Scrappy Little Nobody(6)
Moments before disaster.
I forgot the next lyrics. I stood onstage with my mouth open while the adults in the front row tried to get me back on track. I weighed my options, and while it didn’t occur to me to simply leave the stage, I devised this impromptu exit strategy: slowly slide my feet farther and farther apart, then let gravity take over until I eventually face-plant in slow motion on the stage. I hoped I would wake up in bed. I hoped someone would come scoop me up and take me to Dunkin’ Donuts. But that didn’t happen. The prerecorded accompaniment did not stop. After a while I sat back up, and when the chorus came back around, I started singing again, red-faced and with far less conviction. The song ended and I walked offstage to where my mom was waiting for me. I said, “Well, that was stupid.”
My mom tells this story with affection. I suppose that’s because I shook it off. I didn’t say I wanted to quit and I wasn’t afraid to show my face after messing up. She probably should have been a little worried about that reaction, though. What a little sociopath, right?
The following year, in spite of my disastrous debut performance, my dance teacher suggested that I audition for some local theater. Our community theater was run-down but very charming, and they were about to put on a production of Annie, which is going to come up a lot in my childhood. My apologies.
In preparation, I watched the 1982 film version of Annie with my family and my world exploded. These girls were dancing, singing, causing trouble, and playing with dogs—I needed this to be my life. I was too young to play Annie, but I wanted the part of Molly desperately. Molly is the young orphan whom Annie comforts with the song “Maybe.” It’s a pretty heartbreaking piece of music, and I wanted to get in there and chew some of that depressing scenery.
Alas, they went in a different direction for Molly, but I got to play Tessie. The internet informs me that Tessie is ten years old, while Molly is six, but in our version Tessie was “the littlest orphan.” Tacking on any superlative is a surefire way to get a kid excited about something, so it was a clever way to convince me that Tessie was a special character. However, Tessie should be the littlest orphan. What kind of ten-year-old has a catchphrase like “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness! They’re fightin’ and I won’t get no sleep all night!” Get your shit together, Tessie.
Doing the show was the best. I was in heaven. Being tiny was a good thing, being loud was a good thing. In everything else I’d done in my six years on earth, I’d been told I had too much energy, but here, I had somewhere to channel it all! We sang “It’s the Hard-Knock Life”! We did a dance with tin buckets and scrub brushes that was bursting with adorable scrappy rage! We got to embody the rollicking fun of being orphans! (Why are kids so obsessed with orphans?) We got to play with a dog!! At one point the director told the girls we were playing too rough with the dog and they should play with me instead, because it might tire me out a little. So maybe I still had too much energy—they’re adding a TAP number?! Let’s go learn it!
To this day, seeing a tattered brown cardigan or a pair of thin-soled lace-up boots makes my heart sing. In a costume context, not, like, on a person. I’m not some out-of-touch monster who sees real-world poverty and longs for the days of her musical-theater beginnings.
One review mentioned me. The reviewer said something nice but remarkably unspecific, yet my mother and father know that sentence verbatim to this day. I won’t bother pretending that I think that’s lame of them (I mean, it is, I just don’t think it is), because having my parents love and support me is a pretty sweet situation, as parent-child relationships go.
My next local gig was playing Baby June in a production of Gypsy a few towns away. The director was a woman with enormous black hair who seemed to bathe in knockoff Chanel No. 5 and tacky jewelry. I’d never met someone who was so unapologetic about how they looked. She sparkled like a Christmas disco ball at all times. If I’d known what a drag queen was, I would have thought, That woman looks like a female drag queen and chuckled to myself about my very first piece of lazy observational humor. Instead I thought, That woman is all the colors of the rainbow and I want to roll around in her closet.
She turned out to be all business when it came to this production, and, no, I would NOT be allowed to use a trick baton, I would learn to twirl the batons, because that’s what professionals do! And don’t put your hand there, put it two centimeters to the left! And learn right from left, Anna! The day I cried because I realized that Dainty June (the slightly older version of my character) was played by a different actress, she said, “Yes, that’s right, so let’s rehearse the transition number again. Dig your own grave, little one.” Okay, she didn’t say the “dig your own grave” part, but she was not sympathetic.
With our ruthless and bejeweled director at the helm, the Biddeford City Theater production of Gypsy was actually pretty good. Looking back, I’ve wondered why she was so demanding. It was just community theater. Why did it have to be so perfect? But I’ve also now been around enough people who have a low opinion of anyone who is creative in a nonprofessional realm to know that that’s ugly and ignorant. People don’t have to do things by half measures because they aren’t getting paid for it. In fact, that’s all the more reason to throw every ounce of passion you have behind it. I think she could have yelled a bit less for the sensitive types like me who need to be told they are wonderful every half hour to accomplish anything at all, but I respect that she pushed herself and everyone around her.