My Life: The Musical (6 page)

“So who is this ‘SAVEMEFROMAURORA’ jerk?” said Stephanie, slurping a soy milk smoothie. Actors had to be at the theatre by half hour to get into makeup and costume (that meant one-thirty for a two o’clock matinee), so Stephanie could only briefly grace the Edison with her presence.

Ian snorted. “Have you crossed paths with that bozo, too? He’s haunting all the chat rooms, bad-mouthing the show and pissing everyone off.”

“What a completely
toxic
person!” said Stephanie, shaking her wavy carrot-colored tresses around like a wet dog. “He’s even been leaving nasty posts on the show’s message boards. ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!’
Such
crap. I mean, ‘ye’? Who talks like that?”

“We chatted with him once,” Emily piped up. She was glad to have something to contribute. “What a loser.”

“I think he’s a publicist for
Wicked,
” Ian said. Stephanie screamed and slapped her hand over Ian’s mouth. Every head in the Edison turned.

“Don’t say things like that, Ian,” she scolded. “That’s how rumors start. Especially in
this
place!”

She was right about the rumors. Tucked in the lobby of the Edison Hotel, the Café Edison had been a Broadway performers’ hangout since the 1930s. There were long-legged gypsies at every table, swaying like palm trees in the breeze as they leaned in to gossip and out to eavesdrop; in, out, rinse and repeat.

“I’m sure that SAVEME is just a crank,” said Philip, gently dabbing his lips with a napkin. “He does seem to know his musicals pretty well.”

“Not as well as you, darling!” Stephanie giggled. “You are an
encyclopedia
! Men with brains are so sexy. No wonder Ian chose you as the object of his affections, of all the nubile young boys on the rush line!”

At this, Ian collapsed and pounded his forehead dramatically on the table, almost knocking over everyone’s water. Philip looked like a deer caught in a follow-spot. Emily felt her face flush with embarrassment, but on whose behalf she wasn’t sure.

“You’re such a troublemaker, Dawson!” Ian moaned. “Young Philip here, though admittedly pretty as a chorus girl and sharp as Ben Brantley’s tongue, is
not
my boyfriend.”

“Well, not
yet
!” Stephanie chirped. But something about the look on Philip’s and Emily’s faces finally activated her shut-up mechanism. “I’m sorry, that was rude. I shouldn’t assume things, right?” She slurped the last of her smoothie. “It’s just that at LaGuardia, people are, like,
flinging
themselves out of the closet all freshman year, so I just thought . . . Oh, my, I’m digging myself in deeper and deeper, aren’t I!” Her laugh trickled up and down the scale like a vocal exercise.

“Darling, our young friends are not
from
here,” said Ian. “They’re from—not Kansas, but someplace similar, no?”

“Rockville Centre,” Emily said, feeling like a rube. (One of the ways Emily and Philip had first known they would be friends forever was when they’d simultaneously observed that the name of their hometown was spelled with an “re” at the end. “Just like theatre!” they’d said in awe, at exactly the same time. To Emily it felt like fate. To Philip, it was kismet. “
Kismet,
1953,” he’d explained with reverence. “Book by Charles Lederer and Luther Davis, music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest, adapted from the music of Alexander Borodin.”)

Ian continued berating Stephanie. “Yes, Rockville Cent
reeeeee
. So use some discretion, you little tart. Anyway, I have something much more interesting to talk about than who is and who isn’t! Guess what I know?”

Stephanie glanced at her watch. “Make it quick, I have to get to the theatre.”

“Oh, I’m not speeding through this story. It’s too good,” Ian purred cruelly. “It’s the best gossip ever!”

“Tell me, suckface! I have to go!”

“Well, it’s a long saga. . . . To do it justice, one would have to go all the way back to the beginning . . . to when the Greeks invented theatre, and the first leather-clad thespians lithped acroth the thtage. . . .” Ian dodged Stephanie’s barrage of slaps. Emily was finding it hard to keep up, and Philip had taken himself out of the line of fire by busying himself with the check.

“Ian, you are the
worst
! I can’t be late for half hour again, the stage manager will have me over his knee.”

“You’d better go then, Spanky,” he said, laughing and batting her hands away. “I’ll tell you later. Or maybe I won’t! It can be your punishment for being rude to my friends.”

Calmly, Stephanie stood up and plopped a big juicy kiss on Philip’s mouth. When she was done, she glared at Ian. “Fine. Philip is
mine,
then. That’s
your
punishment. Because you,” she said, turning back to Philip, “are
not
in Kansas anymore.”

Stephanie threw a few dollars on the table and hustled out the door, already late. The faster she moved, the more evident her dancer’s waddle became, her slim legs permanently turned out, ducklike, from hour after hour, year after year of doing pliés in front of a mirror.

Emily was too flustered by Stephanie’s smooch attack to speak. It was Philip, managing to remain perfectly composed despite the big scarlet lip print on the lower portion of his face, who finally asked: “So what is this gossip, Ian?”

Ian looked quite serious all of a sudden. He leaned close to them and whispered, “I know who wrote
Aurora
.”

7

“DON’T CRY FOR ME, ARGENTINA”

Evita

1979. Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber,
lyrics and book by Tim Rice

Even Ian’s tiny whisper caused a palpable hush to fall across the Café Edison, and he refused to say another word until, as he said, “we have entered a secure undisclosed location.” Emily decided the second row of the far right mezzanine of the Rialto Theatre was secure enough. As soon as Philip returned from the men’s room (the lipstick was gone when he came out) and they took their seats for the matinee, she pounced.

“Okay. No
way,
” She felt ready to start slapping Ian herself. “There is no way you can know what you said you know.”

“Shhhh!” Ian hissed dramatically. “Someone I met in Florida told me. But only because I swore not to tell.”

“How’s that going so far, by the way?” Philip had to fold his long legs like a crane’s to fit in the narrow row of seats. “The not telling part, I mean.”

“I
haven’t
told, have I, Miss Smug Thing?” Ian shot back. “And the way you’re behaving, maybe I won’t.”

“Ian! You would never have mentioned it if you didn’t mean to tell us.” Emily smiled sweetly. “You’re not
that
much of a jerk!”

“No matter what people say,” added Philip. Ian started to laugh. They had him.

“C’mon, we’ll swear, too,” Emily cajoled. “Not to tell
and
not to tell anyone we know something we can’t tell them.” Emily was on fire to know, for all the obvious reasons, of course, but also because if there was a chance she’d been right in her persuasive essay, she was going to march into Mr. Henderson’s class on Monday and make a scene. Of course, if she swore not to repeat what Ian told her, she wouldn’t be able to say
why
she was making a scene, and Mr. Henderson would think she was losing her mind, but still . . .

“Did this Florida person say how he, she, or it found out?” Philip asked as they all half stood to let a latecomer take her seat at the end of the row. “Because maybe, dear gullible Ian, your leg has been pulled.”

They lowered themselves back into their seats, and Ian spoke in an intense stage whisper. “The ‘Florida person’ has an impeccable inside track on such information. He, she, or it was utterly shocked with what he, she, or it was unexpectedly made privy to!”

Pronouns suck,
thought Emily.
Just spit it out, the show’s about to start
. And it was. Like a flock of geese whose group mind mysteriously knew how to find South America, the whole audience went quiet a split second before the houselights started to dim.

“Cell phone?” Even under these highly distracting conditions Philip didn’t forget. Emily fished through her bag frantically to find the phone.

“I will tell you this,” Ian said as the houselights came down for performance number 1,022 of
Aurora
. “It’s somebody
famous
.”

Never be enough,
My love for you could
Never be enough.
Infinity could never be enough
To hold what’s in my heart.
I’ll stay with you when times are tough,
We’ll never be apart—

Never understand,
The rest of them will
Never understand.
A love so far beyond
The love that we had planned . . .

AURORAROX
: so who do you think?

AURORAROX
: someone famous, now.

BwayPhil
: ugh! Impossible, AURORA just doesn’t sound like anyone else.

AURORAROX
: Sondheim?

BwayPhil
: Emily, be serious—he wrote Sweeney Todd! He wrote Into the Woods! And Company, and Sunday in the Park with George, and Pacific Overtures and A Little Night Music and and and . . .

AURORAROX
: i know what he wrote!

BwayPhil
: I would hear half a bar of Sondheim coming a mile away!

AURORAROX
: i was just starting with famous

AURORAROX
: Andrew Lloyd Webber?

BwayPhil
: Absolutely not.

AURORAROX
: Richard Rodgers?

BwayPhil
: Famous and ***alive***, I think would also be important.

AURORAROX
: duh. that shrinks the list somewhat

AURORAROX
: Elton John? Stephen Schwartz? William Finn?

BwayPhil
: William Finn is not really famous.

AURORAROX
: we know who he is

AURORAROX
: he wrote Spelling Bee

AURORAROX
: he wrote Falsettos

BwayPhil
: He’s famous to the people who know who he is. That’s not the same as being famous. Anyway, the songs from Aurora don’t sound like any of them.

BwayPhil
: Or anybody else I’ve ever heard.

BwayPhil
: That’s why I love them.

AURORAROX
: i know!

AURORAROX
: “Never Be Enough” is just the best song

AURORAROX
: ever

SAVEMEFROMAURORA
: looky, ma, the kids are playing “who wrote Aurora?”

SAVEMEFROMAURORA: I’m more of a Scrabble fan myself.

AURORAROX
: oh no

AURORAROX
: it’s back

SAVEMEFROMAURORA
: Hush! Now listen: “The best song ever.” That simply cannot be true, and I want you to admit it.

AURORAROX
: but it IS.

SAVEMEFROMAURORA
: You think it’s better than “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” Better than “Hey Jude.” Better than pretty much anything from Gypsy or Oklahoma! or My Fair Lady?