Stage Mum

by Lisa Gee

  ‘Why not?’ I chose to ignore her, because I couldn’t think of a good, satisfying answer whilst simultaneously making sure she had everything she needed and getting us both out the door in a generally calm, positive way. It was time to walk to school, join up with the rest of her class, then turn around and walk straight back the way we came, past our house and on to the City Academy, where we would experience the joy of sports day.

  It was the usual chaos. Dora didn’t place in the potato-and-spoon race, but achieved a creditable third in throwing what appeared to be a miniature primary-coloured intercontinental ballistic missile.

  Eventually it was time for the mothers’ race. I walked up to the line, along with about twenty other mums. We took our places. The gun went off. We ran. I went as fast as I could, legs pounding away beneath me, arms pumping, heart racing. I didn’t come last, but that was only because another mum fell flat on her face. I passed her, and the friend who’d finished and then come back to make sure she was still breathing, seconds after everyone else had hit the finish line. It was the fastest hundred metres I’d done in twenty-five years. Possibly ever.

  ‘You looked really funny,’ said Dora, with a six-year-old’s grasp of both tact and the taking-part spirit I’d been attempting to role-model. ‘Everyone in my class was laughing at you.’

  I felt okay until the walk home, during which my right leg started to hurt. By the time we made it home, I could no longer stand on it.

  I phoned NHS Direct and was put through to a male and perky Australian nurse who compared my injury to Michael Owen’s (he thought I’d damaged my cruciate ligament) and instructed me to go straight to A & E. I didn’t buy the comparison and, hence, the diagnosis. And as I didn’t fancy spending three hours waiting in the local hospital, only to be rewarded with a don’t-waste-our-time-again scowl and a free tubigrip, I tracked down the number of the local minor injuries unit. A rather weary nurse asked me if I’d taken ibuprofen. I hadn’t. ‘Don’t come in,’ she said. ‘We’ll only send you away with a couple of ibuprofen to see if it gets better.’ Not even a tubigrip. I took two tablets, settled down on the bed to read Dora’s recall letter and started wondering if the cycling holiday we’d been contemplating was such a good idea.

  The letter contained details of the next audition together with two and a half pages of genuine Sound of Music script, the scene where the children introduce themselves to Maria. Dora had to learn all their lines (including the boys’) by the next audition on 6 July. I helped, by being Maria, correcting Dora when she went wrong, and making her repeat and repeat until she got it right. Out of sheer curiosity, I timed how long it took her to memorise everything she needed to learn. It took two sessions on successive days, a total of one and a half hours, at the end of which I hadn’t managed to learn the few lines Maria speaks – a fraction of what Dora had absorbed – and still, much to her frustration at how hopeless I was, needed the script.

  The letter said there would be more auditions on Friday 7th, too. Did that mean, I asked Jo by email, that everyone would be seen on the Friday too, or just those who shone on Thursday? Everyone, came the answer.

  Two more half-days off school and still no complaints from Mrs Kendall. ‘Do you think she’s going to get a part?’ she asked, grinning, her perfectly applied plum lipstick stretching from one ear to the other.

  ‘Well,’ I admitted grudgingly. ‘It’s not impossible. This’ll be the fourth round.’

  ‘How exciting! Wouldn’t it be wonderful? I wouldn’t be at all surprised!’ she enthused, looking astutely confident in both Dora’s abilities and her suitability and without mentioning any adverse side-effects on her education or her Key Stage 1 SATs score, which was simultaneously reassuring and alarming. In fact, Adele, Dora’s ballet teacher, had told me that she wouldn’t be surprised, either. Nor would Carl-the-pianist. Or Dora’s father Steve, who, usually a computer techie, had just returned to his old life as a theatre techie to stand in for a friend diagnosed with terminal cancer. The only person, it seemed, who would be surprised if Dora ended up strutting her stuff on the London Palladium stage at the age of six was me. But just in case, I ordered a replacement for our worn-out Sound of Music video from Amazon. A new DVD. The singalong edition.

  And I dared to email Jo again: ‘Are you still seeing hundreds?’ to which Jo’s immediate one-word response was ‘No!’

  At this point, my inner stage mother woke up and smelled the greasepaint. She took over the keyboard

  Aaahh … Do you know how many more stages there are likely to be? And (I’ve never done this sort of thing before), can I ask, on the basis of what you’ve seen of her so far, what Dora’s chances might be?

  Thanks!

  There are likely to be two more auditions at least, I think. I have no idea what her chances are – a lot of people have a say in it. Also if they don’t find what they want we will start again. So it is best to just take it as it comes.

  Well, that told me. I clamped down on the stage mother part of me and tried to douse the fizzling excitement I wasn’t admitting to in public – or even in private – and started planning an October half-term trip to visit Laurie’s sister and niece in New York. That way, whatever happened, we’d have something to look forward to. And I could pretend that I hadn’t started counting chickens. Which, three months and three recalls along, I now had. I would, I realised, be disappointed if she didn’t get at least to the last round, and kept reminding myself – and my inner stage mother, who had already started planning her opening night party outfit – that Dora had done very well to get this far.

  ‘You’ve done very well to get this far,’ I told her, several times, as she recited her lines (I still couldn’t do Maria without a script, or with conviction. I’m not nun material).

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I might get a part, mightn’t I?’

  ‘It’s not impossible,’ I replied, ‘but let’s not think too much about it.’

  ‘But I might, mightn’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ I finally admitted to both of us. ‘You might.’

  ‘I wonder if I’ll be Gretl or Marta,’ she mused.

  ‘Time for supper,’ I said, changing the subject.

  ‘But I don’t like fish.’

  ‘Tough.’

  ‘Do I have to eat all of it? Do you think I might get a part?’

  ‘Eat your fish.’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  I raised my eyebrows and did my best stern face, which, after six and a half years of practice, was quite good, even if it rarely achieved the desired effect.

  ‘Not fair.’

  The day before the next audition, we received a hurried email from Jo Hawes. The venue had been double-booked, so they’d shifted us all from one church hall (Catholic) in west London to another (Baptist) a couple of minutes away. Dora was due at two, and because I had trouble finding a parking place and change for the meter (‘All right. You can have a packet of crisps. But only Ready Salted Lite ones. And save the face-pulling for the audition, okay?’), we were only twenty minutes early, which is almost the same as being on time. It was easy to find the church. It was the squat modern building set back from the road opposite Ravenscourt Park station and largely obscured by a swarm of mostly chattering children of distinctly Aryan appearance, around which the occasional anxious parent orbited erratic as a malfunctioning satellite.

  There were two ways to get to the front door: up a flight of concrete steps, zigzagging round or stepping over the kids sitting talking, rehearsing their lines or daydreaming. Or by negotiating a ramp, which several auditionees’ younger brothers were neeeeyoowwing down, arms outstretched in fighter plane mode. Dora hurtled up the ramp while I picked my way up the stairs, peering down on partings so straight and plaits so perfect that creating them must have involved slide rules, spirit levels and abstruse algebraic calculations. We made our way inside and signed Dora in. This time, the woman with the clipboard and stickers was Jo Hawes herself, commandingly tall and straight �
�� imagine Boudicca in a business suit – with a direct, unblinking blue-eyed gaze and precise Home Counties diction. Not someone you’d want to get into a fight with, unless you happened to have a sports day ICBM or two up your sleeve.

  She was very smiley and welcoming and explained that there’d be a bit of a wait as they were running slightly behind. The group before Dora’s hadn’t gone in yet, which was why there were children bursting out all over the place: once the next lot were called we would, she thought, be able to sit down comfortably. We wandered outside again. A few of the kids were rehearsing lines with the assistance – or, in the odd case, extreme encouragement – of a parent. I asked Dora if she wanted to practise. She wrinkled up her nose and shook her head: she thought she knew it and didn’t, anyway, want to rehearse in front of everyone. I tried not to look up towards the front of the building where a mother was comforting a sobbing girl who had, I found out later, run out of her audition distressed because she kept getting everything wrong. I glanced down at Dora: ‘You’ve done very well …’

  ‘I know,’ she interrupted.

  ‘When it’s your turn, just enjoy yourself and try your best,’ I said, sticking to the healthy manipulate-your-child-into-doing-her-best-without-putting-pressure-on-her-to-achieve parenting script that every middle-class parent believes to be far more effective (and far less work) at generating achievement than traditional-style, overt pushing.

  What I really wanted to say was: It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong, but it would be brilliant if you did get it right and are you sure you don’t want to run through the lines just one more time to be a hundred per cent sure that you know it really well and please concentrate and whatever happens don’t run out of there in floods of tears because I’m starting to think you might be in with a chance and if you do that you’ll blow it just when it’s starting to get interesting and I’d really like you to get a part so please don’t blow it. Oh yes, and also I don’t want you to be upset. Obviously.

  My inner stage mother mostly agreed with me, but didn’t think I should have bothered to include the bit about not wanting her to be upset.

  A surge of children and parents left the building, which seemed, suddenly, to have inhaled most of the people who had been waiting outside. Dora and I went back in and Jo directed us past the reception desk and into a waiting area, where a handful of mums and comparatively quiet kids were fidgeting gently. Dora was instantly drawn to a slightly older girl, blonde, slender and lively, who was playing games on her mum’s iBook.

  Bethany was eight and had been pulled out of the queue at the Palladium by Jo Hawes to try for the role of young Cosette in Les Misérables. She’d won the part, and was enjoying her first West End job. Her mother, Rachel, a slim, sensible redhead, now comfortably ensconced in a second career running a very techie website business and writing articles and books explaining how to use complex software applications, used to be a dancer, and had been reluctant to let her daughter follow in her pointy-toed footsteps. But Bethany had nagged and nagged and, eventually, Rachel had given in, going so far as to enrol her in stage school.

  We nattered while the girls played. I was delighted to meet a fellow laptop-toting freelancer, an open, personable individual who, having lived it herself, had a down-to-earth, sceptical attitude towards showbiz. We swapped the bowdlerised highlights of our life stories, and went into more depth once the girls had been called through to their audition.

  This one lasted much longer than the previous rounds: they were in for over an hour. And in Dora’s absence, I learned a lot. I found out about how doctors test for narcolepsy (electrodes, bed, stopwatch: how quickly does the patient fall asleep?), about the best diet for people with arthritic conditions (lots of fruit and veg; no dairy). And about how much fun these auditions were, and how well the children’s feelings were being taken into account, compared to others these mums had taken their kids to.

  ‘Did you see that mother outside shouting at her son because he couldn’t remember all his lines?’ asked one of the mums. ‘Awful. The lengths some people will go to.’

  I confessed to missing this brazen display of pushiness and rewound my involvement in Dora’s progress so far to check whether I’d committed a similar crime. Recalling that I might have been a little overcritical when she was learning ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’: ‘you don’t have to do it, but if you’re going to, you do have to do it properly’, I immediately suppressed the memory.

  ‘Does that kind of thing happen much?’ I asked, switching my features into what I hoped was an expression of innocent shock.

  ‘If you think that’s bad, you should try the festival scene,’ chipped in an earth-mother type, a comforting presence who had told us that she hadn’t originally wanted children, but had one, then didn’t want to stop, and ended up with five. All of whom were into singing, dancing and acting in a big, schedule-boggling way, and busy progressing through ballet, tap, modern and music theatre exams. I didn’t even know there were music theatre exams to do. ‘My eldest has had to stop for a while,’ Comforting Earth Mother explained. ‘It’s better not to do the higher grades with more grown-up songs until they’re older. Some of the songs just aren’t appropriate.’

  Earth Mother wouldn’t be the last person to tell me how pushy the mums could be at the drama and dance festivals. For the uninitiated, these are highly competitive weekend celebrations of the performing arts, featuring singing, dancing, acting and instrument-playing accompanied by devastated sobbing, violent tantrums and hysterical parental disagreements with judges who have inexplicably failed to recognise their child’s genius. ‘I gave up in the end,’ one former festival judge told me. ‘It got too much. I needed a bodyguard.’

  I dimly remembered taking part in one such festival during my reluctant speech-and-drama-lesson years. We performed an extract from Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children. I was badly miscast in the wrong half of the title role, by a new young teacher who mistook my lack of aptitude for and interest in acting for intelligent and spirited rebellion. It might have worked okay if I could have been and her Children, but at twelve, being neither remotely maternal nor very brave, I was a poor choice for Mother Courage. We came bottom of our section. I wasn’t the least bit upset by what the judge wrote about my contribution to the performance. I agreed with him.

  As if to counterbalance all the waiting-room chat about how appallingly pushy so many (other) mothers could be, I was also initiated into the world of www.notapushymum.com. ‘I’m Catwoman,’ said one of the other mums. ‘That’s nice,’ I said.

  ‘There’s loads of information and gossip on the site,’ said Catwoman. ‘Especially gossip. It’s addictive. Very.’

  I was twitching to get home and check it out. It sounded exactly like my sort of website, one where I could waste hours and hours finding out about things that I didn’t really need to know about in minute detail, whilst fooling myself that I was engaged in serious and productive research. It was, as Catwoman said, highly addictive. Over the successive months, I lost hours – probably days in total – immersed in the discussions and jokes. I followed individual stories with interest and occasional prurience, enjoyed the community feeling – supportive rather than competitive – and, just occasionally, contributed myself, under the moniker ‘inconspicuous’. On notapushymum.com, people post details of upcoming auditions, and parents who’ve taken their children – and sometimes the older kids themselves – share information about castings they’ve attended. It is, as Rachel had told me, great when you’ve been for an audition and heard nothing, because you can find out if everyone else is in the same boat, or if people have already been told about recalls. Or if only the ‘nos’ have heard.

  Meanwhile, back at the Baptist church, the kids emerged from their audition. ‘We learned a dance,’ Dora told me. ‘A man called Frank taught us. It went like this.’ She started to demonstrate, then stopped. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not like that’ and started again, got confused, waved her arms around a
bit and ‘… well anyway. I can’t remember it.’

  ‘And did you do the lines?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you have to do one of the boys’ parts?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Which parts did you do?’

  ‘Only Gretl. It’s not fair. I hardly got to say anything, just to do this.’ She stamped her foot. ‘And I wanted to be a boy. Did you get me anything to eat? I need to practise the dance at home. Can I go and play at Beth’s house?’

  ‘No. Not today. She lives too far away.’

  ‘Can she come to mine? Oh please. Please please please?’

  ‘Not today, sweetie.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because you have another audition tomorrow, and you need an early night.’

  ‘No I don’t. I’m not tired. Can I go to her house tomorrow?’

  ‘Say bye, now, you’ll see her at the audition tomorrow.’

  I used one hand to wave goodbye to the other mums, the other to guide Dora, still demanding a play-date with Bethany – which she would continue to do for the entire journey home, with the odd break for a quick and tuneful yodel – firmly out of the room and back to the car.

  The following day’s audition was back at Really Useful’s offices, after lunch. Rachel was there with Bethany, as were one or two others I recognised and several I didn’t: they’d mixed the groups up from the previous day and also some of the other mums had been nattering outside. The office was much less crowded than last time we were there, and there were enough cups and glasses to go round. While we mums sat up at the table, drinking the complimentary drinks and talking, the kids bounced round the room, chatting, laughing and practising the dance, getting it wrong and saying ‘no, not like that, like this’, and laughing more.

  ‘Look,’ one of the mums pointed out. ‘Even though they’re all competing with each other, and they know they are, they’re still helping each other out.’ And they were. There was no sizing up of the competition, no putting anyone else down, or withholding of information that might help another child, just open friendliness. And if I’ve managed to make that sound a bit vomit-inducingly Pollyannaish, it wasn’t. It was heartwarming.