of Wrestlemania 2.   As I look to the side of my bed I can see the confirmation bible that my aunt gave me a couple of weeks ago when I was confirmed.

Stacia is still fidgeting with the back of her bra in orchestrated pinches. I look at the bible. I try telling Stacia that we can’t do this. I try telling Stcaia that there is a performance transpiring upstairs and that we are both going to miss our collective cues.  I try telling her that lil’ innocuous-eyed Betsy is stowed underneath the bed. I try to tell her all this only for some reason every time I spill open my lips the words ‘Blossom’ comes out followed by the word ‘Vitiate.’

Stacia now has the back of her bra undone and is releasing it like helicopter blades to the side. She begins to quote lines from the scene where Marion the Librarian endeavors to seduce to me.

She is stating, why Mr. Cowell, you don’t know me very well, yet.

“Blossom vitiate. Blossom. Clah-Blossom.”

There is a stampede of giggles from the bottom of the bed.

The second her bra topples from the northern hemisphere of her body her entire face falls into my lap and when I look up I see Andrea from French class. She is wearing a flannel Texas style shirt with red buttons. She is wearing the same cuffed jean shorts that she wore in French class.

When I try to say her name all I hear is the word Blossom echo from my lips.

Andrea tells me to shhhh. She is speaking French. I recognize the word vous.  She is daubing pebbles of sweat off the tip of my forehead. She is kissing me between the eyes. She smiles as if she has just lost something important to her.

I try to say her name. I try to tell her how much I appreciated that we waited for me the last day of French class.  I want to apologize to her for being flippant to her in front of Ian and Ross Perot.

Andrea continues to speak French. She continues to say the verb vouloir. Her thighs are straddled on my hips like she is mounting a hitching post. Every time I try to talk and convey my remorse she again presses her lips together and tells me to shhh before speaking a la francais. She begins to pinch at the buttons of her Texas Style shirt. even though she is speaking French I can tell that she is asking me if I would like to see more.

She props open the buttons of her shirt like she is opening a stage curtain from the inside out.  Both halves of her Texas Shirt are spread out like wings and before me there is Dawn, the make-up lady, straddling me, prodding at the back of her bra.
 

A concatenation of lights  oscillating like a Ferris wheel around my head,  Dawn the make-up lady is steepeled on top of me and she is playing connect the dots using a phial of lipstick dappled with a smack of rouge  and I am lost in the porcelain birth of her cleavage above my chin and below me Betsy is giggling, she is laughing, she is falling over, she is telling me if I don’t stop she is going to pee her pants and all I can hear as Dawn unclasps her bra is Pam, above me in mid- caterwaul asking where Charlie is at, informing me that this is not dress rehearsal, this is a production and that I am somehow late even though everything I have ever wanted I layered on top of me like a pagoda of limbs. 

Pam is screeching out inquires while Betsy is giggling.

She is calling me by my name.