My Life

by Maryrose Wood

  “How was The Boy Friend?” asked Philip.

  “Duh-READful show!” Ian said happily. “And the Florida audiences were, shall we say, elderly! But it was great fun spending winter break sur la plage”—he cast his eyes downward in a winning imitation of humility—“and I am now the owner of . . . it’s such a small matter, I can hardly bring myself to say it . . .”

  “A fake tan?” laughed Emily. “A shuffleboard trophy?”

  “No, you suburban wench! An Equity card!” Ian threw his fists in the air and started singing the theme song from Rocky, except with these words: “I am a man with an Equity card! I am a man with an Equity card! Equi, Equi, Equi-ty card!”

  If my life were a musical, thought Philip, with a deep rumble of feeling that was not unlike envy, I’d start singing right along with him. But Ian was an actor and could behave like a fool in public; it was expected. Philip had no desire to perform. He was a numbers man, and left the carrying-on to others.

  “Ian! That is so awesome!” Emily jumped up and down in celebration. “Just wait! You’ll be on Broadway before you know it.”

  “I’m nervous, actually.” Ian shoved his hands into his pockets against the chill. “Going pro really means ‘Hello, unemployment.’ I’ve worked at every non-Equity summer stock company on the East Coast, but those days are gone. Now I have to hold out for union work. Compete against the stahhhhs.”

  Philip punched him playfully in the arm. “C’mon, you’re not even out of high school yet, and you made the union. You’re way ahead of the game.”

  “Says you!” Ian said, pouting. “I swear, I am the only member of LaGuardia’s senior class who hasn’t done a Law & Order episode yet. I know I nailed the audition. I even scared myself. Bam! Bam!” Ian lunged murderously at Philip, then took an imaginary shot to the midsection and crumpled to the sidewalk in a limp heap. Emily and Philip applauded politely.

  “Hey, Olivier, the line forms in the rear.” The tall, absurdly dressed woman had her hands on her hips and a very threatening look on her face, but her fuzzy mittens and the pink glitter heart painted on her cheek pretty much spoiled the effect.

  Ian sprang back to life and brushed off his jeans. “Chill out, Daphne! I’m not cutting the line, I’m just providing a little entertainment for my compadres, here. Love the outfits, by the way.”

  Daphne and her friends were the kind of Aurorafans who dressed up in faux Aurora costumes to see the show. On the girls one saw a lot of knit caps and goofy scarves mixed with fishnet tights and spike heels. On the guys, it was all about distressed leather jackets, round-rimmed John Lennon glasses, and two days’ growth of beard, with a pout of soulful, I’m-about-to-sing-a-ballad yearning inscribed on each Aurorafied face.

  “Can you stand it?” Ian muttered to Emily and Philip. “So Rocky Horror. Blech.”

  Emily couldn’t agree more, though it was true that she’d once bought herself a striped scarf at a thrift shop. It had been an impulse, really, and she only tried the scarf on occasionally, at home, when she was alone. She was almost positive she’d never mentioned this to Philip.

  “So how come you’re not seeing the show today?” Philip asked Ian, as Daphne and her gang returned to their heated debate about whether there ever would be—or ever should be—a film version of Aurora. “After being away and all. Didn’t you miss it?”

  “Bien sûr! But I have a vocal coaching at two and dance class at four.” Ian shoved his hips sideways in a distinctly Fosse-esque pose, which he dropped just as abruptly. “Next Saturday for sure—we’ll get tickets and do lunch at the Edison. I’ll try to get Stephanie to come, too.”

  “Awesome,” said Philip quickly.

  Stephanie Dawson was a petite, redheaded dancer with huge green eyes and a bright soprano voice. She’d attended LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan, better known as the Fame school, where aspiring performers trained their fannies off in the hopes of becoming stars. After graduating the previous June, Stephanie had promptly been cast as a replacement in the chorus of Aurora. She and Ian were good friends; in fact, last year, when she was a senior and he was a junior, they’d costarred in a school production of She Loves Me.

  Stephanie was only nineteen but she was a pro, working on Broadway and in Aurora no less, and this made her the nearest thing to a celebrity Emily and Philip had ever met. On three occasions Ian had brought Stephanie to have a quick lunch with them at the Café Edison before the matinee, and they’d been utterly dazzled. Emily suspected that Philip might have a crush. He seemed to stammer and turn pink and act even more geeky than usual in Stephanie’s presence.

  Emily both liked and disliked seeing Philip in this state.

  Never understand,

  The rest of them will never understand,

  A love so far beyond

  The love that we had planned . . .

  Despite the vast stacks they already owned, Philip and Emily always took fresh Playbills when they walked into the Rialto Theatre. Each month when the new issue appeared, and the feature articles and star profiles and fawning little restaurant reviews changed, it was always cause for delight.

  They read every issue cover to cover, even though Ian had told them it was mostly paid publicity. So what if it was? The magazine’s pages were filled with juicy tidbits, and this much Emily and Philip understood: if Broadway had its own currency, it would be little razor-edged coins made of fresh gossip. Failing to keep up with the latest meant you were flat broke.

  Philip flipped the pages and was disappointed: there were the same breathless articles from last week about Chita Rivera and Donny Osmond and the Don’t Tell Mama piano bar, where anybody—seriously, anybody—could walk up to the piano, grab the mike, and belt out a show tune. Even so, Philip tucked the Aurora Playbill carefully in his bag, to add to his collection.

  Few people, if any, had spent as much time quantifying, measuring, and dissecting Aurora as Philip had. What he’d discovered was that the facts and figures, consumed wattage and gross poundage of Aurora did absolutely nothing to prepare you for the experience of seeing the show itself.

  Every Saturday afternoon it swept over him once more. The lights went down, the music played, and all at once Philip believed, to the core of his being, that these were real people on the stage. They sang and danced, laughed, fought, wept, fell in and out of love, revealed their darkest secrets in preposterous dream ballets, and, as the second act reached the forty-five-minute mark, resolved every conflict in an improbably swift series of coincidences that necessitated reprise performances of several songs the audience had already heard. And the audience laughed and wept right along.

  How could that be? Philip was a person who liked to understand things, and he had thought long and hard about this. The conclusion he came to was that the realness of Aurora—and by extension, of all musicals—did not exist despite the singing and dancing, but because of it.

  After all, the characters in Aurora expressed themselves far more fully than anyone who didn’t launch into a musical number at every strong emotion ever could. If Philip himself could feel half as real and alive as those made-up characters who lived on the stage of the Rialto Theatre for two hours at a time, eight times a week—well, that would be an excellent feeling indeed.

  Philip and Emily had taken their seats. The houselights started to dim.

  “Cell phone?” he whispered to Emily. It was a ritual of theirs, because one time she’d forgotten and of course it had rung right in the middle of the quietest song in the show. She’d been so upset afterward that Philip had promised her he would never, ever forget to remind her to turn her phone off before the show started, and he never had.

  “Got it,” whispered Emily as she pressed the Off button and dropped the phone back into her bag. She squeezed his leg in anticipation.

  Houselights faded to black. The conductor brought down his baton with enough vigor to slice a watermelon in half, and that very instant the theatre was filled with the music t
hey loved so much.

  Performance number 1,014 of Aurora had begun.

  3

  “DON’T RAIN ON MY PARADE”

  Funny Girl

  1964. Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill,

  book by Isobel Lennart

  In addition to his spreadsheets, Philip also kept a notebook in which he jotted various facts and figures about Aurora. For example: backstage at every performance were one stage manager and three assistant stage managers, one of whom doubled as the dance captain. There were twenty-five union stagehands, two follow-spot operators, and a “sound guy.” The show could not be performed without these people, but the audience never even saw them.

  The notebook had a separate tabbed section labeled “Critical Theories.” These were varied and contradictory, including:

  1. Aurora represented an innovative step forward in the hybrid Broadway pop-rock musical (Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Tommy, Rent, and a few others defined this admittedly skimpy tradition).

  2. Aurora pandered to a naïve audience hungry for melodrama and American Idol–style screeching (an irritating theory born of cynicism and envy, in Philip’s opinion).

  3. The show would never have succeeded without the incandescent performance of its star, Marlena Ortiz, and would fail as soon as she left.

  4. Aurora was fresh and perhaps flawed yet undeniably “worked,” as proven by its loyal fan base and generally strong ticket sales.

  The entire back third of Philip’s notebook was devoted to “The Mystery”: namely, the fact that nobody—except, as Philip would be careful to say, the person or people who had done it—knew who had written Aurora.

  The anonymity of Aurora’s author had been considered a shameless marketing gimmick when the show first opened on Broadway. Everyone in the industry thought it was a ploy, and that the true identity of the creator or creators of this smash hit would be revealed in some kind of follow-up publicity stunt. But he, she, or they never were.

  And when Aurora won the Tony Award for Best Book and Best Original Score, and the director breathlessly accepted the gleaming statuettes “on behalf of Aurora, the real Aurora, who chooses to remain anonymous,” and then broke down in sobs at the podium on national television, that’s when it became clear that this was no ploy. Someone had written the smash hit of the season, and whoever it was did not want anyone to know his, her, or their identity. It was Broadway’s best-kept and most gossiped-about secret.

  “Emily, could you see me after class?”

  Mr. Henderson did not sound pleased.

  After Emily’s last two papers for Mr. Henderson’s English composition class, she had been firmly instructed that she could write about any subject under the sun except Aurora. One of her papers had been on the use of flight imagery in Aurora’s lyrics; the other, more fantastic story depicted in detail a dream Emily had had, in which Marlena Ortiz showed up at school in her Aurora costume and revealed herself to the entire student body to be Emily’s best, best friend. Then she and Emily sang a duet on stage at the sophomore spring dance and brought down the house.

  Did a tiny part of Emily’s brain know that her persuasive essay about who had really written Aurora was the literary equivalent of flipping Mr. Henderson the bird? Perhaps, but she’d convinced herself otherwise. Not until this instant, as she took the long, ominous walk from her desk to his, did it occur to her that she might have been wrong about that.

  If my life were a musical, Emily thought, trying to bolster her confidence as she waited for her teacher to be done answering last-minute questions from a few stragglers, this would be one of those times where I sang a big defiant song that told everyone to shut up. Like “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” she decided. Just thinking of Barbra Streisand belting out her big number from Funny Girl made Emily stand a little taller.

  Now all her classmates had gone. She saw her persuasive essay on Mr. Henderson’s desk. There was plenty of red scribble on it, but she couldn’t see if there was a grade.

  “Emily,” he said, peering up at her over his glasses. “What happened? I thought we agreed you were going to broaden your horizons.”

  “I did,” she said. “It’s not about Aurora. It’s about the mystery of who wrote Aurora.” Somehow the logic of this sounded better in her head than when she said it out loud, but she stuck to her guns. “Didn’t you get that?”

  “Emily, Emily, Emily,” he sighed. “I cannot accept this paper.” He stood up, and Emily was reminded of how short Barbra Streisand was in real life. “I want you to write a persuasive essay about something else. Not Aurora the show, not Aurora the person. I don’t want you to write about the aurora borealis!”

  Very witty, Emily thought. Mr. Henderson looked crabby all of a sudden, which made her wonder if she’d rolled her eyes by accident.

  “I want you to write a persuasive essay that does not have the word ‘aurora’ in it at all.” Students for the next period were already wandering into the classroom, and Mr. Henderson sounded impatient. “Okay? I won’t mark it late if you give it to me by Monday.”

  Emily shifted her weight from foot to foot and tried to think of a rebuttal. “But now I have to do two papers and everyone else just did one,” she said finally. “That’s not fair!”

  “Sure it is,” he replied. He picked up the eraser and started to clean the blackboard for his next class. “I’m encouraging you to find other interests. Enlarge your perspective. Read the newspaper, for heaven’s sake!”

  “But, Mr. Henderson!” Emily protested. “You’re raining on my parade!”

  “You’re a big girl, Emily,” Mr. Henderson said, ending the conversation. “You knew what you were doing when you wrote this. Don’t make me send a note home.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said in a rush. “I’ll have a new essay for you on Monday.”

  “And?”

  Emily bit her lip. “I won’t mention Aurora.”

  Emily’s parents liked the theatre well enough, but her grandma Rose had a passion for it. Grandma Rose was Mr. Pearl’s mother and she lived downstairs, with her own bedroom and bathroom on the lower level of the Pearls’ modest split-level home in Rockville Centre.

  In her younger days, Grandma Rose had been a music teacher, and it was largely thanks to her that Emily had acquired a love of Broadway musicals at an early age. Fiddler on the Roof was Grandma Rose’s all-time favorite, but she’d also introduced Emily to Annie (of course) and many others. The Phantom of the Opera. Cats. Into the Woods. Beauty and the Beast. The Lion King (that was a special outing that had also included Mr. Pearl, who normally stuck with serious, preferably British plays that had been recast with famous American film actors).

  Due to Grandma Rose’s influence, watching the Tony Awards broadcast on television was an annual Pearl family ritual, complete with specially prepared snacks and glasses of inexpensive champagne, from which even Emily was allowed a celebratory sip. Last year Philip had been invited to join them. It had been a marvelous evening, almost too marvelous for Philip to bear. Parents who liked each other! Laughter in the living room! Home-cooked snacks—and the Tony Awards! It was a lot to absorb.

  Mrs. Pearl found Emily’s attachment to Aurora amusing, a phase, “a typical teenage thing” (she was the one who provided Hanukkah-present indulgences like Emily’s Aurora messenger bag). However, Mr. Pearl thought Emily’s fascination with “that show” was obsessive. He often warned Emily that if her grades started to slip, he would be taking “a close look at how you spend your time, young lady.”

  This was why a note home from Mr. Henderson would be most unwelcome, from Emily’s perspective. Especially a note that said she was too interested in Aurora. That was all her father needed to hear.

  4

  “GOODNIGHT”

  I Do! I Do!

  1966. Music by Harvey Schmidt, lyrics and

  book by Tom Jones

  BwayPhil: Still awake?

  AURORAROX: yez,

  AURORAROX: mr hender
son said to read the newspaper

  AURORAROX: so i am

  AURORAROX: did you know

  AURORAROX: there are all these sections of the Times

  AURORAROX: that are not the Arts and Leisure section?

  BwayPhil: I had heard of that, yes.

  AURORAROX: i don’t understand the news at all

  AURORAROX: i think it’s like one of those complicated tv series

  AURORAROX: where you have to watch from the beginning

  AURORAROX: or you can’t follow what’s going on

  AURORAROX: so what are you doing?

  BwayPhil: nuthin

  AURORAROX: i know that nuthin

  AURORAROX: something wrong?

  BwayPhil: Nah. Just—ok, I’ll give you a clue. Show question:

  BwayPhil: “My world’s coming unwrapped”

  BwayPhil: What musical is that from?

  BwayPhil: Hint—it’s based on Shakespeare.

  AURORAROX: Kiss Me, Kate?

  BwayPhil: Nope.

  AURORAROX: well it’s not West Side Story

  BwayPhil: I admit, it’s very obscure.

  AURORAROX: forget it then! I give up

  BwayPhil: “My world’s coming unwrapped,” from Oh, Brother! Loosely based on The Comedy of Errors. 1981, music by Michael Valenti, book and lyrics by Donald Driver. Big flop! Closed after 13 previews and 3 perfs.

  BwayPhil: The clue is the title, btw.

  AURORAROX: oh, brother

  AURORAROX: oh! Mark?

  AURORAROX: what’d he do now?

  BwayPhil: Just acting like his usual disgusting self when I got in.

  AURORAROX: ignore, ignore

  BwayPhil: I do, I do!

  BwayPhil: Now there’s a nice name for a musical!

  AURORAROX: :-P

  AURORAROX: put on some music & tune out the world

  AURORAROX: that’s what I’m going to do now

  AURORAROX: this newspaper thing is bogus