I think I succeeded--at least, that's what everyone told me. The admissions committee couldn't have been more flattering, and my mother's face couldn't have beamed any more brightly.
What about the kiss? Of course I'm going to tell you about the kiss. When Troy climbed the fake ivy and spoke those beautiful words of love, I let my secret feelings flow through Juliet's lines. They flowed across the stage and over the audience, electrifying the entire theater. I didn't know, until that moment, that the simple act of two people pressing their lips together could produce such an intense, physical reaction. What a kiss! It completely erased the first one. Most of the front row girls groaned. Eat your hearts out!
When the play was over, Troy and I had our first official date. We took a taxi to St. Francis's Hospital and got him a big fat shot of antibiotic, right in the butt. Then we went back to the Wallingford because I had some unfinished business. He waited in the taxi while I stood in the lobby, gazing at the portrait of my great-grandmother.
"Adelaide," I said. "I'm leaving the theater."
"Leaving, are you?" She pursed her painted lips. 'Acting is not your cup of tea, is it?"
"No, it's really not. But I did my best tonight."
"Yes, I heard the applause. It was magnificent" Her eyes twinkled. "You should he very proud, my dear, very proud indeed. Applause like that comes from the heart"
Mr. Shakespeare once wrote, Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt. In other words, a wish is a good place to start but then you have to get off your butt and make it happen. You have to pick up a quill and write your own damn story.
So I took my exit.
Om ya.
***
A Few More Words
So that was my story, my life-is-the-stuff-of-dreams story. I'm pleased to report that as of this writing, I'm living in Los Angeles with my aunt Mary, attending UCLA. Troy lives in the city, too. He signed with a new label and is experimenting with classical music. He's really into the mandolin. And yes, we're still dating. The soap opera role is keeping Mom busy, but she's coming out for Christmas. She and Reginald have become an item, so it feels like the theater is still in the family.
But there's one more thing to add.
Remember that little black-and-white cat, the one that lived across from my apartment with the old lady? Well, he's perched in Aunt Mary's oak tree as I write this. The old lady was happy to give him to me. She said he whined too much.
But now he's as happy as a lark.
I named him Romeo.
Acknowledgments
I would be lost without my critique group and their combined talents when working with a first draft. Deep gratitude to Susan Wiggs, Sheila Rabe, Anjali Banerjee, Elsa Watson, Dennis O'Reilly, and Carol Cassella. And endless thanks to my husband, Bob, for always reading every single page I put in front of him even though none of my stories are about aviation or mountain climbing.
I'm lucky to have a supportive and accessible agent, Michael Bourret, and an excellent editor, Emily Easton. Thanks also to the staff at Dystel 6k Goderich Literary Management and the staff at Walker Books for Young Readers.
Last, but not least, I'd like to thank a three-volume set of books titled The Annotated Shakespeare. Santa gave them to me when I was thirteen years old. That's when I fell in love with a certain playwright, without whom this novel could not have been written.
When Suzanne Selfors was cast as Mercutio in a summer stock production of Romeo and Juliet, she was devastated to be playing a male part. But once she realized that she would get to wear a fake beard and learn to fence, she was hooked and spent the rest of her high school years as a thespian. These days, her favorite things include organic gardening, boating in the San Juan Islands, and hanging out in coffeehouses. Suzanne lives on an island in Washington State with her husband and two children.
www.suzanneselfors.com
***
QUOTE LIST
"This above all: to thine own self be true." Hamlet (act 1, scene 3).
1. "All the world's a stage." As You Like It (act 2, scene 7)
2. "What's in a name?" Romeo and Juliet (act 2, scene 2)
3. "Now is the winter of our discontent." Richard III (act 1, scene 1)
4- "Of all base passions, fear is the most accursed." Henry VI, Part One (act 5, scene 2)
5. "Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene ..." Romeo and Juliet (act 1, scene 1)
6. "An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told." Richard III (act 4, scene 4)
7. "One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish." Romeo and Juliet (act 1, scene 2)
8. "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Hamlet (act 3, scene 2)
9. "Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't." Macbeth (act 1, scene 5)
10. "How stands your disposition to be married?" Romeo and Juliet (act 1, scene 3)
11. "Why, then the world's mine oyster." The Merry Wives of Windsor (act 2, scene 2)
12. "O' she doth teach the torches to burn bright!" Romeo and Juliet (act 1, scene 5)
13. "Holy St. Francis! What a change is here." Romeo and Juliet (act 2, scene 3)
14. "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't." Hamlet (act 2, scene 2)
15. "A horse, a horse. My kingdom for a horse!" King Richard III (act 5, scene 4)
16. "The game is up." Cymbeline (act 3, scene 3)
17. "I have not slept a wink." Cymbeline (act 3, scene 3)
18. "The miserable have no other medicine but only hope." Measure for Measure (act 3, scene 1)
19. "Delays have dangerous ends." King Henry the Sixth, Part One (act 3, scene 2)
20. "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" Romeo and Juliet (act 2, scene 2)
21. "The course of true love never did run smooth." Midsummer Night's Dream (act 1, scene 1)
22. "Men at some time are masters of their fate." Julius Caesar (act 1, scene 2)
23. "To sleep, perchance to dream ..." Hamlet (act 3, scene 1) 24- "Thus with a kiss ..." Romeo and Juliet (act 5, scene 3)
25. "Parting is such sweet sorrow." Romeo and Juliet (act 2, scene 2)
26. "All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances." As You Like It (act 2, scene 7)
From the mailbag
A letter from Suzanne Selfors to the man himself--William Shakespeare--just to clarify that she never intended to steal his fans. She only wanted to make Romeo and Juliet seem more applicable to the world today. You should still read the original story after finishing Saving Juliet.
Dear Mr. Shakespeare,
I wanted to let you know that I am a huge fan of your play Romeo and Juliet. I appreciate how you added your own vision and style to a love story that had been published many times by many writers before you. In keeping with this revisionary tradition, I have done likewise with your play. I messed around with it a bit. I turned it inside out and stood it on its head. I'm confident you won't be offended for I have simply followed your lead. We are fiction writers, after all.
I first discovered your play during the summer of my thirteenth year. My father was running a fishing boat in Alaska. My mother had started a new career, and she needed to find ways to keep my little sister and me busy. So she signed us up for summer stock theatre. I'd been in a few school plays but not since sixth grade, so I wasn't quite sure that this was something I wanted to do. Hanging out at home and watching TV sounded so much better.
On a sunny Monday morning, my mother dropped us off at a church in town. We filed into the basement with dozens of other kids. A guy with a bushy red mustache welcomed us. He said he was our director. Then he said that for the next four weeks, we were going to live and breathe Shakespeare. In other words, you.
My reaction was dismay. My summer was going to be a total nightmare. I do not wish to offend you, but at that time in my life your writing was as unappealing to me as cod-liver oil. You
r sentences were completely incomprehensible. Your plays seemed ridiculous--men in tights walking around with thick British accents, saying things like, "To be or not to be," and "Now is the winter of our discontent." Blah, blah, blah.
Our director told us that the play we were going to perform was Romeo and Juliet. I looked around the room. We were all kids. Was this guy nuts? How could he expect kids to perform Shakespeare? And why would we want to?
But then he told us the story. He told us about two families that hated each other and two people who loved each other, and about how they died because there was no way for them to live freely. And then he said, "And these two people were the same age as some of you." And that's when your story came alive for me.
Many years have passed, but your play still holds a special place in my heart. When I decided to put a modern twist on your story, I did it with the hope that it would help new readers discover your play. By introducing a modern narrator (Mimi), I was able to add a modern perspective. By going behind the scenes, I could highlight the aspect of your play that intrigued me the most--namely, Juliet's plight.
For the twenty-first-century Western reader, the idea of being forced into a marriage at age thirteen is horrific. The ideas that as a woman you could not speak your own mind, choose your own husband, or choose your own career go against everything we are taught as girls. Juliet Capulet was a prisoner of her family, her status, and her own body. Her choice to marry Romeo in secret was not just an act of rebellion, it was an act of social, political, and religious treachery--for she was acting against the laws of blood, state, and church. In the end, the only way she could find freedom was through suicide.
For me, then and now, the tragedy of the story is that Romeo and Juliet were destroyed by a society that wanted them to act in a prescribed way, when their souls longed for something else. Though modern teens may live under a different set of rules than fifteenth-century teens, they still feel the suffocating strain of society's expectations--to succeed, succeed, succeed! Failure is not allowed in this achievement-oriented culture. This generation of parents may not be arranging marriages, but they are setting expectations that can feel equally imprisoning.
And so, Mr. Shakespeare, though our stories diverge in some ways, at the heart of each is this powerful question: should we allow others to write our stories, or should we write them ourselves?
Your admiring reader,
***
A Deleted Scene from Saving Juliet
The following scene appeared in the very first draft of Saving Juliet. The setting is a room in Capulet House. Mimi has just arrived and still believes that she is dreaming. An old serving man leads her to a room where she is supposed to wait for Lady Capulet.
In this scene I was trying to illustrate the confinement and boredom of an upper-class woman's life. Also, I was experimenting with language--still not sure whether I should try to sound "Old Worldly" or be modern. In the end, I chose the latter.
Though this scene is entertaining, it slowed the pace of my story, so I cut it. It would have appeared in Chapter 8 of the final book had I kept it.
I stepped into a room thick with the smell of competing perfumes. Four benches sat in a semicircle in front of an unlit stone fireplace, and upon those benches sat seven women, all dressed in lavender and gold.
"Introducing Mimi of Manhattan," the old man said. "Just arrived for the party and newly robbed." He bowed to me and exited.
Seven sets of hands laid down their embroidery and seven heads turned my way. A funny pillbox hat sat atop each head, tied in place with a ribbon. I looked around, wondering if Juliet was present, but no one seemed young enough. I smiled and waited and since no one spoke, I said, "Hello."
One of the women, her neck held stiff in a high collar, patted a vacant spot on her bench. I sat beside her. My bench-mate's eyes bulged like a goldfish's. Her hair was pulled into a tight bun and golden ringlets hung in front of her ears. I never realized that a dream could include so many details.
"Is Juliet here?" I asked.
"Nay. She's in her chamber. Did he say newly robbed?" she asked in a high voice. I nodded and her eyes bulged further. "Pray thee, is that the reason thy gown is torn and muddied? Did the robbers molest you? Is thy virginity still intact?"
The other six women cocked their heads, waiting for my reply. My virginity was not a subject I wanted to focus on. Look, it's not that I was embarrassed by my virginity. Given the choice, I would choose to wait until someone loved me and proclaimed his love and I loved him back and proclaimed my love and all that good stuff. Then I'd have a decision to make. But I hadn't even come close to having to make a decision. You see the difference?
"They didn't molest me," I said. "But they took my traveling cases."
The women collectively sighed with disappointment. "Oh, how dull," one complained. "The least you could have done was to fabricate a story to entertain us."
"Aye, the least."
"Lativia," a woman with a mole on her nose said. My bench-mate looked up. "Lativia, go and see if anyone doth approach."
"You know I don't approve," Lativia told her. "Lativia!"
Lativia got up and scurried to the door, her velvet skirts swishing as she went. She opened it and peered out. "Not a soul," she announced. Upon the door's closing, each woman reached under her skirt and pulled out a book. Without another word to me, they began to read. "I detest reading," Lativia whispered, returning to our bench. "But they read all the time. If caught, they shall be punished."
"For reading? Why?" I asked.
She scooted closer, almost killing me with her perfume. "Lord Capulet sayeth that women should only learn subjects which are womanly in nature." Lativia picked up her embroidery hoop and showed it to me. "I'm stitching a Capulet crest." Each of the other embroidery hoops held Capulet crests as well, in various degrees of completion. "To maketh his lordship proud," she told me, pulling a golden thread through the cloth.
"Oh, shut up, Lativia. You disturb my concentration. I'm reading Petrarch."
"This shall be my twelfth crest," Lativia whispered. "I waste no time with reading."
"Waste time?" An older woman with a slight mustache snapped her book shut and waved it at Lativia. "Foolish girl. 'Tis embroidery that wastes time. Petrarch wrote that 'tis the duty of each individual to strive for excellence and individuality. How shalt we accomplish this if we sit inside all day and know nothing of the world? Did God not giveth us minds, too?"
"Shhh," one of the women said. "You blaspheme."
Funny how dreams can include stuff you never knew you knew. I had never read Petrarch. But he sounded very interesting.
The mustached woman lowered her voice. "Just yesterday morn, my son asked my husband why the church doth forbid Copernicus. My husband did not know the answer because he hasn't read Copernicus. Well, I know the answer."
A few women gasped. "How? Dare you to read it?"
"Fie! What? Of course not," the mustached woman said with a guilty expression. "But I have heard others speak of it. My point being that I could not tell my son that I knew the answer to his question because I am not allowed to possess more knowledge than my thickheaded husband. So I pretend to be stupid and happy with my embroidery day after day after day. Is that what you want for your daughter? For all our daughters?"
"You protest too much," Lativia said meekly.
"Tell us, Hortense, why dost the church forbid Copernicus?" an old lady requested.
We all leaned in. Hortense looked around, then raised her painted eyebrows. "Because Copernicus asserts that it is the sun and not the earth that stands in the center of all things. That the earth actually spins around the sun."
"How indeed, if the earth is actually spinning, do we not all feel dizzy?" the old woman asked.
"I sometimes feel dizzy," Lativia said.
"If the earth doth spin, why do we not fall off?"
"Gravity," I blurted. They fell silent, putting down their books and looking to me for an ex
planation. I strained my brain to remember what I knew about gravity. "Gravity is a force that keeps everything in its place."
"Like the Catholic Church," Hortense said.
"Not quite. Let me show you. May I borrow your book for a moment?" I held out my hand and Hortense passed me her book. "Things can leave the earth and travel toward the sky." I stood and threw the book up in the air. "But eventually, everything comes back down." I caught the book. "Gravity."
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