Who's Kitten Who?

by Cynthia Baxter

  “Exactly. Then the play follows her through all the events in her early adult life: becoming a nurse’s aide in Toronto during World War Two, going up in a plane for the first time in Long Beach, California, with a pilot named Frank Hawks, and then her first flying lesson with Anita Snook—that’s you.

  “The rest of the play takes the audience through her achievements, as well as her relationship with George Putnam. He was a publisher who started out doing public-relations work for her. But before long, they fell in love and married.”

  “She died on that flight around the world, didn’t she? The one the play begins with?”

  “That’s right. It was in 1937. She’d gone more than twenty-two thousand miles with her navigator, Fred Noonan, and she only had about seven thousand miles to go. But something went wrong and she never made it. She was never found either, which resulted in all kinds of speculation. One theory is that she and Noonan were captured by the Japanese and killed. Another is that they both came back to the United States but used assumed names.”

  Betty shrugged. “As tragic as her untimely disappearance was, it adds to her mystery. She was truly larger than life.”

  At least I didn’t get roped into playing Amelia Earhart, I thought as I pulled into a parking space in front of Theater One. Compared to playing Amelia, spitting out a few lines as Anita Snook should be a snap.

  As soon as I walked inside, I sensed that the atmosphere was markedly different from the first time I’d been there, right after everyone got the tragic news about Simon Wainwright. That time I’d felt like I was attending a memorial service. Today there was a buzz in the air that practically screamed, It’s showtime!

  As I trailed down the aisle after Betty, swerving out of the way of the sewing machine someone had set up near the stage, I realized that the butterflies in my stomach weren’t the only ones doing warm-ups. The other members of the company were scattered around the first ten or fifteen rows stretching, doing breathing exercises, or earnestly studying their scripts.

  “How come everyone’s sitting out front, instead of backstage?” I asked.

  “Derek likes the cast members to sit in the audience as much as possible during rehearsals,” Betty replied. “Watching the rest of the cast rehearse helps familiarize everyone with the entire production. This way, everyone can also hear all his comments, so he doesn’t end up saying the same things over and over.”

  Nearly all the cast members were dressed casually in T-shirts and jeans or sweatpants. In fact, Betty was one of the few who looked the way I’d expect performers to look during a rehearsal. She wore a black leotard and a pink chiffon skirt specially made for dancers, along with beige high-heeled dancing shoes with a strap across the foot.

  “I’ll just tell Derek we’re here,” she said, dropping her bag onto one of the red velvet seats. “I’m sure he’ll be grateful that you showed up. Maybe even a little surprised.”

  No more surprised than I am, I thought, once again wondering how on earth I’d gotten myself into this.

  I was doing my best to reason with those annoying butterflies when I heard the woman sitting a few seats away from me say something. It sounded an awful lot like, “Ah, aw, oh, oo.” I wondered if she was in pain.

  “Excuse me?” I said politely.

  “Ah, aw, oh, oo,” she repeated. Apparently I’d heard her correctly the first time. “Ah, aw, oh, oo. Mah, maw, moh, moo. Mah, maw, moh, moo.”

  “Sorry,” I said, trying not to let my embarrassment show. “I’ll just leave you to your…” I let my voice trail off, not certain how to refer to the voice exercises I’d finally figured out she was doing.

  “Pah, paw, poh, poo,” she continued, glaring at me as I moved away as quickly and as quietly as I could.

  I was actually relieved when Derek stood up in front of the stage and clapped his hands. “Okay, people. Everybody onstage. Jill is doing the choreography for ‘Wild Blue Yonder.’”

  “Let me give you a quick overview,” Betty whispered after she and I shuffled up the aisle and onto the stage with all the other actors. “That platform up above is called a catwalk. It’s mainly used for lighting and sound equipment. Those balconies on either side of the stage are called juliets—as in Romeo and Juliet. And those three trapdoors on the floor open into the basement. By the way, upstage refers to the back of the stage. Downstage is closer to the audience.”

  I simply nodded.

  “Jill D’Angelo, the choreographer, changed some of the steps in the ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ number,” Betty continued in the same low voice. “She’s going to teach them to us right now. That’s Jill over there.”

  She pointed to a slender, dark-haired woman standing on the stage. Like Betty, Jill was dressed like a pro, although her leotard, sheer skirt, and high-heeled dancing shoes were all black. I remembered that the director had been talking to her on Saturday, right before he’d decided to make me a star—or at least a member of the cast.

  “This is what’s called a choreography rehearsal,” Betty added.

  I blinked. “You mean there’s more than one kind of rehearsal?”

  “That’s right. First comes the read-through, where the actors sit around a table, reading through the script. Next there’s a blocking rehearsal. The director blocks out the entire production, positioning everyone onstage for each scene. Of course, it’s all subject to change as rehearsals continue and it becomes obvious that some blocking works while other blocking doesn’t.

  “After that,” she continued, “there are music rehearsals, choreography rehearsals, and integration rehearsals. When opening night gets close, we’ll start doing actual runs, which means going through the whole show. And the final week—tech week—is when the lighting people and the sound people come in to do their thing. That week, the members of the orchestra also come in.”

  My head was reeling with all these new terms, not to mention the pressure of catching up. I was going to have to learn what everyone else had already been doing for three weeks, and fast.

  I was still trying comprehend the challenge I’d taken on when Jill clapped her hands.

  “Okay, my darlings, give me your beginning positions for scene four, please,” she said. “Jessie, you’ll be standing over here, next to Elena.”

  I took my place, then proceeded to copy Jill’s movements as she began teaching all of us the dance number. I couldn’t help looking around at the other people onstage, wondering if any of them was harboring a horrifying secret. Was Simon Wainwright’s murderer the lanky, red-haired young man who played one of the two pilots who accompanied Amelia Earhart on her famous transatlantic flight? Was it the intense middle-aged man who played Will Rogers, the comedian and folk philosopher who was one of her contemporaries? Or was it possible that Elena, who’d been moved out of the role of Anita Snook and into the role of Amelia Earhart, was ambitious enough to have killed Simon, knowing that Aziza would drop out and she’d be the most likely replacement?

  I had to remind myself that even though my main reason for being here was to answer all those questions, at the moment I had something much more pressing to attend to.

  You’d better focus on dancing, I scolded myself, or you’re going to look ridiculous.

  “Listen to me, my darlings,” the choreographer said, demonstrating the opening steps that accompanied the song “Wild Blue Yonder.” “It’s step, pivot, step, uh-huh. Got it? Let me just count it out, sweethearts, to the count of eight. If you start on the right, go left, and if you start on the left, go right. So cross over…that’s five, six, seven, eight…and one, two, three, four. I know I’m throwing a lot at you, and I know it’s busy, but you’ll catch on. And it will help if you start coming to rehearsals in clothes you can move in. Let’s take it from where Amelia sings the words learn to fly. And one, two, three, four…”

  My head was swimming. This way, that way, step, pivot—I’d always thought that when it came to coordination, I was at least average, if not slightly above. Why, then, did I fi
nd myself going left when all the other members of the ensemble were going right?

  “Umph!” one of the other dancers cried as I smashed into her, surprising myself as much as I surprised her.

  “Jessie, that’s stage left,” Jill called with just a hint of impatience. “Stage left means left while you’re standing on the stage, facing the audience.”

  I knew that, I thought, embarrassed. At least, I used to know that.

  “Let’s do it again.”

  This time, I managed to cross the stage without causing anyone bodily injury. Maybe I wasn’t exactly graceful, but at least I wasn’t dangerous.

  “You’ll get it,” whispered one of the other members of the ensemble, a lithe blond woman named Courtney who looked as if she was still a college student. “Sometimes it takes a while.”

  “Thanks,” I whispered back, genuinely appreciative of any encouragement I could get.

  All of us in the ensemble continued to copy Jill’s moves, at the same time memorizing where our hands were supposed to be, which way we should be facing, and what our facial expressions should be. Never before had it occurred to me that every moment of a stage production—every word, every hand gesture, every smile, every step—was planned out in advance.

  “Okay, my darlings, that’s good.” Jill extended her right hand with her fingers spread, as if she were imitating a gecko. “Then we go into a Fosse,” she continued, bending from the waist and freezing. “Pose. Then, for a completely different feeling, extend your arm—we’ll call it a Freddie.”

  “What’s a Fosse?” I asked Betty, who happened to be standing right behind me.

  “She’s referring to the kind of move the Broadway choreographer Bob Fosse would have used,” she returned in a low voice. “And a Freddie—”

  “Don’t tell me. Fred Astaire?”

  Betty beamed. “Now you’re getting it.”

  “It’s kick and cross, pivot and pose,” Jill called. “Got it? We’ll end with a button.”

  “Translate, please,” I whispered to Betty, growing increasingly frustrated over my inability to understand this foreign language.

  “It means you wait until the very end of the song to strike your pose. You snap into it at the last second.”

  “Got it,” I returned, wishing I felt as certain as I sounded.

  “Okay, my darlings,” Jill exclaimed, clapping her hands, “let’s take it from the tippy top. Jessie, we’ll start with your line.”

  The tiny amount of satisfaction I’d gotten from learning a five-minute dance routine vanished as I stepped forward as stiffly as a robot. As I gazed out at the endless rows of seats, I was suddenly gripped with fear.

  It wasn’t because I hadn’t learned the few lines my character had. Unlike in my nightmare of a couple of nights before, I’d memorized not only my opening line but my entire part. But saying those words to an audience—acting—was something else entirely.

  My weekly live television spot felt like a piece of cake by comparison. At the Channel 14 TV studio, there were generally only a couple of people in the room, so it was easy to ignore the fact that out there in TV land, thousands were watching me. Here in the theater, I could actually see the faces of the people in the audience. True, there were no more than six at the moment, since most of the cast was onstage. But from this vantage point, I could judge their reactions by their expressions, their posture, even how much they were fidgeting.

  “It begins, ‘Come on, Amelia,’” Derek prompted from the front row, where he was sitting with a script in his lap.

  I swallowed hard. “Come on, Amelia,” I said aloud, aware that my mouth had become as dry as desert sand. “Let’s show these men the stuff we’re made of.” I tried to make the words sing out loud and clear. I really did. Instead, they came out a near-whisper.

  “Good, but not quite loud enough,” Derek said patiently. “Let’s try that again.”

  “Come on, Amelia. Let’s show these men the stuff we’re made of!” This time my words came out like a squawk. An audible squawk, but a squawk nonetheless.

  “You wouldn’t get me in a plane with an instructor who had so little confidence,” some unknown person behind me commented.

  “Come on, Amelia!” I cried in a powerful voice that surprised even me. “Let’s show these men the stuff we’re made of!”

  “Excellent!” Derek exclaimed. “Let’s continue! Amelia—Elena—this is where you start singing. Can we get a music cue?”

  I did it! I thought, experiencing such a rush that I was tempted to try a couple of handsprings right then and there. I actually did a good job of delivering my line!

  I glanced over at Betty, who gave me an approving nod. I just grinned, glad that I hadn’t let her down.

  We did a run-through of the entire number. Even I could see that it was still ragged. But I could also imagine what it was going to turn into once we’d all perfected our dance steps and added costumes, makeup, lighting, props, and hopefully a humongous surge of opening night adrenaline.

  “Okay, my sweeties,” Jill finally said. “Let’s take a ten-minute break.”

  “Wait!” A short, plump young woman bobbed up from the front row. “Before anyone leaves, I’d like President Coolidge and President Hoover to come backstage for their final costume fittings.”

  Lacey Croft, I surmised. The costume designer who had found Simon’s body.

  I studied her with interest. For someone who was so involved with clothes, she certainly didn’t appear to have put a lot of thought into her own outfit. She was dressed in a dark pleated skirt that did little to downplay her ample girth. Her white blouse was rumpled, and the burgundy cardigan sweater she wore over it looked a couple of sizes too big. Her dark-brown hair was twisted into a haphazard bun and loosely held in place with a plastic clip, allowing wisps of hair to frame her round, almost childlike face.

  She was definitely on my list of people to talk to, and I made a mental note to do so the very first chance I got. But now was not the time, mainly because I wasn’t playing one of the two presidents who had honored Amelia Earhart for her splendid achievements. It was just as well, since I was suddenly aware of how much energy the thirty-minute ordeal I’d just undergone had taken out of me.

  Still, I was itching to get a look at the crime scene. But Derek’s policy about cast members watching all the rehearsals made it difficult to slip backstage. Besides, finding an excuse to go into the men’s dressing room would be kind of a challenge. But checking it out was a high priority, and I intended to see it for myself the very first chance I got.

  As I dropped into one of the red velvet seats, one of the actors I remembered from Saturday afternoon’s rehearsal strolled up the aisle. He was lean and on the tall side, probably in his mid-thirties but clearly striving for a slightly younger look by wearing his sand-colored hair on the shaggy side. Like most of the other actors, he wore jeans and a T-shirt. He was the man who’d agreed with Aziza Zorn that the production should be shut down. Yet here he was, enduring the grueling rehearsal, just as I was.

  He stopped and offered me an encouraging smile, his blue eyes shining. “That wasn’t bad, especially since you’re new to the company,” he commented. “I take it you’ve got some serious acting experience.”

  “You’re too kind,” I assured him. “I believe the last time I appeared onstage was in my first grade class’s production of ‘The Food Pyramid.’ I played a carrot.”

  He laughed. “Then I guess you’re simply a natural.” He held out his hand. “I’m Kyle Carlson. Also known as Fred Noonan, the navigator who accompanied Amelia Earhart on her final flight.”

  As we shook hands, I commented, “I guess this rehearsal is difficult for everyone, the first one since Simon…”

  Kyle’s cheerful expression faded. “Yes. He and I were really close friends.”

  “Then you must be devastated.”

  “Frankly, I’m still in shock.”

  “So is Betty Vandervoort,” I said. “She’s a g
ood friend of mine. In fact, she’s the person who got me involved in the Port Players. She was really fond of Simon.”

  “I know Betty. She’s a really nice person.”

  Trying to sound casual, I said, “Betty thinks somebody who’s involved with the Port Players must have murdered Simon.”

  “Duh!”

  The vehemence of his response stunned me. “You mean you agree?”

  “Of course! It’s obvious. In fact, I’m furious that the police haven’t gone ahead and arrested her. I can’t imagine what they’re waiting for.”

  “You know who did it?” I asked, sounding as surprised as I felt.

  “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist—or Sherlock Holmes—to know that Lacey killed him.”

  “Lacey Croft?”

  “Of course!” he exclaimed angrily. “She was standing over his body when the police came in Saturday morning. If that’s not holding a smoking gun, I don’t know what is!”

  “I thought she was simply the person who had the bad luck to find him,” I said, carefully measuring my words.

  “Ha!” he cried. “There was a lot going on between those two. Believe me, I know. Simon gave me an earful, especially over the last couple of weeks. That woman is not stable.

  “In fact, looking back, I’m not surprised.” He clenched his fists tightly. “I should have seen it coming. Simon should have seen it coming.”

  I blinked. “Why? What was—”

  “I can’t believe how incompetent the police are!” Kyle was apparently too wrapped up in his tirade to notice that I’d asked a question. Or at least tried to. “All they have to do is ask anyone who knew him! There’s no mystery here.

  “The way this whole thing is being handled is an abomination,” he continued bitterly. “In fact, I was even furious with Derek at first. I couldn’t believe he wanted to continue with the production. I thought it was really bad taste. I was seething when I walked out of here on Saturday.”

  “Yet you decided not to quit, the way Aziza did,” I said gently.

  “That’s right.” He sounded a tad defensive. But at least he’d calmed down. “After I got home and had a chance to think about it, I realized that Derek was right, that going ahead with the production really is the best way of honoring Simon’s memory.”