Stage Mum

by Lisa Gee

  I had neither the money nor the energy to shop for a new outfit. Scouring my wardrobe, it became clear that ‘quite posh’ narrowed it down to two possible dresses, both of which, by some fluke, I’d managed to buy in the Voyage closing-down sale several years earlier. Voyage was a very trendy boutique, which didn’t let just anybody in. In fact they were so selective about their clientele, it’s rumoured they once refused to admit Madonna. Anyway, I was, for some reason, pushing Dora’s buggy down South Molton Street when I saw a sign with the magic words ‘Final Day! Closing Down Sale! Everything At Least 70% Off!’ The shop was being considerably less fussy about who they let in – and even opened the door to me. I bought two dresses: one simple black one, and one that the shop assistant forced me into, that I’d never have picked for myself in a lifetime of shopping trips. It was knee-length, all green and gold sparkles, with a big green-and-gold rose thing slap bang in the middle of my belly. The dresses were thirty quid each. I kept the original price tag from the green and gold one. It had been reduced by £969.

  That was what I was going to wear for the opening night, so all I needed to do was buy a wrap, an evening bag that would carry my phone, a credit card and a bit of cash, and some boots to go with it. T K Maxx and John Lewis and I was sorted, although that makes it sound a lot quicker and less painful than it was, especially as I also trawled the department stores around Oxford Circus with a few of the other mums, several of whom took the opportunity to invest in new frocks for themselves. Dora, she and I decided, would wear her bridesmaid’s dress from our wedding, although as it was now November, and it was a strappy, floaty, summery number (with gold beading), I popped into Marks & Spencer and bought her a little golden bolero thing to go over the top. Then to H&M for some new gold pumps and grown-up tights. And that was more than enough clothes shopping, thank you very much.

  Dora’s Monday night performance went fine. It was her first with Alexander Hanson, who had debuted the previous Thursday. The word on the stage mother grapevine was that not only was he right for the part, but – big bonus! – he was also ‘a good thing for mums’, i.e. sexy. Dora, however, was still a bit cross that she hadn’t done a show with Simon Shepherd – ‘It’s not fair, Mummy. Mittens and Adrianna got to do one, but the rest of us didn’t.’ She continued to feel the unfairness of this for several months, and would still occasionally complain about it even after she’d left the show. Some of the other things that Dora considers unfair are 1) that children aren’t allowed to go into outer space; 2) that February – her birthday month – has fewer days in it than all the other months (not sure if she thinks it’s unfair to her or to February); and 3) that when she tries to ‘imperius’ me it doesn’t work and I still don’t do what she wants me to do.

  That night, she came out wearing a huge grin and grasping an extra carrier bag. Because she’d stood so nicely and been so good during the stressfully quick quick change, and the creative team had decided on a slightly different costume, they’d given her the nightie she had, until then, been wearing in one of the scenes. She was very proud of herself and loved it so much that for six months I had to do the whites wash first thing in the morning so that her precious nightie was dry and ready to wear again by bedtime. Now it’s too small, we’ve hung it on her bedroom wall.

  After a bit of excitement about her nightwear – ‘Can I wear it tonight? Please? Please? PLEASE?’ she begged, drowning out my yesses – she strapped herself into her car seat and found an excuse (I think I accidentally clicked on to Radio 4 instead of a CD) to have a short yet intense tantrum and then passed out. When we arrived home, she woke up and watched while I unpacked her Scooby-Doo backpack. Big shock! Somehow one of the blue elasticated ties that the boys wear during the party scene had ended up coming home with her. Dora was distraught. What if they didn’t have enough ties for the next performance? They might not be able to do the show. Supposing they thought she had stolen it? On purpose? Who had put it in there and why? ‘Mummy, you must take it straight back to the theatre now. You have to.’

  ‘Er, no. I don’t.’

  I explained that everyone would be gone by the time we got there, that no one would be cross with her, that they would almost certainly have extra ties and if, by some fluke, they didn’t, we could get it there the next day in plenty of time for the show. But I promised to call Jo first thing in the morning, just to make sure. That sorted, I took her up to bed, gave her a cuddle and she fell asleep. I spoke to Jo, who promised to call the people responsible for the costumes (actually, she promised to call ‘wardrobe’, but I assumed she meant a person rather than an item of furniture). She emailed back later telling me (and Dora) not to worry, that they thought it was funny, and just to drop the tie off at the stage door next time we were in.

  As the opening night approached, the publicity for the show took off. There were lots of photos in the newspapers – and Dora appeared in a lot of them, looking cute and sometimes, but not always, facing the camera. On the day the show opened, all the news programmes ran stories, featuring clips from the electronic press kit. She and her friends ‘Do-Re-Mi’ed tunefully on breakfast news, and ‘So Long, Farewell’ed at lunchtime. I watched much more TV than usual, my finger hovering over the record button. Dora began to think it was quite normal to have her picture in the newspaper and to see herself on telly, but didn’t seem overly affected by it all. I told her that after press night it would stop, and all the pictures would be of some of her other Sound of Music friends: Mittens team and Adrianna. She wasn’t bothered, being much more concerned about the opening-night party, specifically exactly how late she’d be allowed to stay up.

  ‘Can I stay at the party until eleven o’clock at night?’ she asked.

  I explained that as the do wouldn’t be starting until after then, she would be allowed to stay up after eleven o’clock.

  ‘Until midnight?’

  I nodded. Dora widened her eyes and mouth into big Os. This must truly be something special if she was allowed to stay up that late. Helen and I had decided to share a cab home. The party was due to end at two and we’d decided to book the taxi for one o’clock. This was on the decadent side for children of Molly-May and Dora’s ages, but we figured that this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and excitement would keep them going. Or at least, keep Molly-May going. Dora, I knew, would experience sudden-onset exhaustion, loudly and inconveniently, but what the heck. She’d coped with the technical rehearsals, and one night wouldn’t kill her. Also, even though it would probably slash years off my life expectancy, and it wasn’t really my party, I wanted to make sure I had enough time to have some fun too.

  All we knew about the party was that it would be quite posh, it would be at Old Billingsgate Market, and the kids who weren’t performing that night, plus one parent each, would be taken there from the theatre along with all the other guests by double-decker bus. This wasn’t really much information, but did allow plenty of room for speculation. Once us mums had got through the ‘what are we going to wear?’ phase, we moved on to ‘who do you think will be there?’ Would Julie Andrews turn up? Would we get to meet Andrew Lloyd Webber? Would Graham Norton be there? Jonathan Ross? The other Marias from the television show? Who else?

  The debate raged, and not only when we met. Phone bills soared. We gossiped for hours on the phone, much to the annoyance of husbands, partners and children, and occasionally to the detriment of our work. In one incident, John’s mum Jane, who works for a vet, was supposed to be bagging up a dead cat, ready for incineration. Unfortunately, by the time she’d spent an hour on the phone to Grace’s mum Lynn, rigor mortis had set in. Her gossiping hadn’t so much let the cat out of the bag as made it impossible to get it in there in the first place, a problem she only managed to solve by snapping one of its legs in two.

  Dora and I went on the tube to the show. I couldn’t fit a Harry Potter book into my evening bag, so we had to entertain ourselves, which essentially involved me hissing repeatedly: ‘DON’T DO THAT: you’l
l get your hands/dress/face/bolero …’

  ‘What’s a bolero?’

  ‘The gold cardigan thing you’re wearing … filthy and your lipstick will come off on that window.’

  In fact I wished I’d managed to find an evening rucksack: it was a struggle to fit the essentials – tickets, invitation, Oyster card, cash, credit card, door keys, mobile phone, a few tissues, lippy, eye pencil and foldaway hairbrush – into the little beaded purse I’d bought specially for the occasion. My inner stage mother thought I should also have packed a few business cards to hand out to famous people, but I ignored her. Anyway, no matter how violently I shoved in everything I needed to take, the catch still kept popping open. Eventually I realised I’d have to leave the tissues out and either sniff disgustingly, use toilet paper or both. Under normal circumstances I’d have taken a bigger bag, but tonight it felt important to make the kind of effort that seems to come naturally to most women, but leaves me feeling confused and inadequate. Partly, I suspect, this goes back to my mother’s exasperation with my untidiness. Partly it’s down to having enough self-awareness to know that I am genuinely clueless. As a student, I landed a Saturday job in a posh Brighton shoe shop. I was not a success and ended up being sacked, because, as the manager’s report made clear, I was the worst salesperson he had ever had the pleasure of trying to train. Alongside my inability to persuade people to buy shoes they didn’t really want and that didn’t fit them, there was the problem of my dress sense. I had been caught wearing lipstick that clashed with my shoes.

  My skills hadn’t improved much over the intervening decades, so it was fortunate that the week before Laurie and I got married, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a friend had patiently explained eye make-up to me in the ladies’ loos at a function. ‘You put on the lightest colour eye shadow first. No. Not like that. Before the mascara, otherwise the eye shadow gets stuck in it. Then you put the darker colour on top. And then the mascara.’ Oh. If only she’d been there to advise on veil-fixing techniques, I might have looked okay during our wedding.

  I managed to remember my make-up lesson while I was getting ready for The Sound of Music opening. The only make-up I had was the stuff I’d bought for the wedding. It didn’t go that well with my outfit, but as it didn’t clash with my boots, I didn’t think it really mattered, so long as I made a bit of an effort – no one would be looking at me anyway. I hadn’t, after all, been invited on my own account, but to make sure that nothing untoward happened to my child and that my child didn’t happen untowardly to anything or anyone else. And in case she did, so that I would be on hand to apologise and mop up afterwards.

  We arrived at the theatre early, but there was already a crowd milling around outside and a group of children dressed as the von Trapp family singing to the camera crews and snappers who were hovering on the steps outside the entrance waiting for all the famous people to arrive. Dora was very excited. So was I – and I also surprised myself by feeling genuinely glad that she wasn’t performing that night. It meant that we could both just concentrate on having a good time. That didn’t mean I didn’t experience a hint of wistfulness: of course I did, but it was nowhere near strong enough to count as envy. And I certainly didn’t envy the way the opening-night parents – most of whom were rigid with nerves – were feeling at that moment. ‘I felt sick,’ John’s mum Jane told me later – and John was one of the more experienced performers that night. ‘I could only hope that he wouldn’t have an attack of nerves. He’d never had one before, but there’s always a first time. And also that they’d all be as good as they had been during the previews.’ On the up side for the first-night parents, a day or so day beforehand, some seats in the upper circle had been released for sale, which meant that the performing kids’ dads could also watch the show, as their mums had bagsied the tickets and party invites – although the more egalitarian amongst them had, previously, been planning to watch half the show each.

  I carefully extracted our tickets from my microscopic bag, wrestled it closed and, clutching Dora’s hand tightly, wobbled around on my high-heeled boots to Café Libre, where the parents of the children performing that night were waiting. They were, understandably, even more excited than I was, but it was hard to tell as they’d also gone uncharacteristically quiet with nervous tension. And then it was time for the show, so, heads down, whilst surreptitiously keeping an eye out for anyone famous, we braved the crowd and cameras and made our way to the theatre.

  Excelling myself, I managed to recognise several Marias from the TV show, and Cilla Black. Also David Ian – but that was mostly because he was with his daughter Emily (a Marta) and his wife Tracy, who I’d met by the stage door wheelie bins. Amongst others, I completely failed to spot Andrew Lloyd Webber (again), John Barrowman, Martha Kearney and, most gut-wrenchingly for the few cells that remained of my teenage self, Bob Geldof.

  All the parents with kids were sitting together in a block at the back left-hand side of the stalls. The parents whose children were performing were just as far back but closer to the centre, seated a little away from the rest of us, but near enough to wave and make thumbs-up signs at. On our seats were the special opening night programmes, black covers instead of the usual white.

  We all trooped over to the pile of red velvet booster seats and snaffled at least one for each child – two for the smaller ones. Most of the children chose to sit together, but Dora wanted to stay with me – or, more accurately, on me. The lights went down, the conductor, Simon Lee, waved his arms expressively, the orchestra burst into music and the curtain came up. And for the first half of the show, an over-excited Dora fidgeted all over me while delivering a loudly whispered running commentary.

  ‘Some of the nuns are boys!’

  ‘Sshhh!’

  All my attempts to get her to sit still and quiet failed abysmally. She simply couldn’t contain herself. It was just as exciting watching her friends perform as it was to be on the stage herself, with the added bonus that she could talk about it while it was happening; something that she was banned from doing whilst actually performing. There was so much she had to tell me, mostly to do with what was going to happen next – ‘Look! The wheelbarrow! I get to go in that too!’ – but also about what had happened when they were rehearsing. Whilst this was merely mildly inconvenient for me – I had already seen the show twice – it annoyed the woman sitting behind us, an actress who evidently hadn’t and who eventually leaned forward and informed Dora that if she wanted to act when she was older, she needed to learn to sit still and be quiet. Now. She didn’t actually say now, but her tone of voice and face did. It worked for about five minutes, but then all the information Dora needed to impart started bubbling up inside her and eventually her lid popped off and the wriggling and whispered explanations recommenced. Fortunately, by then, Lesley Garrett was launching into ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’, Dora decided she was desperate for the loo, and when we returned to our seats, it was time for the interval.

  We all chatted amongst ourselves and congratulated the now much-more-relaxed parents of the kids on stage, who’d been absolutely, delightfully brilliant. Over an overpriced ice cream, Dora elected to join her friends. I smiled at the woman sitting behind me and apologised quietly. She ignored me stonily. Dora, I noticed, glancing over to check on her, was now behaving impeccably. Away from me, she sat still and quiet throughout the second half of the show, completely focused on watching. No wonder they ban mothers from backstage.

  At the end of the performance we all trooped outside. I held Dora’s hand firmly as we made our way through the crowds to the fleet of double-decker buses blocking Argyll Street. Instead of a number, the buses were displaying Sound of Music, and the route was: London Palladium–Austrian Border. We were about to be whisked off on the ‘Salzburg Express’.

  Aside from the performing children – who would be brought along later in a minibus along with their accompanying parent and the rest of the cast – and Emily, who travelled separately with her parents, all
the children, mums and the odd dad got on to one bus together and made for the back of the top deck. Here the younger ones shrieked over-excitedly, while the older ones wound them up, until they all got bored and burst into song. They sang exuberantly and tunefully all the way to Billingsgate. One or two of the mums thought they ought to quieten down a bit – but it was their night and, after all, they sounded fabulous. None of the other passengers seemed to mind, and why would they? Occasionally Dora would pop over for a cuddle. When she went back to the other kids, I sat looking out the window, watching the city lights and listening to the a cappella harmonies, while Alicia (Gretl) bopped Michael (Kurt) over the head rhythmically with an empty plastic drink bottle.

  When the bus stopped, we filed down the stairs and out on to the chill east London street, walked around a big building and, having shown the smartly dressed bouncers our invitations, filed into a large, plain lobby. Here, those of us with coats to leave left them at the cloakroom. The children piled up in front of a curved temporary wall which was repeatedly branded with the Sound of Music logo, and the waiting photographers took a few photos, although they were really waiting for the cast that had performed that night. Then we were all herded into the party proper.

  To enter, you passed through a tunnel housing an artificial snowfall, which proved especially popular with the younger children, who caused a traffic jam by wanting to stay and play in it. Once through, on the right was a glühwein bar, the drink served in Sound of Music mugs. I failed to snaffle one, although several other parents managed. And then … well, the entire enormous space was Austrian-and Sound of Music-themed. There were almost lifesize model cows (complete with cow bells) and sheep, standing in neat lines and confined to an astroturf paddock, and a oompah band, clad in green jackets, black britches and long white socks, playing oompah music. There was a mini Alpine chalet, picture perfect on the outside, but spookily dark and unfurnished inside; and a picnic area featuring enormous hampers filled with a combination of fake and real food set amongst enormous silky black scatter cushions and gigantic potted silk daisies. Electric ‘stars’ shone through a black cloth night that covered the walls. Towards the middle of the enormous space was a gigantic circular bar from which staff served drinks to about twenty double-decker-bus-loads of glamorous guests. It was very, very noisy and very, very exciting. I felt dazed and dazzled.