My Life: The Musical (7 page)

BwayPhil
: Why don’t you go ***see*** the show and come back and apologize for your ignorance?

SAVEMEFROMAURORA
: What makes you think I haven’t seen it?

AURORAROX
: because if you had SEEN it

AURORAROX
: we would not be having

AURORAROX
: this conversation.

SAVEMEFROMAURORA
: I’ve seen it.

AURORAROX
: see it

AURORAROX
: until you GET it

SAVEMEFROMAURORA
: Trust me, I’ve seen it more than you.

AURORAROX
: LOL!!!!! no way.

BwayPhil
: Wait—do we know you?

BwayPhil
: Are you that crabby guy who’s always on the rush line in a Jekyll & Hyde show jacket?

SAVEMEFROMAURORA
: J&H ! ! ! ! horrors!

AURORAROX
: OMG, if you’re a regular

AURORAROX
: we must totally know you

SAVEMEFROMAURORA
: “Have I said too much?”

BwayPhil
: “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” Evita. 1979. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

SAVEMEFROMAURORA
: “There’s nothing more I can think of to say to you.”

AURORAROX
: So who are you, SAVEME?

BwayPhil
: yoo-hoo! SAVEME?

AURORAROX
: he logged off.

BwayPhil
: Weird.

Why Broadway Shows Should Be Free
  A Persuasive Essay by Emily Pearl

Emily gritted her teeth as Mr. Henderson read her essay, right there in front of her, as the rest of the students noisily exited the classroom.

Yes, her paper was about Broadway. But it didn’t mention
Aurora,
not even once. Instead she used
Fiddler
(the original 1964 production, starring Zero Mostel, of course) and
The Lion King
as her examples, and had even prepared a small bar chart titled “Broadway Ticket Prices, Then and Now.” A chart! What could be more persuasive than that? The use of info-graphics was the one good idea she’d picked up from reading the
Times,
and she was half expecting a generous helping of extra credit for her efforts.

Mr. Henderson clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Emily Pearl,” he said. “What am I going to do with you?”

“It doesn’t mention
Aurora,
” Emily said. “Did you see I made a chart?”

“It doesn’t, and you did. Very impressive. Broadway tickets are much more expensive than they used to be. I get it.” He took off his glasses and laid them on her paper. “That is what we call self-evident, Emily. Presenting a self-evident fact—even in a fancy multicolor chart—is not persuading me of anything.”

“I don’t get it,” said Emily.

“Everything costs more than it used to!” Mr. Henderson’s voice grew louder than seemed strictly necessary. “That fact alone does not constitute a reason for those things to suddenly be made free.”

He stood and went to the board and wrote a bunch of words. “Sets. Costumes. Lights. Don’t these cost money?”

“I guess.” Emily felt the prospect of extra credit slipping through her fingers.

Mr. Henderson wrote some more. “Actors. Musicians. Ushers. Stagehands. Do you think all these people should work
for nothing
?”

“Nope,” Emily conceded.

He wrote again, really big this time. “Directors. Choreographers. Composers, book writers, lyricists! Are you suggesting that all these creative people should labor for years and years to create Broadway musicals for Emily Pearl’s personal amusement without ever getting paid a dime?”

“Okay, I get it,” Emily said, shrinking back. Mr. Henderson looked ready to burst a vein. He must have seen the fear on her face.

“Emily, Emily, Emily,” he said. “I’m being hard on you, and there is a reason. I too am a fan of the theatre. There was a time when I dreamed of writing for Broadway myself. Believe it or not, some of us started out with bigger dreams than teaching high school English and directing the spring musical.” He looked around the classroom sadly. “Not that this job is going to save me. I can hardly afford to see a Broadway show myself more than once in a blue moon. But at least I get benefits. Health insurance, pension . . .” Emily found it hard to follow his train of thought, and her mind wandered. “You know we’re doing
Fiddler
this year, auditions are next week . . . ya-hah-deedle-deedle-bubba-bubba-deedle-deedle-dum . . .”

In another minute she was going to be late for Spanish. “Sorry, Mr. Henderson,” Emily said, trying her best not to sound snotty, “but what is your point, exactly?”

He handed her essay back to her. “My point is that this is a wish, not an argument. How
could
Broadway shows be free?
You
figure it out!
Persuade
me it’ll work! Convince me it’s both possible
and
a good idea!”

“Okay,” Emily said, feeling tiny.

“By Monday! And no
Aurora
!” he yelled after her as she slunk out of the classroom.

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?”