Dorothy on the Rocks
a novel by
BARBARA SUTER
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
In Memory of
Jeffrey Roy
“They carried the sleeping girl to a
pretty spot beside the river,
far enough from the poppy field
to prevent her breathing any more
of the poison of the flowers . . .”
—L. Frank Baum, THE WIZARD OF OZ
Contents
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19
Acknowledgments
1
The phone rings once, twice. I open my eyes. Morning sun slaps me full in the face. Damn. I pull the sheet over my head and the answering machine picks up.
“Hi, honey,” a familiar voice says, “we’re on the corner at Broadway and Ninety-sixth, waiting for you. Hope you’re on the way.” I sit up and squint at the clock. My left eye twitches and my head begins to throb. Shit. The voice belongs to Dee-Honey Vanderbilt. She produces the Little Britches Children’s Theater. She’s over eighty years old and although no one knows for sure, rumor has it she served with Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War.
“Maggie, dear, are you there?”
I reach for the phone.
“Hi, Dee, what’s up?” I say.
“We’re waiting for you. We have a Wizard in Connecticut. Did you forget? I’m sure you confirmed with me.”
“Oh no, what time is it?” I ask.
“It’s eight o’clock. We’re waiting for you.”
“Uh, I was sick. I was going to call you—food poisoning—had some bad tuna,” I say, lying neatly through my teeth. Truth is I had totally (and perhaps wishfully) forgotten I am supposed to play Dorothy this morning.
“Do you think you can be here in ten minutes? We want to miss the traffic.”
“I don’t know, Dee. My stomach is still queasy.”
“We’ll get you some Pepto-Bismol. Fix you right up. The kids love you as Dorothy, Mags honey, and we can’t disappoint them. We’ll drive down to Eighty-seventh. Meet you right on your corner.” Then she hangs up. Damn and double damn. My cat, Bixby, peers up from his nest at the foot of the bed. He gives me a knowing look.
I definitely need coffee. As I throw my feet over the side of the bed I hear someone in the bathroom and then a flush. My God. Someone has broken into my apartment and is using the toilet! Seconds later a tall handsome young man walks into my bedroom.
“Mornin’, Maggie Mae,” the handsome young man says with a grin.
My head starts to pound louder than the tympani section in the second act of Das Rheingold—the result of shock smacking butt up against big hangover. I force a smile because by now I’m pretty sure he’s not a burglar. Mr. Handsome is barefoot, bare-chested, and holding a pair of Nikes. He sits on the side of the bed and puts on the left shoe then the right. He finds his shirt in a pile of clothes in the center of the floor; I can’t help but notice my black lace Victoria’s Secret push-up bra in the mix. I pull the bedsheet up to my chin and keep smiling and try to quickly reconstruct the night before. I went to the Angry Squire Bar on Twenty-sixth Street and started off slow with a couple of beers. Then someone played Janis Joplin’s “Get It While You Can” on the jukebox, and I switched to scotch. Apparently I got Mr. Handsome and he got me. Thanks, Janis.
“Mornin’ to you too,” I say trying to remember his name, but nothing comes to mind. Then, remembering Dee, I say, “I’ve got to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz today. I forgot all about it.”
“Is that the dog?” he asks, pulling on his shirt
“The dog? No. The dog is Toto. Dorothy is the girl. You know, Judy Garland in the movie?”
“I’ve never seen it.”
“Never seen it?” I ask incredulously. “You’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz? I can’t believe there is a person left on the face of the earth that hasn’t seen The Wizard of Oz.”
“Well,” he grins, “you’re looking at him.”
“Where are you from, Mars?” I ask.
“No,” he says, buttoning his shirt, “Queens.”
“Oh,” I say, still smiling.
“Look, I’ve got to run,” Mr. Handsome says. “I have an appointment downtown. It was great meeting you.” He leans in and nuzzles my neck.
“You too.” I nuzzle him back.
“I’ll call you,” he says over his shoulder as he makes his exit.
“Sure,” I say. And he is gone—out the front door and gone. What was that? I wonder. I shake my head a few times to make sure I’m awake and not dreaming.
The phone rings. It’s Dee.
“How’s it going? We got the Pepto-Bismol.”
“I’m on my way. Can someone get me a coffee at the deli?”
“Okay, but hurry, honey, we’re running late and traffic on the Major Deegan is going to be awful this morning. It’s already backed up.”
“This is a nightmare, Bix,” I say to the cat, going to the kitchen and putting out his food. “I hate playing Dorothy. That damn pinafore is too small, the zipper is broken, and gingham makes me look fat.” Bixby rubs my leg. He doesn’t care if I look fat; he doesn’t care about anything as long as I feed him. I get my backpack, throw in my makeup and my pigtail wig, and shift into high must-get-to-Oz mode.
I emerge from my apartment building to find Dee and the cast waiting on the corner at the end of the block. Randall Kent is leaning against the van, holding a large coffee. He’s been out of town for the past few months doing Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady at Virginia Stage. He works constantly. He’s what they call, in the biz, a triple threat. He sings, he dances, and he acts, all with considerable relish and plenty of ham. His motto: More is better. I met him at a small theater in Wisconsin. I was an apprentice and he was the leading man in every show that summer, including playing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof and Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha. I called him Mr. Kent, and when I moved to New York, he got me a job with Dee-Honey. That was almost twenty years ago.
“Mags, my dear,” Randall declares in his booming actor voice, “how are you?”
“All right,” I say. “Good to see you.”
Randall hands me the coffee. “For the little princess, from your loyal servant,” he says with a bow.
“Thanks, I’ll remember this when your clemency hearing comes up,” I say.
Dee-Honey sticks her head out the window of the van. “Let’s get going. The radio says the traffic’s getting heavy.”
“And mornin’ to you, Dee,” I say, taking my first sip of coffee. The caffeine immediately shoots through my system, and the majority of my molecules snap to attention. The rest turn over and go back to sleep.
“And how was the show?” I ask Randall as we climb into the van and get settled.
“Well the show was fabulous,” Randall says. “I was telling Dee that the girl playing Eliza was wonderful. She’s just out of Juilliard. A lovely voice but needed help with the humor. You’ve got to find it or it’s dull—dull, dull, and duller. And Dylan Ross was playing Pickering. Do you know him, Mags?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.” I’m sitting in the backseat next to Pauline Letts, who plays Glenda, the Good Witch of the North, in our little production and also doubles as Auntie Em. She’s seventy-three, originally from Georgia, and has been playing the Good Witch for the better part of forty years.
“Pauline, didn’t you work with him? At Utah Shakespeare?” Randall asks.
“Oh, yes, he was Polonius when I did Gertrude. Does he still have those nasty dogs? What were they, schnauzers? They were awful. They used to pee in my wig box.”
“Maggie, honey, how are you feeling?” Dee chirps
from the driver’s seat.
“Better, I think,” I say.
“What’s the matter, Maggie? Late night, dear?” Eddie Houser asks from the far backseat. He plays the flying monkey and doubles as the munchkin. Eddie, now sixty-five, started with the company when his hair was black and his teeth were mostly his own. He is drinking coffee spiked with bourbon out of his Superman thermos. We all know there is bourbon in the thermos. Dee-Honey doesn’t say anything, she just doesn’t let him drive anymore.
“Careful when you’re spinning on that cellar door. That could really make the old tummy flip,” he says with a nasty chuckle.
“Thank goodness you were able to make it, Maggie,” Dee says. “I might have had to put a wig on Frank and sent him on.”
To Dee, the phrase “the show must go on” isn’t just a catchy saying, it’s the eleventh commandment, carved in stone and delivered down from the Austrian Alps in The Sound of Music by Thespis, the Greek father of actors. Last month I saw her squeeze into the crocodile costume for Peter Pan and crawl on all fours across the stage because Scott Lovelady came down with the flu.
“Anyone have some aspirin?” I ask.
Randall rummages through his bag and hands me an economy size bottle of Tylenol.
“And here’s the Pepto-Bismol,” he says.
“Thanks,” I say, popping two pills and swigging some Bismol.
Dee-Honey does a head count. All the players are present and accounted for, so off we go. I tell myself it’s not going to be so bad. The only thing I have to remember as Dorothy is to hang on to the dog and try to get home.
We arrive at the theater ten minutes before curtain. I find Dorothy’s costume; white puffy-sleeved blouse, the dreaded blue gingham pinafore, and a white crinoline. I start to squeeze in. The costume is too small and the zipper is still broken from last time I did the part. Pauline is right by my side with a box of safety pins.
NOTE TO SELF . . .
If the costume doesn’t fit, suck in your stomach and don’t turn sideways.
“Pull that tummy in, Mags,” she says, coaxing the sides together with the help of the pins. The blouse fits, but the pinafore is hopeless.
“Don’t turn sideways and you’ll be fine,” Pauline says as she scurries off, muttering something about false eyelashes. My head pounds in spite of the aspirin, and now random light flickers on the periphery of my vision. I ask Randall about it.
“I don’t know,” he says, “sounds like the onset of a heart attack or possibly a stroke.”
Frank, our trusty stage manager who almost had to double as Dorothy, calls five minutes.
“Feeling all right, Mags?” he asks.
“A little better, and lucky for you I do. Dee said she would have put a wig on you and made you play Dorothy,” I say.
“And she would have. Forget that I’m sixty and have a mustache,” he says. “Come on, let’s do the door thing and make sure it’s working.”
I follow Frank backstage and we practice spinning the mechanical cellar door, with Frank pulling the cord that turns the wheel and me perched on top. Frank moans and the door turns slightly and Frank moans again.
“Save your energy for the show,” I say.
“Sorry, Mags, but have you put on a few pounds?”
“Frank, we’ve all put on a few pounds.”
“Yeah but it’s only you I have to spin,” Frank grumbles as he totters off to set the rest of the props.
“I heard that,” I say.
“Let’s do this,” Frank announces. “Those kids are getting restless. Places, everybody.” The cast assembles in the wings. I find the stuffed dog that plays Toto and stand stage right. The music starts and Randall squeezes my arm.
“Break a leg, kid,” he whispers.
The curtain opens. I run onstage clutching the little dog and say, “Oh Toto, Toto, what are we going to do?”
I hear a tiny voice in the first row say, “Mommy, I thought Dorothy was a little girl, not a big lady.”
I glare out into the audience. Silence. Followed by more silence. I can’t remember the next line. Frank whispers something from the wings but I can’t understand him.
Then Dee-Honey comes onstage as Miss Gulch. I squeal and run upstage and hide behind the curtain. Lights flash and Frank makes tornado sounds in the offstage microphone. Randall and Eddie chime in with cow moos and chicken clucks. Pauline darts across stage yelling, “Get those animals in the barn. There’s a twister coming.” The lights continue to flash. Pauline disappears stage left and the cellar door is pushed on down right.
“Oh Toto, oh Toto,” I cry and then climb on the cellar door. Frank pulls the rope. It doesn’t budge. “Oh Toto, oh Toto,” I cry again. I shake the dog up and down and circle my head as if lashed by the wind. Frank groans as he tries the rope again. I reach over and brace my hands on the floor and try to propel myself around.
“She’s too big.” It’s that kid in the front row again. “She’s not a little girl. I want to go home.” The child bursts into tears and thankfully the lights go to black. Frank shoves the dead witch’s feet onstage, pulls the back curtain across the traveler. I get up off the cellar door. Lights up and Eddie staggers out as the munch-kin, “W-w-wel-l-lcome to Mm-m-un-s-s-ch-kin-n-nland,” he slurs as Pauline sweeps onstage as Glenda the Good Witch in her long pink chiffon dress with hoopskirt and sequin trim, her magic wand shimmering with glitter. The kid in the front row stops crying and leans forward, suddenly entranced.
“I’m Glenda, the Good Witch of the North,” Pauline says in her honey-buttered southern accent, and in spite of the irony, the show is finally rolling.
When Randall Kent, playing the Wizard, sends me back to Kansas, I start to cry my actress tears, because I don’t want to leave the wonderful land of Oz, but the Wizard assures me he can get me back once a year for a visit. Pauline touches me with her wand and the lights flash. I click my heels and twirl round and round and end up on the cellar door again, back home in Kansas—and realize my actress tears are mixed with real tears because back here in this world I can’t remember the name of the man I spent the night with, I’m wearing a gingham pinafore that doesn’t fit, and I’m being heckled by a six-year-old. Who wouldn’t rather stay in Oz?
“Good show,” Eddie says as I pass him on my way to the dressing room.
“Got any of your coffee left?” I ask. Eddie pours me a Styrofoam cupful and I down it.
“Oh, and sorry I kicked you during the munchkin dance but I got thrown by that damned heckler in the front row. I could have killed her.”
“Forget it,” Eddie says, taking a swig from his thermos. “There’s always at least one of those when I do Pinocchio. Kids have no manners these days. They’re all spoiled brats.”
I sit at the dressing room table and begin to remove my makeup. Frank switches on the overhead fluorescent lights. I look at myself in the mirror, with my pigtail wig and rouged cheeks, and recoil in horror. I look frighteningly like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
“Turn off that overhead light, will you?” I snap to Frank.
“Aren’t we sensitive?” Randall says from the other side of the room.
“My vision is weird today, and that fluorescent light makes my eyes flicker,” I say defensively.
After we change out of the costumes and pack up the props, we pile into the van and head back to New York. I’m in the front seat between Dee-Honey and Pauline.
“You always make such a lovely Dorothy, dear,” Pauline says, and pats my knee. “Just lovely.”
“Pauline, you’re sweet, but I’m forty-one. I think my Dorothy days are over. Did you hear that girl in the front row?”
“She was a thoughtless urchin. No imagination. Look, Maggie dear, to a seventy-three-year-old, forty-one is still an ingénue, isn’t that right Dee-Honey?”
“Oh my yes. You’re practically a teenager.”
“Teenager,” Randall snorts from the backseat. “She’s Lady Macbeth if she’s a day.”
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br /> “You hush, Randall,” Pauline hisses. “You just hush.”
“Thanks,” I say to Pauline, then give her a kiss on the cheek. “And I think you’re the real reason that Dorothy makes it back home and it’s not the nasty old Wizard at all,” I say, nodding in Randall’s direction. “It’s Glenda’s good wishes that get her back to Kansas.”
“I’ve always thought that,” Pauline says. “When I give her that final blessing with the wand, I envision Dorothy back home safe and sound. I’m glad you feel it.”
“I always do,” I say.
A few years ago Pauline and I were on tour together in Freddie and his Magic Flute. After too many shots of cheap scotch at the motel bar, I confided to her that I was depressed and feeling like nothing in my life had meaning. She took me by the shoulders and said, “Listen to me, Maggie, you have to go on no matter what, because you never know when something wonderful will happen.” Then she proceeded to tell me about the time, in a fit of despair, she decided to kill herself. It was a cold December day after Christmas. She opened the window of her apartment—a sixth-floor walk-up on West Forty-fifth Street (where she still lives)—and put on her best black cocktail dress (an Ann Roth design she had worn in a walk-on role with Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy), along with her rhinestone earrings, four-inch stiletto heels, and black elbow-length satin gloves. Her plan was to get a running start and hurl herself out the window, down six stories, and onto the front page of the New York Daily News. But just as she was about to get up speed and go, the phone rang. It was a friend, and when she heard his voice she started to cry uncontrollably. The friend (a tall, dark, handsome mystery man is what Pauline leads you to believe) suggested dinner, and since Pauline was already dressed for it, according to legend, they went to the Rainbow Room, then spent the weekend at the Plaza Hotel drinking champagne and eating caviar. That’s the official version; unofficially the word is (and Eddie Houser swears to it) Dee-Honey was the one on the other end of the phone who saved Pauline, and then had her admitted to Bellevue for an extended stay.
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