by Ted Michael
Monica
To: Bob and Martha Fields
From: Grady Samson
Date: 11/26/2013
Dear Martha and Bob,
Wow. That’s all I can say right now. Wow.
Okay, I can say more. We just had our first morning of shooting. The production designer (a freshman!) and her crew did an incredible job of transforming my office into a bedroom. (I chuckle to myself every time I walk in there and see teen girl decorations. Ha!) We shot the scene where Claire falls in love. It’s so subtle. No dialogue. But Tori’s direction in concert with Lily’s nuanced performance and Matt’s cinematography was superb. Transcendent, even. I have never seen such a profound scene unfold in front of me, let alone by high school students. I feel invigorated and ready for tomorrow’s shooting. The rest of this semester is going to be spectacular.
Yours,
Grady
To: Monica Livingston
From: Tori Fields
Date: 11/30/2013
Okay, Monica.
Maybe the movie is based on you and me. Maybe I am working through some of my inner conflict or heartbreak or anger. You, with all of your theories about art, should understand that. Here is where I disagree with you about endings, though:
In life, you’re right, there is uncertainty. You might be completely in love with a girl who loves you completely back. You might wake up one morning, confident in that love, until you find your phone and learn that the girl who was supposed to love you made out with someone else at a party on a Tuesday night when you were sleeping. Probably dreaming about her. There may never be an explanation. You may never feel at peace with it. You may pace around your room and take down all your posters and decorations because everything you see reminds you of her, and then you might put most of them back up again because without them and the memory of her you don’t know who you are anymore. You might feel tied up in her. You might have dreams that she comes back to you, and dreams that you’re touching her face, and dreams that she’s kinder than she ever was in real life. You might not be sure if the dreams will ever stop because even though you’re only sixteen and your mother keeps telling you that life is long and vast and your father keeps saying that there are plenty of pretty girl fishes in the sea, you can’t imagine kissing anyone else ever. That’s what life is like.
But in movies and books and plays—in storytelling in general, I guess—we can offer an ending that feels like a gift. We can offer a world that makes sense, even if it’s painful. I’m going to take myself seriously as an artist for a minute, and go even a step further. I consider it my duty to provide an ending that satisfies without simplifying. That makes people feel on their way to being healed.
I’m not sending you the screenplay. You can see the movie when it’s finished. But I will give you something now: I’ll tell you how it ends.
Remember Lily? She was a freshman last year in our aerobics class? She has long brown hair and big pretty brown eyes and freckles all over her face and she is beautiful in the movie. She is always so present. I cast her as Claire. After Claire finds out about Eric and Sophie, she avoids them for months. She trades her locker for one in a different building. She transfers sections of her Mandarin class. She does this because she can’t help longing for Sophie every time she sees her, and she hates to feel that way about someone who betrayed her.
So I was stuck. I didn’t know how to end it. Part of me wanted to make it happy, for them to get back together. I tried to write an apology for Sophie, but everything sounded hollow. And then, that afternoon in world history, it occurred to me that even though you are in Utah now, even though we don’t go to the same school and we don’t text or talk on the phone and you blocked me from your Facebook—despite all of these things, the chances are good that we will someday run into each other again in real life and will have to confront one another in some way. Maybe we’ll smile and say hi as though it’s no big deal. Maybe you’ll want to talk to me and we’ll go sit and have coffee and I will have to try hard not to yell at you or to cry. Maybe you’ll avert your eyes and pretend not to see me. Or maybe I’ll pretend not to see you. I don’t know what will happen, but I do have this wish that keeps running through me, and so I took that wish and I turned it into a scene. Here it is.
It is winter. We’ve watched Claire agonize through the year, watched Eric apologize and be forgiven, watched Sophie struggle—maddeningly, but you should also know, endearingly, fumblingly—through her tempest of self-alienation. And now the weather has changed, and everything is gray-blue and frozen. Claire is rushing to her car against the cold, and there on the edge of campus, stepping off of the yellow curb, is Sophie. They haven’t seen each other for weeks, haven’t acknowledged one another for months. But this time, when Claire sees her, she doesn’t turn away or feign blindness, and she doesn’t feel like crying or yelling, and she doesn’t especially feel like a conversation. She knows, by this point, that there are no questions between them worth answering anymore. Then Sophie catches sight of Claire and falters. She isn’t sure what to do, and in her impossible-to-read face there may be a hint of hope or longing or regret. And then the camera pans away from her and back to Claire (whose story this is really, even if Sophie is the pointiest point), and we see Claire smile a small, kind smile. It says something like, I forgive you. Or, I loved you once. Or, I hope you’re learning to be better to yourself. Or, maybe, just: hello.
She lifts her hand in a wave, and then she turns away.
The end.
Love,
Tori
ANECDOTE: BONNIE LANGFORD
I was three months old when I first appeared onstage. My mother carried me in her arms at the end of the annual show for the dance school that she ran. I’m told that I took to it like a duck to water, but I honestly don’t remember it at all. It would be a little crazy if I could! But maybe that first of many appearances established the secure and comfortable feeling I have of being onstage.
I’m so glad I never had to make a decision to choose this peculiar profession; it was destiny and fate. I feel very lucky and blessed. I think it’s so valuable to know where your focus belongs and your heart lies and, even though I was a shy, quiet child, I came alive when I was onstage portraying a role.
At the age of eight, I auditioned and was invited to play Baby June in the London production of the musical, Gypsy. It was the first time Gypsy had been produced in London, the first time Arthur Laurents (the book writer) had directed his show and was to star Angela Lansbury in her return to the West End stage. It was a theatrical event. The show was rapturously received, as was Ms. Lansbury. On the opening night curtain call, a member of the audience shouted “Welcome home, Angela!” I loved it so much and felt so fortunate to be on that stage to witness and share it all.
In England at that time, there were legal restrictions for children performing in theater, television, and on film. We could only work for a maximum of forty performances per year, which meant that I could only play Baby June for six consecutive weeks. At my final performance in London, I was devastated and cried buckets. However, after the performance, the producers, Barry Brown and Fritz Holt, asked my parents if they would consider allowing me to go to America to play Baby June on the production’s forthcoming U.S. tour and subsequent Broadway season.
To cut an extremely long, detailed story short involving American Equity, AFTRA, and the British courts, a year later I was made a “ward of court” and my mother accompanied me across the pond to New York to begin rehearsals. It was such an adventure and such a learning experience in every possible sense. To be part of a brilliant, successful show, directed by a highly respected director, and to watch Angela Lansbury give such a heartfelt, truthful, and magical performance every single night, was a treasured gift. She taught me how to behave offstage too. She doesn’t know it, but just being in her company makes you learn—especially at such an impressionable age.
The icing on the cake for me was the very final performance on
Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre. We had played to packed houses and were set to run and run, but Angela needed to rest and return to her home in Los Angeles, so the show closed at its peak. The final show was electric. The audience was with us through each moment, and they gave me the most wonderful experience that I will always cherish.
Gypsy incorporates every crowd-pleasing moment you can think of: I even had to twirl batons while tap dancing on pointe finishing in the splits! At the end of her vaudeville act, Baby June runs to the center of the stage to receive her applause before the play off. At this point I would look around the entire auditorium, from the balcony right to left, and the orchestra stalls left to right. Arthur Laurents had encouraged me to absorb every moment, every person, and “take my time.” So much so, that I was directed to only say my next line when the conductor, Milton Rosenstock, put his glasses across his face and winked at me.
On that final performance, I stood center stage on Broadway with my arms out to the side and looked out at the entire audience standing and applauding. There leading the applause was Arthur Laurents himself cheering for me. Mr. Rosenstock was blowing kisses, and the orchestra members applauded too. I stood there for what seemed like hours, but was probably four or five minutes. It still makes me emotional when I remember those moments.
To do something you love and to know that you have touched people is such a privilege. It’s not about plaudits and praise; it’s just about feeling a universal emotion you can’t buy, and sharing it with an audience. That’s one of the reasons I love my job, through all its fickle ups and downs, sweat and tears—and sometimes blood! It sounds so sentimental, but it’s not. It’s just a unique profession, and I’m proud to be part of it.
BONNIE LANGFORD starred as Roz in the U.K. tour of 9 to 5, and received a Drama Desk nomination for Gypsy. She has played Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway and both at the Adelphi Theatre and the Cambridge Theatre in London’s West End. Other West End and U.K. tours include Sweet Charity, Me and My Girl, Peter Pan, Cats, The Pirates of Penzance, Gypsy, 42nd Street, Oklahoma!, Fosse, Gone with the Wind, and Miss Adelaide in the Donmar Warehouse production of Guys and Dolls. Television/film credits include Bugsy Malone, The Hot Shoe Show, This Is Your Life, Dancing on Ice, and BBC’s Doctor Who. Her solo albums Bonnie Langford Now and the top-selling Jazz at the Theatre are available on iTunes. www.Bonnielangford.co.uk.
STAGE KISS
Cynthia Hand
You’ve heard the term, “sweet sixteen, never been kissed”?
Yep, that was me.
Back then I was just your average high school junior, player-but-not-star player of the girls’ soccer team, solid B student, blah blah blah—I was sixteen, is my point. I don’t know how sweet I was, but up until that spring, the spring that changed everything, I had never been kissed by a boy.
Never.
Not once.
Not even in grade school when it would have been considered cute, or in middle school at one of those spin-the-bottle type parties. Not even on the cheek. I had never, as far as I could remember, ever, been kissed.
But I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me. I wasn’t a social reject or anything. I had friends. I’d liked boys before, and they’d liked me. We’d just never made it to the kissing stage, is all. I was too busy. My parents were under the impression that the way to keep their kids out of trouble was to make sure they were monumentally busy. From the time I’d started school, it’d been pretty much one activity after another: piano lessons, track team, ski team, soccer, gymnastics.
Just call me Little Miss Extracurricular.
The problem with all the after-school fun, besides that it becomes, after a point, exhausting, is that you don’t have time for anything else.
Like boys, for instance.
Hence my unkissed status at the end of my junior year.
Which, I had to admit to myself, was a little sad.
“So kiss a guy,” my friend Becca told me after I fessed up on that fateful Wednesday morning in March. We were sitting on the floor of the commons in the break between second and third period, eating breakfast burritos. Becca had been telling me about how the current love-of-her-life, Peter, had taken her on a hike that weekend in the mountains near the Wyoming border. And how they had watched the sun go down together. And then he’d kissed her.
Cue the sweeping music.
“See, that’s the way a first kiss should be.” I’d sighed without thinking.
Then Becca said, “Oh, that wasn’t my first kiss. My first kiss was when I was fourteen on the ski hill, you remember Stu, that guy on the ski team—Wait, what was your first kiss?” and she could tell by my lack of response and the beet-red color of my face that it was true: I was an official member of the VLC.
The Virgin Lip Club.
“Wow, really?” she said, wide-eyed. “Never?”
“Never.”
“I thought you made out with that Justin guy in eighth grade.”
“No. We just passed notes to each other in science class. No kissing.”
“Hmm,” she said thoughtfully and shrugged. “So kiss a guy.” Like now, hop up, go get that taken care of. Pronto.
I scoffed. “Oh, right. I’ll just walk up to a random guy and say, ‘Hi there, do you mind if I kiss you?’”
“Sure. Why not? Seize the moment, Jo.” She glanced around the commons at the dozens of unsuspecting males passing by on their way to the cafeteria. She grinned. “Pick a boy, any boy.”
“I don’t want it to be just any boy. I want it to be somebody—” special, I was too embarrassed to say out loud, because that was way too Hallmark card. The right boy.
Just then my gaze happened to fall on Ryan Daughtry.
Sigh, Ryan Daughtry. The hottest guy at Bonneville High School. Possibly the hottest guy in the entire state of Idaho. Possibly the world.
I’d had a thing for Ryan Daughtry ever since speech class in ninth grade when he gave a demonstration on how to bake chocolate chip cookies, and let me tell you, I wasn’t the only girl in that class who thought he was delicious. There was just something about him—the combination of deep brown eyes and olive skin, the easiness of his smile, the close-cut dark hair that he styled to look purposefully messy. Adorable. That day in the commons he was going vintage—a white button-down shirt with a thin black tie, a black fedora perched jauntily on his head. It looked good on him.
Anything looked good on him.
Becca turned to see who I was staring at. “Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s setting the bar pretty high.”
Yeah, he was out of my league. I was like a seven to Ryan’s ten, and I knew it.
Becca shrugged again. “I bet he’s gay.”
I was startled enough by this out-of-the-blue remark to stop gazing wistfully at Ryan and frown at her. “What?”
“He’s one of the drama people, right?”
Yes. He was almost always the male lead in the school play. But that made perfect sense. I mean, if you could see how beautiful he was. People would pay good money just to look at him.
“And he sings and dances, right?” Becca picked up the end of her long, chestnut-colored ponytail and examined it for split ends.
“Right . . .”
He did sing beautifully. Last year I saw him in the musical Oklahoma! (wearing cowboy boots and fringe chaps, and oh yes, it looked amazing on him), and he and Alicia Walker sang a duet, something about “people will say we’re in love,” that I had stuck in my head for days after. He kissed her, at the end of that show. Later that week I saw the two of them holding hands at a pep rally, and I could tell by their vibe that they were about an eyelash away from seriously getting it on.
“He’s not gay,” I said to Becca. “I think he’s dating Alicia Walker.”
“Alicia Walker? Blonde, skinny, Barbie-doll Alicia Walker?”
“That’s the one.”
“You could take her.”
I laughed. “Good grief, Becca, this isn’t wrestling
.”
Becca took a sip of milk, then nodded like the issue was settled. “So. Ryan Daughtry. Your first kiss. You should strategize on how to make this happen.”
This was what I loved about Becca—she was nothing if not brutally direct. She set goals for herself and went after them with the persistence of a guided missile. It made her a beast on the soccer field. It was also the reason I generally avoided talking about my love life with her. I couldn’t just moan about how I didn’t have time for guys and have her pat me on the shoulder and say she understood. She was the type to try to make me do something about it.
Like now, for instance. “Did you miss the part where I said he had a girlfriend?” I reminded her.
She took a big bite of her burrito. “Are you sure he’s dating Alicia? One hundred percent certain?”
“Um, no.”
“I think you owe it to yourself to find out, at least,” she said. “Why spend your life waiting for stuff to happen, Jo? You have to go after the things you want. Otherwise life is going to keep passing you by.”
She had a point.
. . . . .
It was literally five minutes later, in English class, that the universe sent me a sign.
We were in the middle of a quiz on Pride and Prejudice when Alicia Walker breezed into the room. I looked up and saw her. I thought, ridiculously, that Becca was right. I could take Alicia Walker in a fight. She was so willowy and delicate. Even with a last name like Walker, Alicia never seemed to just walk anywhere. She floated, like her feet weren’t connected to the ground. She was the picture of grace. Of beauty. Of exactly the type of girl that Ryan Daughtry would naturally go for. She was president of the drama club.
And she had kissed him. She’d felt his lips on hers.
Yeah, I hated her, just a bit.