Dead Man Dancing (16 page)

‘We'll have the use of dressing rooms, don't worry.' She flapped her arms like a scarecrow and laughed. ‘Can you see me dancing a tango in this outfit? The Sta-Puf marshmallow girl meets the Michelin Man.'

I laughed at the image, too. ‘Can I get you guys something to eat?'

‘No thanks. After they gave us the wristbands and collected our forms, they said only one of us had to be in line at all times. So, when the sun came up, Hutch hiked up to Lexington Market – I was absolutely drooling for a Pollock Johnny's hot dog, all the way, you know, with chili, mustard and that secret stuff they put on it, but, darn it, the market doesn't open until eight thirty. So I ate some of the chips we brought along.'

She delivered this information in one long, breathless sentence. I felt exhausted just listening. It reminded me of the difference in our ages. Melanie was younger than my daughter, Emily. She probably even knew the names of Brittany Spears's babies.

My cell phone abruptly launched into ‘Anchors Aweigh'.

Paul. ‘Where are you, Hannah? They're about to open the doors.'

‘Hold on, I'm coming!' I gave Melanie a hug, waggled my fingers in the direction of the still napping Hutch, and sprinted to rejoin my family.

By the time I got around the corner, green-shirted SWD staff had already opened the box-office doors and admitted the first group of ten audience members, counting heads as each person went in. When it was our group's turn, Eva pushed Ruth, and I held Chloe's hand, with Paul bringing up the rear.

Inside the lobby, adjacent to The Hipp Café (closed, alas, the muffaletta panini is to die for) the organizers had set up a sophisticated security screening station, like at the airport. Before we could enter the theater, we had to pass through a metal detector, beyond which I could see other uniformed staff seated at long tables pawing through audience members' bags. ‘Are we flying Southwest to Dallas, or coming to see a television show?' I muttered to Paul as he joined me on the other side of the detector.

While a guard searched her wheelchair for explosive devices and her crutches for switchblade knives, Ruth hopped one-footed through the metal detector. Paul reached out for Ruth's hand, tucked it under his arm to lend support. ‘Count your blessings, Hannah. If the doctors had needed to put pins in Ruth's leg, we might never have gotten to see the show.'

‘Ha ha,' Ruth said. She turned to the guard who had just given the seal of approval to her crutches. ‘Look, I can't bear messing with that blasted wheelchair in the auditorium. I'm just fine with these,' she said, adjusting the crutches under her arms. ‘Can you stow the chair someplace until the show is over?'

The guard pressed a button on his walkie-talkie, and a green-shirted staffer arrived almost at once to give Ruth a receipt and take charge of the wheelchair.

We turned over our bags for inspection – even Angelina Ballerina – and after they had been blessed, we were moved along like cattle to a section of the lobby that had been cordoned off with velvet ropes. Once some sort of critical mass was reached – Twenty-five? Thirty? – another SWD staffer unhooked a rope, gave us a come-along sign, and escorted our group into the theater.

‘Oh, wow!' exclaimed Eva as we traipsed single-file down the aisle behind the staffer. Like me, Eva must have been stunned by the lavish, art deco beauty of the place. Balconies with curtained box seats were stacked to our right and to our left. Behind and above us rose an ornate, multi-layered balcony.

‘I'm glad we came early,' Eva said as we filed into a row of old-fashioned, red velvet seats. ‘If I'd been in charge of the scheduling, we'd be back in row FF instead of up front in row K.'

Ruth settled into a seat at row's end, her cast extending into the aisle like a turnstile. ‘Look at this,' she said as she adjusted her leg. ‘The seat ends are wrought iron. What do they remind you of, Hannah?'

I leaned over for a closer look and smiled. It didn't take much imagination to see what Ruth saw. ‘The legs on Grandmother's old Singer sewing machine!'

Paul sat next to Ruth, then came Eva, Chloe and me. ‘Grandma, we have to move!' cried Chloe just as we were shrugging out of our coats and settling in. ‘This seat already belongs to somebody. See?' She rubbed a chubby index finger back and forth over a brass plaque attached to the wooden armrest.

‘We don't have to move, Pumpkin. That's the name of somebody who donated money to adopt your chair.'

‘My chair is adopted?'

‘Uh huh.'

‘That's silly.'

‘Do you have your notebook?' I asked, trying to distract my granddaughter from what was likely to be a discussion of every adopted child among her classmates and every pet we'd ever adopted from the SPCA. We'd taken Chloe out of school for the day on the condition she write a report on her experience. ‘Look up, Chloe,' I said, and pointed toward the stage. ‘Way, way, up.'

Above the stage was a classical mural – goddesses, muses and nymphs cavorting, or at the very least lounging about an Italian walled garden. The central figure bore a striking resemblance to Jackie O, if the former first lady had gone in for diaphanous robes rather than Oleg Cassini. ‘Write a story about that picture,' I suggested.

‘OK.' Chloe hauled out her notebook and a pencil and set to work.

The section of seats immediately in front of us nearest the stage seemed to have been reserved, and now I saw why. A boom camera sailed back and forth over the first several rows, like a grazing Brontosaurus. On the other side of the stage in front of the proscenium arch, a black-clad Steadicam operator appeared to be testing his equipment.

More quickly than I would have thought possible considering the security measures in place, the rows behind us became occupied. Soon, people began filling the balcony, too. The noise level steadily increased. The rustling of paper, the shedding of coats, the scuffling of shoes, the crackling of candy wrappers. Kids talking, parents hushing. Shouts of greeting. Coughing, sneezing. Even people breathing, multiplied by two thousand, contributed to the noise.

Just when I thought I'd be called upon to take Chloe to the restroom again, more for entertainment's sake than out of necessity, a man bounded down the aisle and up a short flight of steps to the stage, his green shirt bright as a traffic light as he paced in front of the Hippodrome's purple, gold-fringed curtain.

Some guys should never wear jeans, and this fellow was one of them. He was dressed in the same green SWD T-shirt as the rest of the crew, but he'd tucked it into his jeans and cinched it in with a belt riding several miles south of wherever a normal waistline might be. Clapped to his head was a serious pair of headphones with a wireless microphone attached to one side on a flexible stalk.

‘Who is that guy?' Paul asked.

I shrugged. ‘Some sort of technician?'

‘Ladies and gentlemen, good morning!'

A few scattered ‘good mornings' drifted stage-ward from the audience, including an enthusiastic one from Chloe, who had been well trained by Mrs Gottschalk, her third grade teacher.

On the stage, the guy cupped a hand over one ear. ‘I can't
hear
you! Let's make some noise back there!'

‘Good morning!' the audience roared.

‘That's
much
better.' He took several steps forward. ‘Welcome to our first casting call for
Shall We Dance?
' He raised both arms over his head and clapped his hands, which we took as a sign that we should do the same.

So we did.

As the applause died down, the guy continued, ‘My name is Dave Carson, and I'm the stage director for this production. I'm the boss. I tell everybody what to do. I tell
you
what to do.' Up went the arms, and everyone clapped like crazy. Meanwhile, his T-shirt crept out from under his belt, revealing three inches of white, very hairy belly.

Dramatically shielding her eyes, Ruth said, ‘Tell me they're not going to put that on TV.'

‘Vomit girl was.'

‘Oh, right. I forgot. This is
family
television.'

‘Do you
mind
?' hissed the woman on my right.

Dave Carson apparently didn't notice any cool breeze caressing his midsection, so he forged on. ‘A funny thing happened on my way to Baltimore today.'

Paul moaned. ‘Lord, he thinks he's a comedian, too.'

‘Shhhh.' The woman on my right was annoyed again.

‘I walked into a bar down on Howard Street, and I sat next to this guy with a dog lying at his feet. And I said to the guy, Does your dog bite? . . .'

‘Oh, no, not a bar joke.' I reached over and put my hands over Chloe's ears.

‘Grandma, I know this joke,' Chloe whispered.

Thinking kids are growing up too darn fast these days, I removed my hands from her ears. ‘You do?'

‘Uh huh. It's not his dog.'

Up on the stage Dave said, ‘I thought you said your dog didn't bite! And the guy says, Hey, it ain't my dog.'

‘See?' Chloe scoffed as all around us the audience erupted in laughter. I should have put a hand over Chloe's mouth instead of her ears.

Encouraged, Dave pulled out another one. ‘Say, did you hear the one about the circus owner who walked into a bar?' He paused, waiting for a response.

‘No!' shouted someone directly behind me.

‘Tell us, Dave!' somebody else yelled from the balcony.

Dave shuffled his feet in an aw-shucks sort of way, then forged on with an old chestnut about a tap-dancing duck. I zoned out and watched Jackie O take shape under Chloe's pencil, looking a little like Minnie Mouse, but without the ears.

I snapped back to attention when Dave screamed into his microphone, ‘Your duck is a rip off!' and spent another agonizing minute waiting for the punch line. ‘So, asks the duck's former owner, did you remember to light the fire under the pot?'

I managed a modest titter at that, but the rest of the audience roared so loudly you'd think it was the funniest joke they'd ever heard.

‘Well, I don't think we'll have to light any fires under the feet of the contestants here today, do you folks?'

Nooooh
!

Dave made a time-out sign, cutting the audience off in mid-cheer. ‘As you probably know, over the next few months, we will be conducting talent searches in New York, Chicago, Kansas City, Dallas and Los Angeles, so if you have friends in any of those cities, tell them to put on their dancing shoes and come on out! Email 'em. Text 'em. Call 'em on your cell.

‘And speaking of cell phones . . . do you have a cell phone? Of course you have a cell phone. Everyone has a cell phone. My
goldfish
has a cell phone. Well, get them out now.' Dave waited for the deafening noise of everyone scrambling in his or her purse, bag or pocket to die down before continuing. ‘Now, find the off button and push it. Done? OK? Now put those phones away. You won't need them any more today. OK, so you wanna know how it works?'

Oh, yes! Tell us, Dave. Tells us how it works!

‘What we're going to do here today, and in those other cities I mentioned just now, is pick a total of sixty-five couples to compete in the finals in New York City. When they get to the Big Apple, they'll be told which six dances they will have to perform, and they'll be given just five weeks to prepare before the competition begins. One of the couples you see here today could very well be our next
Shall We Dance?
champions!'

Oh, yes! How cool is that!

‘So, are we ready?'

The audience was so ready, hooting and hollering, that if Dave didn't get on with it, they were likely to storm the stage.

‘But, first,' he shouted over the din of the restive crowd, ‘first, you'll meet our three esteemed judges.' His arms shot skyward, followed by renewed clapping and hooting.

‘They'll sit up here,' Dave Carson said, turning to his left and indicating with a sweep of his arm the curtain, which was slowly rising to reveal a starkly furnished stage. Wide and enormously deep, the Hippodrome stage could easily accommodate the most ambitious of Broadway shows, even those that required full-size helicopters to touch down in the center of it.

Now, however, it was furnished with a single, long conference-style table and three chairs, with their backs to us. Three microphones, one for each judge, sat on the table, and between the table and the back of the stage, was a standing microphone.

Eva leaned over and whispered, ‘The judges will be facing
away
from us?'

‘They face the contestants who'll be dancing back there, I suppose, behind the standing microphone.'

‘Once we begin,' Dave continued, ‘the contestants will be called out one couple at a time. Steve Owens here –' Dave gestured to the sound man on stage right – ‘will cue up the music. Let's put our hands together now for Steve!'

Yay! Yay for Steve!

‘Each couple will have ninety seconds to show the judges what they've got.' Dave leaned toward us, the audience. ‘Ready?'

‘Ready!' we all screamed, even me.

‘Now, to meet the judges. First, all the way from Melbourne, Australia where he just finished filming
Paradise Bay
, Neville Grant!'

Neville appeared, gleaming white hair slicked straight back, bowing to acknowledge the thunderous applause. He was dressed entirely in black, including his shoes. The man was painfully thin, desperately in need of emergency ravioli.

Dave pumped Neville's bony hand. ‘When will
Paradise Bay
be released in the United States, Nev?'

‘Next year, Dave, and it's starring two of Australia's greatest exports, Mel Gibson and Nicole Kidman.'

The audience went insane with joy, while Neville, alternately waving and bowing, loped long-legged across the stage and eased into his chair.