The Talent Show

by Dan Gutman

  After fifteen minutes, Mrs. Zafian came back downstairs to see how things were going. She watched what they were doing for a few minutes, then turned off the music. There was an angry look on her face.

  “Sergei,” she said, “why is my daughter in the back row?”

  “Somebody must be in the back row, Mrs. Zafian,” Mr. Sergei explained.

  “The somebody doesn’t have to be my daughter.”

  “It’s fine, Mom!” shouted Anne. “I don’t care.”

  Mr. Sergei turned away, thinking Mrs. Zafian would just drop it. Nobody could possibly be so petty as to care which row their daughter was in. But Mrs. Zafian was used to getting her way.

  “I’m paying you fifty dollars an hour!” she said, raising her voice. “I’m paying for the expensive costumes and the props. I won’t have my daughter stand in the back where nobody can see her.”

  Mr. Sergei turned slowly, trying to think of a diplomatic way to smooth over the problem.

  “The girls will be moving back and forth,” he said. “Your daughter will sometimes be in the back row, and sometimes in the front row.”

  “I want her to be in the front row all the time,” insisted Mrs. Zafian.

  Mr. Sergei closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed his forehead. Then he threw his hands in the air.

  “I cannot work under these conditions,” he muttered as he gathered up his things. “Go get yourself another choreographer!”

  “Fine!” Mrs. Zafian said. “Get out!”

  Mr. Sergei stormed up the steps.

  “Your girls dance like elephants!” he yelled as he slammed the door.

  Everybody just stared at one another. Nobody said a word for a long time. It would be hard to replace Mr. Sergei. There wasn’t exactly a long list of choreographers within driving distance of Cape Bluff, Kansas.

  “What are we gonna do now?” Jessie asked.

  “Maybe we should just forget about the act,” said Chloe. “It was a dumb idea. Who are we kidding? We can’t dance.”

  “I bet Julia could choreograph our routine,” Anne said. “She can dance. She would be great.”

  “Would you be willing to do that, Julia?” asked Mrs. Zafian.

  “Please please please please please?” begged the girls.

  “Uh, I guess so,” Julia replied. It’s nice to be wanted.

  When Julia showed up for the next rehearsal, all the Beach Babes were there except for Jenny.

  “Jenny isn’t feeling well,” Anne’s mom explained.

  Julia ran the remaining girls through the routine, simplifying it so everybody would be able to do the steps. She was careful to put Anne in the front row.

  When it was time to take a break, Mrs. Zafian came downstairs with a plate of cookies.

  “You Beach Babes are starting to look really good,” she said cheerfully. “Julia is a terrific choreo-grapher. And if you ask me, Jenny was holding you girls back. It’s nothing against her, of course. But maybe you should think about, you know, thinning out the herd.”

  “You mean we should kick Jenny out of the group?” Katie asked.

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way,” Mrs. Zafian said.

  “Jenny will be really upset,” Anne said. “She’s been my friend since we were little.”

  “I’m sure she’ll understand, sweetie,” Mrs. Zafian assured Anne. “This is part of life. You know, survival of the fittest. I’m sure Jenny has some other talent she’s really good at. But the girl just can’t dance. You saw her. It was just pathetic to watch.”

  The next morning at school, Julia saw Jenny in the hall.

  “Are you feeling better, Jenny?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” Jenny replied. “I feel fine.”

  “Why didn’t you come to rehearsal last night?” Julia said. “I heard you were sick.”

  “Sick?” Jenny said. “I wasn’t sick. Anne’s mom called and told me practice was canceled.”

  “Oh …”

  Julia realized right away she had said the wrong thing. She shouldn’t have said a word to Jenny.

  “So I’ve been kicked out of the group?” Jenny asked, her hands on her hips. “Is that it?”

  “I didn’t mean—” Julia was tongue-tied.

  Anne came over. She saw that Jenny was upset, on the verge of tears.

  “What’s the matter, Jenny?” Anne asked, putting an arm around her.

  “Julia just told me I’m out of the group,” Jenny said, wiping her eyes. “Oh, I get it. She’s a better dancer than I am, so she’s in and I’m out. Is that it? I guess our friendship means nothing. Fine!”

  Jenny turned on her heel and stormed away, crying.

  Now it was Anne who was mad. At Julia.

  “Why did you tell Jenny we were kicking her out of the act?” she accused Julia.

  “I didn’t tell her!” Julia said. “I just asked her why she wasn’t at rehearsal. She told me your mom called her and told her it was canceled.”

  “Why didn’t you just keep your mouth shut?” Anne asked. “It wasn’t any of your business.”

  The bell rang and as the girls went to their classes, Julia was totally confused. She wasn’t used to playing head games with people. She had never mastered the fine art of lying and withholding information. Maybe Anne was going to kick her out of the group too.

  At lunch, Julia went to sit at another table, but Anne waved her to come over. Nobody said a word about the situation with Jenny. It was like it never happened. But Julia saw that Jenny was sitting with some other girls at another table, glaring at her.

  At the next rehearsal, the Beach Babes were still pretty awful. None of them could dance, and they weren’t trying very hard either. They kept stopping to eat potato chips and answer their cell phones. The music was getting annoying to listen to. As she watched the girls stumble around, Julia thought she would have been better off if she had turned down Anne’s offer to be part of the group. But it was too late now. She made a commitment to dance and do choreography for the Beach Babes.

  Every day leading up to auditions, it was tense in the lunchroom. Anne would invite Julia to sit at her table, and Jenny would sit a few tables away, glaring at them.

  Finally, on Friday, Jenny came over at the end of lunch and stood right in front of Julia at the popular girls’ table.

  “I’ve got news for you,” she told the group. “I’m doing my own act with my real friends. It’s going to be ten times better than your stupid Beach Babes routine. And I’m going to win the talent show!”

  Chapter 8

  Don Potash

  When the tornado ripped his house off its foundation and flung it aside like a used tissue, Don was shaken up pretty badly. For a couple of hours, he was in shock, and barely spoke to anybody. But after a few days, when his family moved in with his cousins and life returned to something close to normal, Don regained his composure and his sense of humor.

  That was a relief to everybody, because it was comedy that Don loved more than anything else. For his ninth birthday, he got a subscription to Mad magazine from his father, because that’s what he used to read as a kid. From there, Don moved on to Saturday Night Live, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Seinfeld reruns, The Daily Show, and just about anything else that was on Comedy Central. He loved to laugh. He would beg his parents to let him stay up to watch Jay Leno and David Letterman do their monologues. He was addicted to classic sitcoms like The Honeymooners and Get Smart. Instead of buying CDs and DVDs of the latest pop stars, Don collected old masters like Redd Foxx and Milton Berle, as well as newer comics like Jim Gaffigan and Chris Rock. He would spend hours watching stand-up comedy on TV.

  Don had an old cassette tape recorder that he would hold up to the TV and record comedians he particularly liked. Then he would listen to them again in his bed at night, writing down the funniest lines in his comedy notebook. This way, he could memorize their routines and get the timing of the jokes just right. He learned that a joke could sometimes be much funnier if the
re was a millisecond pause between the setup and the punchline.

  And yet, Don never thought about becoming a comedian himself someday. He was a quiet kid, for the most part. He didn’t like to be the center of attention, and couldn’t imagine getting up on a stage and telling jokes to an audience. He just loved to watch and listen to good comedy.

  One day, in fourth grade, Don was sitting in class and his teacher passed around a box of crayons. She told the students to color in their worksheets while she stepped out of the room for a few minutes. Don picked out several different crayons, and noticed that the words “non-toxic” were on the crayon box.

  “Non-toxic?” he asked the kids sitting at his table. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that you won’t die if you eat it,” one of them replied.

  “You won’t die?” Don asked. “Are there actually kids who eat crayons? Why would anybody even think of eating a crayon? Those kids must be really hungry. But who would be so hungry that they’d put a crayon in their mouth and eat it?”

  A few of the kids at his table started snickering, which encouraged him.

  “Hey,” he continued, “do you think the kids who eat crayons care what color crayons they eat? I wonder if different-colored crayons taste different? Like, are there some kids who eat only burnt sienna, and other kids whose favorite flavor is aquamarine?”

  Don wasn’t really trying to do comedy. He was just talking about something he noticed, and saying what popped into his head about it. But the other kids at the table couldn’t stop giggling.

  At first, Don thought they were laughing at him. But then he realized they were laughing with him. And it felt good. The laughter was a little reward, like when you’re in first grade and the teacher puts a gold star on your paper.

  “You’re funny,” the girl sitting across from him said.

  “No, I’m completely serious,” Don continued. “Like, what if four kids were sitting in the lunchroom. One of them opens up his lunch box and pulls out a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The second kid pulls out a tuna sandwich. The third kid pulls out a turkey sandwich. And the fourth kid opens his lunch box and pulls out a big box of Crayolas.”

  “You should be a comedian,” the girl said, laughing. Kids at some of the other tables were paying attention too.

  Don couldn’t resist. He chose one of the crayons from the box, put it in his mouth, and took a bite out of it. Jaws dropped open.

  “Mmmm,” he said, “Periwinkle. My favorite color. I mean, flavor!” Then he grabbed his chest and fell to the floor, moaning, “I’m dying! I’m dying! I thought these were supposed to be non-toxic!”

  He was just making it up off the top of his head, but the other kids in the class were falling all over themselves. They couldn’t believe he had actually taken a bite out of a crayon.

  “Thank you,” Don said, as he got up off the floor and took a bow. “You’ve been a wonderful audience. Drive home safely.”

  When the teacher returned to the room, the class was giving Don a standing ovation.

  Don went home that night and decided to try and write a stand-up comedy routine from scratch. He sat at the desk in his bedroom, took out a pen and paper, and started to brainstorm. But nothing happened. No brilliant ideas popped into his head. He couldn’t think of anything funny. Writing comedy was hard.

  He looked at his desk. There wasn’t a whole lot to see. Scotch tape. A stapler. Erasers. A ruler. Glue sticks. A pencil sharpener. So he started jotting down a few notes about the stuff on his desk.

  You wouldn’t think that school supplies could be all that funny. But it was really no different from Jerry Seinfeld talking about doing his laundry. Professional comedians find the humor in everyday things that are obvious, but nobody ever talks about. Humor is everywhere. Anything can be funny. Staplers and glue sticks can be hilarious.

  If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a joke is told and no one is around to hear it, is it funny? Don had no idea whether or not his little routine about school supplies was any good. The only way to find out would be to try it in front of an audience.

  The next morning at school, a bunch of kids were crowded around a desk near the office. Don went over to see what the excitement was all about. It was the sign-up sheet for the talent show. Just about everybody, it seemed, wanted to be part of it. Kids were signing up to sing, dance, play musical instruments, do magic tricks, juggle, and so on.

  Don shook his head. Just about every kid in sixth grade signed up to do something. He knew that all those kids didn’t have talent. A lot of them had no business being in a talent show. They just wanted to show off, he figured, and be on stage.

  Don looked down the list of names. A lot of different talents were represented, but no comedians. He thought it over for a minute, and finally picked up the pen. What the heck. On one of the bottom lines, he wrote:

  DON POTASH, COMEDIAN

  Over the next few days, Don spent hours rehearsing his school supply routine in front of the mirror in his bedroom. He inserted pauses in the spots where he thought the audience would laugh. When everything felt smooth, he clocked it. It came out to four and a half minutes—more than twice as long as the two-minute limit.

  He sat down and carefully edited out the lines he didn’t think were that funny. It wasn’t easy. But when he was done, he had a good, tight, two-minute routine with no dead spots. It may not have been as funny as Jerry Seinfeld, but it wasn’t bad. Don performed it over and over again in front of the mirror until he had it memorized.

  He was ready.

  Chapter 9

  Richard Ackoon

  For his eighth birthday, Richard’s parents gave him his most treasured present—a rhyming dictionary.

  Regular dictionaries are simply alphabetical, of course, listing words and providing origins, definitions, and synonyms for them. A rhyming dictionary lists sounds in alphabetical order, and provides words that rhyme with those sounds.

  So, for instance, if you looked up the sound “each,” a rhyming dictionary would give you “beach,” “bleach,” “breech,” “leach,” “peach,” “preach,” “reach,” “screech,” “speech,” “teach,” “beseech,” “impeach,” “outreach,” “Long Beach,” and other words that rhyme with “each.”

  Rhyming dictionaries are used by poets and songwriters. And rappers.

  Richard’s parents had mixed feelings about giving him a rhyming dictionary. On one hand, they were thrilled to hear that their son wanted a book for his birthday instead of a video game or some silly toy he would get tired of in five minutes. They wanted to encourage his longtime interest in reading, words, and language.

  On the other hand, they didn’t like the sounds they heard coming out of his bedroom. 50 Cent. Xzibit. Jay Z. Notorious B.I.G. Richard’s favorite singers had names that didn’t even look like names. He had developed an unhealthy interest in rap music, his parents feared.

  They weren’t dummies. They followed the news. Rappers were always showing off their cars and their guns, getting arrested, having violent feuds with each other, disrespecting women, and abusing drugs. Mr. and Mrs. Ackoon didn’t want their son mixed up with that stuff. He was only in third grade!

  When Richard started getting interested in rap music, his parents tried to push him in the direction of country, rock, pop, jazz, blues, and even show music. But none of it clicked with him.

  “I don’t care about the music,” he kept telling them. “All I care about are the words.”

  Richard tried to explain to his parents that just because he liked rap music didn’t mean he was going to grow up to be like one of those rappers who set a bad example for kids.

  “Your favorite singer is Johnny Cash,” he would tell his father. “Did you ever shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die?”

  “That’s different,” Mr. Ackoon argued. “Johnny Cash never shot anybody. He just wrote that in a song. But those rappers you listen to actually go aroun
d shooting each other.”

  “Hardly any of ’em do that, Dad!”

  Richard claimed that anything can be used in a good way or a bad way. He told his dad that a knife could be used to cut the food on your plate, or it could be used to stab somebody. A rapper could use words to insult a person, or they could use words to raise millions of dollars for charity. He could use words in a positive way, he explained. He could actually make the world better by rapping. His parents doubted it.

  But Richard didn’t seem like an angry kid who would ever break the law or hurt anybody. He didn’t have an angry bone in his body. So his parents agreed to buy him the rhyming dictionary for his birthday. But they were never really able to understand why he liked rap music or wanted to be a rapper.

  “That stuff doesn’t even sound like music!” his father would argue.

  The other kids at school were also a little mystified by Richard’s interest in rap. Like almost everybody in Cape Bluff, Richard was not African American. There had been a few well-known white rappers—Eminem, The Beastie Boys—but there was still something odd about seeing a white kid rap, especially a short white kid in third grade who had red hair, freckles, and braces.

  There were a lot of people who felt that a white kid didn’t even have the right to rap. Rappers had to come from “the hood” and have “street cred.” They had to pay their dues. They had to be oppressed.

  Richard didn’t think that was fair. Words were words. Anybody should be allowed to use them. Your skin color shouldn’t determine what you could or couldn’t say. That was what free speech and equal rights were all about.

  And besides, Richard felt he did pay his dues, just by living in Cape Bluff. While it was true that he had never witnessed gang violence or the kinds of things poor kids growing up in the inner city experience, he had seen some bad things. Like his town being ripped apart by a tornado. That was pretty bad. Like people living in their cars because their houses were destroyed. Like friends who came over to his house not to hang out, but because they knew they could get something to eat there. Everyone in Cape Bluff had experienced poverty and hard times firsthand.