My Life: The Musical (13 page)

“Do you think,” Emily asked as they turned the corner of Broadway and West Forty-fourth Street, “that SAVEME could
be
Lester?”

“Huh,” said Philip. “That kinda makes sense, actually. How could we find out?”

“We’ll ask Ian to tell us something about Lester, some personal detail, and then we can—we can—” But the words died in her mouth.

It was 2:45. The box office opened in fifteen minutes, and the mob scene outside the theatre extended all the way down Forty-fourth Street to Eighth Avenue and who knew how far around the block.

Stupefied, speechless, they froze in midstep. Emily started to totter on her feet and grabbed Philip’s arm.

Something has gone wrong, so very, very wrong,
thought Philip. Reflexively he tried to quantify the disaster—three, four, five hundred people, he guessed, with streams of newcomers arriving by the minute. And that wasn’t counting the unseen hordes on Eighth Avenue.

“Can you believe it!” screamed Daphne, the costumed rush line regular. She waved her funky knit scarf in the air like a flag as she spotted them. “Can you believe it can you believe it can you believe it!”

Maybe Daphne was repeating herself, or maybe sounds were echoing inside Emily’s head. She couldn’t tell; nor could she tell if she was pulling Philip over to where Daphne was standing—there seemed to be an actual line snaking through the mob, and Daphne was on it—or if Philip was pulling her.

“Oh my God I can’t stand it I can’t stand it I can’t stand it,” Daphne was saying. “I can’t believe
Aurora
is closing!”

Hearing Daphne say it aloud made something inside Emily’s head pop, like her ears did on planes during takeoff. “Where did you hear that?” she demanded, hanging on to Philip for dear life and trying not to shriek. “Who told you that?”

“Who told me is the same person who told everybody here!” cried Daphne, gesturing dramatically with her fuzzy
Aurora
-style mittens. “She posted it on the
Aurora
blog about”—Daphne pushed up one mitten so she could see her watch—“an hour ago.”

“An hour ago?” Philip repeated. “An hour—”

“Who?” screamed Emily. “Who who who who?”

Daphne looked at them, dumbfounded. “Marlena!” she said. “Marlena Ortiz!”

14

“I BELIEVE IN YOU”

How to Succeed in Business
Without Really Trying

1961. Music and lyrics by Frank Loesser,
book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, and Willie Gilbert

Philip and Emily gaped at each other. An hour ago—that would have been right about the time Emily was faking a puke attack in Mr. Henderson’s class, the same time that Philip, who hadn’t bothered to show up at his social studies class at all, was sitting in the IHOP across the street from Eleanor Roosevelt High School, waiting for Emily and drinking watery coffee and staring at the train schedule even though he knew it by heart.

Why,
Philip thought bitterly,
why couldn’t they have wireless Internet access on the Long Island Rail Road, would that be so frickin’ hard?

Daphne looked at them with pity. “Oh my God! You mean you didn’t know?”

Emily’s stomach gave a little twist. “Of course we knew,” she heard herself say. Truthfully, until that minute some secret part of her had clung to the possibility that it was all just noxious gossip, spread, perhaps, by the cast of some competing show, or a publicist for
Wicked
like Ian had said. The stomach pain was spreading upward, into her chest.

Philip looked at Emily, who was wheezing in an asthma-attack kind of way, though he knew she didn’t have asthma. He put his hand on her shoulder, to steady both of them.

Data, numbers, facts, figures.
That’s what Philip needed. Then he would know what to do. “What did Marlena’s post say?” he asked Daphne. “Did she say why the show was closing? Did she say when?”

“She was pissed! She was filled with righteousness!” Daphne cried. “She said the producers made the decision to close and didn’t even tell Marlena or anyone! They were trying to keep it secret—they thought if Marlena knew, she would walk! As if Marlena Ortiz would ever walk out on
Aurora
! As
if
!” Daphne yelled it to the skies.

The line moved forward an infinitesimal amount. Philip looked at his watch. It was three o’clock. The box office had just opened.

“But Marlena found out somehow—you know Marlena!—and she was like, no way José!” Daphne continued, wagging her finger the way Marlena always did in the first-act finale, in a song titled “You Gotta Show the Love.” “ ‘The fans need to know so they can come show the love,’ that’s what Marlena said! So she posted it on the blog right away. I guess word got around fast. I ran right outta my office when I saw it. I’m gonna lose my job over this one.” Daphne closed her eyes and began to sing.

“Show it show it show it show it,
Show the love,
You gotta show it show it show it show it,
Show the love,
You gotta show the love!”

Daphne started to sway as she sang.

Though she loved every syllable and every note of every song from
Aurora,
hearing Daphne sing “Show the Love” under these circumstances made Emily want to smack her. “Did she say when the final show is?” Emily yelled, rather close to Daphne’s face. Five hundred (or more) people standing in a mob were making a fearsome background noise.

Daphne opened her eyes. “Two weeks from Saturday,” she said. “You better get on the back of the line, girl, there is no way we’re all gonna get tickets!” Daphne draped her scarf across her face like a veil and started dancing. “I heard they’re only letting each person buy two.”

“Philip!” Emily said, her voice rising with panic. “Did you hear that?”

Of course he had. His mind was already calculating—two weeks, sixteen performances. It was reasonable to assume the roughly 1,500-seat theatre was presold for say, seventy percent of the tickets, leaving approximately 450 seats unsold for each performance, for a total of 7,200 available seats—but Aurorafans everywhere were working their telephones and computers this very second, gobbling up the remaining
Aurora
tickets on Telecharge, while he and Emily stood here, not even in line yet and with throngs of people already waiting. . . .

It was hopeless. Philip had two thousand dollars cash in his pocket (Emily had been too nervous to carry it), but you had to have a credit card to use Telecharge. They could walk up the line trying to scalp tickets for crazy amounts of money, but the hard-core
Aurora
crowd despised scalpers; if he started to flash his cash they might end up being stoned to death, or (the New York version) being pushed in front of a speeding taxi. . . .

“Please, Daphne, let us stand here with you!” Emily begged. “We were on the train and we didn’t see Marlena’s post, we just got here, you know we would have been the first ones here if we’d known—”

A warning grumble started to rise from the people in line behind Daphne, but they needn’t have worried. “I’m sorry, honey,” Daphne said, shaking her head. “But justice is justice, I can’t mess with the way things are meant to be.” She started singing a different
Aurora
song:

“Look inside!
See what you see.
Who you are
Is who you’re meant to be—”

Philip, meantime, was counting heads. There were now close to seven hundred people clamoring for tickets. There was only one thing to do.

“Hey!” said Daphne as Philip started to lead Emily away. “If you didn’t know about Marlena’s post, how did you find out the show was closing?”

“We uh, uh, uh—” said Emily.

“Emily, let’s go,” said Philip, gently tugging her arm. “We have to get in line.”

Upstairs in the Sardi’s building on West Forty-fourth Street, Stevie Stephenson looked out the windowed rear wall of his office. The floor-to-ceiling glass offered a heart-stopping view of Times Square: the animated advertisements, the glittering theatre marquees, not to mention the underwear models pictured on Times Square’s legendary sky-high billboards. From each photo a tanned and oiled, nearly naked model gazed moodily into Stevie’s tenth-floor office. It made his visitors uncomfortable, and Stevie liked that.

Ten stories down, on street level—Stevie liked what he saw there, too. The theatre district was always crowded, but the sea of desperate ticket-buying humanity before him triggered a special thrill in his nervous system. He lived by the producers’ credo, also known as PBIS: Put Butts In Seats. Most of the people on the street below had never heard of Stevie Stephenson, but at this moment he was a man who wielded power over an awful lot of butts.

One of the nicest of these belonged to Marlena Ortiz, and Stevie chuckled at how well his little plan had worked. How easy it had been to let his news about
Aurora
“slip” to his idiot nephew Lester in Florida. How quickly the “rumor,” thus carefully planted, had spread, finding its way back to the intended target within a twenty-four-hour period and leaving a comet-trail of gossip (and free publicity!) a mile wide.

He still wasn’t sure how Marlena had gotten to the heart of the rumor and confirmed it so quickly, but it didn’t matter. Her reaction was perfect: utterly predictable and endearingly, wrongheadedly noble. Three years of playing
Aurora
had turned the wide-eyed chorus girl into not merely a star, but one who fancied herself a “woman of the people”—it was touching, really, the way she took her fans so seriously.

She’d make a fine Evita someday,
he mused. For now, Marlena had done for free what a thousand highly paid press agents couldn’t—she’d turned an ordinary closing notice into a phenomenon.

And just wait,
he thought.
Wait till you hear what’s coming to the Rialto next.

The One Sure Thing in Show Business, that’s what. He had two signed contracts as proof, typed very late at night by a specially hired temp who could input a hundred words a minute but understood not one word of English. Stevie knew how to leak a secret, and he also knew how to keep one.

The One Sure Thing in Show Business.
Steve smiled. All the top producers knew what it was, but none of them—so far—had been able to make the deal happen. To do so would be like catching lightning in a bottle. Many said it was impossible and had given up trying. Not Stevie.

He grabbed a stick of cinnamon gum from his desk drawer. Stevie had quit smoking cigars a decade earlier on the advice of his doctor, but at times like this he would get a craving.

Music,
he thought as he chewed. That’s what he needed. He punched the intercom button on his desk.

“Miss O’Malley,” he said. “Would you put on the
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
recording, and pipe it in to my office?”

“Original cast with Robert Morse, or 1995 revival with Matthew Broderick?” asked Miss O’Malley, without missing a beat.

“Matthew Broderick.” Stevie snapped his gum with satisfaction. “Broderick, please.”

It was two full hours before word got down to the end of the line, transmitted from person to person like an evil game of telephone—there were no more tickets. The box office was closing. Everyone should go home.

By this time Emily and Philip had about two hundred people in line behind them and six hundred people still in front. For the last half hour Philip’s teeth had been chattering and Emily had needed to go to the bathroom, but they had stood resolutely, without complaining.

They’d passed so many familiar faces on their long walk to the end of the line—it seemed like most of the regulars were there. Some waved, others averted their eyes. From a half block away Morris had mouthed, “You just GOT here?” in disbelief before limping off into the crowd. None of them had offered to let Emily and Philip cut the line, but if they had it might have started a riot, so it was just as well.

There were no more tickets. The box office was closing. Everyone should go home.

Somebody nearby started to cry. Others stood there, unable to leave the line, but no longer knowing what they were waiting for. After a few minutes, the bulk of the crowd wandered off in defeat. One group started singing as they walked away:

“Never be enough
Ten thousands shows could
Never be enough . . .”

But Emily and Philip, the die-hard Aurorafans of Rockville Centre, could not leave without some final heroic effort, no matter how futile. Without even needing to discuss it, they ran, weaving at full speed through the thinning crowd, to the Rialto Theatre box office. The manager was about to turn out the lights.