Starry-Eyed

by Ted Michael

  Nancy Priest taught for thirty years at George Washington High School, and her drama class was no “easy A.” It wasn’t the kind of drama class where you just hung out with friends and did weird acting exercises. In fact, more was expected of me in drama then I was used to. We did Shakespeare; we did Neil Simon; we studied the origin of musicals. We did scene work nearly every week and worked on memorization and creativity. We learned how to give feedback to one another and formulate helpful opinions about our work.

  I remember the day that she asked each of us to raise our hand and “tell the class something you like about yourself.” As an insecure teenager, I immediately started going through my mental list of things that I hated about myself: my body, my skin, my legs, my clothes . . . the list seemed to be endless. But the point of the lesson was to learn not just to criticize yourself or other people, but to see the good in each of us. This set the tone for how we were to critique each other when we did scene assignments. Someone gets up to perform, we applaud. Priest asks us for critiques, and we were to always start with the positive! You can always find the good in what you see. I try to live that way every day and am so grateful for that lesson.

  There was also more to learn than just being good at scene work. There was the design element. I remember we watched South Pacific so that we could create our own costume renderings for the show. Well, I figured since I knew I don’t want to be a designer, I would be funny and draw basic clothes on stick models and draw pineapples for their heads. I thought I was hilarious. Mrs. Priest was not impressed. She reprimanded me for not taking it seriously and failed my drawings. You better believe I did them over and handed them in again! I wanted to succeed in her class. I wanted to impress her. I wanted to learn how to appreciate all the aspects of this industry that I loved so much. She knew how much I wanted to do this for a living, and she pushed me to care about every side of it! It was important that I paid attention to each part.

  She also taught us how to make set models. We designed our sets for Noises Off and Rent. We listened to the cassette tapes of Rent so we would know the show in order to make amazing models. I was terrible at this, but I had to do it anyway. I mostly just liked going to Hobby Lobby and picking out cute things to glue on my set. But we actually had to measure things and use our math skills. Well, suddenly in order to get an A in drama, I needed to listen up in math more. To get an A in drama I needed to attend my other classes. What a concept!

  Outside of class were the school shows. We put on four shows a year, which in itself was an incredible feat for a poor inner-city high school in Denver and because there wasn’t much money, we all helped out. Mrs. Priest taught us how to paint sets, sew costumes, and build scenery. No matter how long you had been a part of her class, everyone auditioned for every show. I always wanted to be the star of each show and she saw my potential early on, but she never let me rest on my talent alone. She never made it easy for me; I had my fair share of disappointments.

  My senior year I wanted to be the lead in Moon Over Buffalo so badly. I did my best audition, and I was sure I got it. But when I got to school the next day, I ran to look at the cast list to see I was not in the show at all. She made me the stage manager. Stage manager?! Mrs. Priest knew I didn’t want to be behind the scenes, I wanted to be onstage!

  But she had a point: she knew I needed to learn all aspects of the theater, not just about being onstage. In my four years of drama class, I starred in shows, I stage managed others; I did makeup, costumes, and sound; I choreographed, and I assistant directed. There were times I was even an usher, but I was always involved. Priest taught us the importance of being supportive no matter what part you have.

  She also taught us the importance of coming together as a team. Before every show, we did something called “circle.” Everyone in the cast, orchestra, and crew stood in a circle in the lunchroom (our backstage, of course), and if anyone had any thanks they wanted to give, we said it one at a time. Then Priest would say the final words of thanks and inspiration. We would then join hands and jump up and down chanting: “aaaaahhhhh ONE, TWO, YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO! UNITED WE STAND! DIVIDED WE FALL! LET’S MAKE THIS SHOW THE BEST OF ALL! GIVE ’EM HELL!”

  My senior year, Priest announced that she was retiring. Oh, the tears. Even though I was graduating, it still felt like such a loss for the school. This woman would be a tough act to follow. We got the auditorium to be named after her in her honor. It was the least we could do for someone who ignited such passion in each of us. It didn’t matter that we had been a school without a lot of money. It didn’t matter that most of us didn’t come from privileged backgrounds. It just mattered that we were there for each other. And I realized, that is why I want to be in this business. I want to be part of a community like the one Mrs. Priest created. A community of artists who always can find the positive in one another, who care about the importance of jobs onstage and offstage and most of all who live by the code “united we stand, divided we fall.”

  So what made me want to do this for a career? I had the world’s greatest drama teacher. Her name is Nancy Priest.

  SIERRA BOGGESS has starred on Broadway as the title character in Disney’s The Little Mermaid (for which she received Drama League and Drama Desk nominations), opposite Tyne Daly in Master Class, and as Christine Daaé in The Phantom of the Opera. She received an Olivier Award nomination for her work in Love Never Dies, starred as Fantine in Les Misérables, and returned to the London stage for the 25th Anniversary Gala of The Phantom of the Opera. Concerts include BBC Proms (Royal Albert Hall), American Songbook Series: The Lyrics of David Zippel and New York Pops (Lincoln Center), and Broadway by the Year (Town Hall). Her TV appearances include Today, Good Morning America, The View, Entertainment Tonight, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the 62nd Annual Tony Awards. Sierra has been heard on the recording of The Phantom of the Opera 25th Anniversary Gala (also DVD), Love Never Dies (symphonic recording), The Little Mermaid (original cast), and Andrew Lippa’s A Little Princess. She holds a BFA from Millikin University.

  HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE MARIA?

  Marc Acito

  “What are you doing?”

  Gale stops typing, startled back to reality, a place she avoids whenever possible. She looks around the camp office, the room thick with soupy summer air, the only sound the chirrup of cicadas—whirring like a thousand tiny helicopters, she thinks, narrating her life. With a British accent.

  She sees no one except a small boy with an unblinking gaze and unexpected hair. In the summer of 1969 even small boys at Camp Algonquin have long hair—not long-long like the counselors, with their hippie dos that make the Squares say they look like girls—but long enough to make them look like sheepdogs.

  This kid, however, has sculpted his hair into a sturdy pompadour, a granite cliff perched on his head. With an aristocratic tilt of his chin, and a stick-up-his-butt posture, he reminds Gale of Captain von Trapp—shrunk in the wash. Maybe that’s because she has The Sound of Music on her brain. Where it frequently does battle with Funny Girl.

  She hez a chronic condition, she thinks, this time sounding like a German psychiatrist. Tsis overly imaginative fifteen-year-old camper suffers frum a “Maria Fanny Fixation.”

  The boy repeats himself, a tiny wind preceding the wh as he says, “What are you doing,” his tongue crossing the t. His voice is high and musical, the diction precise and almost British—like Julie Andrews.

  “I’m typing up a script,” Gale says. “Larry the camp director is too cheap to get the rights to The Sound of Music, so I’m writing it myself. From memory.”

  Her voice sounds defensive, and she’s instantly embarrassed, reports the Newscaster in Her Brain. But she does feel embarrassed. Not just that she’s explaining herself to a little kid, but actually ashamed that in both junior high and summer camp she’s had to endure performing such babyish drivel as The Haunting of Spook House and The Mystery of the Missing Sandwich.

  However . . .

&
nbsp; This summer is gonna be different. This summer astronauts will walk on the moon. The moon! This summer Gale Rosalyn Rubenstein will direct, star in, and otherwise rouse the conformist complacency of Camp Algonquin with her own wondrous version of The Sound of Music. This summer she’ll return to Long Island and start high school, where she’ll finally audition for a REAL play. And when she does, she’ll be able to say, “Experience? Well, I just played Maria this summer. Maria von Trapp . . .”

  Back in reality, the boy’s blue eyes suddenly shine like sapphires.

  “I LOVE The Sound of Music,” he says. “I’ve seen it FIFTY Times.”

  This seems highly unlikely to Gale. After all, she’s fifteen and only seen The Sound of Music ten times. “How old are you?” she asks.

  “I am nine years old,” the boy replies, pronouncing each word as if it were Holy Writ. “I am small for my age.”

  And then he launches:

  “The movie of The Sound of Music had its world premiere at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City in March of 1965—exactly twenty-two blocks from my house—and it stayed there for ninety-three weeks until November of 1966. My father has visitation every other weekend and I told him I had no interest in the Bronx Zoo, the Central Park Zoo, or anything other than The Sound of Music. When I went the fiftieth time, the ushers gave me free candy and popcorn.”

  There’s no denying it—this kid is strange, in a way that makes Gale slightly uncomfortable. Not creepy uncomfortable, more unsettled, like the room is suddenly askew. But she can’t help but be impressed with his knowledge and finds herself addressing the child conspiratorially, as if they were the same age.

  “I wanted to do Funny Girl,” she says, “but Larry said it was inappropriate.”

  The boy gasps asthmatically. “I LOVE Funny Girl! You know the scene where Fanny is in the Ziegfeld Follies and she feels embarrassed having to sing about being the beautiful reflection of her love’s affection, so she puts a pillow under her costume to be a pregnant bride?”

  Of course Gale knows the scene. She knows just about everything there is to know about Barbra Streisand. If Jews could have patron saints, then loudmouth girls with unconventional looks like Gale would worship Barbra. The Holy Nose.

  “The pregnant bride is the fourth best scene,” Gale says. “After ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade,’ ‘I’m the Greatest Star,’ and ‘People.’”

  “I KNOW,” the kid says. “Barbra’s going to do Hello, Dolly! next. I can’t WAIT. I saw Hello, Dolly! on Broadway. Not with Carol Channing, but I have the original cast album. I saw Ginger Rogers. She danced with Fred Astaire. Not in Hello, Dolly!, but in the olden days. I’ve seen TEN Broadway shows: 1776, Fiddler on the Roof, Judy Garland at the Palace. . . .”

  This is Gale’s sixth summer at Camp Algonquin, an experience she inherited from her parents, who met here in the 1950s when it was practically a Talmudic Law that all Jews migrate every summer to the Catskills. Over the years, Gale’s shot arrows, thrown pots, paddled canoes, roasted many a marshmallow, and told many a ghost story. Neither popular nor unpopular, she has one True Friend here, Amanda Horowitz, a tall, mannish girl who rides horses and whose enthusiasm for movie westerns rivals Gale’s obsession with musicals.

  But . . .

  Never before has she met anyone who shares her passion, a slightly guilty pleasure because it is so decidedly uncool. Cool kids listen to the Stones and the Who, while she’d rather hear the original cast albums of My Fair Lady and South Pacific. But she certainly never imagined she would share that passion with an overly articulate nine-year-old boy. Who immediately takes it upon himself to criticize her work.

  “No, no, no,” the boy says as he looks over the pages she’s already typed. “Friedrich doesn’t introduce himself by saying he’s incorrigible. He says he’s IMPOSSIBLE. The younger brother Kurt is the one who says he’s INCORRIGIBLE.”

  He’s interrupted by the arrival of Larry, a big bearded man who looks like a grouchy Santa Claus. One glance at the kid and Larry groans. “What is it now, Sterling?” His voice is edged with irritation. “Other boys giving you trouble again?”

  Sterling. Of course the kid has a name like Sterling. Sterling’s jaw tightens and flexes, his upright posture turning rigid. In an instant Gale pictures him as the hero of Oliver Twist, which she read because she loves the musical:

  The ruffians of Boys Bunk Two bullied the poor lad, mocking him with mincing gestures, the cruelest of taunts spewing from their tongues like rotting food they had spit upon the ground. Crueler still, Sterling found no comfort in the camp director, a hulking furnace of a man who thrummered and thorshed, yet did not emit the slightest trace of warmth.

  The roles are clear: if Sterling is the hero and Larry is the villain, then Gale is the savior, just like Nancy in Oliver!, who wears saucy costumes and has lots of great songs and dies nobly to protect a child.

  “He’s helping me,” Gale says to Larry. “With my script.”

  By her side, she feels Sterling exhale, turning to her like a flower facing the sun.

  . . . . .

  Gale scans the assembled cast, a patchwork of other campers who she cajoled, coerced, herded, and even bribed into doing the show. She savors the moment, preserving it for her future biographer:

  The aspiring thespian, authoritative beyond her tender years, scanned the roomful of uncertain faces in the aptly named Drama Shack, a three-sided wooden fire hazard with an outdoor stage used primarily for movie nights, sing-alongs, alleged talent shows, and the occasional play. With a tin roof that clacked in the rain and screenless windows that allowed in bugs, birds, and bats, the Drama Shack called to mind a hastily remodeled carport because, indeed, that’s what it was.

  Sterling hands out the scripts to each cast member, smiling and nodding in a manner that reminds Gale of airline stewardesses. The title page reads, “The Sound of Music by Rodgers and Hammerstein, adapted by Gale Rosalyn Rubenstein and Sterling Clark Jr.”

  Like R & H, theirs is a true collaboration, Sterling having dictated the entire movie while Gale ruthlessly edited that which couldn’t be recreated in the Drama Shack, like singing “Do-Re-Mi” through a dozen locations in Salzburg, performing “The Lonely Goatherd” with the Bil Baird Marionettes and having any party guests to address “So Long, Farewell” to. Based on limited space—and even less interest—the cast consists solely of the von Trapp children, the All-Jewish Nuns Chorus, some stray prepubescent Nazis . . . and Aaron Messner.

  Aaron peruses the pages with his dark, unfathomable eyes. With his black curls and hawky profile, he resembles what Gale has always imagined King David looked like. As usual, he’s barefoot, his cut-off shorts revealing sturdy, tan legs, corded with muscle like the trunks of two young trees. Instead of a shirt, he wears a groovy deerskin vest with fringe and Gale imagines for the thousandth time what it would feel like to have his lean, sinewy arms around her. He glances up, catching Gale staring at him and the movie in her mind goes into freeze frame for an internal musical thought:

  Aaron Messner, Aaron Messner, what a beautiful, beautiful name . . .

  Aaron Messner, who can identify every plant and tree. Aaron Messner, who can start a campfire faster than anyone. Aaron Messner, who Gale can’t resist mocking anytime they speak, calling him “Nature Boy,” even though she wants to French kiss him to death.

  Despite never having set foot upon a stage, Aaron agreed to play the Captain because his best friend, Conrad, wanted to play Rolf, the Nazi messenger boy. Conrad wanted to play Rolf to be near Barbie Bittman, who’s playing Liesl. Gale wanted Barbie to play Liesl so Conrad would convince Aaron to play the Captain.

  See “French kiss,” above. This month, astronauts will walk on the moon for the first time. Anything is possible.

  “All right, settle down,” Gale says, trying to sound settled even though she feels like her veins are pumping Fresca. “Let’s read through the script.”

  Joni, the counselor nominally in charge, doesn’t look up from her copy
of Rolling Stone as the cast members fidget and squirm like amoeba under a microscope, buzzing as loud as the cicadas outside. How Joni can read through purple-tinted shades is anyone’s guess. Then again, she’s a major pothead, so who knows what she’s thinking?

  Amanda, being a True Friend, rises to her Full Height, asserting herself like a western sheriff ready to rid Prairie Junction of Black Bart and his Gang. “C’mon, people,” she barks, “listen up.”

  The cast obeys, which is one of the reasons Gale cast Amanda as the authoritative Reverend Mother, despite Amanda being a female baritone who’ll have to sing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” an octave lower than it is normally performed. They pick up their scripts, freshly inked in purple from the ditto machine. Several kids raise the limp pages to their noses to inhale the clean, sinus-tickling aroma, the Scent of Possibility.

  But not Barbie Bittman, who’s sliding a comb through her smooth sheath of hair, making Gale feel vaguely homicidal. Not once in Gale’s life has a comb ever slid through her hair. Combs are Instruments of Torture designed to Inflict Pain. Combs snag, tangle, and once even broke off on the left side of Gale’s head, requiring an Emergency Hair-ectomy.

  Like America, God has graced Barbie’s fortunate head with amber waves of grain. Born with the name “Barbara,” she renamed herself after a plastic doll whose feet are permanently pointed for high heels. By way of comparison, Barbra Streisand dropped an a, making her truly original, which is why Gale dropped the y from her name, so she could be a true original just like Barbra.

  Gale casts a grateful glance to Amanda, telepathically thought-ballooning a “thank you,” then readdresses the cast. “For now, we’ll skip the songs, so let’s start with Scene Two at the Abbey.”

  Over Amanda’s shoulder, Gale can see her co-author Sterling, his eyes like high beams, completely unaware that his lips are mouthing the words of the teenage nuns. At his insistence, Sterling will play Kurt (“I’ve ALWAYS wanted to be INCORRIGIBLE”), though he’s better suited to play Marta, the von Trapp who wants a pink parasol for her birthday. Which explains why he has no friends in Boys Bunk Two.