8
“JELLICLE SONGS FOR JELLICLE CATS”
Cats
1982. Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics based on Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot, additional lyrics by Trevor Nunn and Richard Stilgoe
By the following Saturday they were no closer to figuring out Ian’s maddening clue, but it was a special Saturday nevertheless. It was Philip’s sixteenth birthday, and Emily was the only person who remembered.
This was not entirely true, but Philip wished it were. Early that morning the fax machine in Philip’s mother’s bedroom had spit out a page from Wilmington, but it was too garbled to read more than “H py B th ay lv Mo.” For some reason Philip found this depressing.
Mark, cheaply, had made Philip a fake ID and left it on his pillow. Philip stashed it in his sock drawer; he didn’t want it but at least it wasn’t some awful mocking present, like a Village People CD. And not Philip’s father but the second Mrs. Nebbling had sent a card from Seattle, where they now lived. “Best wishes from me and Dad,” she’d written. Mr. Nebbling had not signed his own name. The ten-dollar bill inside the card wasn’t even the crisp new kind people usually give, but a thin and tattered one that had lived inside many different wallets since leaving the mint.
“Intermission M&M’s are on me today,” Philip said to Emily as he smoothed the bill flat against his thigh. They were on the train, heading westbound into the city. “Or maybe I should use it to buy a car. Tough choice.”
“Your dad married a jerk,” Emily said, staring out the window at the familiar landscape of small, weathered houses and abandoned automobile tires. There were plenty of really swank houses on Long Island, but not along the train tracks. Emily wanted to say something else, to comfort or at least distract Philip from this abomination of a birthday card and the fact that his father was the real jerk for moving across the country and starting a garlic farm with his new hippy-dippy wife, thus rendering him unable to pay more than a token amount in child support. (The first and last time Philip had gone to Seattle for a visit he’d had an anxiety attack at the top of the Space Needle, and now he was skittish about heights. The smell of garlic had also become a problem.)
“So, Philip,” she said, with her most winning smile, “what do you think we should do when we get to the city?”
Philip shifted in his seat. “I dunno. How about we wait on line for rush tickets to Aurora?” He was trying to sound playful, but it fell flat. “You know, try something new!”
Emily reached into her Aurora messenger bag. “Well, we could do that,” she said, “but then what would we do with these?” She took a slim, rectangular envelope out of her bag and handed it to Philip, who was genuinely astonished.
Inside were two full-price Aurora tickets, one hundred dollars each. Eighth-row center orchestra, the best seats in the house. A special birthday treat, purchased months in advance by Emily with a painstakingly accumulated nest egg of babysitting money and a little boost from Grandma Rose. She really was very good at keeping secrets.
“Emileeeeeeeeeee,” he cried, hugging her hard. “You are the best, best, best, best!”
“I know,” she said, very pleased. “I am.”
It was a delicious kind of fun for Emily and Philip to saunter past all the regulars on the rush ticket line, after a long lazy browse through the cast album section at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square.
“You guys are so late!” called Ruthie, from the line. “You’ll never get a ticket now!” Ruthie was in her fifties and worked as a paralegal during the week, but on Saturday mornings she put on a push-up bustier, red satin hot pants, and a crazy-quilt poncho with matching floppy hat and waited for Aurora tickets with her boyfriend, Morris, who was nowhere to be seen at the moment.
Philip merely grinned, but Emily couldn’t resist waving the pair of hundred-dollar orchestra seat tickets in front of Ruthie’s nose.
“Smell you!” Ruthie squealed. “You musta got a good report card or something.”
“It’s a special occasion,” Emily said. “It’s Philip’s birth—”
“Hey!” It was Morris, heading toward them with the limping, rolling, bowlegged walk of a peg-legged pirate. He carried two cups of coffee in the Edison’s signature take-out cardboard cups, which bore the dual masks of comedy and tragedy, each savoring a cup of joe. Comedy seemed to like the coffee; tragedy, not so much.
Morris did not dress in Aurora costume, thank goodness. He was a grizzled phone company retiree, a cantankerous theatre freak who’d seen every show since Porgy and Bess and held violently strong opinions about all of them.
“Damn, Ruthie,” he called as he approached. “This toe is killing me. I hope whatever show it is posts a notice soon—”But when he saw Emily and Philip, he stopped.
“Hey, Morris,” said Philip. “Seen anything good lately?” It was a joke, since they all knew Morris went to the theatre constantly and hated everything, which apparently only fueled his desire to see more. (Emily had once questioned the logic of this, and Morris explained that bad shows demonstrated the Pringles Effect: they tasted kind of gross, but in a way that made you want to keep eating.)
“Don’t mess with me,” Morris growled. “I’m in pain.”
“It’s the Toe,” Ruthie explained in a hushed voice. “The Closing Toe.”
Emily and Philip looked confused.
“Whenever a show’s about to close, the Toe swells up and hurts like the devil,” Morris said. “It came on me all of a sudden, ’bout eight o’clock this morning.”
“The longer the show’s been running, the more it hurts,” Ruthie added. “When they announced Cats was finally closing, my baby could hardly walk for a week.”
“Thorn in your paw, huh?” The Closing Toe concept was so beyond even the normal insanity of Broadway that Philip couldn’t resist being fresh. Teasing Morris required delicacy, though, because his temper was easy to provoke. One time he and another guy on the rush line got into a shoving match over whether or not Bernadette Peters was miscast in the revival of Annie Get Your Gun, and they wouldn’t stop even after the police were called.
“Go ahead and mock,” growled Morris. “The Toe has never been wrong.”
“Thorn in your paw, that’s pretty funny,” Emily whispered to Philip.
“It’s a jellicle joke,” Philip whispered back. “For jellicle cats.” Emily had to bite her lip not to crack up.
“Thanks for the java, baby,” Ruthie said, taking her coffee and dropping a kiss on Morris’s nose. “So what’d you think of that play last night at Soho Rep?”
“Preposterous,” Morris declared. “The dramatic structure was all over the map. Avant-garde? Avant-crap, more like it . . .”
Morris’s diatribe filled Emily’s mind with a thought that seemed so incontrovertibly right she couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to her before. Who were the crankiest theatre cranks she knew? SAVEMEFROMAURORA and Morris, of course! Could they be one and the same?
“You!” she said, unable to control herself. “You should be ashamed of yourself, hassling kids on the Internet!”
“Keep it down!” said Morris, looking around in a panic. “Watch what you say, little girl! The cops are everywhere. Now what the hell are you talking about?”
“You know what I mean,” said Emily, in a quieter but still insistent voice. “You know exactly what I mean. SAVEME.”
“SAVEME? You mean that loudmouthed misanthrope who hangs around the Broadway chat rooms, spewing bile and vitriol?” Morris looked genuinely hurt. “And you think that’s me?”
“My Morris is an idealist,” said Ruthie. “A man of high standards! That’s why I wuv him.” Morris blushed, and Ruthie started crooning in his ear: “Never be enough! My love for you will never be enough!”
Emily didn’t know whether to apologize or keep pressing, but she didn’t get the chance to do either because a box office staff member started yelling instructions at the rush line, as if everyone didn’t already know the drill.
“Hey,” said Morris. “How come you guys aren’t on the line? You lose your spot?”
“We already have tickets,” said Philip.
“Eighth-row orchestra,” said Emily proudly. “It’s Philip’s birthday. He’s sixteen today.”
Ruthie gave Philip a hug, but Morris turned away, wincing. He gingerly put a little weight on his foot. “Getting worse,” he muttered. “Feels like a three-year run, at least.”
Silly Broadway, thought Emily fondly, with its Pringles Effect, prophetic toes, and strange, superstitious rituals. Ian had long ago explained to Emily and Philip how you were never supposed to say “good luck” to an actor (it was bad luck; instead you said “break a leg” or “merde”). Even worse was to mention Shakespeare’s Mac—well, the Scottish Play, as it was always called, because to say the play’s name was to invoke a mysterious curse that often caused scenery to collapse upon actors, theatres to burn down, or other, often fatal mishaps to befall the production.
Emily’s favorite Broadway tradition was the Gypsy Robe. She’d never seen it, but her understanding was that it was basically a decorated bathrobe, presented by the chorus of one show to that of another show before curtain on opening night. Each show added its own memento to the robe—a flower from the leading lady’s hat, or an autographed patch of fabric from a costume—and awarded it to the gypsy with the most Broadway credits.
Sometimes Emily imagined herself receiving the robe and being crowned Queen of the Gypsies, traipsing from dressing room to dressing room and wishing everyone merde, merde, merde. It would be a royal feeling indeed.
For now, though, it was special enough to be downstairs in the orchestra section, instead of up in the balcony where they usually sat. Emily knew the Rialto Theatre like the back of her hand, but she let the usher direct her to her seat. It made her feel like a princess.
“Thank you,” she said to the usher, distinctly, like Audrey Hepburn, as she was handed her Playbill. “Thank you so much.”
There was much to look at, in those sacred moments before an Aurora performance began. The Rialto was an ornate relic from a bygone age, meticulously restored, its cavernous ceiling bedecked with cherubs and angels, gilded harps and carved medallions. What mad genius could imagine such a place? Sometimes Emily and Philip would just sit there gazing upward, wordlessly nudging each other and pointing at some freshly noticed detail.
“Cell phone?” Philip asked.
“Got it,” said Emily. “Happy birthday, Philip.”
“Emily,” he said, full of feeling. “Thank you so much.”
The lights started to dim, and Emily wondered if she might give Philip an impulsive birthday kiss. If Stephanie could do it, why couldn’t she? But before she could decide, the houselights faded to black. A moment later the overture began; as for the kiss—she’d forgotten almost completely about it.
9
“SIXTEEN GOING ON SEVENTEEN”
The Sound of Music
1959. Music by Richard Rodgers,
lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II,
book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse
Maybe it was the awesome seats or a whiff of birthday magic, but that performance of Aurora was inarguably the best they’d ever seen. The audience was transported: laughing uproariously at the funny parts, gasping with surprise at the plot twists, and melting into tears at the point in the story where Aurora, despite the disapproval of her friends and family and the increasing difficulties posed by her own mysterious illness, sacrifices everything for one last chance at happiness with Enrique, the endearing yet chronically unreliable love of her life.
Enrique was no longer being played by the original performer, but by a big-name teen heartthrob more famous for being the lead singer in a boy band than for any kind of serious acting. Today it didn’t matter who played the part, though, because Marlena Ortiz was on fire. She was Aurora, and Aurora was her, and the boy-band star sobbed real tears onstage as Marlena looked tenderly into his eyes and sang:
“Never be enough,
Ten thousand nights would never be enough . . .”
Emily and Philip hugged each other for a long time after the curtain call was done (it seemed to last forever; no one wanted to stop clapping). They hugged and hugged and none of the people waiting to get out of their row minded, because everyone was feeling the same way.
Getting autographs at the stage door had become part of their Aurora ritual since the first preview. By now Emily and Philip knew the doorman by name, and the cast members slapped them high fives as they dashed out to their postshow lives.
“Philip! Emily! Darrrrrlings!”
Stephanie exploded from the stage door and sang out their names like a melody. She gave Philip an extraspecial smile.
“The show was unbelievable today, Stephanie,” Emily burbled. Even though she knew Stephanie was an ordinary, flawed, and somewhat potty-mouthed human being in real life, there was something so thrilling about watching her emerge from the theatre after a show. It made Emily feel hyper, nervous, badly dressed—starstruck, though she hated to admit it. “The audience went nuts.”
“I know,” Stephanie said, in a confidential tone. “There was a rumor backstage that some Hollywood people were here to see Marlena. She sure turned on the juice, didn’t she?”
Philip held his pen and Playbill out to Stephanie. She laughed and said, “I feel kinda stupid giving you my autograph, since we’re such good friends now.” Stephanie waggled her eyebrows suggestively. “Special friends, right, Phil?”
Nobody called Philip “Phil” except his mother and Mark, but when Stephanie said the name it was a whole different thing. Philip blushed and grinned. “It’s his birthday!” Emily explained, elbowing him in the ribs. “We want the whole cast to sign the Playbill with today’s date on it.”
“I’ve got everybody but you and Marlena,” said Philip.
“I know,” giggled Stephanie. “We’re always the slowpokes.” She signed her name really big, right on the cover of his Playbill. “Whoops! Guess I didn’t leave much room for Marlena. Birthday, huh?” She handed him back his Sharpie. “That explains why you’re looking so very handsome and grown-up today.”
Stephanie stepped close to Philip, who only now realized what was coming his way and was instantly grateful for the breath mint he’d been sucking on during the second act.
“Happy birthday, baby,” Stephanie said. She stretched up on tippy-toe and kissed Philip three times: once on each cheek, and once more, very gently—here Emily got embarrassed and had to look away—on the lips. “I wish I could party with you guys but I have a dinner date before the second show—you know how it is!”
Philip felt like he might be having an out-of-body experience, which was a shame, since this was the most fun his body had had in a while. “Thank you,” he managed to croak. He didn’t dare look at Emily.
“Good night!” Stephanie kept waving to them as she trotted to the curb in her fur-trimmed, high-heeled boots. A taxi was waiting for her. “Make sure he has a good time!” she yelled to Emily.
“I will,” Emily tried to call back, but it didn’t come out loudly enough for anyone to hear. She had a weird feeling in the pit of her stomach. Behind her, Marlena Ortiz had just stepped out the stage door. Everyone was screaming and Philip had already turned his attention to getting the star’s autograph on his Playbill.
If he wants a birthday kiss from Marlena, he can ask for it himself, Emily thought, in an uncharacteristically snappish way. Usually she would push to the front of the crowd to say hi to Marlena, but this time she stayed where she was.
As she stood there, glowering with a kind of irritation she couldn’t quite name, she saw Morris limping with determination toward Eighth Avenue, like an escaped convict with a ball and chain still shackled to his leg.
“Wait!” Emily yelled, dashing into the street. She was nothing if not impulsive. “Morris, wait up!” Fearlessly dodging traffic, Emily zigzagged between the honking cars until she caught up wit
h him.
“I just wanted to apologize for thinking you were SAVEME,” Emily said, blocking his path and placing her hand on his arm.
Morris waved her away with his gnarled, nicotine-stained fingers. “I don’t lose sleep about what other people think,” he said. “I have my own thoughts to occupy me.”
“I guess it was dumb.” Emily sighed. “I just really wish I knew who he was. He bugs me.”
“Get a life, honey,” Morris said, not unkindly. “Then you’ll forget all about it. Now I gotta go, Ruthie’s working the night shift at her law firm and I’m on my way to Don’t Tell Mama—the pianist starts at five.”
“I was wondering,” Emily said before he could bolt, “if you could give me some advice about this paper I have to write? For school?” Mr. Henderson had given her until Monday for her revised persuasive essay; she still had no clue what to put in it, but one good rant from Morris and she’d have enough material to argue her case before the Supreme Court. “I had this idea that tickets to Broadway shows should be free, you know? But my teacher asked me to figure out how that might work, so I thought I would ask someone with a lot of experience, and I realized you were probably the most knowledgeable person there is when it comes to Broadway.”
“If you think flattery is gonna get me to do your homework for you,” growled Morris, “you are barking up the wrong—”
“Emileeeeeeeeeee!” It was Ian’s familiar tenor, carrying Mermanesquely above the din of Forty-fourth Street. He ran over to them, breathless and upset. “Oh. My. God. I have to tell you something. I think it’s bad but I’m not sure.”
“Whatever you heard—ouch!—why not keep it to yourself, kid?” Morris winced and rubbed his foot.
Ian ignored Morris and spoke urgently to Emily. “I got this e-mail, from my ‘friend.’ The one sur la plage. The one who knows things.”
“The Actors’ Chapel is on West Forty-eighth!” thundered Morris as he hopped on one foot in agony. “Tell your secrets to the Great Casting Director Upstairs!”
My Life Page 5
