Jack & Louisa: Act 1

by Andrew Keenan-Bolger

  We were all Musical Theater Nerds (MTNs, for short). We wore this title with pride at CCU, where for one perfect week, obsessing over how high Idina Menzel belted in Wicked was not only acceptable, it was encouraged. We could debate endlessly about whether the original-cast recording of The Last Five Years was better than the movie-cast recording (it was), and no one looked at us as if we were weird. We didn’t have to convince one another that Into the Woods was sacred. Everyone at CCU knew that it was.

  It’s not like I didn’t have friends at home; I did. But no one appreciated the things I was passionate about, certainly not with the same intensity. Even my closest friend, Jenny, who’d been taking ballet since she was five, kind of zoned out if I went on for too long about Kristin Chenoweth’s impeccable comic timing.

  There were the Shaker Heights Community Players, who had cast me as Amaryllis in their production of The Music Man last fall, but they were all much older than me. (Even the role of Winthrop, the little boy who sings “Gary, Indiana,” had been given to Amy Judd, a petite fifteen-year-old girl with short hair.) I’d had a lot of fun doing the show with the Players, but I didn’t really consider any of them my friends—it’s not like I would have invited any of them over to hang out at my house. (Though Amy Judd did babysit me once when my parents went out for their anniversary.) Besides, the musical they’d chosen to do this fall was Chess, and there were definitely no roles for kids my age.

  • • •

  “I wish—”

  I was snapped to attention by the crystal-clear voice of Little Red Riding Hood, played by Danielle Ferland.

  My parents were discussing what to do for dinner, and I shushed them.

  “Just till this part’s over,” I said, “please.” And then I couldn’t help but sing along.

  “It’s not for me

  It’s for my granny

  In the woods

  A loaf of bread, please”

  Having listened to the album so many times, I knew every word, every inflection, every breath that Danielle Ferland took, and I made sure to match her as best I could.

  “You really do sound just like her, Loulou,” my mom said once the solo was finished.

  I know moms have to say stuff like that, but I still loved being compared to Danielle Ferland. Little Red Riding Hood was my dream role.

  “We have similar vocal placement,” I said, using a singing term I’d learned at camp.

  Mom leaned forward and looked at me as she rested her head against the driver’s seat.

  “You know, Lou, I’ve said this to you before, but you are very lucky that you’ve figured out so early in life what you love to do. It’ll be challenging, for sure, but some people spend their whole lives searching for something they’re passionate about. You’re only twelve years old and already set.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking out the window.

  I wanted Mom’s words to make me feel better, especially since I knew how much she meant them. She hadn’t figured out what she wanted to do until a couple years ago, and was now (at age thirty-nine) about to start her third semester studying psychology as a part-time student at Cleveland State Community College. All the same, a wave of self-pity washed over me as we passed a “Shaker Heights: 20 Miles” sign. Having just said good-bye to a bunch of people who loved the same things that I did, I felt incredibly lonely as I pictured myself back in my normal life. I’d looked forward to camp for so long, and now that it was over, I had nothing to look forward to except seventh grade. Blech.

  • • •

  “And home before dark!”

  The prologue to Into the Woods was over, and true to my word, I switched out my iPod for Dad’s, scrolled down the Artist list to Sheryl Crow, and seconds later we were all listening to her proclaim that she just wanted “to soak up the sun.” Dad sighed with contentment. Mom reached from the backseat and patted his shoulder.

  “You’re a good father, Doug.”

  Dad took the Northfield exit, signaling the last ten-minute stretch of our journey home. Even though there were still two weeks remaining before I would become a seventh-grader, it kind of felt like the summer was over. I stared out the window as the increasingly familiar landscape—Thistledown Racino, Heinen’s grocery store, and Pearl of the Orient (Dad’s favorite Chinese restaurant)—turned the past week, full of dance combinations, up-tempos, improvisational exercises, and lots and lots of laughter, into a dream. The next two weeks would be full of new sneakers, haircuts, and figuring out bus schedules.

  Soon enough we were taking the right off of the service road into Sussex Meadows, our subdivision, where the Thompson kids were kicking around a soccer ball in the street before their parents called them inside for dinner.

  “Car!” they yelled, and scrambled toward the curb to let us pass.

  “Dinner,” my mom announced, revisiting the subject, “is going to be pizza. I don’t feel like cooking after that long drive.”

  “No argument here,” said Dad.

  “How ’bout you, Lou?”

  “Pizza’s fine,” I murmured, suddenly distracted by the large U-Haul parked in the driveway two houses down from ours. As Dad pulled into our driveway, I watched a woman about Mom’s age carry a crate of glass canisters (holding what looked like sawdust) up the walkway and disappear through the front door. Moments later, she reappeared, followed by a kid who looked about my age. He was short with a cool haircut. He seemed about as interested in unpacking that U-Haul as I was in unpacking our Subaru.

  “Looks like the new neighbors have arrived,” said Mom, gathering up her newspaper. “We’ll have to do introductions at a time when we haven’t all been sitting in cars for half the day.”

  “Are you saying I smell bad, Hannah?” Dad said, shutting off the ignition.

  He got out of the car and made grunting noises as he stretched. Mom wasted no time grabbing as many of my bags as she could carry and headed toward the house. She hated clutter, which meant that the suitcases and duffel bags were usually emptied and stored in the basement within the first thirty minutes of our return. I was ready to help maintain Mom’s record, but as I emerged from the passenger side, I was caught off guard by the new kid’s T-shirt, which read very clearly, “Mary Poppins.” I recognized the logo from the Broadway Playbill Jenny had brought me after her family saw the show in New York. Was my new neighbor an MTN?

  –JACK–

  The house looked like something you’d build in a computer game—one of those simulation ones where you created a character and moved them into a neighborhood. Everything felt entirely too neat. The roof slanted into perfect gingerbread triangles. The windows were framed with clean white wood and hugged by brown shutters. Bushes dotted the garden with the precision of a mouse click. At least in the computer game, your character got to be a doctor, rock star, or mad scientist. I’d be lucky if I got to be anything other than a bored twelve-year-old.

  “Jack, could you grab the door for me?” my mom called. I looked up to find her nervously clutching a table lamp, a mop, and a bag of high heels. She looked like that picture of the Cat in the Hat, recklessly balancing all those household objects; all that was missing was a fish bowl.

  I slung the duffel bag off my shoulder and pulled open the screen door.

  “Thanks, love,” she said, brushing past me. “Can you even believe it? The house is so much bigger than I’d imagined! Wait until you see the backyard!”

  I wonder if we have a swimming pool? I thought, tossing the duffel bag into a pile accumulating by the door.

  My dad emerged from the back of the U-Haul carrying our coffee table covered in bubble wrap.

  “I told you that website wouldn’t do it justice,” he called to her. “And this lawn is so huge we’ll probably have to hire a gardener to keep it from turning into a jungle.”

  “Or maybe it’s time a certain son of ours started ea
rning that allowance.” My mom grinned, setting down her stuff and jogging past me to help my dad with the table.

  “Wow. You guys don’t waste any time, do you? ‘Welcome to Ohio, here are your chores,’” I grumbled.

  “We’re just teasing, Jack,” my dad said. “No talk of chores until after we finish unloading all this stuff.”

  I scuffed my feet down the stairs and made my way back to the U-Haul. Grabbing a box filled with sheet music and theater books, I began to hear my parents laughing and chattering on the porch. As I got closer, I heard them joking in exaggerated Midwestern cartoon voices.

  “Golly gee, what’s for dinner tonight, Dennis?” My mom giggled. “Sloppy joes and brats?”

  “I reckon we better drive down to the pizzeria and pick up some slices,” my dad answered gleefully. “This kitchen is so huge I’m liable to get lost in it, dontcha know?”

  “Yah, yah, you betcha!” My mom chuckled.

  Who were these strangers that body-snatched my parents?! You betcha? In the twelve years I’d known these people, I’d never heard them carry on like this. My parents were edgy New Yorkers. My mom wrote a food blog and my dad said things like “Ugh! Tourists!” and “My guy at the cheese shop.” I wouldn’t go so far as to describe them as serious, but I was supposed to be the one in the family who cracked the jokes and talked in character voices. And what was the big deal with everyone wanting a huge house, anyway? For as long as I could remember I’d heard everyone complaining about the size of New York apartments. They were always the butts of jokes on TV and in movies. “Her apartment was so small, it was like living in a box of Cheerios.” I’d always thought of our apartment as being just big enough. I had my own room. I knew where everything was, and if it ever got tight, I could always walk a few blocks to the coolest park on earth.

  I lived in a neighborhood called the Upper West Side on 86th Street. In New York a lot of the streets were named with numbers instead of words. I liked to think it made everything easier. If you ever got out of the subway and didn’t know where you were, you’d only have to walk one block before realizing the numbers were going in the wrong direction. Our apartment was one of forty in the building, another perk. On Halloween, you could hit up forty different homes without even having to put on a jacket. I never had to walk up any stairs, because we had a fancy elevator. We even had our own doorman, Nelson, who’d help us with heavy groceries and give great restaurant recommendations.

  As the sounds of my parents’ laughter trailed to the back of the house, I set my box down and took a seat on the warm concrete steps. I couldn’t help thinking about my New York bedroom. I wondered what it would look like with other people’s things in it. Men were probably in there right now slapping paint over the dark green walls, whitewashing away the memories of my first twelve years. No one would remember how I’d felt waking up in that room on Christmas morning, or what it was like staying up past my bedtime, memorizing the lyrics to “You Can’t Stop the Beat” from Hairspray. And they’d certainly never know how happy I was sitting on my bed five months earlier, reading the script for The Big Apple for the first time.

  • • •

  “So, Jack, what do you think?” my mom had asked. “The show must be pretty good to keep you inside on your first day of vacation.”

  Even though spring in New York usually had me scarfing down breakfast so I could meet my friends on the High Line, I had spent the entire morning holed up in my bedroom.

  “I love it!” I exclaimed, slapping the script shut and sliding it next to me.

  “Oh good!” my mom chirped as she made her way from my bedroom door to the bed.

  “You have to read it next. It’s, like, really funny for the first half, and then in the final scene I got kind of sad, but not like ‘West Side Story someone dies’ sad, just, like, you really care about them by the end.”

  My mom’s eyes twinkled as she reached over to straighten the collar of my shirt.

  “Do you think they’ll make a cast recording?” I asked her.

  “I don’t see why not.” She smiled.

  My body hummed with excitement. I’d memorized the words to what seemed like a hundred Broadway albums and had always been in such awe of the kids who’d gotten to sing on them. Like Daisy Eagan from The Secret Garden, who at eleven years old (even younger than me!) won a Tony Award for her performance as Mary Lennox. I had played that album so much that I could even tell you exactly where she’d chosen to breathe in her Act 2 opening, “The Girl I Mean to Be.” Would other kids be memorizing the choices I decided to make?

  “I’m saying it now, Mom: The Big Apple is gonna be the best show of the year!”

  “I hope so. That’s what Davina is telling us, at least.”

  Davina was my agent. She was the person who let my parents know when I had an audition or who booked a job, kind of like a school guidance counselor, but instead of talking about classes, it was conference calls, coffee, and contracts. She was a short, sturdy woman with curly silver hair and a loud, thick New York accent that I always thought made her sound like Bugs Bunny. Her voice carried so much you could hear her talking on the phone while you were still in the elevator. She pronounced New York like Noo Yawk and theater like theet-uh. She was what my dad called a “tough cookie.” On the whole, I really liked her. Plus, she always sent me edible fruit arrangements for my opening nights.

  “You know this is going to mean you’ll have to have a tutor for the months you’re in rehearsal,” my mom said.

  Tutoring meant not getting to hang with my school friends, but it also meant learning at my own pace and getting to eat snacks during spelling tests.

  “Fine by me,” I answered. “I think we should tell Davina we’re in!”

  “I think so, too, Jack . . .”

  • • •

  “Jack. Jaaack. JACK!”

  I jolted back to reality. My parents were standing at the top of the steps, concerned looks spread across their faces.

  “Do you want to take some of this stuff up to your room?” my mom said, pointing to the pile of bags and boxes. “You’ve barely set foot in the house.”

  “Oh sure,” I said quickly, pushing past them and into the entryway. Our living room was big and white with uncovered windows. A light smell of lemon lingered from the hardwood floors, still glossy from whoever cleaned them last. A grand staircase sloped from the living room up to the second floor. It reminded me of that scene in The Sound of Music where the Von Trapp children stand on the stairs and sing “So Long, Farewell,” the musical theater equivalent to “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” I grabbed my backpack and dragged my feet up the stairs.

  “Jack, your room is down the hall on the right,” my dad called after me.

  I made my way down the dark hallway and stopped at the last door. I could see tape residue in the center of it from where the previous resident must have hung something, an art class picture or maybe a No Parents Allowed sign. I pushed open the door. The room was flooded with light from a big window facing the backyard. My eyes did a quick scan as I stepped in. No swimming pool. Beneath my toes I could feel a dent in the carpeting where the foot of a bed once stood. I crouched down and sprawled out on the floor, bathing in the warm rectangle of light from the window. I stared up at the freshly painted ceiling.

  “My name is Jack Goodrich,” I said to myself. “I’m from Shaker Heights, Ohio, and this is my home.”

  It felt like reading lines from a strange play; one I knew I had to start memorizing. There was no turning back at this point. My parents had already fallen in love with the new house. They were already planning dinners with Nana and the cousins, whose names glowed dimly in my memory. Soon there would be rugs rolled out on the floors and photos hung on the walls, letting the world know that the Goodrich family was here to stay. There would be no more numbered streets and subway rides to school. There would be no more dan
ce classes on Mondays and auditions in tall buildings. And there definitely would be no phone call from Davina explaining that it was all a big mistake, that the director had gotten it wrong and needed me to come back to save The Big Apple.

  “Jack!” I heard my dad bark from downstairs. “Come help us with the mattress.”

  –LOUISA–

  I was no anthropologist, but I was pretty sure you didn’t wear a Broadway-show shirt unless you were a fan of the Great White Way. Who is that kid? I wondered as I sat on my bedroom floor amid bittersweet reminders of the last week: scripts, sheet music, leotards, tap shoes, a signed Playbill of Jersey Boys (my voice teacher had been in the national tour, so I had him sign my program). Maybe it was because I was still grieving the end of camp that I was so fixated on the boy in the Mary Poppins T-shirt, but I couldn’t help think what a nice consolation prize it would be to have a neighbor with similar interests.

  Mom appeared in my doorway. “Darks first,” she instructed, placing a laundry basket next to my yoga mat. The countdown to “Camp Curtain Up: Like It Never Happened” was well under way. I must have been making a face, because Mom said, “I’m not asking you to do the laundry, Lou, just separate.” And she was off, calling after my father, “Do you have any darks you wanna throw in, Doug?”

  I started picking through my dirty clothes, wafts of Coppertone and OFF! rising from the mound. Such a mundane task required music, I decided, so I grabbed my iPod out of my backpack. The Broadway-cast album of In the Heights seemed like the perfect choice—its funky Latin hip-hop beats would provide just the right amount of spice. As Lin-Manuel Miranda delivered his rapid-fire lyrics, I thought: Rapping. There’s another skill I would have to master in order to work in the American musical theater. And writing, too, since Miranda not only starred in In the Heights—he wrote it. I felt a rush of panic as I contemplated how much I would need to learn to be ready for Broadway. And how one week a year with Broadway professionals (if I was lucky) just wasn’t enough. I thought of all the math and science classes that would take up precious time in the years ahead—time I’d much rather spend in a dance studio, or at a voice lesson, or in an acting class. My mind drifted once again to my “Mary Poppins” mystery man, and I wondered if he felt the same frustration. Seized by curiosity, I hastily threw my dark clothes into the laundry basket and carried it downstairs to the kitchen, where I found Mom on the phone, a Donato’s takeout menu spread in front of her. She placed her hand over the receiver as I set the laundry basket at her feet.