Screen Play (4 page)

~
Six
~

Avril brushed a fallen lock of blonde hair back in place as she stepped into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. Inside, she found a green and silver foil bag of gourmet coffee that looked like a Christmas present and proceeded to pour a heap of the dark brown coffee beans into a Braun grinder sitting next to an automatic espresso machine.

“Get any sleep last night?” she asked.

“I would have loved getting nine hours instead of six, but I’m more or less recharged to go another round with Tabby. Yesterday was brutal.”

Avril pressed the button on the coffee grinder, drowning out all hope of further conversation. I picked myself up from the bar stool at the kitchen island and walked into the living room as she tap-tap-tapped, grinding the beans to a perfect consistency.

It was a small apartment, less than eight hundred square feet, but the morning sunlight filled it with the optimism of a new year. The tones were cool and brown; they reminded me of the sands of Malibu. On one wall were bookshelves filled with a brainy collection of hardcover classics, silver-framed photographs of Avril and her parents, and Chinese pottery. A small blue water globe no larger than a baseball caught my eye. I touched it with my fingers, causing the earth to bobble slightly on its stand. When it settled, I could see the United States, from New York to California, making the country look small from sea to shining sea.

I watched Avril pour a bottle of Evian water into the coffeemaker and flip the switch to brew. She joined me in the living room, where I was sitting in a comfy brown chair facing the bookshelves and a fireplace with white painted bricks. A moment later the sound of percolating coffee filled the apartment like a relaxing fountain. The aroma of French roast soon followed, and we soaked it up like the meditational comfort of a weekend spa.

“As soon as I heard Molly was leaving, I thought how perfect you’d be in this role,” said Avril, dovetailing one conversation into another. “Ben’s choice of Helen is obvious because she’s box-office gold on Broadway, and the character of Audrey Bradford
has
always been played by an older woman. But his casting choice of Molly as a younger Audrey Bradford was kind of interesting, don’t you think? Ben told me he believes there could be an even greater potential for drama if Audrey
is played by a younger actress. Of course, he’d never say that around Helen. You should have seen her face the day Molly was introduced as her understudy. Well, I guess you didn’t have to—you caught some of that vibe yesterday.”

“But wouldn’t it be weird if Helen could only do the first act, and a younger Audrey Bradford
came out for the rest of the show?”

“I wondered the same thing. But Ben is pretty confident that
if
Helen couldn’t perform, he’d know well in advance of her ever taking the stage. And with only forty-two performances, the odds of her becoming ill during the show are minimal. She agreed to a physical with her doctor, and I guess passed with flying colors.”

The coffeemaker puffed its last gasp. Avril proceeded behind the island to pour us each a cup of day starter. She returned carrying two mugs to the living room with poise, and handed one to me. I blew delicately across its surface before setting it down to cool.

“I meant to ask you,” Avril said, “does Sydney know you’re here in New York?”

Sydney Bloom, our beloved theatrical agent, our wise and witty mother hen, had loved actors all of her fifty-plus years, Avril and me for the last seven. She was equally at home talking shop over lunch at a kosher deli on Fifty-first Street, or a wheat grass bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. I loved to picture her in the place she loved best, her beach house in Monterey.

“I left Sydney a message,” I said. “Just told her I was flying to New York, but I didn’t say why. I didn’t want to share my news over voice mail.”

I’d fallen in love with acting the day I stepped into a crowded theater class at Northwestern in Chicago. At first, The Fundamentals of Acting was just a freshman elective, a stop on the road to my English degree and nothing more. But by the end of the semester, I was no longer content simply to
read
Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
—I wanted to
be
Juliet. The next fall, I switched my major to drama and theater and began soaking up the art form with other theater students, including Avril and a bumbling young theater major named Ben Hughes who discovered his talent lay not in acting but directing. We dubbed ourselves “The Misfits” after the 1961 John Huston movie starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, mostly because none of us felt like we fit in anywhere else. We were a tight-knit group in and out of the classroom, writing and performing student productions, blocking our scenes, and trying our hand at improvisation. We pooled together our meager dollars to root through vintage clothing stores in Chicago for authentic costumes and crazy props.

We fought off butterflies fluttering in our underfed stomachs each opening night, peering through the thick black curtain and counting heads under the houselights of the campus theater. We were young romantics, dreaming of somehow making a career out of pretending.

What’s the best part of acting? It’s the indescribable feeling of being someone you are and someone you’re not, all at the same time. Acting is finding a character that’s in you, forgetting yourself, and then bringing out this whole other person. Character is all that matters when you’re onstage.

“I never do this,” Sydney told me one night outside Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre after a midseason performance of Tennessee Williams’s
The Glass Menagerie
. She handed me her business card, which I was understandably leery to take. We stood outside the theater chatting, wrapped in heavy wool scarves and thick winter coats to stave off Lake Michigan’s bitter winds. Her cheeks were pink from the chill, and I remember thinking she wasn’t made for exposure to the elements. Her trademark designer glasses, oversized purple frames, fogged with every breath that puffed out of her round face.

“Call me next week if you think you can stand talking to a real agent,” Sydney said, as if there were hardly a worse thing a person could do.

“Sydney will be thrilled you’ve landed a role in the first New York revival of
Apartment 19
in thirty years,” Avril said now.

“I know, but I’ve wanted to avoid ‘the conversation.’”

“Which conversation?”

“The one that follows a thirty-year-old actress who hasn’t worked in a year. The gentle pep talk your agent gives you when she knows your career is over.”

Avril waved my argument away with a brush of her delicate hand. “You’re crazy. Sydney will be thrilled you’re here. You should call her this morning to let her know.”

“Avril, Sydney and I haven’t spoken in six months,” I confessed. “We stopped talking after
Grease
ended, when there wasn’t a job out there for me and we both felt awkward with her ‘something will turn up’ talks.”

“But all that’s changed now. You’re back on your feet, on Broadway no less. Sydney will love hearing the news.”

I blew across the surface of my coffee again before taking a sip. The flavor was strong and black, and by the time I took my second sip, I realized that Avril was right. Sure, I was broke, and going back into the world of unemployment in six weeks, and my acting job didn’t involve any real stage acting. And, yeah, I was single without prospects and almost every stitch of clothing I owned was still locked away in my checked suitcase, lost somewhere in the dungeons of LaGuardia or maybe Philly. But I wasn’t going to worry, and not just because I had a good cup of coffee and a temporary roof over my head. I had at least two other incalculably good things going for me: my vivid memory of God’s well-timed rescue, and my belief He could do it again whenever He pleased.

“I’ll call her,” I said, clinking my cup to hers.

“Happy new year.”

I showered in a tiny white-tiled bathroom Avril had “colorized” by adding a yellow daisy curtain, a matching floor rug, and photographs of wildflowers arranged on the wall beside the medicine cabinet.

I dressed in dark slacks I’d stuffed in my carry-on and buttoned up the black chemise Avril had purchased for me the night before, wearing it untucked. Judging from the full-length mirror in the bedroom, everything fit the look of a New York winter: basic flats, a red wool scarf I borrowed from Avril, and finally, my made-for-Manhattan leather jacket.

“Can you get yourself back to the subway?” Avril asked as I cut across the living room and rattled open the latches and chain locks on the apartment door.

“Think so. See you at the Carney later, right?”

“Right after your rehearsal with Tabby,” Avril said, teasing me as she refilled her coffee. I gave her a friendly “oh, shut up” look before closing the door behind me.

Life had been so easy in Chicago with Avril, and our yearlong stint in
Grease
was the icing on the cake
.
Avril played the female lead, Sandy, and I was one of the sassy (but nameless) Pink Ladies. It didn’t matter that my name wasn’t written in lights on a marquee, and I really didn’t think much about it. I was happy to be working in a career field known for an 85 percent unemployment rate.

What kept me financially afloat was a commercial I shot for a nighttime cold medicine, Drowz-U-Tab. That one-day commercial shoot rewarded me with $8,500 per quarter in residuals, a “performance” fee paid to actors whenever the commercial aired on TV. $30,000 for one day of sitting up in bed and pretending to suffer the insomnia associated with a runny nose. The truth was, after that first check arrived, I never slept more like a baby.

But all good things must come to an end. The last Drowz-U-Tab check arrived the week after the plush red curtains closed on Ben Hughes’s all-that-and-a-milkshake production of
Grease.
That’s when Avril boarded a jet to Boston for the next act in her breezy, triumphant career, and I was set adrift in a sea of icebergs.

I stepped off the subway car in midtown Manhattan, a short twenty-minute ride. The smell of hot tar and diesel fuel thickened the air like the breath of a dragon. I walked the remaining blocks to the dance studio, studying the faces of New Yorkers on the street. It was time for Scene 2 with Tabby Walker. I prayed I’d do better this time, hold my tongue, and be the person my faith said I was.

With closed eyes I recited my lines, practicing a Zen-like concentration. I stood in the middle of the makeshift stage Tabby and I had constructed using folding chairs and an Asian rug we found rolled up in a closet. I juggled the recitation of Audrey Bradford’s words with hitting my mark or remembering to bolt out of a chair when I recited a certain line in Act 1. After I’d surprised Tabby by knowing the script
off book
the day before, she’d decided to up the ante on New Year’s Day, running me through
all
the stage blocking for Act 1 and 2 in a single morning.
What was her problem?

Tabby threw a line to me from her do-it-yourself director’s chair, Ben’s master script open on her lap like a fifty-state road atlas. I began to perspire as I concentrated on my lines and moved to the correct stage positions Tabby had marked out on the rug and the studio floor. I thought about the difference watching Ben’s rehearsal DVD would have made, but it was too late for that now. I also ignored the dirty looks Tabby gave me when I messed up, and just did the best I could.