Viola in Reel Life (15 page)

“And when you’re an actress, your livelihood is subject to the whims of a director. When I go up for a part,
sometimes I’m too tall or too thin, or too this or too that, or not enough or way, way too much. The goddamned theater! You can’t please them! I have to live with being judged from everything from the credits on my résumé to the size of my ankles! But you—you are
not
judged, and you are
not
dismissed. You are the first thought in your mother’s and father’s mind in the morning and their last one before sleep.”

“Did they tell you that?” I ask.

“No. But I’m a mother. And that’s just the way it goes. Someday, when you’re a mother, you’ll know what I’m talking about. But for now, I’m asking you to open up your heart a little bit wider, and give your parents the security of knowing how happy you are here. Because I see it in you, I see how happy you are here. And your parents need to know this.”

Grand is right. I am pretty happy, but I like to complain. And then of course, I like to throw on my Princess Snark tiara from time to time…just
because
. Those days are over. “I won’t make everything about me anymore, Grand,” I vow.

“Nonsense. You must. It’s in the genes—you’re my granddaughter, aren’t you? We like a mirror. And we also like our reflection in the eyes of someone who thinks we’re just yummy. But you may be too young for that yet.”

“No, I have a boyfriend,” I blurt.

“You do?” Grand’s eyes widen.

“His name is Jared Spencer.”

“Rugged name.” Grand looks off in the distance and squints, as though she’s seeing it up in lights. “I like it.”

“He makes movies too.”

“Lovely.”

“You’d like him a lot.”

“I’m sure I will. Now, will you do me a favor? Will you go and video doo-dad—or whatever it is—your parents and be you? Be funny and dear and sarcastic just as you are so they don’t think we’ve ever had this conversation. Can you, on this Christmas night, make them feel good about themselves? Can you do that for your very well-preserved, young-ish Grand?”

I nod that I can. I hug Grand and I inhale the scent of her perfume. Closing my eyes tightly, I hug her hard enough for my mother to feel it halfway around the world.

“There. That’s better,” she says. And somehow, for real, it actually
is
.

“Mom? Dad?” I say into the camera on my computer.

“Merry Christmas!” Mom waves as Dad squeezes in. They lean forward.

“Oh my God, you totally missed it! It was the best one ever. We went to church….”

“Really?” Mom’s eyes widen.

“Grand cried.”

“She did?” Dad is impressed.

“She didn’t get her soul saved or baptized or anything, but she had a good cathartic weep. Her boyfriend is totally dreamy.”

“He’s a little…,” Mom begins.

“
Way
younger. But you should see them together. They’re so natural. They read aloud from their play and made us dinner. We had so much fun. But, of course, it would have been perfect to have you here.”

“Thanks.” I can tell my mom is trying not to cry.

“Please don’t cry. I love you so much and we’ll be together next year. And this, this was, well, a very interesting Christmas. A learning experience. I want to thank you for it.”

“We’re just happy when you’re happy.”

“And I’m happy. I’m very happy.” I smile.

My mother and father look at each other, and for the first time since they dumped me here, it’s as if someone let the air out of them. They relax before my eyes.

My father puts his arm around my mother and together they touch the screen, and I touch it on my end.
This time I don’t cry or long for them, but see myself in them. Their struggles are mine, and mine are theirs. Just the way it should be for parents and children—together as best they can be, on Christmas.

GEORGE AND GRAND SIT AT THE LOUNGE TABLE IN
Curley Kerner’s rec room and read my script for the May McGlynn story. George finishes first, and puts down the script. He gets up and stretches his long legs, not giving me any indication of whether he likes it or not.

Grand reads slowly. Finally, after what seems like a billion years, she puts the script down and removes her reading glasses. “George?” She looks up at him.

“I think it’s very good,” he says.

“So do I. But it’s missing something.”

“What?” I ask nervously.

“Well, you have the drama of her tragic death down cold—you’re going to film the nose of the crashed plane, and the ghost of May McGlynn emerging from the rubble,
all of that is very visual and fine, and clearly, you know what the movie is
about
—it’s about a young woman who died before she achieved her full potential…right?”

“Exactly.” I’m so happy the script makes sense I could burst with joy.

“But we never see the world that she worked in: the world of the actress, the movie actress of her era, the film studio, the world that defines who she is—or who people thought she was.”

“I can’t go to Hollywood and build interior sets of silent movies.”

“No, you can’t. But you could do it here. A story within a story. George could play her costar and I could play her sidekick and we could improvise a scene or two from her last movie project—”

I interrupt. Suddenly I get it! “And I could film you in black-and-white and we could do a voice-over about how the movie was going to change the course of her career and how May’s moment had finally arrived. She was just beginning to say something with her work, to dig deep.”

“Right, right!” Grand sees what I see.

“And then…,” I think aloud, “it wasn’t to be. Her dream died when she died. And then she was judged after her death for being young and beautiful, reduced
in memory to a lush and a flapper.”

“Absolutely. Had May McGlynn lived we’d be talking about her as an iconic actress of the thirties—not Bette Davis or Myrna Loy, but May McGlynn!”

“Are you in, George?” I ask.

“Sounds like fun.” He shrugs.

“Okay. I’ll storyboard it and then we’ll film first thing in the morning.”

There’s nothing an artist needs more—even more than excellent tools and stamina—than a deadline.

So, I sit at my computer and, with words—
not
my chosen form of self-expression, but necessary in this instance—hammer out, moment by moment and scene by scene, what I see in my mind’s eye in the telling of May McGlynn’s story.

Marisol watches me from her bed, as she listens to her iPod. It doesn’t even bug me when she occasionally sings a “whoo whoo” phrase aloud from Gwen Stefani. She catches herself, looks at me, mouths
I’m sorry
, and gets quiet.

I’m comforted to have a witness as I figure this thing out. This movie is now driving me with an intensity I haven’t felt since September when my parents dropped me off here. Back then, all my energy went into finding my way back home, and now, everything I am,
everything I know, everything I want to say is wrapped up in this movie, in getting this story just right. I am driven by the desire to make something worthwhile. And then, having made something worthwhile, I want to
win
the competition.

“Are you okay?” Marisol asks.

“Never better,” I promise.

The theater in Hojo is used for assemblies, plays, and faculty meetings. It’s a simple auditorium with wooden seats that fold up, and a proscenium stage with black velvet drapes that create scrims on the upstage wall of the theater. It’s plain and cavernous, just what I need to fake an old Hollywood set.

I set my Canon XH A1 video camera on a tripod. Grand and George are downstairs in makeup. We looked at some old photographs of Rudolph Valentino movies, and I told them to be creative. George is wearing a tux from the costume shop, and Grand chose a lacy black evening gown, elbow-length gloves, and a short flapper wig with thick bangs and spit curls. They laughed a lot when they were trying on the old costumes.

I check my lighting. Grand and George will do voice-overs later, over the images on the Avid, so at least I don’t have to worry about sound when I’m filming.

Marisol hollers from the wings. “The actors are ready.”

“Places,” I tell them, adjusting the lens on my camera.

George strides across the stage—he really comes alive in the lights; I can see why Grand fell for him. Then she enters. As Grand moves across the stage, she’s deft, smooth, and totally willowy. Grand and George have the same reverence for the stage that Father Time had for his altar in the Loretto Chapel on Christmas Day.

Grand and George applied a pale yellow pancake makeup on their faces as a base, and then very deliberate black eyeliner and brownish lipstick. I look through the lens as I check their makeup in the light. They have the look of silent movie stars.

I come from behind the camera because not only am I the director of photography on this movie, I’m the actual director and writer, so I have to do it all. “You look amazing,” I tell them. My actors sort of exhale, relieved that they’ve pleased me.

I put my hands in my pockets and pace in the audience by the downstage lip.

“Basically, you’re going to act out the day on the set when you got the news that May McGlynn has gone down in a plane. You’re to act directly into the camera and react to her death. Now, the backstory is: George, you’re her lover hearing the news for the first time and,
Grand, you’re May’s mentor—the actress who helped her learn all about Hollywood, helped her find a place to live, all of that. Any questions?”

They shake their heads no. We’ve been over this a few times, and we went through the storyboard before they went in to makeup. George and Grand are quick studies.

“Now, I’ve only got the one camera so we’ll do the more stationary stuff first, and then I’ll pick it up and handhold it, which wasn’t something they did back then, but in telling the story it makes it more intimate and effective.”

“What do you want me to do?” Marisol asks.

“I’d like you to mark each of the bullet points on the storyboard as I film them, so we know we have what we need when we go over to the dorm to do the narration.”

“No problem.” Marisol takes the script and a seat by the camera.

Marisol has tears in her eyes as she watches the scene. I am moved too by the power of emotions without the aid of words. George and Grand communicate everything without talking, in that very delicate way that the great silent actors did.

I do the scene several times, covering it from various angles—Grand’s point of view, then George’s. Then I do something that I didn’t plan. I take the camera off the
tripod and head to the back of the darkened theater and I ask them to hold the position after they’ve heard the news about May’s plane crash.

Something compels me to get this intimate scene in a wide shot. That the depth from the back of the theater just might give me scope, dramatizing the loneliness of their loss in the distance and the silence.

The single beam of light from the follow spot bleeds into the work lights. George, prostrate with grief, bends so far forward he looks like a child. Grand has her hand on his back, and it’s almost as if she’s guiding him toward the truth. They hold the pose for a long while.

“Cut!” I shout at long last.

George comes up from his kneeling position and Grand shakes out her legs. “You trying to kill us, Viola?” Grand bellows.

“Did we get it?” George asks.

“Oh yeah,” I holler.

I’m actually energized when I get back to my room after our day of filming. I’ve loaded the footage into the Avid. Marisol is already asleep, beat from the rigors of filmmaking. I text Jared.

I sit back in my desk chair. Maybe it’s the exhilaration I feel after a full day of filming, and maybe it’s residual Christmas spirit, but I miss my BF and I want him to know it.

The seconds it takes for the text response to appear seems to take, like, ten years. Finally:

I look down at the word
beautiful
and wish for a second that it wasn’t 2009, but 1809, and that the word
beautiful
was written on parchment paper with a quill pen in fancy cursive letters in indelible ink. I want this
text to last forever, not scroll into cyberspace where it disappears into technowhere. I want this word to last, and even more, the feelings behind it.

What a perfect ending to a perfect day.

Grand and George pack up his Prius and head off to Cincinnati to start rehearsals for
Arsenic and Old Lace
on Sunday as the girls return in droves to PA to start the new semester. Every girl on campus seems to be wearing a new sweater.

Before she left, Grand met Suzanne and Romy and Trish, who swears she saw Grand when she toured with the musical
On the Twentieth Century
in Chicago in 1995. Trish could find stardust in the bottom of a jar of pickles.

“I just love Grand,” Marisol says wistfully. “And if I had to spend a Christmas away from my family, I’m glad it was with Grand.”

“Hey…”

“And you.”

“Thanks.”

“So, Viola, I’m a little worried about your movie.”

“Why?” I ask, suddenly nervous.

“I don’t really understand the black-and-white footage and the voice-over. I don’t get it. Why do you need it?”

“Well, Marisol. You know how a poem uses words in a spare way to describe a feeling?”

“Yeah.”

“When you make a movie, you have to take the audience to a place that they can only go in a movie. So, I needed to dramatize May’s 1920s life, and the best way was to show her workplace.”

“But how is it all going to fit together?”

“That’s the art part,” I tell her.

Mrs. Carleton passes out instructions about our English lit project for second semester. She wants us to imagine a police officer comes to knock on our door after a robbery, and we are to describe to the officer how the crime transpired. It’s an interesting assignment, but I have other things on my mind.

“Mrs. Carleton?” I ask her after class.

“Yes, Viola?”

“I read online that you were a theater major.”

“I was. Undergrad,” she replies without even looking up from her laptop.

“Did you ever do any acting?”

Mrs. Carleton straightens her spine, and it’s almost as if her jeans fall into straight, pressed creases. “I was the lead in Andreyev’s
He Who Gets Slapped
.”

“Wow. Well, I was wondering if you’d be in my movie. I’ve got every role cast except the fortune-teller, and I think you’d be great.”

“This is for the Midwest film project?”

“Yes, it is. I have Mrs. Zidar playing a role, my RA, Trish, is going to be Hedda Hopper in Hollywood, and my roommate Suzanne is going to be May McGlynn. We’re going to film this weekend here on campus.”

“Do you have a script?” she asks.

“Right here.” I pull the script out of my backpack. I’m sort of thrilled she asked for the script, as this is the sign of a true actress. That of course and, once reading the script, passing on the part. But I’m not worried.

“You’re Mavis the fortune-teller who begs May not to get on the plane in South Bend, but to stay until the following morning. The plane crashes, so it turns out you were right,” I explain.

“This sounds like fun. Count me in.”

“Great!”

“And, Viola?”

“Yes, Mrs. Carleton?”

“You still have to write the witness paper.”

“Oh, I know. I wasn’t bogarting for extra credit. In fact, I’m getting pretty good with the writing part because I had to write this script.”

Romy has turned out to be an excellent producer. She broke down my script over three days and organized the actors. Romy made sure they had their scripts in advance, and that they knew where we were filming and how long they were needed.

Marisol pulled the most fabulous period costumes from the costume shop at Phyllis Hobson Jones Hall. Marisol found drop-waist dresses, silk stockings, cloche hats, and gloves for the actors to wear. The characters came alive as the actors put on the costumes.

The biggest surprise of all was Suzanne, who never acted in her life and who stars as May McGlynn. She was so beautiful on video, her blond hair gleaming, her long torso perfect for the costumes of the period. She made the leap from coquettish actress to tragic victim with the grace and knowing of an old pro. I can’t wait for Grand to see what Suzanne did with the part.

I believe Suzanne got the bug playing May McGlynn.

The movie has definitely pulled Quad 11 together in a way that we had not counted on. It’s one thing to live
together in harmony, but it’s something special to work together, get along, and help one another in a professional setting. I won’t ever forget how the girls rallied to pitch in on this just for me.

Time has definitely flown by since everyone came back from the holidays. Class, and prepping for the movie, and then actually
filming
the movie—I can’t believe it’s already March! The snow has melted, leaving behind mud on the ground and a small river of slush in the gutters. Spring is trying to make its way to South Bend as purple and yellow crocuses push up through the tangled brambles of winter. The bare branches of the trees are turning the palest of green, ready to bud.