Colors Insulting to Nature. Cintra Wilson
don’t look like a kid!” squealed Misty-Dawn.
“This is how they told me to do it,” Liza lied. “Break a leg, Roland,” she offered, smiling bravely with her shiny purple mouth.
“Thank you,” he said, his teeth dazzling. “You too.”
“You’re not wearing your glasses,” Liza gasped, noticing that Roland’s eyes were an unlikely greenish color, adding extra torture to her longing.
“I can’t see shit, either. I’m probably going to fall on my ass.”
“They have to airlift you to Faggot Mountain Hospital,” said Barren, laughing.
At that moment, Ned walked by carrying a mostly dead ficus tree (to add to the “hills”) and a large flashlight, by which he and Ike would read their lighting cues.
“What are you juvenile delinquents doing?” joked Ned with a coplike shout, shining the light on Roland.
Liza saw the flashlight’s beam illuminate Roland Spring with the ficus tree casting a shadow on the wall behind his head—for a heart-stopping split second, Roland had a perfect set of radiant antlers.
Backstage, everyone held their breath, preparing to plunge into the hallucinatory waters of focused group attention. The music came on (from a new reel-to-reel machine, purchased by Noreen with her meager pension check as an opening-night gift, because she couldn’t stand the idea of the old one cacking out midnumber), the lights came up, and the stage effloresced into bright life. The chords swelled, and Peppy jogged out onstage, wig bouncing, breasts heaving. The eyes of the audience grew wide. Husbands and wives nudged each other.
THE HI-l-I-ILLS ARE ALI-I-IVE! WITH THE SOUND OF MU-U-U-USIC!
Thighs were grabbed in an anguish of vicarious embarrassment.
(Peppy’s slummocky nature simply did not lend itself to the sexually astringent role of Maria, a role more suited to actresses like Julie Andrews or Sandy Duncan, whose panties naturally seemed to be full of Borax.)
When the enormous nuns appeared onstage, the audience of parents began to get the idea that the show was not the standard young-adult vehicle they thought it would be. Nonetheless, they were Marin County-ites and thus sophisticated (or so they told themselves) when it came to a little harmless decadence.
How do you find a word that means Ma-riaaaa A flippety gibbet, a willow-o'-the-wisp, a dooooum,
… the nun-boys trilled.
“I ‘m afraid you don’t look at all like a sea captain, sir,” Peppy yelled when she had arrived at the Von Trapp family mansion. Snickering was heard in the audience because, in fact, he didn’t. Nobody had gotten Lalo the proper shoes, so he wore rubber flip-flops; he still had his handlebar mustache and shoulder-length blond hair, his jacket was buttoned incorrectly. Plus, he was visibly drunk.
“And I ‘m afray zhou don’t look bery mush like a goberness.” A wave of giggles escaped from Neville’s friends, because indeed, Peppy’s Maria looked like the kind of governess who would get the children really loaded and let them watch late-night softcore on cable.
The Baroness Schrader was supposed to be a dazzling creature; a stylish Viennese beauty. Ike looked the other way while Ned designed her lighting—he backlit and underlit Barbette in the starkest way possible, creating a Bride of Frankenstein—type effect. When Barbette delivered one of the Baroness’s sarcastic lines, the audience, feeling thus cued, actually hissed at her. Barbette, unaware she was a villain, was shocked to the roots. Her voice cracked, her hands shook. She looked old, frightened, and ghastly.
Ned and Ike high-fived each other silently in the lighting booth, but Ned vowed to himself that he would change the lights the next night; his revenge had been too easy and too damning. It took so little to reveal her pitiable frailty, Ned couldn’t believe that seconds previously, he had thought Barbette such a powerful foe.
Mike’s star turn as Max Detweiler, with pencil-thin mustache and Tyrolean hat, added a much-needed anchor of intelligence and relative maturity: “I must explore this territory,” he exclaimed, happily. “Somewhere, a hungry little singing group is waiting for Max Detweiler to pluck it out of obscurity and make it famous at the Salzburg Folk Festival.”
(This, Critical Reader, is one of the criminal bits of logic that corrupts mankind’s expectations. How simply Max throws around the idea of bestowing Fame upon those who charm him. How easily these drab, voiceless children will leapfrog into being prodigy songbirds, capable of bursting into spontaneous, complex, Mills Brothers-style harmonies. The children are passively led into instant celebrity. This is the necrotic root of the prevailing dead-end dream: If only the right mentors will produce me, direct me, refine me, and discover me! Many a starry-eyed girl or boy would climb into the back of a mysterious big black car for the promise of adequate pop “coaching,” because such wishful egoporn has always been tossed into screenplays without caution.)
Roland sang, like sweet coffee:
Your life little girl Is an empty page That men will want to write on….
Women swooned, men admired him.
I’m GLAD to GO-O-O, I cannot tell a LIE-I…
… bellowed Liza in her power-voice during her one big solo moment, as audience members wondered why she was wearing high Lucite heels with her nautical infant dress.
I flit, I float I flick-I-flee-I fly-?…
… purred Desiree Baumgarten, adding a ballet stag-leap to her pretty exit as Liza clomped offstage.
“You were blushing in his arms tonight,” remarked the Baroness, after Maria and Von Trapp are caught doing an Austrian folk dance.
(Hisss, went the audience.)
“I was?!” screamed Peppy, grabbing her cheeks.
(Cackles.)
“Goodbye Maria,” sneered Baroness Barbette, “I’m sure you’ll make a very… fine nun.”
(Howls of mirth.)
Maria’s return to the abbey was the cue for Neville’s big scene as Mother Abbess, during which he sang “Climb Every Mountain” in an unctuous pseudo-operatic falsetto. Audience members found themselves checking the program:
Neville Vanderleeg (Mother Abbess, Herr Zeller, Franz the Butler) is the last of the living castrati tenors, his testicles having been removed in the service of the Royal Latvian Boys’ Choir at the age of nine. His precious instrument has since been destroyed by cigarettes.
After marching down the aisle to “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria (Reprise),” Peppy ascended to the altar (a podium draped in gold lamé) and tore her wedding dress down to a white micromini. Gasps were audible. As she began to juggle four sizable wooden crucifixes, the audience sat in goggle-eyed shock. Several parents pondered lawsuits, others considered storming the backstage and rescuing their teens from Act II.
Brigham Hamburger stood and exited, nostrils flaring in outrage.
Peppy threw a wild cross, tripped over her dropped skirt, and sprawled onto her stomach, inadvertently exposing the hygienic cotton crotch of her nylons to the aghast spectators as crucifixes bounced and smacked to the floor.
Ned and Ike wisely plunged the room into total blackout.
~INTERMISSION~
(“This is the best thing Neville’s ever done! It just pees all over everything sacred!”)
(“Should I go backstage and get Tiffany?”)
(“Can you believe that all they have is generic beer?”)
Somehow, the parents were too intimidated by the magical “Fourth Wall” to disrupt the proceedings, and the