by Federle, Tim
Number ninety-one.
“We will take in fifty children at a time, and do a type-out”—this makes Uncle Robert groan—“and it will take approximately twenty minutes, per fifty kids.” All this math, it’s harder than algebra. I thought the very point of New York was that there was no homework, only dangerous subway rides and Brooklyn Bridges and giant-size Applebee’s. And Wicked.
“So,” the casting woman continues, “this could be quite a long day, and I encourage everyone to make use of the snack shop down the hall, or to get outside and get some fresh air.”
A mom with a smoker’s voice raises her hand and wails, “Is the director in there?” Her son has on one of those surgical masks that Chinese people wear so they don’t catch diseases on trains and stuff.
“I have a creative team list, here,” the casting woman says, really shouting, actually, “of the adults in the room today. But when your children go in for the type-out, they will be introduced in person.” She sits back down, and the hallway descends into a panicked demiroar.
“What’s a type-out?” I say to Uncle Robert.
“It’s where they line you all up,” Robert starts.
“Like you’re a criminal, accused of stealing cookies,” Nephew Shawn says, stupid Nephew Shawn who actually thinks stealing cookies is a crime. Maybe it is in Florida. Who knows. They have alligators in pools there, so anything’s possible.
“They line you up and decide,” Uncle Robert says, “simply upon your looks and heritage and type, whether you are even appropriate to sing for them. To advance to the actual audition portion. It’s ridiculous and very old-school.” He takes out a swatch of knitting and bounces his leg. “When I lived here in the seventies, it was all the rage: You’d audition for Michael Bennett and you couldn’t even get through the door without them practically throwing boiling water at you.” Uncle Robert’s lips have gone frothy white, spittle forming.
Also, I had no idea men were allowed to knit.
I lean back in my chair. So I guess an “audition type-out” is a lot like gym class, where student captains are chosen (never me) and one at a time you’re picked for their team (never me). A month ago, Danny Brooks, the eighth grader with a scoliosis brace, was picked six slots ahead of me for a round of dodgeball. Not even kidding.
“Silence, please!” the blonde casting assistant screams, bellowing over the buzz of mothers putting makeup on their girls; of boys singing scales; of every other child nervously retucking-in his or her shirt. (For some reason, when people are very nervous, they untuck and retuck their shirts.) “Please return your application as soon as possible, because I have to get the team lunch.”
The team. What does that even mean?
Back to the application.
STUDIO: Robert Poppins School of Performing Arts
It’s a minor lie, a white one, and looking up at Uncle Robert, I can tell—his hair is just this fake-shade-of-red enough—that he isn’t a big enough deal in the dance world for anyone to cross-reference my fib. This Uncle Robert guy doesn’t know anyone on Broadway, I can just sense it.
HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE MOVIE E.T.? Yes, it is my favorite movie.
(It is, too, not lying.)
WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE PART IN THE MOVIE, AND WHAT DO YOU CONNECT TO MOST IN THE STORY?
* * *
Oh, Lord, this is like psychology. This is the kind of thing people in Jankburg make fun of, the kind of flamboyant stuff that got the arts funding all but cut from my school in the first place. The only thing children should be connecting to, my dad would say, is each other, in a football uniform. Or connecting to a blasted scholarship. I’d like Nathan to connect to a nice pre-med scholarship before he ups and connects to a flipping movie about a bunch of queer kids and their pet alien friend.
WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE PART IN THE MOVIE, AND WHAT DO YOU CONNECT TO MOST IN THE STORY?
I liked how the dad was never around.
WHAT IS YOUR AUDITION SONG TODAY:
“Bigger Isn’t Better” from the Broadway musical Barnum
HOMETOWN:
I think on this one. They’re probably looking for Broadway-savvy people who won’t get lost on subways and be late for rehearsals. But I decide on a seven-lie limit for this application, and calling myself twenty-one probably counts as four. I wish Anthony’s fake ID weren’t such a stretch. I could probably pull off eighteen, blaming it on a condition, some shrinking-boy thing, but twenty-one . . . I dunno.
HOMETOWN: Jankburg, Pennsylvania
IF YOU ARE HIRED FOR E.T., AND AREN’T FROM NEW YORK, WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO RELOCATE TO NEW YORK CITY? If I don’t get hired for E.T., I’d be willing to relocate to New York City.
ARE YOU A MEMBER OF ANY ACTORS’ UNIONS?
I pause.
“An actors’ union,” Uncle Robert says, and I realize he’s looking over my shoulder, “is what professional actors belong to, with years of authentic training and time spent in the trenches, slaving away in New York, trying their hardest to make it.” The froth is back on his lips. “So you can put no, you’re not a member of any actors’ unions.”
“Okay.” Unions, plural. There are multiple. Wow. Probably separate unions altogether for child jugglers and people who can do the splits.
“And then,” he continues, “you can erase my performing arts studio as a reference. Unless,” and Uncle Robert stands and clears aside a horrible little hallway throw rug, “you’d like to get up and have a pirouette competition with my nephew Shawn, right here. And if you can beat him, by all means.” The black girl with the flute is staring at us now, having finished the polishing business and begun nibbling celery. “If you can beat my Shawn, I’d love to claim you as a student.”
Nephew Shawn does a knee bend and cricks his neck from side to side, like he’s done this a billion times. If a pirouette actually were a pastry, I’d be delighted to have a pirouette competition with Shawn. I could out-eat anyone here, I bet you.
“No, thank you,” I say, the crowd of auditioning onlookers moaning in disappointment, “I don’t want to twist my knee in these new Adidas.” I wave them for everyone and erase Robert Poppins School of Performing Arts from the application, feeling a total moron. “Sorry about that, Professor Poppins.”
“Okay!” the large flowy man from before sing-songs, shocking me out of my embarrassment, forcing a scratched line across the whole audition form. “We want the first fifty kids, lined up single file outside this door. And, moms! That means you have to put away your iPads and your purses and your own dreams!” This gets a tremendous roar from all the moms. “And clear this aisle so your kid can be the next big thing. But listen!” Everything is exclamation points with this guy. “We only want kids who really, really want to be here, who go to bed at night and dream of Broadway and wake up in the morning and cry for Broadway! Who eat, bathe, and juggle Broadway.” Here, he pats one of the juggling boys on the head, like he already knows him from Juggling Union membership meetings. “So please, please, only line up if you and you alone want to be here, kiddos!”
All the kiddos, everyone but me, who is horrified at this clown, jump up and down like he’s handing out chocolate-covered cotton candy, and Uncle Robert takes Shawn’s hand and starts toward the lineup.
“Where are you going?” I say, and Uncle Robert turns back and sneers, “We were here at dawn. Shawn is in the first group,” and I go back to my application and finish up.
SPECIAL SKILLS: Lying on applications, I’d love to write, debating further entries: Stealing brother’s ID; Wearing inappropriate clothes to auditions, and finally, Great admirer of children who can do multiple pirouettes. But I decide to be simple and honest.
SPECIAL SKILLS: I thought a pirouette was a pastry, before this audition, and if that’s any indication of how much I could learn in New York, I hope I have a chance to live here.
I take the form to the casting assistant woman and slide it over facedown, hoping she won’t look too closely.
“Okay, Anth
ony,” she says, “thank you very much.” She takes a pen and writes “#91” on a name tag, the sort of thing my dad might wear to the company Christmas party, once a year when the janitors are actually allowed to mingle with the heart surgeons. “Just put this number on your shirt,” she says, “and think about taking off your hat for the audition.”
My Yankees cap, its unbroken brim hovering over my forehead, had become totally forgotten, another thing that isn’t really me. Another foreign object in a day full of them.
“Wait,” she says, squinting at the application. Oh, Carrie!! She’s discovered the lie.
(Carrie, a nineteen-eighties megaflop musical, was based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, and evidently featured a mile of Spandex and fake pig’s blood, and wasn’t even played as a comedy.)
Frickin’ Carrie!
“Anthony?” she says. “Didn’t you mean to put twelve for your age? Because the numbers are reversed, here—it says ‘twenty-one’—and I think that might not be true.” She picks up a tremendously huge Starbucks drink and sips at it and is acting like she cares, but her eyes are still darting that already-recognizable Manhattan Dart.
“No. I mean yes. I wrote twenty-one.”
“Okay.” Her arm is shaking under the sheer weight of mocha. “Are you here by yourself?”
“Well, look around, there’s hundreds of us,” I think to say, but don’t, managing just, “Uh.”
She takes my application off the clipboard, folding it directly in half, writing a red X—suddenly she has the biggest red Magic Marker I may’ve ever seen, bigger even than her Starbucks—and drops my form into a garbage can below the desk. A garbage can that I swear wasn’t even there a second ago. I have a knack for spotting garbage cans, because I so often end up in them, headfirst.
The hallway is quiet, as still as that horrible elevator ride, and all fifty of these children, lined up against the wall, are gaping directly at me; so are the other million, with their moms and dads and bitter uncles, all watching as this idiot who belongs in Western Pennsylvania makes a total Carrie of himself.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, soft, picking up my bookbag. I pull my new Yankees hat back on so hard, hoping that perhaps some of the magic skills of these brilliant New York kids—these jugglers and flutists—might have rubbed off on stupid Nate Foster. That maybe if I tug this hat on hard enough, down over my entire face, it might make me disappear, or turn me into a rabbit. Ninety bucks Uncle Robert Poppins has a delicious Crock-Pot recipe for stewed rabbit, and a hundred bucks he’d cook me and feed the result to Nephew Shawn.
I’m just about to spin on myself and hightail it to the elevators when the casting assistant woman pins my hand to the table, shouting: “Listen up, everyone,” shooting me daggers and pulling back her blonde-ringlet hair into a nervous twist. She turns her Starbucks over and spills a remaining gulp all over my lie of an application. “Unless you’ve got an adult to vouch for you today, don’t waste our time. This is Broadway,” and she leans over, pulling the dripping audition-form out from the garbage, and says (as loudly as anyone has ever said anything, as loudly as the shade of red she used to X out my application), “This isn’t Jankburg, Pennsylvania.”
“I’ll vouch for him,” I hear.
The hallway falls even more still, if possible, and from sixteen floors below us a siren whirs past, and you can practically hear the flap of a pigeon’s wings from outside the window.
“I can vouch for this boy.”
And when I turn, it isn’t my imagination talking, or Mrs. Rylance or Uncle Robert.
It’s a woman with Mom’s nose and Mom’s chin and Mom’s sad almond eyes, but with better hair, straighter and trendier, and an umbrella and rain boots and the look of a thousand lost dreams all over her shoulders.
“Aunt Heidi.”
Explanation Time
We find another corner.
These audition studios are a series of corners, hallways connecting to hallways, like an Escher drawing, a staircase becoming an upside-down door. I have a hunch there might be no actual rooms at all, that when you walk into the “audition studio,” it’s actually just a direct drop-off to the street below.
And that’s what I’m staring at, frozen: an ant path of cabs, a city of yellow where everything would be grey back home.
“Well, long time no see, Nathan,” Aunt Heidi says, clicking one of those free pens people get at banks, click click click.
“I’m—I can’t believe this,” I say, turning from the window. I’m not sure what I am most: embarrassed or freaked out or just knocked to my senses by seeing a forgotten blood relative. Someone I haven’t laid eyes on since I was a toddler. Someone I only really recognize from the pictures Mom keeps hidden. “I’m really sorry I never thanked you for all the cool cards you sent me,” I say.
“Yeah, well,” Heidi says, taking off her rain boots and pulling up two wool socks. Wool socks: that would’ve been smart to pack. “Most aunts probably send money, so don’t be too hard on yourself, Nathan.”
“Nate, now,” I want to say, “I just go by Nate, now,” but I don’t want to stutter, so I just go, “Uh.”
Heidi puts her rain boots back on and looks me up and down, just like Libby did in my yard right before sending me off on my maiden moron voyage. But Heidi’s eyes are more concerned. Judgmental. “Nathan, what were you thinking?”
“You ran away from Pittsburgh yourself, Aunt Heidi,” I want to say, “and tried to make it in the big city, so don’t look at me like that,” but instead I say, “I dunno.”
A man comes out of the snack shop, holding a banana and a packet of Protein Graham Crackers, whatever those are. I’m starting to get the sense that you can’t get anything in New York without something else coming with it: You can’t get directions without getting condescended to, and you can’t even get graham crackers without somebody injecting them with protein.
“How—how did you know I was here?” I finally say, the most obvious question to lead with but one that begs an answer I don’t want to hear.
“Your friend Libby,” Heidi says, taking my shoulder and gently pushing me back, so a few grown-up dancers can pass us, “told your older brother.”
“She did what?” I say, or shriek, and press away from the wall.
“Keep it down, Nathan.”
How could Libby do this to me?
“Your brother got injured at some track event,” Heidi says, her eyes doing the Manhattan Dart, “and got home early and found your friend Libby going through his underwear drawer.” Libby! “It sounded like quite a thing.”
“Oh my God,” I say. Holy Cats! (Cats wasn’t technically a flop, but Libby says it was, artistically, so it’s on our list of alternate swears.) Holy Cats, I can’t believe Libby would do that, except I can.
“And Anthony asked her what the heck was going on, and she broke down and told him everything. That she’d seen an audition for E.T., online, and couldn’t make it because her mom would never let her go to New York. Not with—I don’t know, I forget.”
“Not with her mom’s cancer coming back,” I say.
“Yes,” Heidi says, sighing and sitting down. I follow suit. “And that all Libby wanted was to audition for the part of Elliott’s younger sister. And that her good friend Nathan was so sweet, such a sweetheart, that he offered to go all the way to New York City to drop off her headshot and résumé in a manila envelope, and to bring a CD of the two of you doing some duet.”
Not some duet. “I’d Give It All for You” from Jason Robert Brown’s seminal Songs for A New World. We recorded it in the soprano key, even though it’s usually for a (normal) guy’s and girl’s voices. On us, it ended up sounding like a lesbian rock ballad. But still.
I know exactly the CD Libby would’ve secretly packed for me.
“Apparently you’re quite a bold friend, Nathan, but what were you thinking?”
“Mom is going to kill me,” I say.
“So it is true?”
“Is what true?” I say. A hip-hop dance class begins in a studio directly behind us. That, or a really, really angry guy has started sledgehammering the wall, such is the way the music pulses. If it is a guy with a sledgehammer, I hope he finds the spot right where my head is resting.
“Is it true that you came all the way here for your friend? That she actually sent you with a package of her materials?”
I reach into my bookbag and pull out the manila envelope, sliding it open, and I lift a piece of paper that says, “You’re only reading this if there was an emergency and I had to cover for you. Good luck, prince.”
I put the paper back in and realize there is no duet, no headshot of Libby, no résumé or CD.
That Libby knows she is six years too old for Elliott’s younger sister.
That she has neither the right body for the part nor the right voice. Libby’s is a husky, throaty torch voice, and I can’t imagine the songwriting team has given Elliott’s younger sister a song on a piano with a bottle of scotch.
And forget all that, even: between you and me, Libby only acts for fun. She’s the world’s biggest theater fan, but she doesn’t want to be the world’s biggest theater star. Libby wants to be the world’s biggest theater star’s agent.
Libby wants to be . . . my agent.
“Yes, Aunt Heidi,” I say. I lie. “Yes, I came all the way here for Libby.” I did in a way. I did it for us, and Libby and I are practically one.
“Well, we’ve got to get you back on the bus, then,” Aunt Heidi says. “Come on.”
From down six sets of halls, I can hear the mean Starbucks-dumping casting assistant shouting for the next fifty children to line up. And to have gotten all the way here, to have survived the night and two slices of awful pizza, to have lived through Jaime Madison not noticing me on the street . . . to return to Libby having not even stood in front of the director of the musical: I wouldn’t be her hero, and I have to return her hero. Even a fallen one.