Temporary Insanity

by Leslie Carroll

  I fastened Gram’s watch around my wrist. “You’re an angel,” I said, hugging her. She raised her goo-covered hands in the air to avoid ruining my suit.

  “You’re my angel,” she said.

  I’m not very good at keeping secrets; not when they’re my own, anyway. They tend to start burning little holes in my soul if I don’t set them free. So I told Gram about the audition I planned to attend later in the day if my duties at the Dalton trial ended in time to spring me from the courthouse.

  “Grandma Finnegan’s Wake? That’s a terrible name for a play,” she remarked. “But at least it’s better than that awful literary allusion masquerading as theater that you dragged me to at the New York Fringe Festival last summer: Moby’s Dick.”

  “A friend was in it; we had to go,” I replied. “But you’re right. It was truly dreadful.”

  “Dreadful? Dreadful is an understatement. I’ll bet Herman Melville was spinning in his grave.”

  “Well, if I get the part in this, will you come to the show and promise me not to put up a fuss about James Joyce’s postmortem acrobatics? ’Cause this play has nothing to do with him.”

  Gram wiped her hands on a terrycloth fingertip towel and placed them on either side of my face, cradling my cheeks in her warm palms. “Alice, my precious baby, I will be there on your opening night. And I swear you won’t hear me say a single word about James Joyce. Now run off to court before your rat bastard uncle phones the house a hundred times to ask if you’ve left yet. I’ve got a hair appointment later, but I should be home by four, if you want to call me after the audition.”

  I rested my hands over hers, pressing them more tightly to my face. “Will do. And I should have a better time at this one than with Darva the soap diva. Hopefully, the director won’t tell me I need my nose fixed! I’ll see you later, all coiffed, buffed, and polished,” I kidded. “I love you, Gram.”

  She kissed me on the lips. Hers were moist and warm. “I love you, too, sweetheart. Break a leg and knock ’em dead!”

  At least my wearing the same outfit to court two days in a row didn’t call as much attention to itself as the giant gravy stain on my uncle’s necktie. I have no idea why he didn’t notice it when he got dressed in the morning, but I couldn’t let him get up in front of the judge and jury looking like that; I felt embarrassed for him. So I discreetly alerted him to the problem and told him I was running out to the haberdasher over on Worth Street to find him a clean and tasteful replacement. He seemed somewhat touched that I cared. Well, of course I cared. I often wanted to strangle him with his own duodenum, but he was still my flesh and blood.

  I’d rigged my suit jacket so that the glittering gold lamé top I was wearing underneath didn’t show, even when I had to perch on the edge of the chair and lean into the microphone as I was sitting in the witness box. It was after the official lunch break when Uncle Earwax finally called me up to read in the testimony of Miroslav Janousek, night manager of the defendant’s garage.

  The judge didn’t have quite the vantage point I did from where I now sat, and I wondered if he had an inkling just how bored the jury appeared to be. The foreperson had a cheesy romance novel sticking out of the top of her purse at such an angle that if no one was watching, she could slip it, unnoticed, into her lap. Juror number three’s eyes were closed, his head lolling back over the top of his chair. I doubted that was how he listened. Number six, in rally cap and sweats, had an open bag of potato chips on the floor by his left sneaker and kept winking at me.

  My uncle had warned me not to state on the record that I was a professional actress. I was simply to say that I was Mr. Balzer’s secretary. Which was the truth, though not really the whole truth, so help me God.

  We began to read in the sworn testimony of Mr. Janousek, taken during his examination before trial. As coached by Uncle Earwax, I was careful not to obviously overemphasize any of the witness’s words, endeavoring to give as neutral a reading as possible. But after a few lines, the defense counsel jumped up from his chair and shouted, “Objection!”

  “Counsel will approach the bench,” the judge instructed. My uncle and his adversary, Harold Wilbur, came forward, speaking in hushed tones before the judge so the jury was unable to hear them clearly.

  “Your honor, Miss Finnegan is attempting to shade the testimony of defendant’s witness,” Mr. Wilbur said.

  “What’s wrong with it? She’s doing a straight reading of the deposition testimony, Your Honor,” my uncle replied disingenuously.

  “Your Honor, she’s reading the testimony with an accent,” Mr. Wilbur insisted. “That’s not a straight reading, in my opinion.”

  “The man is Czech,” Uncle Earwax countered. “So, she’s sounding like a Czech. It’s authentic. Why is that a problem?”

  The judge looked at me, then at the two attorneys standing before him. He ruminated for a few moments. Then he sighed and leaned forward. “Counselors, I’m going to admit to the two of you that this is the most entertainment I’ve had all trial. And at least it woke up the jury. However, in the interest of impartiality, I will agree with Mr. Wilbur that a female American secretary deepening her voice and reading Mr. Janousek’s testimony in an accent appropriate to the witness’s mother country is not, strictly speaking, a straight reading of the text.” The judge turned to me. “Miss Finnegan, from now on you will read in the witness’s testimony in your own voice and not attempt to be Meryl Streep.” He looked back at the attorneys and ordered my uncle to proceed.

  Phooey!

  I could see that he was displeased with the judge’s ruling. From his expression, I could tell that he was blaming me. And knowing Uncle Earwax as well as I do, if His Honor had ruled in our favor on my affecting the Czech accent, he would have been delighted with my gambit.

  As the reading wore on, with further interruptions from the exceptionally objectionable Mr. Wilbur, I kept trying to surreptitiously check Gram’s watch. It was my last chance to get to the Grandma Finnegan auditions. I tried to do the best I could with Mr. Janousek’s testimony, but my mind was on getting up to the Macdougal Street Theatre. The auditions had already been going on for a few hours.

  The judge raised his hand and indicated that Uncle Earwax should stop his questions. “Are we holding you up, Miss Finnegan? Do you need to catch a train? Obviously something is more important than this trial.”

  Oh, shit. Now you’ve done it, Alice. You’ll be held in contempt of court.

  “No, no. Everything’s fine, Your Honor,” I lied.

  At four-thirty, I was finally asked to step down from the witness stand. I dashed out of the courthouse and hailed a cab to take me up to the theater. My heart was racing. By the time I got there, I was drenched in a rather unattractive nervous sweat.

  I thought, mistakenly, that at this late hour there wouldn’t be too many actors left waiting to audition; I’d even worried that the producers might have decided to call it a day by now, despite what they’d advertised in Spotlight. I followed a handwritten sign to the theater’s lower lobby and surveyed the scene. There must have been about fifty people down there—sitting on the floor, chatting, propped up against their backpacks…the place looked like a bohemian railway station in the middle of the night.

  I looked for a sign-in sheet, and found it on a clipboard precariously perched atop the show’s main prop—an enormous mahogany casket with a shamrock carved into the slightly domed lid. I wrote my name in the next vacant slot, beside number 134. According to union rules, producers are required to see 120 people in a day of open call auditions. If they want to cut it off after that, it’s their prerogative. Since the ad stated that they were seeing people until seven P.M., I hoped they’d get to me. They were only up to number 88. I looked anxiously at Gram’s watch. It was 4:58.

  There wasn’t much to do but find a square foot or two of floor space and park myself. So much for my black suit looking crisp by the time I got upstairs to the stage.

  I took A Tale of Two Cities from my purse
and decided to skip the introduction and go straight to the first chapter. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. How depressing. And I couldn’t concentrate in this atmosphere, either, so I closed the book.

  It’s times like this when I wish I knew how to meditate. I needed a serious attitude adjustment after the Dalton trial. A stiff belt of whiskey might have done the trick just as well, but then I would have been in no shape to audition. I leaned against the wall by the casket and closed my eyes. Soon the voices of the other performers in the room became muted, as though I were hearing them from underwater—indistinct and far away. I have the same sensation when I’m lying in a dentist’s chair flying on nitrous oxide.

  Maybe I did fall asleep for a brief while. Or maybe my body had just shifted itself into neutral. I opened my eyes and looked at Gram’s watch: 5:11. Had I really been at the audition for only thirteen minutes? Roughly half the number of people who were there when I arrived still waited to be seen. This was good news. Maybe they were really moving things along upstairs.

  I stood up, flicked a bit of red and gold carpet lint off my black hosiery, did a couple of stretches to uncramp my back muscles, went to the ladies’ room, checked my makeup, and came back to my little spot. Then I decided it might be a good idea to give my photo and résumé a quick once-over in case there was something I wanted to be sure to mention to the producers and director once I got inside the auditorium.

  Feeling a touch of stage fright and nervous energy, I looked at my watch again: 5:11.

  That’s what it said the last time I’d checked it.

  “Excuse me,” I said to a guy lying on his stomach in front of the casket. He was sketching the two women chatting by the stairway. “Can you tell me what time it is?”

  He looked at his wrist. “Six-oh-five.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Not five-eleven.”

  The guy looked up at me. “’Fraid not. Hasn’t been five-eleven in fifty-four minutes.” He checked his watch again. “Make that fifty-five minutes.”

  “Hmnh.”

  That’s odd.

  Her battery probably died. I wondered if Gram realized that no one winds a watch anymore to get it back up and running. I removed the timepiece from my wrist and shook it vigorously like a thermometer, then gave the crystal a few sharp taps with my the pad of my index finger. The second hand began to move.

  And so did the actors on the line that snaked up the stairs to the theater.

  “We’re on number 129!” a disembodied voice called from the street level. “With 130 on deck!” Then a stage manager, clipboard in hand, emerged at the top of the stairs. “Everybody got that? So if your number is between 131 and 140, you should be lining yourselves up on the right side of the stairwell. Leave room for people to come back downstairs to claim their belongings. If you’ve got any personal property that you care about, take it with you,” she cautioned. “And please, people. I can’t say this enough. Make sure your cell phones and beepers are turned off. Our director has been known to tear them apart with his teeth when he hears them ring during his auditions.” She gave a little smile. “Just thought I’d share that!” she said happily.

  Don’t forget to breathe, Alice.

  I always do that, don’t I, right before I walk into an audition?

  Yup. And sometimes you forget to have fun, too. Go in there and cut loose. Throw yourself a party up on that stage.

  Number 133, a real off-the-boat Irish working-class type, left the theater, whistling and spinning his tweed cap on the tip of his finger. “They’re very nice in there,” he said reassuringly in a genuine brogue. He slapped my upper arm with the cap. “Break a leg, missy!”

  He’d made me smile, which was how I entered the theater. Suddenly I felt giddy, upbeat, in complete control. It was a first for me in such a situation. I introduced myself to the production staff, and Joey Moriarty, the show’s co-creator and director, made a joke about my surname. “Yes, I really have my own Grandma Finnegan,” I laughed. “But she’s very much alive and kicking. In fact, she can still do high kicks from her days on Florenz Ziegfeld’s chorus line. Gram’ll display her legs to anyone at the drop of a hat.” They seemed genuinely amused and intrigued, which really put me at ease. I felt like I was in the room with family, just shooting the breeze, so when they asked me what monologue I planned on performing for them, I had to take a pause to refocus my brain on the task at hand.

  “Monologue?” My stage fright returned. Their casting notice in Spotlight mentioned nothing about monologues.

  “You look terrified, Alice,” Joey remarked jovially.

  “Well, your ad didn’t say anything about preparing a speech, so I figured—mistakenly—” I added, trying to make a joke out of my predicament, “that you’d have sides from the script, or throw me an improv or something.”

  “The throwing-you-an-improv part comes after the monologue,” Joey chuckled.

  “Does it matter what kind of play it’s from?” I asked him. “Because the only thing I can remember off the top of my head is Shakespeare. It’s from a comedy, at least!”

  Joey leaned back in his chair and squinted at me. “Shakespeare?”

  I shrugged apologetically.

  “Grandma Finnegan’s Wake is kind of a quirky show,” he said. “Haven’t you got anything quirky?”

  Think, Alice, think.

  Under the “special skills” section of my theatrical résumé, I list my ability to mimic various celebrities. It’s the same skill that the character of Fionulla Finnegan employed to win on Star Search.

  “Okay!” I told the auditors. “I’m going to give you thirty seconds of the Midsummer Night’s Dream scene in the forest between the rivals Hermia and Helena, as though they were being performed by Fran Drescher as The Nanny and Gilda Radner as Lisa Loopner.”

  I’d never pulled this stunt before. I was totally flying by the seat of my pants, but I threw myself into it without looking back, forgetting that there was anyone else in the room. At the end of my half minute, Joey and his staff were cracking up while I fought to catch my breath.

  “All right, you’ve earned your improv,” he told me. He looked down at my résumé. “Which role were you interested in?”

  “FiFi,” I said unhesitatingly.

  Joey looked at his producers. I couldn’t read his thoughts. “Do you sing?’

  I nodded.

  “Do you know ‘Danny Boy’?”

  “How can someone surnamed Finnegan not know it?” I kidded. “Do you want me to sing it straight?”

  “Well, FiFi does it practically to a disco beat with her cousins the No Commitments playing backup for her. But you’ll have to sing a capella this evening. Any other stars you can imitate?”

  “Singing, you mean? I can do Julie Andrews, Ethel Merman, Stevie Nicks…Janis Joplin when I’ve had enough tequila and the rare cigarette or seven…I’m not too sure it’s a pretty sight.”

  “Surprise us.” Joey gestured to the mike stand. “You can use the mike if you want. It’s live, so go for it.”

  I tossed off the black suit jacket and took center stage in my tight gold lamé tank top and black miniskirt.

  Fionulla Finnegan, here I come!

  I figured I’d totally strafe my vocal cords if I started out with Ethel, and I can only do Janis when I’m totally wasted, so I started out with Julie and her perfectly orotund vowel sounds, segued on the next verse to Stevie’s node-induced dreamlike throatiness, then ended with Ethel’s klaxon contralto, which couldn’t have been performed at a volume any lower than earsplitting. I was afraid the plaster would start falling from the ceiling.

  It was the most fun I’d ever had at an audition. It felt more like cutting loose at a cast party instead.

  Joey complimented my work, then said we were going to bring it down a notch. “Have you ever seen the show?” he asked me.

  “Back
when it first opened,” I admitted.

  “Well, Fionulla’s got a scripted speech where she eulogizes Grandma Finnegan, and then, if you remember, everything sort of degenerates, and her relatives start accusing her of turning the memorial into something about herself instead. I’d like you to try the top of the speech for me, if you would, Alice. The part before all hell breaks loose.” Joey looked over at his stage manager and asked her if she had the page of text in her folder of audition material.

  The stage manager leafed through the envelope and shook her head. “I don’t know what happened to it,” she said apologetically. “I know we had a couple of copies. People must have walked away with them.”

  Joey sighed and ran his hand through his hair. He thought for a moment or two, making a nervous clucking sound with his tongue, clicking it against the roof of his mouth. He turned to the producers, exchanged a couple of whispered sentences which I couldn’t make out no matter how hard I tried to eavesdrop, then looked back at me.

  “I know we’re making you jump through hoops of fire here, Alice.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” I said cheerfully. “I’m having a blast.” And I was.

  “I just want to see if you can do the shift in tone,” the director said. “You don’t seem to have trouble with the outrageous, egotistical aspects of FiFi’s personality, but I’d like to know how you would handle the opening remarks of the eulogy. Can you just, on your feet, give me a minute or so in that vein? Don’t try to remember what Fionulla actually says in the show; I don’t need the exact lines. Just the flavor.”

  “Can I have a second to switch gears?” I strode over to the corner of the stage where I’d left my black jacket.

  As I slowly fastened the four brass buttons, I thought about the task immediately ahead of me. It was going to be the hardest thing I’d ever had to do, onstage or off. I was about to draw on every ounce of life experience and every minute of acting training to eulogize the only Grandma Finnegan I’d ever known.