The Tricky Part

by Martin Moran

  Auditions, October 14, 15, 2:30–5:30, Auditorium. Sign up, Room 228.

  Without much thought, I moved through the crush of students up the stairs and across the hall to the drama room. My head had the slightest conversation with my feet. What are you doing? My body’s reply: This is the way it is.

  I signed my name on the clipboard hanging near the door.

  The following week, I sat clutching sheet music for Camelot against my knees, my legs jerking up and down. The whole thing’s absurd, I kept thinking. I’ll never go through with it. There was a row of folding chairs lined up in the hall just outside the entrance to the auditorium. They were all occupied with students like me, holding music, humming softly, appendages jerking. This is crazy, I kept thinking. How could anyone do this?

  “Next.”

  He was pointing at me. This guy with copper-colored hair (Is that dyed!? I wondered) was telling me I was next. I stood and, avoiding the eyes of the others folded in their folding chairs, I walked past the boy with flaming hair, through the door, and onto the stage of the enormous auditorium.

  “Music, please.” It was a deep, disembodied voice bubbling up from somewhere. “Down here,” it said. I walked forward and saw a guy seated in the orchestra pit behind an upright piano. A white guy with the biggest Afro I’d ever seen—a globe of curly black hair topped with a tiny purple yarmulke held in place, I noticed, with a bobby pin. “Music?” he asked again.

  I bent down to hand him my song. He stood to take it. His yellow T-shirt cried, Godspell!

  “Tempo?”

  “Fast,” I whispered.

  “OK.” He gestured for me to move back toward center stage.

  I shuffled back and forth, stuck my hands in my pockets, took them out. I bent my knees to keep them from shaking.

  “Dive in, baby lamb!” came a female voice from amid the dark sea of seats. I squinted and saw, several rows back, the outline of a hairdo and the glimmer of glasses. I stared.

  “Darlin’, did you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you singin’?”

  “ ‘Camelot.’ ”

  “Lovely.”

  “Go ahead, Allan,” she yelled. The music began and, miraculously, so did I.

  A law was made a distant moon ago here . . .

  I got three lines in, blanked, and stopped singing. Oh well, that’s the end of that, I thought.

  “Oh! You’re a tenor!” she cried. I saw the head of hair stand. She moved briskly down the aisle toward the stage. She seemed excited. She was small. Well dressed. She had a lovely scarf and a huge grin. “Did you bring any other music?”

  “No.”

  “That’s OK. Have you got nice legs?”

  “What?”

  “John?”

  The boy with the fiery hair was at my side.

  “This is John, my assistant.”

  He nodded at me. “Fabulous voice,” he whispered. “Ms. Priest likes you.”

  “Darlin’, would you mind throwing on a pair of gym shorts and letting me have a gander at your legs?”

  I shrugged and mumbled something, assenting but embarrassed.

  She said, “It’s part of the story, honey. One of the characters has lovely gams, wears a toga. I’m sure yours are great. I just need a quick look.”

  John handed me a pair of gym shorts and pointed. “Last door, up right.”

  “What? Where?”

  “Wing three, off up right.” He pointed again.

  I followed the general direction of his finger. I found the door to a small room and returned with bare legs and stocking feet.

  “Turn once around, darlin’, would you?”

  I spun, they gazed. It was oddly intoxicating. Attention. Eyes coming at you, lingering on you. The ham in me was definitely pleased. The drama lady (that’s how I thought of her then) came to the edge of the stage. “Sing something else for me. Anything you know.”

  “Without music?”

  “Yeah, a cappella.”

  I saw the boy at the piano stand and lean in.

  “Um, I really don’t know much . . . except church stuff or . . .”

  “Something, honey, you know something. Whatever comes into your mind.”

  “OK.”

  The floor of the stage was slatted, varnished and beautiful. I stared down at the swirling grains of wood, clutched the hems of the gym shorts, and sang the first song that came to my head.

  Will I ever find the boy in my mind, the one who is my ideal? Maybe he’s a dream and yet . . .

  “What show’s that from?” the piano player asked when I’d finished.

  “That’s not from a show,” John said. “That’s from life.”

  It was a cross between sports and choir, church and an unending party. Putting on a show had to be the fastest way on earth to meet people. There was Phil, a small, adorable guy who played the comic lead. He taught me all the important terms in one afternoon. What wings are and what up and down mean, which turns out to be something quite different, of course, when you’re on a stage as opposed to off. He showed me a shorthand for recording movements, called “blocking.” For years to come I’d use the symbols Phil taught me, and think of him every time I scribbled in my script: x d r for “cross down right.” There was Kent, the man who played all the leads (even though he was my age he seemed like a grown man) and had the biggest voice and personality I’d ever seen in a high school student. I was convinced he’d been belting high notes and tapping out time steps since the womb. He took great pains to teach me the basic elements of stage makeup. I watched him paint his eyes—liner, mascara. My God, suddenly this place, this permission, to wear lipstick and rouge. Lots of it. All in the line of duty. All part of getting the story told. I wasn’t that keen on eyeliner but I took it as a sure sign that I’d landed somewhere different, where the usual rules didn’t apply. I was aware, as I watched this dynamic thespian, of a wonderful feeling of delight and liberation. “You don’t want those spotlights washing you out,” he told me in his resonant baritone. “Your face, your eyes, are the windows to your soul—the character’s soul.” As he continued to apply his cosmetics, carefully chosen to enhance the rich black of his beautiful black skin, he spoke of the nuts and bolts of trodding the boards. He dabbed a bright red dot on the inside corner of each of his eyes. “This,” he proclaimed, “is a comedy dot. This helps your eyes look farther apart and more distinct. Good for laughs. There are comedy dots, red, and tragedy dots, white. That’s what you’ve got, comedies and tragedies. We’re in a comedy.” He turned to me. “Open wide.” He dabbed at the inside corner of each of my eyes. “So here’s red!”

  “What if something is comic and tragic?” I asked.

  “That rarely happens.”

  My first dance partner ever was sexy, sultry Cynthia, who yelped on opening night when, during our big number, I fell going through her legs and took her skirt with me to the floor. She forgave, invited me over for Sabbath dinner, and taught me the Hebrew for Ruler of the Universe. I met and worked with Pearly, a crackerjack jazz pianist. We stayed up nights in his basement, where he rolled joints and taught me Cole Porter tunes. I became smitten with Jan, a keen-tongued comedienne who shocked us all by deciding to sing a verse of her song from the lap of a distraught man in the third row. I marveled as she twirled her fingers through the man’s thinning gray hair, belting out lyrics with the worldliness of Marlene Dietrich. She was sixteen going on forty. We all were, it seemed—a collection of odd kids feeling quite adult in this histrionic sphere and, though we couldn’t have fully realized it then, a group of students who had the fortune to be at a fine school at an extraordinarily creative time. As it turned out, many in this group would go on to make lives in and around the arts.

  When I first stepped before an audience, a bundle of nerves wrapped in a toga, I could scarcely believe it was my own body. Right on cue a voice resounded (whose throat is that?) and the limbs attached to the trunk I called Martin instantly inhabited a
character named Hero and his bumbling love for the girl next door. I felt myself rise up and lean into the presence, the touch of all those human eyes and ears. It was a lightness of being, a momentary pardon for all the secrets and sins. They were smiling out there. They weren’t seeing bad or damaged, so it seemed. They saw, I think, a kid with rouge all over his cheeks, red dots in the corners of his eyes, and a mouth open wide, belting high notes as if his life depended on it. And what I saw written across the field of faces was rapture. A collective delight. How astonishing it was to stumble upon such genuine life while at the business of pretending.

  And there was something familiar about it all. Something church. The huge auditorium, though it didn’t have the flying buttresses and jutting steeples of a basilica, had the grandeur of a space built for mortal communion and prayer. Though I was dressed for a silly musical, I couldn’t help feeling a bit the altar boy in front of the congregation. Different costume, different stage, but a ritual nonetheless. In the coming years, I would come to think of theater (when it’s good) as a place of epiphany. Not the transformation of the Body of Christ, but of every body present. Humans fused by a jolt of laughter, by the thread of a story. And from this very first experience of Forum I felt, even in all the irreverence, in all the courtesans chasing Pseudolus, in all the raunchy jokes, that there was something sacred. A celebration of what’s human and what’s here. I stood there, an essentially ex-Catholic, uncovering a new faith. And when the curtain call arrived I bent my head, my body, into the praise, and felt no quarrel with living, and the voice in my head said: This is joy. Remember this. This exists.

  When the ovations stopped and the lights went out, I was back confronting the infernal wishes to die, the hollow sense of unbelonging. But I knew that something had changed. Not only had I connected with classmates in a genuine way, not only had I discovered something really fun that I was good at, but some force had made its way in and, without my even knowing it, was rearranging molecules. The playful collaboration, the applause, was an embrace I’d been longing for. Like Hero, I was giddy with love, but mine was for the stage, and rather than knock me off my feet it seemed to set me right back on them.

  There was, in my class, the absolute coolest group of guys. Ken-Mike-Dave-Jeff-Barry. Everyone agreed, in that unspoken high school way, they were cool. All the more, I think, because they had no sense of themselves as being popular. They were just good at things. They played a wicked game of basketball and got straight As. All smart, all straight, all handsome, and, by chance, all Jewish. I revered them.

  They were close, they’d known each other since kindergarten. I was new and could barely hold a basketball, but I got good marks and this helped, at least, in holding a conversation. Sometimes I would conquer the crush and find the courage to turn around in class and say something to one of them about an isosceles triangle or the fall of Rome or Death in Venice. Mike played the trumpet and turned up in the pit for Forum. In the lull of rehearsals, in the atmosphere of theater, it was easier to talk. I don’t know how the subject presented itself or when, but the idea of going camping, of maybe climbing Longs Peak, came up.

  “Yeah, man. We should do that,” Mike said in his straightforward way.

  It wasn’t until later the next year that we actually camped and climbed to the summit of Longs. But, meanwhile, other plans got made. I joined Mike and the gang to drive to Winter Park and ski. One trip turned into several. Then it was smacking tennis balls with Ken or Barry or getting high and hanging out all together to watch Saturday Night Live. It was going to Ken’s to study for a physiology test. Then Jeff got us into TM and we’d gather to transcendental meditate in his parents’ pitch-black sauna. Then there was, “Dave’s got an extra ticket to the Nuggets game” and, “You can’t miss Ken’s birthday dinner.” By the time junior year was over, I’d somehow become something I never dreamed (especially when I was drowning among the Jesuits) I could ever become. One of the guys.

  On one trip, Dave drove. The night was clear. I don’t know why, but we never seemed to bother with tents. We found a ledge above a creek across the highway from the trail, threw down a tarp, lined up our bags. Mike and I searched for kindling; Jeff sat on a big rock and meditated. We ate simply around the fire. We had boots and water at the ready for the next day’s climb. We hit the sack. Ken wrestled Jeff until Jeff could barely breathe for laughing. At ten thousand feet we were flying high, staring at the stars, talking a mile a minute.

  “I didn’t get it at all.”

  “I think he was saying his idea of hell was other people.”

  “But what’s the existentialist thing?”

  “Meaningless universe.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “I never got through it.”

  “How’d you pass the test?”

  “Is that girl from Manual still calling you?”

  “Once in a while.”

  “Hey, northern lights.”

  “Not till August.”

  “It’s glowing over there.”

  “You’re stoned.”

  Next day we stood strong at fourteen thousand feet. Mountain conquered. The wind knock-you-down wild. Our home state lay glorious at our feet. All directions clear as far as you could see. “This is the best,” Jeff said. And it was. We sat on our parkas and ate peanut butter sandwiches and I had but the dimmest thud of remembrance in my chest, the merest thought, of how many times I’d crisscrossed these peaks with Bob. Of how I struggled against the sense that I’d somehow sullied all of this, could not belong in these parts. That noise was drowned out by the sheer pride I felt in being among my new friends. Climbing with these guys was like regaining the high ground. Rediscovering home. Finding trust and strength in my own male body. I couldn’t have explained it then, can barely now, but I knew that being near their self-confidence and their kindness, at simply being among them in this uncomplicated way in the middle of our mountains, in the middle of our high school lives, was healing beyond measure.

  I was confused and frightened of much that was in me, including the love I felt for them, but I never had to hide who I was. Not what was essential. And a day would arrive when they’d come to know Henry. Come to know my story. And I would come to know their children. A day would arrive when Mike would tell me, Man, you’re one of the bravest people I know. And I would look at him and the others and remember there was a time I thought bravery for me impossible. Living, unthinkable. That I wasn’t man enough for it. How would I ever begin to tell them that so much of the courage that grew in me came from what I saw reflected in their eyes.

  Lucky.

  Not long after that first musical was over, the irrepressible drama lady, Nancy, cornered me in the hall one day and asked if I was planning on taking part in the next project. The spring production of Oliver! “You have a shot at a good part.” I walked away calculating that if I were to get into the show, then I’d have to postpone killing myself for several weeks. If I started, I couldn’t possibly miss rehearsals. Let everyone down. I’d have to wait until summer.

  I got into Oliver! and, when it was over, the summer came and I had to postpone my plans again because I was cast in the all-city production of West Side Story.

  And so it went, death deferred because I could hold a melody. Because I got the part, got to sing. Suicide on hold for rehearsal, for a hike with friends. I began to figure that, maybe, if I could quell the demons until the next ovation, the next peak, then I’d never take more pills or use the .22 rifle again. After all, the first principle you learn in this line of work is: The show must go on.

  3

  ONE EVENING AFTER a performance of Forum, I was at my dressing table mirror in the cafeteria—the area that, by night, magically transformed into backstage. I sat scraping pancake from my face when a redheaded woman in a long pink gown and fur coat entered the room. I watched as she threw open her arms, smiled broadly, and hugged a few students she knew. “Congratulations, sweetheart!” I heard her say. She looked as though s
he’d arrived not at the lunchroom of a high school, but at the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera. Maroon-colored jewels dangled from her ears, sparkled over the fluffy collar of her coat. Her grin, which she bestowed generously on all who cared to take notice, was blue-eyed and blinding. I turned back to my mirror, figuring she must be someone’s glamorous mom or a kooky official from the school board. A few minutes later I heard her say my name, and I turned to see her moving in my direction, her hands extended as if to embrace.

  “You are simply terrific,” she said. “I’m Winnifred Magoun.”

  “Thanks,” I said, picking up a Kleenex to wipe the cold cream from my hands.

  “Have you ever studied voice?”

  “Oh . . . no.”

  “You should. You have an instrument.”

  The word struck me as odd. Did she mean my throat was like a cello?

  “I’m just doing this for fun,” I said.

  “Of course you are. Doesn’t mean you can’t study. I’m a voice teacher. Why don’t you take some lessons with me?”

  “It’s great of you to ask but I really couldn’t. Schedule and, you know . . . money and all.”

  “Of course. Well, thank you for a wonderful performance.” She leaned into me. “You should just see the color of your aura.” I stared at her. I’d heard of such things, but only vaguely from flower children who’d appeared on the news. She laughed, reading my face, my thoughts, I felt sure, and whispered, “I’m not kidding—a shimmering blue-green light spreading right out to the last row. Gorgeous. Congratulations on a great performance. Goodnight.”

  “Thanks, goodnight,” I said as she turned away.

  She waved to a few more kids she seemed to know and then glided out of the cafeteria, leaving in her wake the distinct aroma of an exotic perfume.