Colors Insulting to Nature. Cintra Wilson
in her path, stapling yards of cheap black fabric onto scrim frames. Liza, surging with the power of spangled femininity, floated down among them in a sinus-conquering mist of Jontue.
“Woah,” said Roland, looking up with a smile. “Whatcha lookin’ like that for?”
“I’m going out for a gig,” Liza said in a casual voice throatier than her own, her heart hydroelectrically feeding lightbulbs for Ferris wheels and boardwalks.
“Whatchu auditioning for? Miss Universe?” Roland teased. Barren giggled, a strange, girlish giggle.
“Oooh! You look fine” gushed the Mastodon.
“You should take some of that makeup off,” Roland told her, not unkindly. “You’re a young girl, you don’t need all that.”
“I like a girl don’t have all that shit in her hair,” Barren told Roland, staring disapprovingly at Liza’s shellacked canopy of crimp-ripples.
Roland nodded. “Yeah. All soft and blowy.”
Liza stood like the remains of a sand castle after a fatal wave, silently chastising herself for not predicting that Roland would be a fan of the Clean and Natural Look.
“Liza!” Barren called to her as she slunk away.
“What?”
“You look like Brooke Shield.”
“I do?!”
“Psych,” Barren hissed, then giggled.
“Aw, that was cold.” Misty-Dawn laughed, high-fiving Barren. Liza noticed ruefully that Misty-Dawn had instantly abandoned any solidarity with her to suck up to Barren, her new crush.
As Liza slunk into Peppy’s Honda, punctured by her failure to hypnotize Roland Spring, her feminine guile did take one victim, skewering his good Christian heart like a shish kebab. Brigham Hamburger was parking his moped and removing the white plastic football helmet his mother insisted he wear when the cosmetically amplified vision of Liza torpedoed his repressed hormones, causing that biochemical system to gush its special poisons and set off submolecular chain reactions throughout his entire nervous system. As the Honda drove away, Brigham Hamburger had to crouch down and put his head between his knees, for he felt the same palpitations, sweatiness, and dizziness that had always previously meant he was about to faint from exertion. When the blood slowly returned to his extremities, he knew he was In Love.
All of the nuns in the production ended up being men. Neville, who eschewed color-blind casting but had no problem ignoring gender, recruited several drag queens; the nuns soon had a great deal of Three Stooges—esque comedy “business”—Nun A would crouch down behind Nun B, and Nun C would shove Nun? backward over the bent body of Nun A, all with a lot of black sleeve-flapping and polite falsetto “Ooofs!” and “Eeeks!”
“This isn’t exactly what I had in mind as a religious community,” Peppy remarked with distaste.
“You ain’t exactly Julie Andrews, Miss Snuffleupagus,” countered Miss Vonda Pleasance, a six-foot-four transvestite with shaved eyebrows who had been cast as Sister Margaretha.
“Let’s just not get too koo-koo with the slapstick, ladies.”
“Ma-ria’s not an asset to the a-a-abbey,” the sarcastic men would sing.
There has never been an opening of any production without panic. The moment the ads came out in the paper, everyone writhed under the sudden knowledge that the flailing and bleating they had been doing in a half-assed manner was going to be starkly judged by an audience of strangers in just a few days. At this point, a stage production quickens and takes on unplanned flavors of its own; the latent idiosyncrasies of the cast and crew suddenly surge into growth from seedlings into prehistorically huge, steaming jungle plants—these can end up wholly obscuring the landscape of whatever text the group is abusing in the name of art.
Barbette, who wanted to focus exclusively on her role as the Beautiful Baroness (feeling sure the role would earn her a few dates with wealthy divorced fathers), was engaged in a new hell: getting Brigham Hamburger to dance was exponentially worse than trying to bully grace out of Ned; Ned, at least, had some pliable sensitivity to exploit. Brigham was intractably pious, thickheaded, and possessed of jerky, primitively bolted erector-set limbs. No amount of shame Barbette could dish out had any effect on Brigham. He would simply look down at her, smiling with the infinitely smug, pitying look of someone who knows that he is going to heaven, and you aren’t. Ned, catching sight of Barbette biting through the filter of her cigarette as Brigham made his palsied stork-hieroglyphics across the stage, felt gratified.
Liza began to rejoice in her tiny role, solely because she didn’t have to do any scenes with Brigham Hamburger. Chantal Baumgarten had been forced to buck up with a level of professionalism well beyond her years; Brigham’s breath was apparently so unbearable she had taken to buying him cartons of Velamints. “My father gets them free,” she lied.
Liza sat in the back of the theatre near Roland, Misty-Dawn, and Barren, who were hot-gluing fabric remnants as Chantal and Brigham rehearsed “You Are Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” Liza silently gloated to herself, watching Chantal squelch all of her revulsion and act madly in love with a boy who was an icon of world-class adorkery, taking his hand and flirting desperately with him while he chastely sidestepped her romantic zeal. It made Liza alive with a burning sensation of wrongful happiness.
“It would’t never happen like that,” Barren muttered as he looked on. “No girl that fine would have no problem gettin’ that motherfucker’s attention.”
Misty-Dawn’s shoulders bounced as she laughed noiselessly.
The rehearsal ended abruptly when Lalo’s accompaniment tape spit in squealing loops out of the aged reel-to-reel. Brigham turned toward Liza from the stage and gave her a terrifying metallic smile.
“Oooh. He like you,” whispered the Mastodon, who had recently taken to speaking like Barren.
“Shut up. He does not.”
“Look. He comin’ this way.”
Roland and Barren stifled snorts of hysteria and looked down at their work, so as not to interfere with the flow of whatever Brigham intended to do, now that he was advancing toward Liza, blazing with some sort of naked intention.
“He want you,” giggled the Mastodon.
“Shut up!”
“Liza?” squeaked Brigham, with a frightfully assured look on his face. “Would you come outside with me for a second, please?”
“Why?” asked Liza, horrified.
“I’ve got something for you.”
Roland, Misty-Dawn, and Barren were barely containing geysers of hysteria.
“I don’t want to go outside.”
“Just come with me a minute. I think you might like it.”
“Don’t leave the man with his ass hangin’ out in the air, shit,” encouraged Barren.
Liza shot a look of fury at Barren, who widened his eyes and gave a dramatic, deadpan shrug.
“I’ll come outside with you for ten seconds, but that’s all.”
“That’s all I need,” Brigham intoned with an excess of courtly confidence.
Liza shuffled out the door with Brigham, who seemed to be seven feet tall at that moment, such was his enthusiasm. As soon as they were on the other side of the doorjamb, Liza heard the set builders splutter into floor-beating hilarity.
“I noticed you leaving in the car the other day, and I thought to myself, wow, who is that beautiful lady? And then I was like, no way, that’s Liza,” Brigham confessed with the pride of someone convinced that what they’re saying is exactly what the listener is dying to hear.
“Thanks,” said Liza