The Winter of Her Discontent (4 page)

Jayne grinned mischievously. “I'll do it…on one condition.”

“Fire away.”

Her smile vanished. “You go with me.”

“You know I wouldn't stand a chance. Why would I waste a day waiting in line for some cattle call?”

Jayne brushed her finger curls into smooth waves. “To keep me happy. If I'm going to do this for you, I need someone there to help me pass the time.”

W
E WERE UP AND OUT
by ten o'clock the next day, to give us plenty of time to grab chow, doll up, and arrive at the theater early enough for the proctors to still have fresh eyes, but late enough that it didn't look like we were desperate for work. The show was going to be at the Sarah Bernhardt, a huge Byzantine building nestled on Forty-fifth Street west of Broadway. It had been named for the celebrated French stage actress who had also had a career as a vaudeville performer and silent film star. In the lobby, above the stage doors, was a quote of hers engraved into the stone: “Life engenders life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.” She seemed like a stand-up kind of gal.

The relatively young space had become as well known for the art in its lobby as for the works on its stage, and it was the kind of theater every actor dreamed of one day performing in but few could afford to even set foot into to see a Sunday matinee. I'd been inside it once before, to see Shirley Booth in
My Sister Eileen,
and I was so overwhelmed by the feeling that this was real theater and everything I'd been doing was a sorry imitation that I missed half the show. Sure, size and location didn't instantly make every production I'd done irrelevant, but it was hard to get excited about a play when you had to come to each performance dressed in your costume because if you didn't you'd have to wait in line to change in the public restroom.

When we got to Forty-fifth Street, there was already a line of men and women weaving around the lobby, all testing the limits of their leotards and tights by stretching inhumanly long legs above their
noggins while arching their backs until their heads almost brushed their buttocks. We took our places behind these contortionists, and I passed the time eyeballing bodies that were supposedly the same species as mine, but which were capable of very different feats than those of the tall, gawky package I trudged around the city in.

“What I wouldn't give to see one of them snap in half,” I told Jayne. Her stomach growled in response. “Easy, tiger,” I told her. “Job first, food later.”

“Do you smell that?” she asked.

Someone had left one of the lobby doors propped open, filling the space with chilled winter air. Above the sensual mix of Evening in Paris and Eau de Sweaty Leotard came a scent that reminded me of my grandmother's kitchen. Never much of a cook, Granny could ruin the best cut of meat and the finest of fresh vegetables with her ancient iron stove, a device she insisted was an improvement on newer models. This was true if you liked your roast black and your potatoes hollow.

I diagnosed the source of the stench. “It's the deli across the street. And if that's today's special, I'm not having any.” It should've been a crime, ruining meat when there was so little to begin with.

I turned my attention from my stomach to the crowd before us. Everything about these men and women spoke of strength and control; every movement they made seemed impulsive and effortless. Although she only reached most of the other dancers' shoulders, Jayne was clearly one of them. The minute we entered the lobby, her posture improved and her movements took on a deliberate, choreographed quality. I mimicked her stance as best I could, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't echo the grace that entered her every move. One of these things was clearly not like the other.

Fortunately, nobody noticed that an interloper was in their midst. The casting directors entered the lobby at 1:05 and began renaming each dancer either yes or no so rapidly that a number of people had to stop them and ask them to repeat what they had just said. Jayne and I watched in growing anxiety as the men and women we assumed
would be shoe-ins (tall, lithe, hair in perfect chignons) were given their walking papers while the less traditionally dancerly were asked to remain in line. I half wondered if the whole thing wasn't a cruel joke and the dancers they sent away were already being shepherded into stage two of the audition, while the unfortunately named yeses waited for the proctors to announce, “You do realize we were kidding?”

If there was a joke, nobody let us in on it. Before I could announce that I was there only for moral support, the casting directors breezed past Jayne and me, giving us each a yes that blurred the two words into one. There was no time to point out their error; as the directors left the lobby, an elfin man in green tights arrived, handed each of us a number we were to pin to our chests, and directed us to grab our things and join him in the rehearsal room on the second floor.

As the crowd started up the stairs, I pulled Jayne aside.

“What do I do?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I just passed the first phase of an audition I didn't audition for. Don't you see a problem with that?”

“Not really. What else do you have to do today?”

She had a point.

Dance auditions were nothing like acting auditions. Aside from years of training or inherited skill, you couldn't prepare for a dance audition. That was kind of the point. The directors wanted to see not only what you could do but how quickly you could learn something new. You didn't walk in with some pre-rehearsed routine you knew as well as a monologue; instead, you and all the other poor schlubs watched a dance captain who moved at a rate you thought existed only on sped-up film perform a combination that he made look ridiculously easy but which magically changed into something much more complicated the minute you attempted it. And that was the easy part. The hard part was learning the combination in the first place, since it was rare that a captain demonstrated it more than twice. Some dancers had a kind of mental muscle memory that could
instantly recall what they'd just seen, in what order, and duplicate it perfectly. I wasn't one of them.

Fortunately, Jayne was. We were instructed to spread out in four lines in the rehearsal hall, and I made sure to get behind my best pal so I could copy everything she did. I wasn't just thinking about myself. When I did mess up, being in my vicinity would make her look good.

The elfin man stood in front of us, his tiny back reflected on a wall-length mirror that also captured our mean, hungry faces. He lifted a short, ropy leg onto the bar and stretched, more, it seemed, to show off how flexible he was than to really prepare himself for whatever he was about to do. Once he was done preening, he nodded at the accompanist, an ancient, gray-haired doll who had long before mastered the art of simultaneously playing the piano and chain-smoking. Her gnarled fingers rose high into the air, before crashing onto the keys with a jarring intro. The elf leaped, whirled, reached, and froze in a series of movements that would've—outside of this space—gotten him a long stay at Bellevue.

“All right,” he said, after clapping his miniature hands together, “now it's your turn.” We mimicked his pose, waited for the accompanist to ash her Lucky Strike, and rushed into the opening bars of the song like parachuted infantry leaping out of a plane. Half the room remembered what they'd seen and did a fine job replicating it. After about the fifth step, the rest of us began making up whatever seemed close to the spirit of what the elf had demonstrated. Our efforts were rewarded with one sharp “No!” after another, each one doing nothing to fix our failing memories.

The piece came to an end. The elf put his fingertips to his lips as though he had to physically locate his next words before speaking them. “I'll do it again. Watch more carefully this time.” He did and I did, though I can't say it counted for much. While the other dancers learned their lesson, I just didn't have the heart to care. Even if a miracle happened and I managed to nail this routine, I was still going to get axed further down the road. It was the natural order of things.

“You—tall girl,” said the elf when the second humiliation had come to an end. Since the description fit half of the women in the room, we all looked around, trying to deduce which giantess he was referring to. “No, you,” he said, pointing a finger my way. This was it; I was finally going to be given the gate. Thank God.

“I'll get my stuff.” I bowed my head in my best imitation of shame.

“No, no,” he said. “Let's try it with me calling out the steps.”

I wasn't savvy to what the little man was doing—was he trying to torment me further as a way of getting back at all the tall Tinas who'd harmed him in the past, or had he seen something in my flaccid attempts at dancing that made him want to help me?

I abandoned my analysis of his motives as the rest of the dancers cleared the way, leaving me alone in the center of the room. I put my fear of humiliation in the same mental footlocker in which I stored the war and my worry over Jack and willed the audience to keep their laughter low enough that I couldn't hear it. “And a five, six, seven, eight.” As the Lucky Strike bobbed along to the tempo, the elf shouted out the proper names in the combination. Red-faced, I performed each step as he asked, my memory finally kicking in long enough to remind me what was coming next. “Good, good,” he said at the end. “We'll all take a break and announce the next cut in twenty minutes.”

“What the deuce was that?” I asked Jayne as we sought out a drink and some privacy.

“I think the little man likes you,” she said.

“Bully for me. Is this what my life has come to: flirting with men I couldn't care less about to get jobs I don't deserve?”

She shrugged. “Things could be worse.”

We slumped against the wall in the hall outside the rehearsal room and passed a Coca-Cola back and forth until the sugar perked us up. The other dancers milled in and out of the room, pacing like wolves on the off chance the cut sheet had been posted without announcement. The movement abruptly stopped and the crowd split down the middle as the stairwell door opened. Ruby and her entourage had arrived.

“Oh look,” I mumbled, “the real actors are here.”

While we were suffering the indignities of auditioning, those fortunate enough to be cast in parts with names and lines had been rehearsing in another room. Ruby led these blessed souls with her head held at a haughty angle. Behind her lurked Minnie and three other women.

From what I'd been able to piece together,
Goin' South
was about four sisters—Stella, Sue, Ellen, and Kate—who inherit a former plantation house in South Carolina. On a whim, the girls abandon their lives in the North and start over in what they imagine will be a Southern paradise. The place is a run-down disaster and the girls are soon given the boot when the army appropriates the house for maneuvers. Naturally, one of the girls—Stella—falls in love with the sergeant in charge and encourages him to move his men out sooner rather than later. When the army departs, the sisters decide to turn the house into a dance hall for soldiers and find themselves making money hand over fist. Just when things seem rosy, a rival for the sergeant's affections—the unfortunately named Myra Pentall—tells him that the house isn't being used just as a dance hall; the girls are also running a whorehouse. The sergeant makes a surprise visit and catches the girls in what he wrongly interprets as compromising positions. He shuts the house down and breaks up with Stella. Completely out of left field, Stella discovers that her dental fillings are picking up radio signals from enemy aircraft. She reports what she's heard, prevents an invasion, saves countless men, and, in the last scene, marries the sergeant while her sisters and hordes of adoring men look on.

The writer, from what I heard tell, was a raging alcoholic.

Paulette had been cast as Stella, and now Ruby had that honor. I didn't know the other three women who were playing the sisters, though Minnie had been cast as Myra, the sergeant's meddling admirer. Carl Lumboldt, an actor whose near-sightedness had kept him out of the army, was playing the sergeant. In addition to performing balletic interludes, the members of the corps de ballet would portray
soldiers, girls at the dance hall, and any other characters needed to populate the scenes.

Ruby snapped her fingers, and Minnie pushed her way to the front of the line and joined her mistress. Words we couldn't hear were delivered with a smile we didn't believe, which sent Minnie bustling in our direction. She fumbled in her pockets, pulled out a coin, dropped it into the Coca-Cola machine, then rushed back to Ruby with the icy dope in hand.

“She has a way with people, doesn't she?” said Jayne.

The elf interrupted any further observations. “Ladies and gentleman! If I don't call your number, you've been cut.” With the speed of an auctioneer he read off digits that most of us forgot we'd been assigned. I read Jayne's chest and squealed as her number was called only to realize that my pal was frozen with fear, her eyes locked on my own number.

“You made it through,” she whispered.

I pushed through the crowd and approached the cut list the elf had hurriedly taped to the wall. She was right: someone had made a horrible mistake.

The miniature man waved a stack of mimeographed scores and told us to form groups of eight. We'd have to sing and dance for the bigwigs next. They would make the final cut.

Jayne grabbed two girls and four guys and forcibly pulled me by the hand into a corner to rehearse with them. I half-heartedly practiced the steps we'd already done while singing a song called “My Tooth Tells the Truth Even as My Heart is Breaking” that I hoped was a joke. Long before we were ready, the elf beckoned “Tall Girl” and her group to join him in the rehearsal room.

A long table had been added to the front of the space. The elf took a seat at the end of it, at a safe distance from three new faces. One was Walter Friday, a jovial-looking middle-aged man with a perpetual tan, a bad rug, and a permanent squint. He nodded to himself as we entered, as though we were confirmation of something he'd been, up until that moment, arguing with himself about.

The man next to him was so large his thighs oozed off each side of his chair. Despite his size, he wore a well-fitted handmade suit that I bet cost more than the show's budget. His fastidious attention didn't just extend to his clothing—it was clear this was a man who lived for manicures, steam baths, and weekly visits to his barber. He had a cigar in his mouth—unlit—that was as much a part of him as his nose and his chin. His clasped, bejeweled hands rested before him, and I couldn't help but think of Al in the stir, forced to put his braceleted mitts on the table to make sure he didn't try anything.