My Life: The Musical (4 page)

“And?”

Emily bit her lip. “I won’t mention
Aurora
.”

Emily’s parents liked the theatre well enough, but her grandma Rose had a passion for it. Grandma Rose was Mr. Pearl’s mother and she lived downstairs, with her own bedroom and bathroom on the lower level of the Pearls’ modest split-level home in Rockville Centre.

In her younger days, Grandma Rose had been a music teacher, and it was largely thanks to her that Emily had acquired a love of Broadway musicals at an early age.
Fiddler on the Roof
was Grandma Rose’s all-time favorite, but she’d also introduced Emily to
Annie
(of course) and many others.
The Phantom of the Opera
.
Cats. Into the Woods
.
Beauty and the Beast
.
The Lion King
(that was a special outing that had also included Mr. Pearl, who normally stuck with serious, preferably British plays that had been recast with famous American film actors).

Due to Grandma Rose’s influence, watching the Tony Awards broadcast on television was an annual Pearl family ritual, complete with specially prepared snacks and glasses of inexpensive champagne, from which even Emily was allowed a celebratory sip. Last year Philip had been invited to join them. It had been a marvelous evening, almost too marvelous for Philip to bear. Parents who liked each other! Laughter in the living room! Home-cooked snacks—and the Tony Awards! It was a lot to absorb.

Mrs. Pearl found Emily’s attachment to
Aurora
amusing, a phase, “a typical teenage thing” (she was the one who provided Hanukkah-present indulgences like Emily’s
Aurora
messenger bag). However, Mr. Pearl thought Emily’s fascination with “that show” was obsessive. He often warned Emily that if her grades started to slip, he would be taking “a close look at how you spend your time, young lady.”

This was why a note home from Mr. Henderson would be most unwelcome, from Emily’s perspective. Especially a note that said she was too interested in
Aurora
. That was all her father needed to hear.

4

“GOODNIGHT”

I Do! I Do!

1966. Music by Harvey Schmidt, lyrics and
book by Tom Jones

BwayPhil
: Still awake?

AURORAROX
: yez,

AURORAROX
: mr henderson said to read the newspaper

AURORAROX
: so i am

AURORAROX
: did you know

AURORAROX
: there are all these sections of the Times

AURORAROX
: that are not the Arts and Leisure section?

BwayPhil
: I had heard of that, yes.

AURORAROX
: i don’t understand the news at all

AURORAROX
: i think it’s like one of those complicated tv series

AURORAROX
: where you have to watch from the beginning

AURORAROX
: or you can’t follow what’s going on

AURORAROX
: so what are you doing?

BwayPhil
: nuthin

AURORAROX
: i know that nuthin

AURORAROX
: something wrong?

BwayPhil
: Nah. Just—ok, I’ll give you a clue. Show question:

BwayPhil
: “My world’s coming unwrapped”

BwayPhil
: What musical is that from?

BwayPhil
: Hint—it’s based on Shakespeare.

AURORAROX
: Kiss Me, Kate?

BwayPhil
: Nope.

AURORAROX
: well it’s not West Side Story

BwayPhil
: I admit, it’s very obscure.

AURORAROX
: forget it then! I give up

BwayPhil
: “My world’s coming unwrapped,” from
Oh, Brother!
Loosely based on
The Comedy of Errors
. 1981, music by Michael Valenti, book and lyrics by Donald Driver. Big flop! Closed after 13 previews and 3 perfs.

BwayPhil
: The clue is the title, btw.

AURORAROX
: oh, brother

AURORAROX
: oh! Mark?

AURORAROX
: what’d he do now?

BwayPhil
: Just acting like his usual disgusting self when I got in.

AURORAROX
: ignore, ignore

BwayPhil
: I do, I do!

BwayPhil
: Now there’s a nice name for a musical!

AURORAROX
: :-P

AURORAROX
: put on some music & tune out the world

AURORAROX
: that’s what I’m going to do now

AURORAROX
: this newspaper thing is bogus

AURORAROX
: ooh, Marlena’s singing “Never Be Enough”

BwayPhil
: First act version or second act reprise?

AURORAROX
: first act.

AURORAROX
: i’ll hold my headphones to the screen

AURORAROX
: so you can hear

BwayPhil
: Funny.

BwayPhil
: Hey, I ***can*** hear it.

AURORAROX
: course you can, listen—

“forever will have to be enough,
not one day less will do,
But forever will never be enough
to celebrate allllllll
myyyyyyyy
loooooooooove—”

BwayPhil
: “for yooooooooou!!!!!”

AURORAROX
: *thunderous applause*

BwayPhil
: It’s Wednesday.

AURORAROX
: they did the show twice today

BwayPhil
: Sometimes I hate that they do it without us.

AURORAROX
: me too

AURORAROX
: but we will be there again soon

AURORAROX
: sleep tight now

BwayPhil
: Night, Em—thanks for the song.

AURORAROX
: don’t thank me

AURORAROX
: thank whoever

AURORAROX
: thank Aurora

BwayPhil
: Okay I will.

BwayPhil
: Thank you Aurora, whoever you are!

5

“THE TELEPHONE HOUR”

Bye Bye Birdie

1960. Music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Lee Adams,
book by Michael Stewart

Although Emily and Philip always called it Philip’s house (as in, “See you later, Mom, I’m going to spend Saturday prepping for the PSAT at Philip’s house”—sometimes little white lies like this were necessary to explain what it was exactly the two of them did together every Saturday), the term “Philip’s house” was not technically accurate. Unlike most of the kids he knew, Philip and his brother, Mark, and their mother, when she was around, lived in an apartment, not a house. A “garden apartment,” it was called, in a complex called Birchwood Gardens.

But there were no gardens, nothing that bloomed or smelled good or was nice to look at. The main geographic feature was a long, snaky parking lot that meandered like an asphalt stream around all the separate buildings of Birchwood Gardens, providing each apartment with two of its very own parking spots,
whoop-de-doo
. Like Philip would ever have his own car.

Philip’s family had one of the upstairs apartments in D building, which was really a pair of attached duplex town homes. “Fastest gun in D-West!” Mark would joke, when he was acting stupid. That was pretty often.

Mark was nineteen and enrolled in community college in alleged pursuit of a business degree, but he rarely attended classes. He liked to play video games, chase girls, and hang out with his equally boneheaded friends. Sometimes he did these things at his friends’ houses, but often they came over to Birchwood Gardens, apartment D-West, since Mrs. Nebbling was rarely home.

Not that Philip’s mother was a bad parent; at least, Philip didn’t think she was. She had a solid track record of being a perfectly adequate and occasionally standout mother (homemade Halloween costumes were a particular strength, though Philip was too old for that now). She’d been home practically all the time when Philip and Mark were young.

But that was before the divorce. Now, after three years of heroic effort, she’d finally passed the bar exam and gotten a job as an actual lawyer. She was making decent money, but three years of living off credit cards, student loans, and part-time jobs had dug a pretty deep hole for the remnants of the Nebbling family to climb out of. Nevertheless, Mrs. Nebbling refused to let Mark get a job until he finished school.

“It’s bad enough I had to work my way through college,” she would say when Mark batted his bleary eyes and sweetly offered to drop out and apply for a graveyard shift at the local Dunkin’ Donuts, precisely because he knew she would never allow it. “You boys are going to have an easier time of it.”

Of course,
Philip would think bitterly,
she has no idea just how easy a time Mark is having.
That was because Mrs. Nebbling spent days at a time at the AllChem industrial storage facility in Wilmington, Delaware, wearing a hazmat suit and shouting questions through her mask to similarly dressed employees of AllChem. Some very nasty stuff had been dumped in the Delaware River, apparently. Now there was a lawsuit. Mrs. Nebbling’s firm represented AllChem, and her task was taking depositions.

If my life were a musical,
Philip sometimes thought,
there would be a song called “Allied Chemical versus the State of Delaware.”
It would start with twenty dancers dressed in hazmat suits, which they would soon tear off to reveal the spangled leotards underneath. The final chorus would have the dancers tapping and splashing their way through vats of noxious chemical goo.

Sort of like “Singin’ in the Rain,”
he would think.
Only carcinogenic.

Mark was far from an ideal big brother, but this didn’t mean he paid no attention to Philip. Quite the contrary: Mark had made it his personal mission to hound Philip into admitting that he was gay.

“Look around you, dude. There’s just a lot of queer-type crap in this room, you know?” This was the conversation that made Philip later complain to Emily about Mark being a jerk.

“They’re
Playbills,
you idiot. I collect them. They could be valuable someday,” Philip added, though he wasn’t really sure about this.

Mark shrugged. “I’m just saying—you’re not showing a normal interest in girls.”

“But I don’t like boys, either.”

“That’s because you’re latent,” explained Mark, patiently feeding a fresh supply of fake IDs through the laminating machine he kept stashed under his bed. He sold these for a tidy profit. In most areas of his life Mark was lazy and dishonest, but when it came to his antisocial pursuits he was nothing short of entrepreneurial. “You’re gay, dude. You just don’t know it yet.”

Philip found this kind of logic hard to refute, but talking to Mark was a waste of time anyway, so he didn’t bother to try.

“Look who it is! Hey, guys! Are you seeing a show today? We’re seeing
Mamma Mia!
Oh my God! We heard it was great. Have you seen it? Was it great?”

Five squealing girls from Eleanor Roosevelt High School had boarded the same Long Island Rail Road car as Emily and Philip and plopped themselves in the seats directly across the aisle. Now they would all be together for the full thirty-eight-minute ride.

Emily knew their names. Michelle, Cindy, Chantal, Lorelei, and Beth. She’d had classes with some of them last year, and Beth was in the same period of Mr. Henderson’s English comp class.

How did we not see them on the platform?
thought Emily.
We could have ducked into another car. Now I have to listen to them go on and on and on—

“First we’re going to go shopping at H&M! And then we’re having lunch at Planet Hollywood. And then we’re going to the show. It’s at, um, three?”

“Saturday and Wednesday matinees are at two,” said Philip dryly. “Sunday matinees are at three.”

“Well, that’s confusing!” said Cindy.

“It’s because the actors have another show to do at eight on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and they have to have a dinner break.” Philip explained. “It’s a union rule.”

Michelle smiled and tossed her hair. “Okay, so then we’re seeing
Mamma Mia!
at two. And then if we really really love it, which we will because I hear it’s great, we thought we would go to Virgin and get the soundtrack CD.”