Trying to Float (14 page)

THE BANANA PEELS OF OPTIMISM

LUNCH AT TABLE
17 was a time usually devoted to bemoaning various embarrassing social situations. One day I found myself the focus of everyone at my table's gaze.

“Where do you want to go?”

This came from Maria and was a question echoed by every kid in my school. And we would not stop asking it for the next few months, each time more nervously. Maria, luckily, got to opt out of the entire process because her family was moving back to Italy.

Typical of my parents, they had done nothing to figure out where I should go to high school, so I took the elevator down to the lobby of the Chelsea, hoping that someone there had gone to high school in New York and would know what was going on.

It was late in the afternoon and I caught the Crafties in the window of sobriety between lunch and predinner cocktails at El Quijote. I emptied my sack of complaints.

Waving his cane to silence the others, Mr. Crafty began.

“As I look back on my life, the people I met at Hotchkiss and then the Naval Academy helped me to achieve my greatest accomplishments. Am I proud to admit that? No, but the advantage cannot be denied.”

“Excuse me,” interrupted Uber-Crafty, “you never went to Hotchkiss, and it was the Capitan, not you, who went to the Naval Academy.”

“Well, what about ‘my greatest accomplishments'?” asked Mr. Crafty, surprised at the revision to his biography.

“Locked securely in the future.”

“Funny man, but let me remind you”—Mr. Crafty now had the end of his cane stuck in Uber-Crafty's chest—“‘the distinction between the past, present, and future is only a persistent illusion.' ”

“Who said that, Mr. Crafty?” I questioned.

“I can assure you that he doesn't remember,” Uber-Crafty responded. “The point that he is trying to make is that if you want to get into a good college you will need to attend a private high school.”

This was the first I'd heard of such a thing. Noting my surprise, Uber-Crafty continued.

“Over half the kids from private schools in this city go to good colleges, even if they're screw-ups. That's not true of public schools.”

I was beginning to feel a fever coming on.

“Loaded parents know that the best way to get their lit
tle idiot into a respectable college is to find a private school where the kid automatically goes from elementary and middle school into high school.”

“What about poor kids?”

“No damn shot. No matter how much you work cleaning the shitters for Mr. and Mrs. Loaded, you aren't going to make the scratch to send your kid to a private school.”

This roused the Capitan, who was relaxing in a chair on the opposite side of the lobby.

“ ‘Muchacha!' to quote our recently departed friend.”

“Right you are, El Capitan. It's all about muchacha.”

Crafties Number One and Two were now waving their arms and clapping in mock tribute to Uber-Crafty.

“If you idiots would shut up, you might learn something,” shouted Uber-Crafty.

There was no chance of that, but Uber-Crafty continued anyway.

“So rich parents take a good look at themselves, their relatives, and Little Maxie and make a quick decision that the little crapper will never have the genetic stuff to beat out Jane Chu for that spot at a top public high school, so they pick up the phone and call in some solids to get Maxie into a private kindergarten. This is the last time, by the way, that these assholes will be honest about what's going on with their kid.”

“Hallelujah! Praise Uber-Crafty!” The chorus of sarcasm had started up again.

“Shut the fuck up!”

And with that the lecture was over.

—

The next day I sought out the school guidance counselor and told her that it was important that I get into a private high school. The conversation didn't last long: I had missed the deadlines for private schools, and as for the selective public schools, I was too late for most of those as well.

I was back where I had started.

That evening I returned to the lobby.

This time, Uber-Crafty was alone.

When I told him that I'd missed the deadline for private schools and that I was again at a loss for what to do, he laughed.

“Do me a solid,” he said.

I nodded.

“Tell me what you've enjoyed most in the last year.”

“Singing along to ‘Anything Goes'?” I replied cautiously.

He grimaced.

“Anything else?”

“Watching movies,” I admitted.

“Well,” he responded, “here's my advice: find a goddamn public school where you can sing and watch old movies, and stop bothering me.”

As I stood at the elevator, waiting to go back up to my room, Uber-Crafty approached me. He looked me in the eyes.

“One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Don't sweat it, kid.”

—

Two days later, glancing through the several-hundred-page
Directory of New York City Public High Schools,
I came upon a place where I could sing and act.

That evening I told my father of my selection: Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.

“Congratulations, my good girl,” Father announced. “You've made a fine choice, and I have every reason to believe that you will find the curriculum exactly what you are looking for. And as to the student body . . . ”

“Father,” I interrupted, “have you actually heard of the school?”

“Not by name.”

Lord.

Luckily, my fellow students knew a lot about the school, which is why they laughed when I told them of my decision. According to them, LaGuardia or “LAG” was where you went if you were genuinely talented—if you had played Annie on Broadway or done master classes with a famous musician.

It was the
Fame
school.

If that wasn't enough to intimidate me, there was an addi
tional bit of bad news: according to the kids at my table, LaGuardia required an audition.

I soon confirmed this: the acting studio at LaGuardia asked for two monologues, one comedic, one serious, and both had to be contemporary and appropriate for a thirteen-year-old. In other words, no Shakespeare.

As to the singing studio, the school required one a cappella song and a series of vocal and rhythmic tests, basically impossible for someone, like me, who couldn't read music. I decided to go for the acting studio.

Terrified, I reported this to my parents. They could not believe that I was the least bit bothered. They would help me find the monologues, they promised, I would pop up on stage, perform them, and the judges would declare that they'd heard nothing like it in all their years.

Here was the slippery stuff that my parents constantly tossed in my path—the banana peels of optimism, which invariably caused me to fly up in the air and come down on my head. I'd long ago excused them this attitude of theirs: they'd both grown up in the Midwest, where, it would seem, seldom was heard a discouraging word and where whenever the two of them actually decided to do something, which was not often, the universe agreeably parted and let them complete their task.

For me, by contrast, the world was the sort of place where just as you were getting to love someone (like Artie or my grandparents or Cream Puff), you were forced to watch
them suffer and die; a place where one could spend years alone and not understand why; not an easy place, an often painful place.

—

The whole problem of what to perform for my audition was made easier when I discovered a list of suggested monologues on the LaGuardia website. When I presented the list to my parents, my mother suggested I do the Auntie Mame monologue that I'd been performing at cocktail parties since I was five.

“It's a sure win!” she said.

But my father disagreed. He couldn't believe that I would even consider doing a monologue from the school's list. Why, he asked, bore the judges with something they'd heard a thousand times?

With that he set off to find the right monologue.

And find it he did. After searching through the theater section in our local library, he reappeared with a couple of handwritten pages which he had copied out of a book.

In the passage my father gave me, a teenage girl attempts to tell her family about something amusing she'd seen on
Oprah
—an interview Oprah had done with twin sisters. The parents of the girl aren't listening, choosing instead to shout at each other. Frustrated by being ignored, the girl's description of the interview becomes more and more manic.

It seemed funny to me, and Father's argument about bor
ing the judges with things they'd already heard made a certain amount of sense. Then again, most of what my father said had a small amount of sense packed inside it. The bait in the bear trap.

At the last minute, I decided that I would also apply to the voice studio. Choosing a song was much easier. My godfather, who had a career in musical theater, introduced me to a song that Carol Burnett had performed on Broadway when she was a young woman. The song was “Shy” and I loved it, as I loved everything that Carol Burnett sang.

An advantage of the song was that no one else was going to perform it. The girls who were applying to LaGuardia were more likely to sing something contemporary, like a song by Taylor Swift or Adele.

On the day of the audition, my parents accompanied me to LaGuardia. The audition was at 8:00 in the morning. Leaving the subway on Sixty-fifth street, we walked the several blocks to the school. I began to go over what I'd prepared for the audition, but I didn't get very far, for we were immediately interrupted by other kids, with other parents, moving in the same direction. As we approached the building, we ran into a wall of kids who had arrived well before us and had already formed a line which, beginning at the school, ran around the block.

“Twenty thousand,” one of the students whispered to me as I took my place in line.

I shook.

Directly in front of me was a short boy with dreadlocks. He was wearing a black suit and white shirt. His tie was poorly knotted and his cuffs frayed. He had no parents with him. Under his arm was a portfolio of drawings.

Two kids in front of him was a girl whose grandfather's name was embossed on a building down the street.

Never before had I seen so many kids from so many different parts of New York. Each of us would be required to perform, and if the judges were interested, we would be called back for another performance and interview.

But the important thing was the performance, and for that, it did not matter who you were or where you came from. The idea was thrilling and terrifying.

I glanced at my parents. If I was not mistaken, it was the first time I saw a dent in their optimism.

I, on the other hand, had been prepared for the worst but this exceeded my greatest fears. And isn't that the hellish thing about life: there is only underestimating the worst.

An hour and a half later, I was inside.

My first audition was for the vocal studio. I sat in the long line of chairs outside the auditorium. I had gone over the song many times, and I knew it. I also reminded myself that Mom had a beautiful voice and that, if I had inherited just part of it, I had a shot.

As I drew closer to the door of the auditorium, I could hear the other students performing. Each voice seemed better than the last, and the first was better than mine. But there was
one thing that I had and they didn't: while they all performed the same pop songs, I would be performing an ancient gem, “Shy.”

I was now sitting right outside the auditorium. The girl before me—a thin young girl with a quiet manner—had just walked in. She began, as all others had, by introducing her song.

“Today,” she announced, “I shall sing a song by Mary Rogers . . . ”

What, what?

“Written in 1958 . . . ”

Wait a minute . . .

“Titled . . .”

It couldn't be . . .

“ ‘Shy.' ”

No!

She began. And within a few stanzas, you'd have thought Ethel Merman had bolted from her grave. The room shook with this girl's voice. And with the room shaking and my mind spinning, I was unable to get to my feet fast enough to run out of the school.

My name was called. I had no choice but to march into the room and keep my chin up.

On the plus side, I got through it. Though there was a spark of snickering from the judges at the beginning, this was quickly doused by disinterest.

As I left the auditorium, filing past the others who were
waiting for their chance to sing, I wondered how many of them were going to sing “Shy” or something like it. How many of them were like me: kids who others considered weird, backward, and unlikable? And was this possibly, just possibly, a school for such characters?

But I didn't have much time to think about this. There was still the audition for the acting studio. I rushed to the basement, where three judges waited for me in a small classroom.

When I announced the name of the play, two of the judges leaned forward. Obviously no one had performed it, let alone the student just before me. A good start.

The attention of the three judges did not move from me, and as soon as I'd finished, they began talking among themselves with energy. Seeing that the discussion needed more time, they asked me to step outside. This could only be a good sign.

Upon being called back into the room, they asked if I would answer a few questions. Of course. I was feeling confident. I'd heard that acceptance notices would not be sent out for another couple months, but perhaps they made exceptions for the especially talented.

“Do you know anything about the play you performed?” was their first question.

My father, you will remember, had only given me a couple pages he'd copied from a book, but he'd given me enough of a description of the rest of the play for me to take a shot at an answer.