The Fat Lady Sings

by Lovett, Charlie

  I’m ready a half hour before Cameron comes to pick me up, so I call Karl and we talk and he makes me feel better. He always does that. I’m actually on the verge of telling him all about Cynthia Pirelli and the cast list and what a crappy week it’s been when he gets paged to go deliver a baby.

  Cameron picks me up last, and we settle down for a production meeting as he pulls onto the interstate. I don’t say anything about the script, because I don’t want a repeat of yesterday. There is just this unspoken agreement that there will be a script and we will find a way to produce it. In the absence of a title, story, or concept, we refer to this groundbreaking piece of theatre simply as “it.”

  “I’ve been asking around very quietly,” says Elliot, “and I’ve already found a dozen actors who would be willing to be in it. And for each one of them there are two or three more I haven’t talked to yet.”

  “I’ve got a crew recruited from people who aren’t working on Dolly,” says Suzanne. I’m starting to feel a little guilty that I didn’t work on the script last night, with all these people now standing by to produce my work.

  “So we have a cast and crew,” says Cameron. “What else do we need?”

  “Well,” says Suzanne, pulling out a notebook. “I’ve been crunching some numbers. It’s mostly guesswork, of course, because I don’t know exactly what our technical requirements will be, but it’s a ballpark.”

  “What’s a ballpark?” says Cameron.

  “The budget,” says Suzanne.

  I don’t think it had occurred to any of the rest of us that we would need actual money to put on a show. I mean, we have talent, enthusiasm, and manpower — that was enough for Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, wasn’t it?

  “First of all, we need a space. Rehearsing and performing in the same space would be ideal, but probably not practical, so I’m assuming we can do early rehearsals in a classroom or someplace free before we move into the rented space.”

  “Rented?” says Elliot.

  “They don’t give out theatre space for free,” says Suzanne. “Now, I’m assuming a small budget for costumes, but we’ll need some money for sets, and even if I can boost a few things from school we’ll need to rent some lighting and sound equipment. Then there’s printing costs for sheet music, programs, tickets, advertising — “

  “How much are we talking about?” asks Cameron.

  “You want to be better than Dolly, right?” says Suzanne.

  “Damn right,” I say.

  “I figure five thousand is a pretty reasonable budget.”

  “Five thousand dollars!” says Cameron.

  “Did you think theatre was free?” says Suzanne.

  “But we don’t have five thousand dollars,” I say. “We don’t have five hundred dollars.”

  “What if we perform outdoors during the day? Like Shakespeare did,” says Elliot. “That would cut out a lot of expense.”

  “Is that really what you want?” asks Suzanne.

  “No!” we all three respond together.

  “So where are we going to get five thousand dollars?” I say.

  “Bake sale?” says Cameron.

  “That would be one serious bake sale,” I say.

  “Car wash?” says Cameron.

  “We raise the money the same way they do in the real world,” says Elliot.

  “How’s that?” I ask.

  “First we do everything we can to cut the budget, and I’ve got a few ideas about that.”

  “And then?” says Suzanne.

  “Then we look for investors,” says Elliot.

  “And where are you going to find investors for an amateur unauthorized production of a show that hasn’t been written yet by a high school student no one has ever heard of?” I ask.

  “Leave that to me,” says Elliot, and suddenly the conversation is over and we’re sitting there in silence, watching the guardrail tick by.

  “I can’t wait until eight o’clock,” says Cameron.

  “What happens at eight o’clock?” I ask.

  “Hello!” says Cameron. “Wicked!”

  “Well, sorry I don’t know the show as well as you do,” I say. “Which number is a half hour in?”

  “What do you mean a half hour in?” says Cameron.

  “You said you couldn’t wait until eight o’clock, and the show starts at seven-thirty, so I just wondered — “

  “The show starts at seven-thirty?” screams Cameron.

  “Yeah,” I say. “What’s the big deal?”

  “I can’t get to Ovens Auditorium by seven-thirty,” says Cameron. “I thought it started at eight o’clock.”

  “I told you seven-thirty!” I shriek.

  “You didn’t!” yells Cameron. “How could I possibly get there by seven-thirty when we didn’t leave until six?”

  “I don’t know how long it takes to get places,” I say. It’s true. I think it’s because I don’t have my own car. I just don’t pay attention when someone else is driving.

  “Seven-thirty!” says Cameron. “Oh, this is just great.”

  “Well, if you had asked,” I yell back at him, “then we could have — “

  “Aggie. Cameron,” says Elliot, firmly enough to shut us both up (although you can probably see the steam coming out of our ears). “Stop yelling. Aggie, you calm down. Cameron, you speed.”

  And so he does. I cross my arms over my chest and sulk and Cameron drives like a madman, weaving in and out of traffic, and the atmosphere in the car is very awkward. Normally I would be yelling at Cameron to slow down and be careful if he were driving like this, but now I just sit there scowling at him and sloshing around in the back seat every time he switches lanes. If he ruins this for me I will never forgive him.

  We skid into the parking lot at exactly seven-thirty and Elliot yells that professional theatre always starts seven minutes late. We sprint across the parking lot — even though I’m fat, my field hockey legs don’t fail me and I’m the first one to get to the ticket barrier. From the empty lobby we can hear a voice in the theatre telling people to turn off their cell phones and then we’re careening down the aisle and crawling over six obviously annoyed people (hey, I don’t blame them, I hate people who get to the theatre late).

  The music starts the second our butts hit the seats, and I’m instantly not mad at Cameron anymore and he’s not mad at me and we’re all holding hands and tensed with excitement and then — oh my god! I’m sitting between Cameron and Elliot, and we hold hands all the way through the act. Elliot grabs my hand again during Act II, which is fine with me because I really feel the need to be connected to someone. Because here’s the deal — I am Elphaba.

  I mean, I used to think I was Annie — the rejected child who finds a man who understands her (not that Karl is anything like Daddy Warbucks, but you get the idea), but sitting in that theatre watching this epic unfold, I realize that I’ve grown up now, and I’m Elphaba. “Green” might as well be a code word for fat.

  In case you’re one of the six people in the world who doesn’t know anything about Wicked, Elphaba is the “wicked” witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, only this story is not told from the point of view of the meddlesome little brat from Kansas.

  Elphaba is smart and talented, but she’s also green, and nobody at school likes her because she looks different. And then there is this pretty girl who everybody does like — well, you get the idea. I am Elphaba. Of course Elphaba and Galinda (the pretty one) end up being friends, which I really don’t see happening with me and Cynthia. So when Elphaba sings “The Wizard and I,” about her dreams for the future, I cry. When she sings “Defying Gravity,” about how she’s going to succeed on her own terms, I cry. And in the second act — well, I don’t want to give anything away, but let’s just say that Cameron had to pass me tissues when I ran out.

  It’s not just that I feel connected to Elphaba, though. The show is transporting. I don’t know any other way to put it. I’ve had amazing nights at the theatre in the pa
st, but nothing like this that grabbed my heart in the first scene and never let go. I call Karl from the lobby at intermission to thank him and tell him how amazing the show is. He says the delivery went well, and I think that only people with a new, healthy baby could be happier than I am right now.

  When it’s over I have to stay in my seat crying for a while (I think Elliot and Cameron are crying too, they’re just trying to hide it; Suzanne and I are letting it flow). It’s such a fantastic feeling, to be completely emotionally overwhelmed by something that is, let’s face it, make believe. All the endorphins and none of the personal anguish. I’m not going to be one of those people who sobs her way through the lobby, though, so I wait a few minutes until the wave of tears passes, give Suzanne a quick hug, and head up the aisle after the boys.

  But as we’re pushing through the crowd in the lobby I see a girl about my age just standing there bawling and I happen to catch her eye and as soon as I do it hits me again and I can’t do anything to stop it and the next thing I know I’m in the arms of this total stranger who isn’t even fat, and we’re crying and crying and holding on to each other for dear life.

  God, I love the theatre.

  I always make the move between parents (also known as the week’s most awkward moment) on Saturdays, so Cameron drops me at Dad and Karl’s long after they’ve gone to sleep. On Sunday morning several items are staring up at me from my desk: an unfinished sheet of math homework, a pile of monologues for my UNC School of the Arts audition (I still haven’t decided which ones to do), and the blank paper that I brought from Mom’s and left there to inspire me to write a play (oops, I mean a musical comedy). Before I can face any of them I need food and caffeine, so I follow the smell of coffee into the sunroom.

  Dad and Karl worship at the Holy Sepulcher of fresh bagels and the Sunday New York Times, and by the time I get up Dad has devoured the Sports section, Karl has finished the crossword, and the two of them are slowly leafing through Sunday Styles and Real Estate. Like he does whenever I’m there, Karl has set aside Arts & Leisure for me to read first. I give him a huge hug and thank him again for the tickets. The imprint of the show on me is still so raw it’s hard to talk about, but I promise him a full report soon. Then I curl up on the couch with theatre reviews and a warm everything bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee, and even though we live in suburban North Carolina, I feel like I’m on the Upper West Side. I love Sunday mornings with Dad and Karl.

  It’s different at Mom’s house. When I was a little kid, for some reason she thought I ought to go to Sunday School (she was a non-practicing Jew, but don’t ask me to figure out her logic). She would drop me off at this Methodist church and I would walk in the front door and out the back into the “Memorial Garden,” where I would read a book until she came back an hour later. Eventually she caught on and stopped making me go, but still, Sundays at Mom’s have always been awkward.

  With Dad and Karl, though, Sundays are about reading the paper, drinking coffee, getting help on homework, and talking to Karl about theatre while Dad watches a game on TV. Never the slightest threat of religion.

  When we did Godspell last year, Mr. Parkinson asked what everybody’s religion was (we’re a private school, so he can get away with that). “It doesn’t matter to me,” he said, “but I think if we’re doing a musical about Jesus, it would help us all to know where everyone is coming from.” He says things like that — “can you dig where I’m coming from?” I think he’s stuck in 1969 or something. I didn’t feel like explaining that my mom is a lapsed Jew and my dad is agnostic, so I don’t believe in God, but I feel guilty about it. “Lapsed Jewnostic” didn’t sound quite right, so when it was my turn, I went with “apathetic.” I think Melissa Parsons thought it was some sort of Buddhist sect.

  After a long, luxurious session of therapy with coffee and the Sunday Times, I decide I’d better get some work done. With Wicked still fresh in my mind, I can’t face learning a monologue; the math homework is hopeless without help from Cynthia (Dad is a car salesman who says he “leaves the math to the folks in finance,” and Karl claims he doesn’t remember anything after Algebra 2); so I decide to take another shot at the script. I pull out the pages from Thursday night to see if there’s anything I can use. They were right — it is overly melodramatic and unintentionally humorous. Funny how that can be so blindingly obvious to me now when the script seemed so deep and meaningful when I first wrote it.

  So what have I got? I’ve got two characters: one fat, one thin. One of them is talented, the other skates by on beauty. One is deep and thoughtful, the other is shallow and self-centered. And in this draft, they both take themselves way too seriously for a musical comedy. Then it hits me like a ton of bricks — even before I saw Wicked, I was writing Wicked. And how does Wicked handle the exact same situation? The two characters become friends.

  So it’s a comedy. And the people who shouldn’t like each other do like each other; or at least they like each other by the end — the fat girl and the prom queen. And hey, this is fiction — it doesn’t mean I have to be friends with Cynthia Pirelli.

  And so I set to work, and now I’m doing a kind of writing I’ve never done before. I’m not just letting the words flow unfiltered from my subconscious to the paper; I’m questioning every word. I’m reading dialogue aloud to see if it sounds natural. I’m rewriting and editing and throwing away phrases, speeches, even whole pages.

  This isn’t a way to relax — it’s hard work, and that would depress me if I didn’t feel that for the first time in my life, I’m actually being a real writer.

  “So what do you think?” says Elliot.

  “I think it’s possibly haunted, probably rat infested, and definitely sketchy,” I say.

  “But it’s free,” says Elliot.

  “So is typhoid,” says Cameron.

  “The electricity is still hooked up,” says Suzanne, flipping on a switch.

  “I know, right,” says Elliot. “It’s perfect.”

  “You have a very warped concept of what constitutes perfect,” I say.

  We are standing in a vast cavern of a room, or what used to be a room, in a long-abandoned sock factory. To me it looks like an accident waiting to happen. To Elliot, self-appointed keeper of our budget, such as it is, it’s a rehearsal hall. At the far end there are gaping holes in the roof where water drips through. The paint is peeling from the walls, the floor is covered in grime, bare wires hang from the ceiling, and some rusted out pieces of machinery are lurking in the corners.

  “Don’t go past that column,” says Elliot, “the floor is falling through in some places.”

  “Delightful,” I say.

  “Look,” says Elliot, “I know it’s not perfect and it does kind of smell like fifty-year-old socks, but it’s unlocked, there’s never anyone here, and there’s a parking lot at the church across the street.”

  Cameron has been pacing out the floor, trying to see if there is a rectangle the size of a stage that doesn’t have any holes in it — not that we know what size our stage will be because we still haven’t found a performance space.

  “Well,” he says, “rehearsing in here will be seriously uncomfortable, potentially dangerous, and almost certainly illegal. When do we start?”

  “We can have auditions as soon as Aggie gives us a script,” says Elliot, “or even part of a script.”

  It’s been a week and a half since Wicked, and I’ve barely done any homework that whole time. I’ve been writing and rewriting and editing and writing some more. If I were at Mom’s house my floor would be ankle-deep in discarded pages — Mom never comes into my room, so what does she care. But Mom wanted to “switch weeks” this week. She does that sometimes when she “just doesn’t have enough energy” for me — it’s so nice to be loved. So I’ve been at Dad’s this whole time. There it’s a little different, because the house is decorated within an inch of its life (surprise, surprise) and no room is exempt from Karl’s obsessive cleanliness. In the end I d
idn’t use any of my first draft, but now I have about fifty pages of script. I’m not completely satisfied with it, but it does feel like it might be on its way to becoming a show.

  Even though it’s not always laugh-out-loud funny, I think it is a comedy now — though there are certainly poignant moments, too. Poignant, but not melodramatic, I hope. It turns out that by making Aggie and the cheerleader friends (yes, I named the main character after myself — lame, I know, especially since I hate my name), I’m no longer attacking the issue of Aggie’s insecurity about her weight head-on — which is what got me in trouble before with that over-the-top speech in the lunch room. I’m not avoiding the issue, I’m just approaching it more obliquely, allowing it to slip out in a series of songs and scenes and even in Aggie’s big monologue when Suzy (she’s the skinny cheerleader friend) takes Aggie to the spa for the day. I’m hoping this speech is now less Tennessee Williams and more Christopher Durang. (Can you tell from that last paragraph that I’ve been working on my SAT vocabulary? Poignant. Oblique. Pretty good, I think.)

  “I’ve gotten a lot written,” I say. “The problem is I still don’t have a real story — just this series of moments in the friendship between the prom queen and the fat girl.”

  “So what if there’s no story,” says Cameron. “Company doesn’t have a story. Why not take a risk? Make it a concept musical.”

  “Yeah,” says Elliot, “a concept musical.”

  “A concept musical?” I say, doubtfully. “Are you comparing me to Stephen Sondheim?”

  “If you’re gonna steal an idea,” says Cameron, “you might as well steal from the best.”

  “Look,” says Elliot, “why don’t you just give us what you’ve got and we’ll start to work. You can always make changes if you need to, but we have to start somewhere.” Elliot is now calling himself the “producer” of this as-yet-unnamed extravaganza. Cameron is lyricist and director; Suzanne is designer and technical director, and I am playwright and star.

  “OK,” I say, pulling a sheaf of papers out of my bag and handing them to Eliot. “But this time I don’t want to be around when you read it.”