Emma Who Saved My Life (14 page)

Actors and actresses with some pull get the same staff person each night, so they feel at ease, trust their dresser, don't have to worry about their clothes falling off while they're tap-dancing. I kept getting assigned the chorus line, usually chorus boys but sometimes chorus girls (there is no modesty backstage during a quick-change). Most chorus-people, sorry to say, are dime-a-dozen. Which is not to say they are untalented: they are enormously, frightfully adept and talented. There's just 100,000 of them in New York. You have to be soooo talented it's not funny to be the chorus-extra in the lousiest low-budget musical in New York (usually running at the Venice, I assure you). They are young (eighteen to twenty-threeish), näive, they have been in dance classes since they were nine, vocal since fourteen, theater classes with Mr. Once-Famous in the Village since sixteen, they are from Riverdale and Mother has pushed them all the way, Mother is manager and agent and, yes, the sympathetic best friend.

How do these extras get in the door? Well, one of the regulars, Tony, has the flu and will be out for two weeks (what Tony is really doing is auditioning for another show in San Francisco, a big role with billing; no one has
ever
had the flu in the history of the theater, absence is due to something else always—you'd go on with the flu, for pete's sake). ANYWAY, so the theater calls some agency and gets sent Chorus Boy Clone No. 34,798, and Chorus Boy is very excited, happy to have another show on his
ŕ
esu
ḿ
e, and he has delusions of staying on, replacing old Tony. The Dresser is the main contact for the extra, and hence I learned that the Chorus Boy substitute/Dresser relationship moves along this inevitable path:

First, the Dresser is the Chorus Boy's best friend. Remember, they think this two-week trial is their Big Break, someone famous may see them, so they're going to dance their little hearts out, sing the ooohs and ahhhs so beautifully that they will be asked to stay on … maybe a cast album credit. But they learned all the steps in a week, the words last night, the music from a badly recorded cassette, and they watched the play all last week to get the feel of the production. Then there they are. You know their cues and where they should be. They don't. At this stage it's “Thanks Gil,” and “You're a real pal, Gil,” and “I never woulda made it without you, Gil,” and you get taken out for an occasional drink (not that these boys have one interesting thing to say—they're all chorus machines, automatons of talent).

Second phase, around the fourth day in the role. They have the feel of the thing, they're having fun, they're getting cocky now. Guess what, they tell you, I talked to the director and he really likes me. Uh-huh, you say, your mouth full of pins, doing an emergency hem-job on his formal trousers he ripped, kicking his heels in the finale. The Dresser is not as important as he once was; he is, it seems, subservient …

Third phase, the Chorus Boy manifests confidence, utter disregard, contempt, indifference, superiority: “Quickly, quickly,” they snap, “I haven't got all day. Owww, that's too tight—can't you find me another necktie?”

End of story? Tony doesn't get the part of the second male lead in San Francisco, he is back. Tony is the director's nephew, by the way, which no one bothered to tell Chorus Boy. So, son, they tell him, we're sorry to see you go, you were good, real good, damn good (the Kiss of Death: “damn good”) and, yes, of course, when something opens up, if someone leaves, he will be the very first person they immediately call.

Fourth phase, for the last two nights only. You, the Dresser, are once again his all-time best friend. You are inside the theater, lowly thing that you are, and he would pay anything just to be where you are, inside instead of outside, no more auditions, no more Mother in Riverdale (“I know it's 8 a.m. darling, but don't you think you ought to get up and practice your audition piece for Mother?”), no more sacrifice. And so you say goodbye and he is extra friendly and asks you to put in a good word for him if someone, ha ha, breaks a leg or something, and you say you will, and he gives you his phone number (or his mother's) for you to give to the director, and you take it, and there's a lot of real-nice-working-with-you and then they walk away, kit bag over the shoulder, perfectly assembled in I'm-a-professional-dancer-on-Broadway fashionable sweats. And you NEVER see them again, and they NEVER have any more personality than that, and they NEVER seem happy.

And finally:

4. The First Reader.

Everyone's a writer in New York, as Emma says, and when they're not working on their Great Novel, they're writing their Great Play and sending it to off-Broadway theaters. One in a million gets produced this way but theaters, particularly the Venice, don't want to miss out on a hit, and plus they like the “artistic interaction” with the community, and plus if they read free-lance submissions they get a little money from some playwright's guild and a state-funded grant, so this CHARADE of reading plays occurs, and this task is pawned off on the New Kids.

At first I thought I shouldn't be a First Reader because I didn't finish college and had a limited background in theater literature, but Joyce gave me this look that said: You don't think reading this crap takes any talent or smarts, do you? And I recall, god, with a blush now, that I told Joyce that I was looking forward to reading plays. Joyce smoked her cigarette impassively, with the merest shake of her head: “Gil, darling, they've been waiting for you to come along. For a long time.”

Joyce would collect a week's worth and drop them in a pile in front of me and Monica, the second-to-last person to join the Venice, and Joyce would give a little spiel: “All right, here they are, one performance only before the Trashcan. Three piles. No Way in Hell. Not Half Bad. Might Work. Let me warn you I've seen only two “Might Work”s in twenty-five years here come over the transom. If the writer has an agent, we send it to Schmeen in case it's for real. If it's a real prize turkey, we keep it for our Classics file for the Christmas party.”

At the Christmas party three things invariably happened, and having missed last year's, I got to hear all about them: 1) the Classics folder was read, some of the actors taking part in the dialogue (Him: You lied to me, Sylvia. I thought we had love! Her: Oh we did, we did, Jerome, but it went away, far far away…”); 2) Joyce was coerced into performing her tap-dance routine from
The Follies of 1939
and everyone loved it and everyone said her legs hadn't changed and they were still those of a nineteen-year-old and Joyce sat there and ate up her annual night of adulation; and 3) Arnie Schmeen, Sr., would get up to give a speech, drunk, and get sentimental (“But what
is
the Theater? I'll tell you what it is—it's Dreams, it's Hopes, it's Magic … and if anyone tells you, hey, it's just a business, well you tell 'em they're wrong, baby, wrong as can be…”) and rousing and teary-eyed until the emotion overwhelmed him and he was led away, back to the table with the spiked punch and everyone was supposed to, at some point after it, go up and tell him how much what he said meant to them, and the actors cynically competed amongst themselves for who could lay the biggest pile of bullshit on Arnie (“Oh Mr. Schmeen, I … I don't think I ever understood why I was here, in the Theater, until you got up there and said what you just said…”), and woe unto the person who broke up laughing in midspeech. But anyway, in my days at the Venice, particularly in the summer as the Hot New Ideas for the Fall Season drifted in, and Monica and I sat there in the boiling hot practice room dragging ourselves through these things, I personally put quite a few Classics in the Classics folder.

Monica would read the one-paragraph description required on all submissions. At first we were conscientious and read some of each play, but finally we learned it wasn't necessary …

Monica would read: “Steve is married, but his ex-roommate John is gay; Mary is married to Steve but he doesn't know about her lesbian past! What happens when all three plus Mary's strident lover share a mountain cabin in New England for the weekend? A delightful romp, a comedy of manners—”

Not Half Bad pile, I'd say. At least there was a plot.

Next. Monica read on: “A musical based on the
Diary of Anne Frank.
It moves from light romantic comedy—”

You've gotta be kidding, I said. Classic folder.

“—to the tragedy that was Nazi Germany for the Jews.
Anna!
(yes, Gil, with an exclamation mark) will make you laugh, make you cry, fun for the whole family, heartwarming and educational…”

Is there a rundown of musical numbers, I asked.

Monica couldn't read she was giggling so hard, “Oh god yes, of course—he's even got a cassette tape for us. Oh Gil we've got to put it on and hear ‘I Call My Closet Home.'”

I wanted to hear something called “Jawohl,” and “Mama's Song.” Monica and I put first dibs on performing “Maybe the Nazis Are People Too” at the Christmas party.

Slowly the pile would lessen. Monica and I were becoming friends through all this, and we gossiped about people, trusted each other sort of, discussed our eventual goals—a true TOP SECRET as, bizarrely, no one ever
admitted
to any ambition in the theater. It would be six o'clock and time to go home, or for a drink with Monica, and on some days we were clever enough to be so quiet, so unnoticed that we stayed up in the rehearsal room all afternoon unmissed, goofing off, avoiding other assignments.

Real life seldom intruded once I moved to daytime at the theater. There was a president named Ford who told New York City to drop dead, Nixon to go free, had a cool wife who said she knew her kids had sex and smoked dope, got shot at by someone in the Manson Family.

“Well well well,” said Lisa, one night when I came in late, “look who's here. Our roommate. Our roommate, that is, when last we checked.”

“I don't know this man,” said Emma blankly. “Wait … a distant, ancestral memory returns … You are Gil … he walks among us.”

Oh come on guys, I'm not gone that much.

“Why don't you bring your theater friends over?” asked Lisa.

Then Emma kicked in: “Why don't you invite us to hang out with your artsy fartsy THEATUH friends, huh? Ashamed of us?”

I haven't been keeping you from them or them from you, don't be ridiculous.

(But I had been, they were right. Unconsciously, I had kept my apartment life from my theater life, one as a retreat from the other. Besides, I didn't mind the idea that Emma might be thinking I was up to something behind her back. Nor did I mind having the theater think I was living with someone and being modern and with-it—I hid behind Emma and Lisa. If the loud unappealing actress or middle-aged gay director made a play for me I could say, gee, let me call my housemate and see if
she
has dinner ready. If all my acquaintances got together and compared notes nothing major would be exposed but I couldn't keep inventing my life with such confidence if that happened, so I made sure it didn't happen.)

And then one night, Emma walks into my bedroom and slams the door. She stands there with her arms crossed. I can't tell if she's really upset or not:

“WHO is Francine?”

Francine? Francine Jarvis, I repeat instinctively.

“You tell me.”

Francine's an actress. Did you find a Kleenex with her phone number on it?

“Yes I did. I want to know if I've been paying a third of a phone bill rife with calls to Francine Jarvis. If so, I'm getting a separate line.”

Well … I sit up in bed and I do what any man would do in the circumstances: I lie. I say: Francine and I met at an audition and we went out and I've seen her a few times, just friendly-like, for drinks, for coffee—

“
Coffee
?” Emma blanched. “You had coffee with a woman—an actress—and you didn't clear it with me?”

It was spontaneous.

“Don't let it happen again. No actresses—is that clear?”

Emma, what's the big deal?

“This apartment will not disintegrate into disgusting couples with Emma watching from the sidelines. I will not condone BIMBOS on your arm.”

Francine's no bimbo, Emma, she … she uh has a degree from New York University and she's a good actress and—

Emma sternly wagged a finger at me: “Actress equals bimbo. There are no exceptions.”

Can I have the Kleenex?

“I incinerated it in the ashtray. And another thing: Why don't you take me to any of the theater parties at the Venice?”

Because you say theater people are phoney and pretentious, all actors are jerks, all actresses are bimbos, all people associated with it are stupid, there hasn't been a good playwright since Aeschylus—

“I'll soften the rhetoric. Someone's got to keep an eye on you. It's my duty to work the Bimbo-Watch.”

Remarks like that keep you at a distance from my social life—

“Pleeeeease take me to a theater party…” she begged. “I don't get to meet any
artistes
and bohemians in my boring life and my boring jobs. I never go out. Pleeeeeease.”

All right, all right. You can come to the next one if you really want to. But you'll hate it.

The Time Emma Went to a Venice Theater Party:

Emma wore a slinky black dress, trying to be bohemian for the occasion. She spent all day frizzing out her long brown hair which made her look Bride of Frankensteinish but I didn't say anything. She was trying to look stylish for me. I think.

There she was, cornered by the cocktail bar, with Robbie the Mime. Robbie was immensely handsome with a perfect body flexing underneath his leotard, but nobody liked him because he wasn't funny and had no sense of humor and was vain about his work and the one thing you can't be as a mime is unlikable. I went to get a little cocktail sandwich when I heard Emma's voice ringing out: