Colors Insulting to Nature. Cintra Wilson
is the-best form of revenge then I’d better get famous real fast and the only way to do it is to go to the High School of Performing Arts and really nail the audition. Also it would be great if there was TV involved. Hopefully I’ll be famous within 8 or 9 months. That would be cool. Because the Baumgartens suck so much.
I HATE CHANTAL BAUMGARTEN AND ALL
BAUMGARTENS!!!!! FOREVER!!!! FUCK. C.B.!
GOD PLEASE MAKE ME FAMOUS. Love,
Liza Normal, Singer, Dancer, Actress Lizette Normale, Liza LaNorm
Ned’s and Liza’s audition pieces, Peppy decided, would be Sound of Music— based, since she was damned if she was going to pay for more sheet music.
Ned began studying for the role of Rolfe. His acting was relatively OK, for a kid, but in his tone-deaf singing, he felt he should imitate Liza, compensating for what he lacked in ability with sheer, yowling volume.
YOU WA-AAIT LITTLE GIRL
ON AN EMPTY STAGE
FOR FATE TO TURN THE LIGHT O-ON,
“Oh shit, Naid.” Lalo would laugh, lighting another Camel short. “You sound like some donkey get his balls catch in the Nazzi war machine, man.”
The dancing section, for Ned, was the worst nightmare: twenty minutes alone with Barbette, daily. The first week, Barbette worked through clenched teeth and Ned was sullenly obedient, to the best of his abilities. On week two, Barbette could resist her natural cruelty no longer: “Ned, if you keep bouncing on your toes like that, you’re going to need a brassiere.” Ned was morbidly sensitive about his pudgy boy-mammaries. The low blow shamed him so deeply he momentarily lost his mind. Ned was slow to anger, but when it came, it was of the shrieking, breaking objects, and locking-self-in-bathroom variety.
Lalo and Ike, who were smoking a joint in Lalo’s subtheatre cave, heard his cries and ran upstairs. They soothed him through the door with tender words. Ned finally emerged twenty-five minutes later, red and damp with mortification.
“Don’t tell your mom I say, but Barbate is really mean beetch, man,” whispered Lalo.
Ned’s wet eyes looked at him gratefully. Ike gave him a manly hug around the shoulders.
“Yeah. Screw her,” he said, bringing Ned great comfort.
Peppy greeted the news with an exasperated “What now?”
She knew she couldn’t afford to let go of Barbette; she was already too enmeshed in the production. Peppy ran to Barbette to apologize for Ned’s behavior and gave her the rest of the day off.
“He’s going to have to learn how to take criticism if he wants to be an artist,” Barbette said. She shrugged, her lizardine eyes half-open.
“You’re going to need to be able to dance,” Peppy told Ned, sternly.
“I can’t do it. I hate dancing, and I hate Barbette. Look at me! I’m not the dancer type!” Anguished tears sprang into his eyes again.
“What are you going to do, give up?” Peppy heard the TV-movie of herself asking, in appropriate cliché-speak. “If you can’t pull your jazz shoes back on and march right back onto that stage and give it your everything, what kind of hero will you be when meow meow meow (ad nauseum).” What she actually said was: “Ned, nobody’s asking you to be Rudolf Nureyev, all Barbette wants to do is give you a little bit of movement—”
“I’m NOT DOING IT!!” Ned yelled, blood pounding in his neck.
“So you’re quitting, then? Is that what my son is? A quitter?” said the TV Peppy, tapping her foot, trying to get Ned angry so he’d dig in and fight while the real Peppy struggled with feelings more complex and less virtuous.
She looked her miserable son over and tried not to reveal her cold disappointment. Peppy had been so taken with her vision of the vital young danseur trapped inside Ned’s blobby adolescence, she could not forgive him for willfully sabotaging the future Christmas she envisioned wherein he was a tin soldier in the Nutcracker, with round red cheeks, and she sat proudly in the audience in a fur coat, smugly grinning at the other mothers.
Peppy left the room. Ned could hear the suction of the freezer door in the kitchen, the crack of the ice tray, the tlink of cubes bouncing in the tumbler.
“I’m throwing my tights into the alley!” Ned yelled through the wall.
“You do that,” murmured Peppy.
Ned heard pouring liquid cracking ice, Peppy swirling the glass, schlick.
He stuck his tights on a protruding nail in the wall and ripped them into cobwebs, feeling a sick hole of shame over being graceless. Who doesn’t want to dance? He cried again, soundless and exhausted, deeply suffering his incurable lack of talent.
“You’re out of the production,” Peppy yelled abruptly from the kitchen.
“Good. Thank you,” Ned yelled back, regret crushing his chest.
“And I guess you’re not auditioning for the High School of Performing Arts,” Peppy yelled back.
“I guess not,” shouted Ned, sensing for the first time, from the pain in her voice, that the whole Fame fantasy was more about Peppy than it had ever been about him or Liza.
Noreen was broilingly furious at Peppy for trying to bully Ned into being something he wasn’t. There was a loud fight, after which Noreen stormed down the street and bought a local newspaper, then got on the phone and immediately signed Ned up for the first summer course she could find at the local community college, in order to get him out of the theatre and redirect his energies toward something she knew he’d be good at.
“Glassblowing for two weeks, then welding.” Noreen was firm.
“ Glassblowing?!”
“Then welding.”
“Nobody every won a Tony Award for welding,” said Peppy.
Ned began his summer school course the very next day. He went every morning on the bus and found within a few days that he liked glassblowing a lot.
Peppy, in the meantime, went into overdrive trying to find a replacement Rolfe. She placed an ad, offering a “Featured Role for Talented Boy 16–18.”
They were auditioning a lusterless collection of weedy, sebaceous youths when Roland Spring came in.
Roland was a fifteen-year-old half-black kid, with big black nerd glasses and a pilly hand-knit stocking cap. His general dishevelment and concave posture suggested an unusually vibrant intelligence. Liza glanced at him and didn’t smile or say Hi; his shabby brown pants, shredded deck shoes, and unspecified race placed him even lower on the teen totem pole than she was (and as you well know, Reformed Teen Reader, no juvenile of low status misses an opportunity to flaunt their position at someone perceived to be even lower).
Roland came by himself, with a large plastic putty-tub and some drumsticks. Peppy, Lalo, Neville, and Barbette watched him from behind a foldout table as he took a smaller putty tub out of the larger one and sat on it.
Then he began. He wasn’t a drummer so much as a human beat-box; his act had been honed in front of movie lines all summer and involved singing, mouth noises, and agile finger gymnastics with the sticks. His head began to nod, his eyes rolled up into his head. His mouthful of large teeth began smiling hugely as he warmed up; raw joy began to spill from his heart in wild currents, filling the room, as he sang:
You got shoes! I got shoes! All God’s children got shoes!
Liza was nailed to the floor; watching Roland Spring, it felt like all of her hair was being pulled out slowly and easily, like worms from holes; her stomach caved in with something like starvation; it felt like she would simply die of deprivation if she could not eat Roland