Unnaturally Green (5 page)

But Julie assured me I shouldn’t panic; the songs were sing-able. Without missing a beat, she opened her mouth to demonstrate, and I nearly imploded. Her singing was so effortless it made me doubt she was a real person and not some extremely convincing human-shaped synthesizer. I gave her the once-over. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, attractive. Was she, like all other Elphabas, scientifically engineered?

“Okay, your turn.”

My pulse started to race.

What gives?

It wasn’t even the audition yet.

Truth is, I’d always been insecure about my singing. Not having gone to college for theater, I’d dabbled in voice lessons, but never trained intensively. Sure, I knew about breathing from your diaphragm and all that, but learned to sing mostly by a method I liked to call “Guess and Check”—guess a way to sing something, check to see if it sounds good. If so, great. If not? Adjust.

Would my do-it-yourself approach fly in the face of the impossible?

Julie was peering at me with searching eyes, like a stern-browed headmistress. I counted off in my head, planted my feet, and started singing a few bars of the Act I Finale, “Defying Gravity.” I managed to hang in until the end, but soon it got way too high and relentless, and I had to stop.

“Um, yeah—great!” Julie said.

I would have maybe half-believed her if my throat didn’t feel like it had just been slathered in razor butter.

Julie said she’d observed a few imbalances in my posture, which may have been compromising my singing support. My left knee had a habit of bending inward and collapsing my hips, she said, which threw off my diaphragm and short-changed my breathing.

“To fix this,” she advised, “tighten your butt, really hard.”

She demonstrated, and I stared, enthralled. And not just because she had a totally rockin’ butt.

Who knew it all came down to butt clenching?

I could definitely do this; I’d been clenching my butt for years! Just ask anyone who’s ever known me at an academic institution.

We worked a bit more, the goal being for me to align my body and suck in my glutes with a vengeance. I next applied these principles to “The Wizard and I,” whose excerpt was twice as long, though slightly less terrifying than “Defying Gravity.” One of the tricks here was to adjust the vowels of the lyrics sung on super high notes. For example, final lyrics, “the Wizard and I,” were actually sung as, “the Wizard aaaa naaaa.” (Like you were saying the middle vowel of “banana.”) The listener’s ear, Julie explained, would be tricked into thinking they’d heard it right. Same went for “Defying Gravity.” At the end of the song the lyrics were “bring me down.” But I would actually sing, “bring maaaa naaaa.”

What is this crazy singer voodoo,
I thought as I clenched my butt once more, gearing up to sing. In a leap of faith, I tried it.

“
The Wizard….aaaa naaaa!
”

In the end, Julie promised that no matter my difficulties now, I would eventually be able to sing Elphaba. I just needed to practice every day.

This was great news, except for the fact that the audition was in less than forty-eight hours. Would I pull through, I wondered, given the time constraints?

Next, we read the confrontation scene between Elphaba and Glinda, 
Wicked
’s other main character. “Don’t be afraid to really let her have it,” Julie told me after one run-through. “Elphaba doesn’t take crap from anybody. She’s brave, and sticks her neck out.”

I flashed back to the time I had seen
Wicked
 on Broadway five years before, when I couldn’t help but feel a strong connection to the character. Elphaba was fiery, like me, but also sensitive, bookish, and awkward, with a confused fashion sense. (Like me.) Through outward greenness and inner strength, she was one-of-a-kind: a girl who would face, head-on, any challenge cast before her.

(My only wish? That Elphaba could audition in my place.)

“You know,” Julie said, “once you’ve got the acting down, you’ll find that singing the role is as much about emotion as it is about vocal technique. You have to reach inside yourself to find the source of what’s causing Elphaba to sing so passionately. Practice good form, of course—but once you have that down, just let everything go.”

Our session came to a close, and we hugged goodbye.

Alone in the studio, it was time to keep pounding the pavement. I’d typed up the lyrics to “Defying Gravity” on a separate sheet of paper, which helped me to visualize the lyrics as a story, as opposed to spread out across a musical score. As Julie had said, I needed to find the source of Elphaba’s passion—to tap into something that meant something to me. To remember something that would resonate, emotionally.

Two days later, nearing the end of my audition, I’d made it to the end of “Defying Gravity.” I lowered my voice and rumbled from my gut, daring anyone who’d ever hurt me to try and do it again.

“Maaaa naaaa!”

I let go, releasing all of my sound, from head to toe.

Then it was over.

“Thank you, Felicia.”

I looked over to the pianist then back to Craig, sweaty, out of breath. My mind was contracting, then expanding, and my body felt wrecked. I wandered over to the piano to get my stuff, then back to the door.

“Thanks.”

As I turned the knob, tears started to run down my cheeks. I didn’t know the exact reason, but my body was telling me it was time to cry.

Back in the terminal, I reunited with Lipstick Loop and the other misfit toys. Teardrops speckled my burgundy collar, which fed down toward my armpit stains, like two rivers meeting the sea. I imagined I must have looked exactly as the others had: bleary-eyed, dazed, a shell of a person.

“Fierce,” I heard somebody say.

“
Fierce!
”

After changing into jeans in a bathroom stall (pleasantly larger than a dog kennel), I consulted the mirror. My nose had become positively clown-like from crying, and the only course of action was to deploy urgent de-puffing reinforcements. As I blotted it with a cold paper towel, it occurred to me that if I ever had to cry on camera, they would need a wide-angle HD lens to capture the girth and saturation of my truly majestic schnozzer.

Once my nose was no longer visible from space, I took the elevator down to street level, since it was time to head to my afternoon Chanukah rehearsal. As I walked through the glass double-doors, I caught sight of a familiar silhouette hovering on the sidewalk. He turned and smiled, scooping me up for a bear hug.

“Marshall! What the—!”

Enter Marshall Evan Roy, my brand new sort-of boyfriend of several weeks. He was caring, reliable, told me how he felt, loved to cook, and had the physique of a Greek god. With a man that perfect, there had to be drawbacks. I was certain that one of these days I would see his face plastered on the news, below the headline, “Con Artist Slash Occasional Fitness Model Dupes Heartbreak-Weary Girl Into Thinking He’s Perfect, Steals Her Bananas.”

It would be a long headline. But, still: it was such an obvious plot twist.

“You mentioned the name of the casting office over the phone,” Marshall said, “so I Googled it. I wanted to surprise you. Here.” He handed me a baggy. “I brought you an oatmeal raisin cookie.”

“Marshall! How the—!”

I was speaking in half-phrases, a dead giveaway that the cat had gotten my tongue and the butterflies had colonized my stomach. “Thank you,” I said, through a mouthful of oatmeal and raisins, planting an ill-timed cookie-crumb kiss on Marshall’s lips.

He had shown up unannounced, but Marshall’s thoughtfulness came as no surprise. Instead, it was a trend; from gourmet dinners, to homemade cocktails, to tickets to Broadway shows, our dates so far had been off-the-charts.

(
GREEN.
5.
fresh, recent, or new:
a green relationship
)

We’d been set up on a blind group date by mutual friends from childhood, his best friend Francesca and my best friend Becky, who, for years, had been pitching me like the next billion-dollar ad campaign.
Our date location of choice was (brace yourself) Serendipity on the Upper East Side—the one from that terrible John Cusack movie.
(“
You don't have to understand. You just have to have faith!
”
“Faith in what?” “Destiny!”
)

On said group date, at one point I squeezed Marshall’s upper arm. Based on what I felt, he earned a second, solo date.
I do not remember any of this second date, so distracted was I by the fact that I was out with someone, (1) who looked like a gladiator, (2) who wasn’t brain-dead or sociopathic, (3) whose company I was starting to really enjoy. What I
do
remember is I was served one whole sea bass, with eye and bones intact, on a wooden slab. Rather than send it back, I chewed down the fish, bones and all, as if this were my regular practice, which was an early sign that I was falling for him.

A few dates more and I accepted an after-dinner invitation to have tea at his place.

You heard me:
tea!
Because “tea” is code for “I spent the night.”

Chastely!

(Okay, not in the true Catholic sense of the word. But we
were
able to resist our lightning-bolt mutual attraction, i.e. nobody scored a homerun, i.e. do you want me to spell it out for you? i.e. we didn’t have sex, i.e. but we made out.)

The next morning I woke to homemade eggs and toast, my impossibly muscular chef decked out in nothing but boxer briefs and a striped scarf, which I first observed through the frame of his kitchen doorway, squinting my eyes so it resembled the watercolor book jacket of a romance novel. (I can see it now, in paperback:
The Brooklyn Scoundrel:
Omelets of Sin.
)

I slunk over to the kitchen table, where I commented on the fact that Marshall was left-handed.

“Just like Obama.”

“Or Sarah Jessica Parker,” he said.

We lazed into the afternoon, eating eggs with globs of goat cheese, bantering ten miles a minute, at which point I realized that not only was this guy a total hunk, but he was—gasp!—smart, funny, and interesting.

Was dating supposed to be this great? History, political scandals, and all my prior boyfriends had taught me, no.

That day after my audition Marshall wore the same structured, burnt-brown leather jacket and plain white t-shirt he wore on our first date, which made him look a bit like James Dean (if James Dean were a giant, stylish gladiator). His hair had been mussed from the wind and hung a bit in his eyes, in an unnerving “come hither” way—which made me want to obey, immediately, rubbing oatmeal cookie all over him, like some weird baker’s porn.

“How did the audition go?” Marshall asked, putting his arms around my waist.

I chewed and swallowed.

“Oh, pretty okay,” I said, telling him about Lipstick Loop, Faux Hawk, my unfortunate Western-themed introduction. In recounting it struck me: the audition hadn’t been half bad.