My Life: The Musical (5 page)

“You mean cast album,” said Emily, trying not to sneer. “Soundtracks are from movies. Shows have cast albums.”

“Same thing!” giggled Michelle. “And then we’re getting pedicures! Because it doesn’t have to be summer to have pretty feet, right?”

“Pedicures, pedicures, pedicures!” Cindy and Chantal and Lorelei and Beth chirped in unison. Well, not really, but that’s what it seemed like in Emily’s head. Like they were starting a chirping, squealing musical number, like the one from
Bye Bye Birdie
where all the teenagers go crazy because some big singing star is coming to town. It was called “The Telephone Hour”; Philip had played it for her once.

“Spring! Oh my God!” Cindy shrieked. “Did you hear? Evelyn told me that Frankie Russo told her that Mr. Henderson told him what the spring musical is going to be!”

Chantal and Lorelei and Beth and Michelle started bouncing up and down on the seats. “What what what what what what?”

Cindy frowned. “She said it was going to be
Fiddler on the Roof
.”

A collective, disappointed sigh escaped the girls.

“A classic,” said Philip. “One of the best shows ever.” Emily nodded in agreement.

“Yes, but the
costumes,
” Chantal moaned. “Aren’t the characters, like, peasants?”

“I guess we won’t be driving the football team wild with our Hot Box Girls costumes this year!” Lorelei quipped.

At that, the five girls started spontaneously singing “A Bushel and a Peck” from
Guys and Dolls
in their highest, squeakiest voices.

Emily slumped in her seat and hid behind her Week in Review section from last Sunday’s
Times,
which so far had not provided any inspiration for her persuasive essay, other than to argue that newspaper ink should be made less smudgy. And Philip wished he’d brought some aspirin. Didn’t these girls realize how idiotic they were? He’d seen them in
Guys and Dolls
last year, out of morbid curiosity. The band had sounded like—well, like a high school band. The voices were uneven. The dancing, embarrassing. The acting ranged from soap opera to nonexistent. And those tacky, sequined, far-too-revealing Hot Box Girls costumes—the stuff of nightmares! On Broadway, at least, if you were wearing a skimpy costume, it was because you actually had a great body. In high school, this was not always the case.

“Hey, Emily!” said Beth. “Mr. Henderson is always saying how you’re some kind of theatre fanatic. How come you guys don’t try out for the shows?”

Because you are deluded,
Emily wanted to say.
Because we know people who are trained actors, who are on Broadway, who are actually talented—who carry on like fools just like you do, but they’ve earned the right because they are really good at what they do!

What she said was, “Because they su—”

“We prefer,” Philip said, carefully interrupting Emily before she finished the last word, “the
professional
theatre.”

“Huh,” said Michelle. “Whatever. So what show are you seeing today?”

Emily smiled.
“Aurora.”
The word itself made her happy.

“Aurora.”
Michelle’s face looked semiblank but her voice maintained its high-pitched, overexcited tone. “Awesome! I haven’t seen that but I hear it’s great! Oh my God, have you seen
Avenue Q
? Have you seen
Wicked
?”

The other girls started chattering.

“I totally saw
Wicked
! It was great!”

“I thought
Phantom
was great, too!”

“I hear the food at Planet Hollywood is great.”

“Our
Mamma Mia!
seats are really great!” added Cindy. “My mom bought the tickets. She said we were in the downstairs part.”

“You mean the orchestra section?” Philip said.

“Oh my God, I
hope
we’re not sitting with the band!” Cindy pretended to faint and the other girls giggled. “Though if we’re going to meet some cute musicians, maybe we should get our pedicures first!”

Then they kicked off their shoes to compare feet, each one claiming hers were the
absolute worst
. Soon there were ten girlish legs waving around in the air, like the June Taylor Dancers.

Not that they’d know who the June Taylor Dancers were,
thought Philip. He looked over at Emily to catch her eye and share a moment of “Can you believe these dum-dums?” but Emily had propped her head against the window in despair and her eyes were closed.

Philip glanced back at the giggling centipede and decided to follow Emily’s lead.
Thank God for
Fiddler, he thought, leaning back in his seat.
Put these five in some ankle-length peasant dresses, quick.

6

“DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND”

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

1949. Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Leo Robin,
book by Joseph Fields and Anita Loos

As she and Philip walked from the Rialto Theatre to the Café Edison for their prematinee lunch date with Ian and Stephanie Dawson (their precious
Aurora
rush tickets had already been purchased and tucked into Philip’s backpack), Emily added up the expenses that would be incurred that day by the five-headed, shrieking spending machine that was Michelle, Cindy, Chantal, Lorelei, and Beth.

A hundred dollars each for orchestra seats to
Mamma Mia!

Twenty-five dollars, easy, for lunch in that overpriced tourist trap.

A trip to the Virgin Megastore to buy “soundtracks” (duh): another twenty-five dollars each.

Pedicures? Who knew? Twenty dollars, Emily figured.

Shopping? At least fifty dollars each, maybe more.

Plus the fourteen-dollar round-trip train fare from Rockville Centre to Penn Station. And these girls would probably take taxis everywhere.

Conservatively, then, each one of those squealing dimwits would be spending close to two hundred fifty dollars today.

Two hundred and fifty dollars each! One thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars total!

That was fifty discount rush tickets to
Aurora
. Practically a year’s worth.

Thank goodness for Grandma Rose,
Emily thought, and she resolved to spend no more than seven dollars at the Edison: that would cover a cup of soup, tax, and tip. She was craving a cheeseburger, but unlike Michelle, Cindy, Chantal, Lorelei, and Beth, Emily was on a budget.

The very first time Emily had seen
Aurora,
it was her father’s brother, crazy Uncle David, who’d given her the tickets. Emily was thirteen at the time and too young to go by herself, so Grandma Rose had taken her.

It was a fateful night, for her and for Philip as well—really, what were the odds of both of them being there at the first preview of a new musical hardly anyone had heard of? It only took one performance to forge their special, permanent bond—a bond as indelible as an autograph signed in the bold black ink of a Sharpie. . . .

“Who is this Marlena Ortiz?” Grandma Rose had said as they gathered up their coats. The show was over and everyone was leaving, but young Emily, tears still wet on her cheeks, was frozen in her seat, staring at the empty stage. “Marlena Ortiz, she’s all right,” Grandma Rose decided. “No Ethel Merman, but cute. So, what did you think? Did you like it? I thought it was pretty loud. But that’s what the public goes for these days. Come on, darling, people want to get out.”

Grandma Rose kept chatting as Emily stood up like a sleepwalker and allowed herself to be led out of the theatre. In her head it was all still going on. The story. The music. The dancing. Emily had seen a lot of Broadway shows, maybe even more than most girls from theatre-happy families in the New York metropolitan area, but she had never seen anything that touched her like this.

Never be enough,
My love for you could never be enough,
Ten thousand years could never be enough
To say what’s in my heart—

“Come on, let’s get her autograph!” said Grandma Rose, waving the souvenir program she’d purchased for Emily. “Who knows, that Marlena Ortiz, maybe she’ll be a big star someday.”

Emily and her grandmother pushed their way through the chattering mob outside the theatre. The air tingled with the collective excitement of 1,545 people who’d just been the first human beings on the planet to see a new Broadway musical:

one that had the rare, intoxicating smell of a hit.

The stage door of the Rialto was on the side of the theatre, down a short alley. The crowd waiting there numbered at least thirty and seemed to be mostly pros—professional autograph hounds who’d already amassed stacks of first-night
Playbills,
with Sharpie markers at the ready to thrust at whichever actor emerged first.

“I know him,” Emily blurted out. One of the people in the front of the crowd, nearest the stage door, looked really familiar. In fact, she was sure he went to her school.

“Philip, right?” she called over the din. “Philip?” She had to call again even louder, because the stage door had opened and everyone was screaming. But it was one of the musicians, dressed all in black and grinning with embarrassment that he wasn’t who the crowd wanted.
“Philip Nebbling?”

Finally hearing his name, Philip turned around. Thirteen years old but looking older because he was tall for his age, even skinnier than he’d be a few years later, eyes rimmed red from crying through the last twenty minutes of the show—Philip Nebbling had run off to the city by himself that night because he couldn’t bear to stay home and face what he’d just found out. (“A garlic farm?” he’d screamed at his mother as she’d tried to explain, the phone still in her hand.
He’d lost his father to a woman with a garlic farm?
)

Now the show was over and he was standing at the stage door, waiting for what exactly he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that the worst day of his life had turned, improbably, into the best, and he wanted, he
needed
the magic of this night to last a few minutes longer. And now somebody was calling his name.

From the expression on his face when he finally looked up and saw Emily calling to him, Emily could tell they were about to become best, best friends.

Aurora
.

He got it, too.

Afterward she and Philip had had to make do with only occasional visits to the show, funded at first by Emily’s accumulated birthday and Hanukkah money and later by Grandma Rose’s generosity. Unlike Emily’s parents, Grandma Rose didn’t need to be convinced that seeing the same show over and over again was a valid expense.

“When your father was a baby,” Grandma Rose liked to recount to Emily at the dinner table, “once a week I left him with my sister for the afternoon, and you know what I did? I saw
Fiddler on the Roof
! Every Wednesday afternoon! With Zero Mostel, every Wednesday!”

Mrs. Pearl would ladle more mashed potatoes onto everyone’s plates in an attempt to change the subject, but Grandma Rose was tenacious. “What a performance!” she would crow, gesturing with her fork. “So sad! So funny! So
true
!” Then she would sing: “If I were a rich man! Ya-hah-deedle-deedle-bubba-bubba-deedle-deedle-dum!”

Of course, when Zero Mostel starred in the original Broadway production of
Fiddler,
it was 1964 and a balcony seat for a Saturday matinee of a Broadway musical cost three dollars and sixty cents. Mere latte money! Emily found the figure impossible to believe, until Grandma Rose showed her the old
Fiddler
ticket stubs and
Playbills
in her scrapbook.

It wasn’t until Emily turned fifteen and was allowed to go into Manhattan without an adult (“As long as you travel with a friend,” her parents had stipulated, “and stay together the whole time”) that seeing
Aurora
on a weekly basis became a possibility. But even at the rush-line price of twenty-five dollars a ticket, two people seeing the show every Saturday quickly added up to a significant sum. There was also the round-trip train fare to the city and lunch at the Edison to pay for.

That was when Emily struck her deal. Now, Grandma Rose had made it clear she didn’t have unlimited funds, and she had a slew of grandnephews and grandnieces to spoil. So the secret weekly
Aurora
allowance she provided was not an outright gift, but a loan—or, as they called it in show business, an
advance
.

“Don’t worry, you’ve got it,” Grandma Rose would say as she counted out the tens and twenties every week, enough to cover both Emily and Philip’s expenses (of course Emily paid for Philip; she had to, because they were best friends and fellow Aurorafans and he was poor). “You’ve got money in the bank, darling,” Grandma Rose assured her. “From your bat mitzvah. You’ll pay me back when you’re older.”

Grandma kept her cash in a cigar box in her top dresser drawer, and Emily always tried to catch a glimpse of what else was in there when Grandma tucked the box away. She could have sworn she’d once seen a label from Victoria’s Secret, which was an odd feeling. Grandma was seventy-five, after all. Anyway, this week, like every other week, Emily had thanked her grandmother profusely for the loan.

Grandma shrugged. “What if I’d waited to see Zero Mostel? Now he’s dead. And they didn’t even use him in the movie! They used that other man, the one with the strange name.”

“Topol.” Emily didn’t find Topol any stranger a name than Zero, but Grandma was entitled to her opinion. “He was good, Grandma. He got nominated for the Academy Award.”

“He’s no Zero Mostel, that’s all I’m saying. Now,
that
was a Tevye.” Grandma Rose’s whole face crinkled when she smiled. “This is my point, darling. You have to see your show while it’s running. ’Cause when it’s over—goodbye, Charlie. That’s my advice.” And she grabbed Emily by the earlobe and gave a little pinch, and that was that.