by Ted Michael
“But you,” he says, “you’ve got this thing that you love, this thing you’re amazing at, and you keep it a secret from the entire world.”
I’m a tree falling in the forest.
“Play for me.”
“Henry, I don’t want to.”
“You’ve got an unbelievable talent. I’ve just confessed to you that I’ve got nothing. I want to know what it feels like to be you.”
“Trust me, you really don’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
How can I explain my Swiss cheese soul to Henry? “It’s just, when I play in front of people, I feel like I lose myself, piece by piece.” I keep the part about feeling like a member of Barnum’s Freak Show to myself.
Henry studies my face, and I hope I’m not still blushing.
“When was the last time you played for an audience?”
“When I was nine,” I admit.
“So? It’s been so long, how do you know you’ll still feel the same way?” He puts his hand on my arm. “Try it. Just with me, like an experiment. Play Kreisleriana. From the beginning.”
He doesn’t know what he’s asking. The first movement is wild, uncontrolled passion.
When I don’t answer, he sits next to me on the bench. There’s barely enough room and our hips touch, but both of us pretend not to notice.
“Please.”
How many more ways can I say no? But the truth is, I kind of want to do it. Maybe Henry’s right. Maybe it’ll be different now.
There’s a ball of ice in my stomach as I push the pages from left to right. Page one: ausserst bewegt. Extremely moving. Agitatissimo. Very agitated.
“Wait,” Henry says, his expression a new and totally unfamiliar mixture of shyness and need. “I want to know what it feels like.” He reaches his hands toward mine. “Can I? I mean, would you be able to play if I . . .”
I understand what he’s trying to say. Can he hold my hands while I play Kreisleriana? The idea is terrifying and irresistible.
“It won’t work like that,” I say.
“Of course not. I understand. I’m sorry,” he says, looking completely mortified, another unfamiliar expression.
“No, I mean I can’t play if you’re leaning across me,” I say. “You’d need to sit behind me.”
“Oh,” he says. “Okay.”
Henry gets up and I shift forward on the bench. Then he sits behind me, straddling me. “You mean like this?” he says. His mouth is just above my ear.
I have to tell myself to breathe. Henry’s body is so warm. “Yes,” I say. I put my hands on the keyboard, and Henry puts his hands on top of mine.
You know what it’s like when you go to the beach in June on a hot day when the water is only about fifty-five degrees, and you’re standing at the shoreline with the sun boiling your scalp and your toes numb in the frigid sand? That’s how I feel right now.
I think about the rooms full of strangers at my auditions. I think about my mother’s meat mallet. And then I push it all out of my head and think about Henry’s thighs, which are currently sandwiching mine, and how the poor lonely tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it has always seemed so pathetic to me and I really don’t want that to be the metaphor of my life.
One-two-three-go!
There’s no introduction to the first movement of Kreisleriana, no way to get ready for the tidal wave of sound that overwhelms you from the first instant. My hands are like life rafts in a tumultuous sea of music. They fly to the extremes of the keyboard and Henry leans against me, following my body’s movements to keep his hands from slipping off mine.
I can feel Henry’s heart beating against my back, feel him breathing in fits and starts. I’m breathing hard, too, but it’s okay. I’m okay. I’m playing Kreisleriana and Henry’s here listening—more than listening—and I don’t want to die.
The movement is building toward its final crescendo, the chords climbing higher and higher. It ends sforzando, as loud as I can make it, and while the blast of sound decays around us, Henry squeezes my hands and I feel the rise and fall of his chest on my back, his breath heavy in my ear. I turn my head, but before I can say anything we’re kissing.
This is not the awkward too-wet fumblings of the boys at music camp. This is the kiss I’ve been waiting for. I twist around so I can put my hands on Henry’s shoulders, and he grabs my legs and pulls me the rest of the way so now I’m the one straddling him.
Which is when the practice room door swings open.
Chloe.
Her hand flies to her mouth, and her eyes well up for an instant. Then just as quickly, she’s pulled herself together.
Henry jumps off the bench, like if he can get away from me fast enough, maybe Chloe won’t have noticed the way I was wrapped around him.
“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” Chloe says, “but break ended five minutes ago. You remember—we’re doing ‘Dear Friend,’ the song where Amalia begs the love of her life not to humiliate her? She’s such a tool, Amalia.”
This time, Chloe doesn’t take a beat. She exits. Center stage.
. . . . .
I’m back at the piano in the auditorium watching Ben and Chloe go through their scene. Chloe seems distracted, and Ben keeps botching his staging.
“Hold!” Mr. Sandburg says for the umpteenth time. “Ben, you’re supposed to take the book from Chloe. Why is this so hard?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Sandburg,” Ben says, looking straight at me. “Maybe if I sat next to her—or maybe if I sat in her lap—it would be easier.”
“Just do the bit, Ben. Take it from when he tells her it’s wrong for a man to keep a girl waiting.”
I feel the tears well up like they always do when I’m mortified, but unlike Chloe I can’t control them. They run down my face while I play “Dear Friend” for her. If Chloe notices, which I doubt, she doesn’t care.
Henry, meanwhile, is backstage. Since he doesn’t have to go on again until the second act, I can only assume he’s hiding, asking himself why he ever thought it was a good idea to get within ten feet of freaky me and Kreisleriana. Or, like everyone else, he’s entranced by Chloe’s riveting performance. Or making out with Sophie. Or Ben.
This is what I get for sticking my neck out. Yes, Chloe’s a diva and Ben, as it turns out, is a jerk, but if I’d never agreed to play for Henry, I wouldn’t be sitting here now, melting away bit by bit.
After about a hundred years, my sleeve is encrusted with snot and Act I is over. Mr. Sandburg doesn’t give us a break. Instead, we go straight into “Try Me,” where Davis Lee begs his boss for a job. Davis is full of “Hey, world, I’m in ninth grade and I have a song!” exuberance. He doesn’t care that it’s ten thirty at night, and he doesn’t know that his school is full of nasty egomaniacs, and a dirty mean part of me wants to grab him by the shirt and tell him.
But I don’t. Instead I play “Days Gone By” and “Where’s My Shoe?” and I give Ben all the notes he can never find on his own and I hold all the high notes just the way Chloe likes them—and stretch the ritards for her because she sounds even better that way. And Jenny Jackson keeps missing her cues and Walter the Sound Guy is AWOL and now it’s past midnight and half the cast is asleep or in tears from pure fatigue. Did I mention that the audience is full of pissed off parents waiting to pick up kids who were supposed to be home hours ago?
Also, I haven’t seen Henry since Kodaly got fired for sleeping with the boss’s wife.
And then it’s time for “Vanilla Ice Cream.”
Not the dessert, the song. Chloe’s last big song, where she flits around her bedroom in a nightgown charming the pants off everyone. I’m about to cue her when she leans over the stage and beckons me until her face is about two inches from mine. “Watch me make my mark,” she says.
I know instantly what she’s going to do. “Vanilla Ice Cream” is the best song in the show, mainly because Chloe is the one who sings it. It’s the one everyone’s going to walk out humming. I
t’s hard because it’s so high, which you’d never know because Chloe makes it look easy. But there’s one note even Chloe hasn’t gone for yet. An optional high B at the very end when the singer is bound to be tired. And you can’t just touch it, you have to hold it.
I don’t know what Chloe had planned to do before to make her mark, but she’s changed her mind. She’s going for the high B.
. . . . .
Chloe, fragile and angelic in her cream-colored negligee, is at her desk, writing to her lover. Jenny dims the lights and shines a spot on her. As soon as the first lines are out of Chloe’s mouth, the buzz in the auditorium dissolves. Cranky parents lean forward in their seats to catch every word. Mr. Sandburg stops talking to the music director.
Chloe looks up from her letter, distracted by a shiny new thought:
Ice cream!
Smiles spread across all the tired, furious faces. She’s that good. And suddenly I see Chloe’s performance for what it is: a gift. Even though she didn’t intend it to be. Even though she’s doing her thing just to show the world how great she is, the fact remains that watching someone great do what they do shines a light on the rest of us.
I’m infuriated by my own sappiness, but I still can’t take my eyes off Chloe. Neither can Henry, who’s now watching from the wings with the rest of the cast.
She’s nearing the end. I can see her getting ready for the high B, planting her feet, rolling back her shoulders—when every single light in the auditorium goes out.
We’re all sitting in pitch black.
Dead silence and then Chloe screams, “JEENNNNYY!!”
From the dark comes Ben’s voice, “Chlo, com’ere. It’s okay,” at the same time that Henry says, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
From Jenny in the lighting booth, “It wasn’t me! I swear! I didn’t touch anything!”
From Mr. Sandburg, “What the hell is going on! Walter!”
From Walter the Sound Guy, “. . .”
You can hear parents jumping up from their seats and their cries of “Enough!”, “Sandburg!”, and “One o’clock in the frigging morning!” Onstage kids are wailing and someone is screaming, “Stop it! Just stop it! Stop it!”
Which is exactly how I feel. I can’t breathe. The noise is a vortex that sucks every molecule of air from the room.
“Help!” says a voice.
I could help.
I could replace the screaming and crying with something else. Something beautiful. I could replace it with the fourth movement of Kreisleriana.
It wouldn’t be about Andie the Oddity. It wouldn’t be about me at all. It would be a gift. For all of us.
I think about Robert and Clara Schumann. I think about the look on Henry’s face when he said, “Holy cow, what was that?” And then I think about the kiss I’d been waiting for and I start to play.
It helps—a lot—that the lights are still off. The movement begins like a whisper, lyric and ethereal, and I’m not sure anyone can hear me. But, gradually, musical tendrils gentle the whirlwind and fill the auditorium, the sound building in power until every crevice is smooth.
The houselights come back on and although my eyes are glued to my hands, I’m aware that the hall has gone silent and people are coming up the aisles and down from the stage. I feel their eyes on me, but instead of melting away I’m growing warm, coming alive like a daffodil after winter.
I finish playing and the silence that follows is a respite, a moment of grace. It hovers over the room and its inhabitants like a slow breath after a long cry.
I look up.
The whole cast is crowded around the piano, their parents behind them. I scan their faces—Chloe, Ben, Davis Lee, Jenny Jackson, Mr. Sandburg—looking for envy or greed or weirded out, but I don’t find anything remotely like that. Instead, Henry catches my eye and tilts his head to the side, conveying an unspoken message that I can feel as clearly as if he had whispered the words directly into my ear.
I scan my soul and it’s whole.
ANECDOTE: JESSE TYLER FERGUSON
I have been charmed with a few things in life. My hair is the hue of crimson that can never be achieved from a bottle; I have a fairly healthy if somewhat slowing metabolism; and I have always known what I wanted to “be” when I grew up.
I have gone back in my mind to try and pin down the exact moment I knew I wanted to be an actor. I always seem to end up back at the uterus. I am using the word uterus literally here. It isn’t the name of a downtown improv group I started at. Also, if I ever start a downtown improv group it WILL be called the Uterus so . . . consider it trademarked.
I know I nagged my parents about letting me join the local Albuquerque’s Children Theater after seeing one of the plays they produced, but I can’t even remember what play it was. I have told interviewers and talk show hosts that it was Alice in Wonderland. I have no idea if that is true but it is on my Wikipedia page now so it is basically written in stone. I guess I really WAS one of those kids who came into the world with jazz hands and great extension. (I curse myself for not stretching daily to maintain my flexible newborn muscles.)
Now, there is a HUGE difference between knowing you want to be a professional actor and knowing that you like acting.
Someone who knows they like acting might be comfortable spending their entire stage career in Middletown, USA, building a résumé of roles ranging from Harold Hill to the first Caucasian Coalhouse Walker Jr.
The crossover to wanting to be a professional actor comes with the reality that you WILL be a small fish in a big pond. People use this metaphor a lot. They always fail to add that the small fish species is a guppy and the big pond is actually a piranha river. Wanting to be a professional actor is accepting that you will be unemployed more often than not. It means you are ready to leave the comfort of suburbia to barely afford rent in a studio smaller than the size of your childhood bedroom.
I had to really sit down and think: What in the world could possibly have had the magnetism to allure me into this insane world of acting?
It can only be one thing. The Tony Awards.
It really was my only consistent outlet when I was growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sure, every once in a while a non-union production of Cats or Something’s Afoot would roll through town but it was the Tony Awards that really captured my attention.
As much as I still enjoy this Awards Show, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the Tony Awards of the eighties and early nineties. Every category came with an amazing montage of clips from the musicals and plays nominated that year. This was before the age of YouTube and DVR so I would sit close to the TV . . . trying to absorb every moment.
Side note: A few years ago, at the age of thirty-four I found myself back in Albuquerque on the night of the Tony Awards. We already had plans to have dinner at my aunt and uncle’s house, but they assured me dinner would be over before the telecast started. A game was also on that night so I was demoted to the tiny TV that sat on the kitchen counter. You would have thought it was still 1989. Here I was crouched in front of a twelve-inch screen begging my family to “keep it down, I’m trying to watch the Tony Awards!”
But I digress. The show that really captured my attention when I was a kid was a bizarre little musical called Falsettos. It was written by some guy named William Finn and directed by James Lapine. Research told me this was the same guy that directed and wrote my CURRENT favorite show, Sunday in the Park with George. I don’t know what it was about Falsettos that entranced me. The actors were rolling around on bleachers and singing about baseball, lesbians, and Jews. It was bizarre . . . and I loved it! I remember thinking at that moment: if I ever get to work with someone like William Finn and James Lapine my life will be complete.
I made my first trip to NYC with my local community theater when I was sixteen. It was one of those whirlwind tour groups that packed six shows and a tour of Radio City Music Hall into a long weekend. I separated from the group on my first night, went to TKTS, and bought a
ticket to see Falsettos, making it the first Broadway show I ever saw. It was late into its run. The house was half-full, and many of the cast members I remembered from the Tony Awards were different. I do remember Barbara Walsh was still in the show, and I looked upon her with the same awe that a modern-day Jesse would look upon Lady Gaga, Cher, or Jennifer Aniston. It was a truly an amazing night, one that I have NEVER forgotten.
Those who are as obsessed with theater history as I am may know where this story is ending up.
At the ripe age of twenty-nine, I was asked to workshop the role of a twelve-year-old kid in a bizarre new musical about a spelling bee. It was written by some guy named William Finn and directed by that guy James Lapine, who directed Sunday in the Park with George. To say I was having a full-circle moment would be an understatement. We even had rolling bleachers in the production!
The show was called The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Since it was nominated for Best Musical that year we were invited to perform on the Tony Awards. As we were onstage that night (killing it, I might add), I couldn’t help but think: somewhere there is a kid watching this on a twelve-inch screen TV, screaming at his or her parents to “keep it down, I’m watching the Tony Awards.” I imagine that kid thinking: “I want to do that someday. I want to be an actor.”
The jaded part of me wanted to say: “No, it’s too hard! They don’t tell you the part about the piranhas! Turn back! Save yourself!!!!!” But the part of me that knew there is nothing you can do to dim that spark said: “I understand. Buckle up. Have a good time. Oh . . . and remove ‘Caucasian Coalhouse Walker Jr.’ from your resume.”
JESSE TYLER FERGUSON currently stars as Mitchell Pritchett on ABC’s Modern Family, for which he has received three Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. No stranger to television, Ferguson received rave reviews and was honored by the Hollywood Reporter in 2006 as one of “Ten to Watch” for his role on the sitcom The Class. His additional television credits include Do Not Disturb and Ugly Betty. His film credits include Untraceable and Wonderful World.