Fame, Glory, and Other Things on My to Do List

by Janette Rallison

She humphed and ate the rest of her sandwich in silence. Which was fine with me, since it took all my effort not to rip the newspaper into chunks and pelt her with them.

  I worried that the cast would be steamed about the editorial. But at rehearsal those who’d read it just shook their heads and joked about it. “People should really see the play before they judge it,” Mary said.

  “This is so cool,” Andre told Jeff and Tye. “Our very first play is causing controversy. Chicks dig controversial actors.”

  Kate huffed a lot during practice. I ignored her and sat in the back of the auditorium and did my homework.

  Up onstage Andre as Riff, Jeff as Bernardo, and Jordan as Tony ran through the rumble scene. Every once in a while I watched them because I wanted to see their acting methodology, and not because I’m a Jordan groupie who constantly stares at him.

  Mrs. Shale stood beside them, correcting their blocking as though teaching waltzing lessons. “Right foot forward, turn, and left arm up higher . . . Timing, people—timing is everything!”

  Jeff moved with choppy steps. He didn’t look capable of fighting for a parking space, let alone street turf. Mrs. Shale took his place and tried to demonstrate the proper way to stab Andre. She obviously knew a lot about stabbing techniques, since she’d had no compunction about stabbing me in the back.

  I doodled a large elaborate J on my chemistry notebook. J for Jessica. It was most definitely not a J for Jordan. Jeff stabbed Andre. Then Jordan took the prop knife and stabbed Jeff to complete the scene.

  “Much better,” Mrs. Shale said with forced cheerfulness. She always spoke cheerfully to Jordan, which lately had gotten on my nerves. I mean, she’d snap at the rest of us for not having enough sparkle as we yelled out street slang, but Jordan could do no wrong.

  Mary as Maria, Lauren as Rosalia, and Annabelle—the girl who played Consuelo—came onstage to do the “I Feel Pretty” scene.

  I went back to doodling. Next to the J, I wrote an O. It started out as an E, really, but somehow its O-ness took over as I drew. Then I added a flowery R.

  “Hey.” Jordan sat down beside me, glancing at my paper as he did.

  I put my algebra book over my notebook and blushed. “Hi.”

  He smiled at me. “Doing homework still?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Which of your classes requires you to doodle my name?”

  “I wasn’t doodling your name. I’m writing a paper on Jor . . .” I mentally ran through every word I knew that started with a Jor sound—which aren’t many. “Ja,” I finally finished.

  “Georgia?” Jordan asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Georgia doesn’t start with J-O-R.”

  “Really? My spelling has always been lousy.”

  “Your alibis aren’t so great either.”

  I picked up my books and put them behind me. “Did you come over just to criticize me?”

  He leaned back, resting his weight against his arms. “No, actually I didn’t.” Another minute went by. He looked at the stage, and not at me. I waited for him to say something and hoped it would be something I’d want to hear, such as “Sorry I haven’t spoken to you for two months,” or “By the way, I find the Marias repulsive.”

  “My father is coming in tomorrow,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “He’ll probably show up at rehearsal.” Jordan’s voice had a sting to it, as though he wasn’t entirely happy about this.

  “I thought you wanted your father to help you with your acting.”

  “I do.”

  Guys. Just when you think you figure them out, they purposely make no sense.

  “Do you remember that agreement we made about borrowing your car?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d like to borrow it Friday after school. Will that work for you?”

  Would that work for me? He’d ignored me for two months, and then, out of the blue, asked to borrow my car. My pride wanted to tell him what he could do with our agreement—although the fact that he’d just caught me doodling his name sort of let all the air out of any indignation I could muster. Besides, I still wanted to make things right with him. “I guess that would be fine,” I said.

  He stood up, his eyes on the stage. “Great. I’ll talk to you more about it later, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Then he went onstage to sing a duet with Maria. I tried to go back to my homework, but couldn’t think of anything besides Friday and why Jordan wanted to borrow my car.

  On Tuesday at rehearsal, I could feel Christopher Hunter’s presence as soon as I walked into the room. Instead of lounging around the stage talking, all the kids huddled up front around him. Even kids who weren’t in the production mingled with the crowd, smiles animating their faces. Jordan stood beside his father, not speaking, his hands in his pockets. He couldn’t have spoken if he wanted to because everyone else lobbed questions at his father, hung on his responses, and basically stared at him like crazed fans. For the first time I realized how hard it must be to have an idol for a parent, to always be invisible by comparison. More than anything else, this one moment explained to me why Jordan hadn’t wanted people to know who his father was. And I’d let them know. It made me feel even worse.

  Christopher Hunter looked older than he’d been in his last movie—which shouldn’t have surprised me, since the movie came out about three years ago. But it was still a small shock. I’d half expected that his image would remain as unchanged in life as it did on my DVD player. Streaks of gray lightened his hair around his temples, and wrinkles crinkled the corners of his eyes. Still he was a handsome man, an older version of Jordan.

  My glance moved to Jordan, and I found him watching me. I stood away from the group, hovering, unsure as to whether I should join them or not. It felt odd to stand all alone, and yet I didn’t want to be one more teenager mobbing the movie star. Besides, I wasn’t sure if Jordan wanted me there.

  I sat down in my usual spot, opened my algebra book, and forced myself to work a problem even though I wanted to look up at Jordan and see if he was still watching me.

  Ten minutes past the time we usually started, Mrs. Shale told us to run through the last act. She sat next to Mr. Hunter at the front of the stage, but didn’t even try to direct. She turned it over to him. He watched us run through scene after scene and offered advice every few minutes.

  Except for the last scene where we were all onstage to help carry off Tony’s body in a mournful way, I didn’t have anything to do. I sat in the auditorium with the other understudies and miscellaneous fans who’d come in. Lauren sat two seats away from me. I could almost hear her gnashing her teeth together. I tried to do my homework, but every time Jordan’s dad stopped the action to tell the actors something, I found myself riveted to his words. He’d done this for real. He actually knew what he was talking about.

  I watched him a lot, thinking about all the times I’d seen his name in People Magazine articles and TV shows. It’s odd to know so much about a person who knows absolutely nothing about you. I wasn’t sure how to even address him. In my mind he’d always been Christopher Hunter, but now that he was here in the room, it seemed an impossibly familiar term. He was Mr. Hunter—both of those words being spoken with gilded letters.

  Up on stage Jordan spoke most of his lines stiffly, and his father kept stopping him. “You can’t act like you’re embarrassed to be up there,” his father said. “Forget you’re on a stage and concentrate on being Tony. If you feel awkward telling Maria you love her, the audience will pick up on that.”

  Jordan spoke to Mary again, louder but just as stiffly. “We’ll be all right. I know it. We’re really together now.”

  His father held up a hand to stop the dialogue, then thought better of it and waved at them to continue. “We can work on it at home.”

  He has done it better, I wanted to say. He’s only nervous because you’re here, because you’re his father and he knows he can’t compete with you
in this area. I didn’t say it though. I just pressed my pencil lead down so hard on the paper that it broke.

  Finally we did the last scene. I stood onstage with the other gang members, trying to look tough yet somber while the main characters ran their lines. Jordan’s father made him die in Mary’s arms five times. I was so tired of watching it, I wanted to take the prop gun and shoot myself just so I’d have an excuse to lie down. Then I had to endure Mary waving the gun around at everyone screaming, “YOU ALL KILLED HIM! AND MY BROTHER, AND RIFF! WELL, I CAN KILL TOO BECAUSE NOW I HAVE HATE.” It was supposed to be the epiphany of the whole play—the dramatic moment when she threw down the gun, symbolizing hate needed to be thrown away. Only Mary forgot to throw down the gun. She yelled out her lines, then clutched the weapon against her chest and stared out into the audience.

  We waited. The guy who played Officer Schrank waited in the wings for her to finish her part so he could come on and say his lines.

  Mary glanced offstage and nodded at him.

  “The gun,” I whispered. “You’re supposed to throw down the gun.”

  Either she didn’t hear me or she ignored me, because she still held fast to the gun with one hand and made waving motions to Officer Schrank with the other.

  He stood offstage, turned his finger into a gun, and pretended to shoot her.

  She cocked her head at him, confused.

  “The gun,” I whispered again.

  Finally, Jordan stood up from the stage, clutching his stomach as though horribly wounded. He staggered over to Mary and held his hand out. “Before I die, I think I have just enough strength to take this gun from you and throw it away.”

  She handed him the gun, he tossed it on the ground, and then Jordan did a dramatic twirl and fell over dead again.

  I clapped for him. Several other cast members joined in.

  Mr. Hunter stood up and put both hands on the stage. “Very cute, but that’s exactly the sort of thing that can’t happen. Look guys, mistakes happen. You have to learn to work around them in a professional way. Jordan, if you had done that during the performance, you would have ruined the whole play.”

  Jordan sat up on one elbow. “But it’s not the performance. It’s just a rehearsal.”

  “And rehearsal is where you learn how to handle the mistakes.” Mr. Hunter turned to Officer Schrank. “If Maria forgets to throw down the gun, you just come onstage and say your lines anyway. If anybody forgets anything, you do your best to ad-lib your way out of it and move on. You don’t get second chances when you’re onstage. Everybody got that?”

  Everybody nodded and mumbled yes, except for Jordan and me. He didn’t say anything, because he was clenching his jaw too tightly, and I didn’t say anything, because I was watching Jordan. He hadn’t even wanted to be in this play. I’d made him do it.

  “Great.” Mr. Hunter clapped his hands together. “I know you’ll all do a super job with this play, so I’ve got some good news for you. I talked to my agent and told him my son was the lead in West Side Story. He’s coming down to watch the play opening night. I might even get a reporter to show up. Sort of a chip-off-the-old-block human interest story. What do you think of that?”

  A chorus of gasps intermixed with excited twitters answered his question. Jordan just stared at him. “Your agent is coming?”

  “Yep. He said he wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “That’s great,” Jordan said, but he still needed to work on his acting skills. I could tell he didn’t mean a word of it.

  Nine

  The next day at school all anybody talked about was the play, Christopher Hunter, and his agent. Even the teachers wrapped themselves up in the discussion. Everyone wanted to know when tickets would go on sale and how they would be distributed. We’d never sold out a play before, and now it seemed as though the whole town wanted to come just in case—I don’t know—the agent held an impromptu talent search during intermission, or something.

  As drama class started, the principal strode into the room to talk to Mrs. Shale. He gripped a copy of the Three Forks News in one hand. He clenched the other in a fist. Even though the two of them went out into the hallway to talk, the conversation still filtered in to us, partially because they hadn’t closed the classroom door and partially because Mr. Poure’s voice is loud enough to pierce concrete.

  “What kind of play are you putting on?” Mr. Poure asked. “The paper says it promotes racism and violence, and now I hear reporters are coming. We don’t need this kind of attention drawn to our school.”

  Mrs. Shale answered quietly. I only caught a few muffled words, and then Mr. Poure bellowed, “I don’t care how many awards it won back in the sixties. We can’t have our students calling each other spics and Polacks onstage. What’s the news media going to make of that?”

  More muffled sounds from Mrs. Shale. Then Mr. Poure again: “Well, you’ll just have to change those parts. We can’t insult people this way. And change all that gang fighting too. We suspend kids for bringing even toy weapons to school, and now I find out my drama department waves them around every rehearsal. This is a lawsuit just waiting to happen.”

  More muffled sounds from Mrs. Shale, intermingled with protests about time constraints.

  We all sat perfectly still in our seats, staring first at the door and then at each other. “There goes the play,” Andre whispered.

  “Oh well,” Tye agreed. “We still get extra credit for being in the cast.”

  Mrs. Shale finally came back into the room two shades paler, but she didn’t say anything about her conversation with the principal.

  I expected she would say something at rehearsal, but she just sat in front of the stage marking up a script while Jordan’s dad directed us again.

  I had to credit him with having patience. We made as many mistakes as we did the day before, but he didn’t seem frustrated at giving us the same instructions over again.

  Jordan was a little better. Mary was a little worse. Lauren sat in the audience with her eyes shut and said every line Maria had. When Kate wasn’t onstage, I gave her a rundown of everything I’d heard Mr. Poure say. “He wants Mrs. Shale to change the play. Are you happy now?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Sometimes Kate just misses the point.

  After rehearsal ended, Mrs. Shale called us all over and handed out photocopies of the revised script. “I know it’s late in the game, but I’ve had to make some changes to your parts. The principal is worried that some of the scenes and language will be offensive to the audience. You’ll need to have your new lines memorized as soon as possible.”

  Mr. Hunter took one of the scripts from Mrs. Shale’s hand and flipped through it. “Did you let the principal know copyright laws prohibit you from changing the text of a play?”

  “I did.” Her shoulders slumped. “He said when kids are onstage, they forget lines all of the time, and our kids just need to forget all the bad stuff.”

  “The bad stuff,” Mr. Hunter repeated. More flipping. He shook his head and grimaced. “I think I should talk with your principal about this. Perhaps if someone explained to him the nature of the play, he wouldn’t be so . . .” Mr. Hunter didn’t finish, but I thought of many adjectives to insert in the blank.

  “Why don’t we go find him right now,” Mr. Hunter told Mrs. Shale.

  She nodded, and the two of them walked out of the auditorium. The rest of the cast sat down and flipped to our revised parts.

  Jeff spoke first. “We’re not a gang anymore. We’re a group.”

  Andre shook his head. “We don’t call people spics. Now we yell ‘nitwit’ and ‘pizza face’ at one another.”

  I checked my lines and found them unchanged. “I still have to say, ‘Oo, oo, ooblee-oo.’ That is so unfair.”

  “‘Oo, oo, ooblee-oo’ isn’t offensive,” Kate said.

  I put down my script. “It is to me.” Leaning over, I looked at Kate’s script. It was open to the part where the Jet gang—make that “g
roup”—attack her. “Well, I see you’re no longer called ‘spic’ or ‘gold tooth.’ Now you’re ‘lying’ and ‘ugly.’ That’s got to feel like an improvement.”

  She pulled her script away from me. “It is.”

  “Get this,” Jordan said. “Mrs. Shale crossed out all the references to Puerto Ricans.”

  Jeff flipped through his papers. “We’re not Puerto Ricans anymore?”

  Jordan shook his head. “Nope. Apparently your names are Bernardo, Maria, Chino, and Consuelo for some undisclosed reason.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” Jeff threw his script back in his lap. “Since when are the words Puerto Rican offensive?”

  “Figures,” I said. “Maria could have been blond after all.”

  “How am I going to learn all of these new lines?” Mary wailed. “I’ve become a victim of political correctness.”

  “Cracko, jacko,” I agreed. “And double Oo, oo, ooblee-oo.”

  “You can joke about it,” Jordan said. “You’re not going to be the one up there making a fool of yourself.”

  “And suddenly I’m really glad of that.” I flipped another page of script and sang, “I feel normal, oh so normal—”

  “It’s not going to be that bad,” Kate cut me off. “And actually some of this is an improvement because . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence. The entire cast turned in unison and glared at her. “Anyway,” she went on, “I’d better get home because I have a lot of homework and stuff to do, but I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

  The glares followed her as she stood up and walked out of the door.

  Andre turned to me. “Did Kate write that stupid editorial in the paper?”

  My cheeks grew hot. I didn’t want to rat on my best friend, but I didn’t want to lie either. By next rehearsal Kate might not only admit to authoring the article, chances were she’d defend its contents and call the rest of us insensitive because we didn’t agree with her. I looked at my script, and not at Andre. “When the article first came out, I asked Kate if she wrote it and she told me no.” Which was true. Of course, she’d fessed up immediately afterward, but technically I wasn’t lying.