My Life

by Maryrose Wood

  Of course, when Zero Mostel starred in the original Broadway production of Fiddler, it was 1964 and a balcony seat for a Saturday matinee of a Broadway musical cost three dollars and sixty cents. Mere latte money! Emily found the figure impossible to believe, until Grandma Rose showed her the old Fiddler ticket stubs and Playbills in her scrapbook.

  It wasn’t until Emily turned fifteen and was allowed to go into Manhattan without an adult (“As long as you travel with a friend,” her parents had stipulated, “and stay together the whole time”) that seeing Aurora on a weekly basis became a possibility. But even at the rush-line price of twenty-five dollars a ticket, two people seeing the show every Saturday quickly added up to a significant sum. There was also the round-trip train fare to the city and lunch at the Edison to pay for.

  That was when Emily struck her deal. Now, Grandma Rose had made it clear she didn’t have unlimited funds, and she had a slew of grandnephews and grandnieces to spoil. So the secret weekly Aurora allowance she provided was not an outright gift, but a loan—or, as they called it in show business, an advance.

  “Don’t worry, you’ve got it,” Grandma Rose would say as she counted out the tens and twenties every week, enough to cover both Emily and Philip’s expenses (of course Emily paid for Philip; she had to, because they were best friends and fellow Aurorafans and he was poor). “You’ve got money in the bank, darling,” Grandma Rose assured her. “From your bat mitzvah. You’ll pay me back when you’re older.”

  Grandma kept her cash in a cigar box in her top dresser drawer, and Emily always tried to catch a glimpse of what else was in there when Grandma tucked the box away. She could have sworn she’d once seen a label from Victoria’s Secret, which was an odd feeling. Grandma was seventy-five, after all. Anyway, this week, like every other week, Emily had thanked her grandmother profusely for the loan.

  Grandma shrugged. “What if I’d waited to see Zero Mostel? Now he’s dead. And they didn’t even use him in the movie! They used that other man, the one with the strange name.”

  “Topol.” Emily didn’t find Topol any stranger a name than Zero, but Grandma was entitled to her opinion. “He was good, Grandma. He got nominated for the Academy Award.”

  “He’s no Zero Mostel, that’s all I’m saying. Now, that was a Tevye.” Grandma Rose’s whole face crinkled when she smiled. “This is my point, darling. You have to see your show while it’s running. ’Cause when it’s over—goodbye, Charlie. That’s my advice.” And she grabbed Emily by the earlobe and gave a little pinch, and that was that.

  “So who is this ‘SAVEMEFROMAURORA’ jerk?” said Stephanie, slurping a soy milk smoothie. Actors had to be at the theatre by half hour to get into makeup and costume (that meant one-thirty for a two o’clock matinee), so Stephanie could only briefly grace the Edison with her presence.

  Ian snorted. “Have you crossed paths with that bozo, too? He’s haunting all the chat rooms, bad-mouthing the show and pissing everyone off.”

  “What a completely toxic person!” said Stephanie, shaking her wavy carrot-colored tresses around like a wet dog. “He’s even been leaving nasty posts on the show’s message boards. ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!’ Such crap. I mean, ‘ye’? Who talks like that?”

  “We chatted with him once,” Emily piped up. She was glad to have something to contribute. “What a loser.”

  “I think he’s a publicist for Wicked,” Ian said. Stephanie screamed and slapped her hand over Ian’s mouth. Every head in the Edison turned.

  “Don’t say things like that, Ian,” she scolded. “That’s how rumors start. Especially in this place!”

  She was right about the rumors. Tucked in the lobby of the Edison Hotel, the Café Edison had been a Broadway performers’ hangout since the 1930s. There were long-legged gypsies at every table, swaying like palm trees in the breeze as they leaned in to gossip and out to eavesdrop; in, out, rinse and repeat.

  “I’m sure that SAVEME is just a crank,” said Philip, gently dabbing his lips with a napkin. “He does seem to know his musicals pretty well.”

  “Not as well as you, darling!” Stephanie giggled. “You are an encyclopedia! Men with brains are so sexy. No wonder Ian chose you as the object of his affections, of all the nubile young boys on the rush line!”

  At this, Ian collapsed and pounded his forehead dramatically on the table, almost knocking over everyone’s water. Philip looked like a deer caught in a follow-spot. Emily felt her face flush with embarrassment, but on whose behalf she wasn’t sure.

  “You’re such a troublemaker, Dawson!” Ian moaned. “Young Philip here, though admittedly pretty as a chorus girl and sharp as Ben Brantley’s tongue, is not my boyfriend.”

  “Well, not yet!” Stephanie chirped. But something about the look on Philip’s and Emily’s faces finally activated her shut-up mechanism. “I’m sorry, that was rude. I shouldn’t assume things, right?” She slurped the last of her smoothie. “It’s just that at LaGuardia, people are, like, flinging themselves out of the closet all freshman year, so I just thought . . . Oh, my, I’m digging myself in deeper and deeper, aren’t I!” Her laugh trickled up and down the scale like a vocal exercise.

  “Darling, our young friends are not from here,” said Ian. “They’re from—not Kansas, but someplace similar, no?”

  “Rockville Centre,” Emily said, feeling like a rube. (One of the ways Emily and Philip had first known they would be friends forever was when they’d simultaneously observed that the name of their hometown was spelled with an “re” at the end. “Just like theatre!” they’d said in awe, at exactly the same time. To Emily it felt like fate. To Philip, it was kismet. “Kismet, 1953,” he’d explained with reverence. “Book by Charles Lederer and Luther Davis, music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest, adapted from the music of Alexander Borodin.”)

  Ian continued berating Stephanie. “Yes, Rockville Centreeeeee. So use some discretion, you little tart. Anyway, I have something much more interesting to talk about than who is and who isn’t! Guess what I know?”

  Stephanie glanced at her watch. “Make it quick, I have to get to the theatre.”

  “Oh, I’m not speeding through this story. It’s too good,” Ian purred cruelly. “It’s the best gossip ever!”

  “Tell me, suckface! I have to go!”

  “Well, it’s a long saga. . . . To do it justice, one would have to go all the way back to the beginning . . . to when the Greeks invented theatre, and the first leather-clad thespians lithped acroth the thtage. . . .” Ian dodged Stephanie’s barrage of slaps. Emily was finding it hard to keep up, and Philip had taken himself out of the line of fire by busying himself with the check.

  “Ian, you are the worst! I can’t be late for half hour again, the stage manager will have me over his knee.”

  “You’d better go then, Spanky,” he said, laughing and batting her hands away. “I’ll tell you later. Or maybe I won’t! It can be your punishment for being rude to my friends.”

  Calmly, Stephanie stood up and plopped a big juicy kiss on Philip’s mouth. When she was done, she glared at Ian. “Fine. Philip is mine, then. That’s your punishment. Because you,” she said, turning back to Philip, “are not in Kansas anymore.”

  Stephanie threw a few dollars on the table and hustled out the door, already late. The faster she moved, the more evident her dancer’s waddle became, her slim legs permanently turned out, ducklike, from hour after hour, year after year of doing pliés in front of a mirror.

  Emily was too flustered by Stephanie’s smooch attack to speak. It was Philip, managing to remain perfectly composed despite the big scarlet lip print on the lower portion of his face, who finally asked: “So what is this gossip, Ian?”

  Ian looked quite serious all of a sudden. He leaned close to them and whispered, “I know who wrote Aurora.”

  7

  “DON’T CRY FOR ME, ARGENTINA”

  Evita

  1979. Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber,

  lyrics and
book by Tim Rice

  Even Ian’s tiny whisper caused a palpable hush to fall across the Café Edison, and he refused to say another word until, as he said, “we have entered a secure undisclosed location.” Emily decided the second row of the far right mezzanine of the Rialto Theatre was secure enough. As soon as Philip returned from the men’s room (the lipstick was gone when he came out) and they took their seats for the matinee, she pounced.

  “Okay. No way,” She felt ready to start slapping Ian herself. “There is no way you can know what you said you know.”

  “Shhhh!” Ian hissed dramatically. “Someone I met in Florida told me. But only because I swore not to tell.”

  “How’s that going so far, by the way?” Philip had to fold his long legs like a crane’s to fit in the narrow row of seats. “The not telling part, I mean.”

  “I haven’t told, have I, Miss Smug Thing?” Ian shot back. “And the way you’re behaving, maybe I won’t.”

  “Ian! You would never have mentioned it if you didn’t mean to tell us.” Emily smiled sweetly. “You’re not that much of a jerk!”

  “No matter what people say,” added Philip. Ian started to laugh. They had him.

  “C’mon, we’ll swear, too,” Emily cajoled. “Not to tell and not to tell anyone we know something we can’t tell them.” Emily was on fire to know, for all the obvious reasons, of course, but also because if there was a chance she’d been right in her persuasive essay, she was going to march into Mr. Henderson’s class on Monday and make a scene. Of course, if she swore not to repeat what Ian told her, she wouldn’t be able to say why she was making a scene, and Mr. Henderson would think she was losing her mind, but still . . .

  “Did this Florida person say how he, she, or it found out?” Philip asked as they all half stood to let a latecomer take her seat at the end of the row. “Because maybe, dear gullible Ian, your leg has been pulled.”

  They lowered themselves back into their seats, and Ian spoke in an intense stage whisper. “The ‘Florida person’ has an impeccable inside track on such information. He, she, or it was utterly shocked with what he, she, or it was unexpectedly made privy to!”

  Pronouns suck, thought Emily. Just spit it out, the show’s about to start. And it was. Like a flock of geese whose group mind mysteriously knew how to find South America, the whole audience went quiet a split second before the houselights started to dim.

  “Cell phone?” Even under these highly distracting conditions Philip didn’t forget. Emily fished through her bag frantically to find the phone.

  “I will tell you this,” Ian said as the houselights came down for performance number 1,022 of Aurora. “It’s somebody famous.”

  Never be enough,

  My love for you could

  Never be enough.

  Infinity could never be enough

  To hold what’s in my heart.

  I’ll stay with you when times are tough,

  We’ll never be apart—

  Never understand,

  The rest of them will

  Never understand.

  A love so far beyond

  The love that we had planned . . .

  AURORAROX: so who do you think?

  AURORAROX: someone famous, now.

  BwayPhil: ugh! Impossible, AURORA just doesn’t sound like anyone else.

  AURORAROX: Sondheim?

  BwayPhil: Emily, be serious—he wrote Sweeney Todd! He wrote Into the Woods! And Company, and Sunday in the Park with George, and Pacific Overtures and A Little Night Music and and and . . .

  AURORAROX: i know what he wrote!

  BwayPhil: I would hear half a bar of Sondheim coming a mile away!

  AURORAROX: i was just starting with famous

  AURORAROX: Andrew Lloyd Webber?

  BwayPhil: Absolutely not.

  AURORAROX: Richard Rodgers?

  BwayPhil: Famous and ***alive***, I think would also be important.

  AURORAROX: duh. that shrinks the list somewhat

  AURORAROX: Elton John? Stephen Schwartz? William Finn?

  BwayPhil: William Finn is not really famous.

  AURORAROX: we know who he is

  AURORAROX: he wrote Spelling Bee

  AURORAROX: he wrote Falsettos

  BwayPhil: He’s famous to the people who know who he is. That’s not the same as being famous. Anyway, the songs from Aurora don’t sound like any of them.

  BwayPhil: Or anybody else I’ve ever heard.

  BwayPhil: That’s why I love them.

  AURORAROX: i know!

  AURORAROX: “Never Be Enough” is just the best song

  AURORAROX: ever

  SAVEMEFROMAURORA: looky, ma, the kids are playing “who wrote Aurora?”

  SAVEMEFROMAURORA: I’m more of a Scrabble fan myself.

  AURORAROX: oh no

  AURORAROX: it’s back

  SAVEMEFROMAURORA: Hush! Now listen: “The best song ever.” That simply cannot be true, and I want you to admit it.

  AURORAROX: but it IS.

  SAVEMEFROMAURORA: You think it’s better than “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” Better than “Hey Jude.” Better than pretty much anything from Gypsy or Oklahoma! or My Fair Lady?

  BwayPhil: Why don’t you go ***see*** the show and come back and apologize for your ignorance?

  SAVEMEFROMAURORA: What makes you think I haven’t seen it?

  AURORAROX: because if you had SEEN it

  AURORAROX: we would not be having

  AURORAROX: this conversation.

  SAVEMEFROMAURORA: I’ve seen it.

  AURORAROX: see it

  AURORAROX: until you GET it

  SAVEMEFROMAURORA: Trust me, I’ve seen it more than you.

  AURORAROX: LOL!!!!! no way.

  BwayPhil: Wait—do we know you?

  BwayPhil: Are you that crabby guy who’s always on the rush line in a Jekyll & Hyde show jacket?

  SAVEMEFROMAURORA: J&H ! ! ! ! horrors!

  AURORAROX: OMG, if you’re a regular

  AURORAROX: we must totally know you

  SAVEMEFROMAURORA: “Have I said too much?”

  BwayPhil: “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” Evita. 1979. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

  SAVEMEFROMAURORA: “There’s nothing more I can think of to say to you.”

  AURORAROX: So who are you, SAVEME?

  BwayPhil: yoo-hoo! SAVEME?

  AURORAROX: he logged off.

  BwayPhil: Weird.

  Why Broadway Shows Should Be Free

  A Persuasive Essay by Emily Pearl

  Emily gritted her teeth as Mr. Henderson read her essay, right there in front of her, as the rest of the students noisily exited the classroom.

  Yes, her paper was about Broadway. But it didn’t mention Aurora, not even once. Instead she used Fiddler (the original 1964 production, starring Zero Mostel, of course) and The Lion King as her examples, and had even prepared a small bar chart titled “Broadway Ticket Prices, Then and Now.” A chart! What could be more persuasive than that? The use of info-graphics was the one good idea she’d picked up from reading the Times, and she was half expecting a generous helping of extra credit for her efforts.

  Mr. Henderson clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Emily Pearl,” he said. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “It doesn’t mention Aurora,” Emily said. “Did you see I made a chart?”

  “It doesn’t, and you did. Very impressive. Broadway tickets are much more expensive than they used to be. I get it.” He took off his glasses and laid them on her paper. “That is what we call self-evident, Emily. Presenting a self-evident fact—even in a fancy multicolor chart—is not persuading me of anything.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Emily.

  “Everything costs more than it used to!” Mr. Henderson’s voice grew louder than seemed strictly necessary. “That fact alone does not constitute a reason for those things to suddenly be made free.”

  He stood and went to the board and wrote a bunch of
words. “Sets. Costumes. Lights. Don’t these cost money?”

  “I guess.” Emily felt the prospect of extra credit slipping through her fingers.

  Mr. Henderson wrote some more. “Actors. Musicians. Ushers. Stagehands. Do you think all these people should work for nothing?”

  “Nope,” Emily conceded.

  He wrote again, really big this time. “Directors. Choreographers. Composers, book writers, lyricists! Are you suggesting that all these creative people should labor for years and years to create Broadway musicals for Emily Pearl’s personal amusement without ever getting paid a dime?”

  “Okay, I get it,” Emily said, shrinking back. Mr. Henderson looked ready to burst a vein. He must have seen the fear on her face.

  “Emily, Emily, Emily,” he said. “I’m being hard on you, and there is a reason. I too am a fan of the theatre. There was a time when I dreamed of writing for Broadway myself. Believe it or not, some of us started out with bigger dreams than teaching high school English and directing the spring musical.” He looked around the classroom sadly. “Not that this job is going to save me. I can hardly afford to see a Broadway show myself more than once in a blue moon. But at least I get benefits. Health insurance, pension . . .” Emily found it hard to follow his train of thought, and her mind wandered. “You know we’re doing Fiddler this year, auditions are next week . . . ya-hah-deedle-deedle-bubba-bubba-deedle-deedle-dum . . .”

  In another minute she was going to be late for Spanish. “Sorry, Mr. Henderson,” Emily said, trying her best not to sound snotty, “but what is your point, exactly?”

  He handed her essay back to her. “My point is that this is a wish, not an argument. How could Broadway shows be free? You figure it out! Persuade me it’ll work! Convince me it’s both possible and a good idea!”

  “Okay,” Emily said, feeling tiny.

  “By Monday! And no Aurora!” he yelled after her as she slunk out of the classroom.