Unnaturally Green (9 page)

I was on a street corner in Manhattan’s Battery Park, having walked there from midtown with my best friend Becky. We’d been eating frozen yogurt and distracting each other with scrupulous analysis of the latest celebrity gossip, as was our custom.

There, the phone rang—at precisely 4:55 p.m.—at which point my stomach broke its record for most number of back flips in one 24-hour period.

“Hello?”

“Well, you just fell into a
bowl of jam
,” Ann snarled.

“Excuse me?”

Curse you, Annglish!

Pause.

“You got the job, Missy!
”

Bingo.

At which point I screamed and leapt into a dance break that was part Running Man, part air guitar. Luckily, New York pedestrians were used to this sort of thing; I think some even tossed over a few nickels.

Still dancing, I put Ann on speaker, and for once, her braying voice was downright mellifluous, layering onto my imaginary dance beat like jelly on musical toast.

Somehow it had happened.

I was going to be in
Wicked.

And it was time to move to San Francisco.

Later that night I sat cross-legged on the floor of my apartment, having spent the last few hours calling every person who’d ever met me, at whom I shrieked and screamed, sometimes explaining what had happened. Sometimes not.

The gist:
Wicked
had offered me a production contract to perform in the ensemble and understudy the role of Elphaba in their San Francisco company. This company, as well as other national tours in the states and international sit-downs, were satellites of
Wicked
’s Broadway production—so each was produced by the same producers, overseen by the same creative team, and therefore shared the same production values and creative imagining as Broadway.

The icing on my
Wicked
cake? As soon as I signed my contract, I would have the right to join the actors’ union, Actor’s Equity Association, making me eligible to attend members-only auditions and later receive health insurance. To signify this, I’d get my very own membership card, a badge to remind me I’d accomplished a once-distant goal.

The sugar flowers on my cake icing? Getting
Wicked
meant no more dreaded day-jobbing.

Hallulejah!

While I’d been chasing the actor dream, I’d been supporting myself marketing medical software, a random job I’d found on Craigslist that taught me the true meaning of suffering. The company was led by a kooky husband and wife team who bickered about power adapters, web browsers, and other mysterious technological things almost every day. They secretly ran their business from a retirement community, using the residential apartment for office space. As such, most mornings when I took the elevator up to the eleventh floor I ran into some poor, incapacitated elder person who was either mumbling about the meaninglessness of life or staring blankly. Which really helped set the appropriate tone for the workday.

But more on that later.

Goodbye, software—hello,
Wicked
!

I stretched my arms to the ceiling and let out a luxurious, self-congratulatory sigh, recapping the day in my mind.

Of all the phone conversations, my favorite was with my Grandma Yola, a firecracker of an octogenarian who’d seen me in nearly every show I’d ever done, including my very first onstage turn as Young Laurie in
Oklahoma!
, when I danced the famous dream ballet—which, in our version, involved a lot of yawning, both from the actors and the audience. Citing generational bragging rights, Yola promised to call everyone in her phone book to tell them my
Wicked
news, and insist they each do the same, and so on and so forth, into a phone tree of infinity.

“I’m your grandmother. I’m allowed to brag!”

(She said that to me at least once every time I spoke to her.)

Second-favorite call was to gladiator boyfriend Marshall, who stole away to his stairwell at work and whispered that I was the single greatest woman he’d ever known. I told him the same, replacing woman with Gentle Rambo. Moments later he had to get back to work, so we tabled the rest of our conversation. We’d be seeing each other that night to talk—and to figure out what the heck we were going to do, now that I was leaving New York.

Honorable mention went to my mom and dad, mostly because I disproved their theory once and for all that I should go to medical school and be a surgeon. (“You can still sing as a hobby, to your patients, even,” my dad would say, which is problematic on many levels, including that a surgeon’s patients are unconscious.) But that day they were thrilled—two physicians who could now live vicariously through their artsy-fartsy daughter.

I looked around. The room was quiet. Was there anyone else to call? I heard the faucet drip.

And then, out of nowhere, it happened. The first lightning clap of dread.

Holy crap, what is happening to my life?

I wasn’t sure what had sparked it. If I just breathed, I could keep it together.

No, you will
not
keep it together!

It’s a bad sign when I argue with myself in the second person via interior monologue, so I sprinted to my iPod dock and switched on my favorite Early Nineties Mix. This, I knew, would transport me to more carefree, less fashionable times.

You have to move across the country for who knows how long!

So what! Everybody says it’ll be like
Full House
twenty-four hours a day.

What’s going to happen to you and Marshall?

I cranked the music louder to drown out my thoughts, but did so at the most inconvenient of moments, just as Alanis Morrisette wailed about rain on my wedding day, which was tragic for obvious reasons, but also for the fact that she was incorrectly illustrating the concept of irony.

It had happened. I’d flipped my excitement coin and it had landed face down. I knew it was only a matter of time before Self-Doubt declared civil war on my Confidence.

Troops mobilized.

They never should have hired you.

I heard the first crack of musket-fire.

You may have been able to fake it at the audition, but you won’t be able to fake it onstage.

Cannons raged.

Face it, Felicia: You won’t be able to do this.

What, is that a stealth bomber? Are things about to get nuclear?

Incoming!

You. Are. Going. To. FAAAAAAAAAAAIL!

Confidence Soldiers, retreat! Retreeeeeeat!

I collapsed onto my bed and hugged my pillow. The battle was over, but the war would rage on. If I let Self-Doubt win in the end, I’d end up wrecked and ashamed.

And what was I going to do about Marshall?

Several days ago, I’d wandered into my bathroom in the early morning hours to find a miniature yellow envelope wedged at the bottom corner of my medicine cabinet. Inside was a note that said:

I’m falling in love with you.  –Marshall

Breathless, I considered the outcomes. Would he earn his own bust, immortalizing our eternal failure? Or would he reveal himself to be the mythical One—that final, missing piece in my Museum Collection?

I was in way over my head.

5. GOODBYE, KANSAS

Email from stage manager David to Felicia.

Hi, Felicia,

Great to talk with you today! A script and score are on the way. Let me know if you want to see the Broadway show (just yourself) and I will check with the Broadway Company Manager.

Cheers, David

Facebook Message from cast member Annie to Felicia.

Hey Felicia! Hear you will be joining us in San Fran! Very exciting. Looking forward to meeting you! if you have any questions don't hesitate. Happy new year and WELCOME!!

Best, Annie

Email from co-company manager Michael to Felicia.

Hi Felicia,

It was nice speaking to you today.

We have a few hotel options if you want to stay in one for a week or so while you look at apartments.

Most of the company have used Craigslist to find their housing out here. We have a few realtors who have helped with corporate housing. Let me know if you want me to put you in touch with them.

Again, Welcome to the Wonderful World of Wicked,

Michael

Facebook Message from theater friend Sam to Felicia.

hey I was in a gift ship today and saw a little wicked witch figurine and was going to get it for you, but then I realized it was going to be expensive to ship it and it was kinda shitty anyway and I just didn't really feel like spending that much and I'd rather get myself some candy.

Love, Sam

I
t was my last night in New York City. I was commemorating the occasion by eating pizza on the floor, in that way you see people do in movies. Marshall had joined me so we’d ordered a large pie with extra toppings. Apparently, opting for the most possible calories is a good thing when you are trying to double in mass, a favorite practice of men with Adonis-type constitutions. (If you’re this Adonis’s girlfriend, you run the risk of doing the same.)

(At least my costume fitting was out of the way.)

Marshall had brought with him duct tape, Sharpies, plastic bags, and brute strength for lifting and hauling. We’d been closing up shop all night, pausing at 2 a.m. for a pizza break, reclining on the floor, enjoying our paper-plated Last Supper, until it had somehow become 5 a.m. It felt like the final hours of a sleepover, before the sun started to rise and you heard car doors closing as your parents came to pick you up.

“Looks like we’re almost done with everything,” said Marshall, folding the empty pizza box in half and stuffing it into a loose black trash bag.

“Way to go,” I said, going in for the high five. This I immediately regretted, feeling the lasting sting of his enormous hand on my palm. I often joked with him that he was like the teenage Hercules in the Disney animated movie. Cute and unassuming, he didn’t know his own strength, and so brought disaster with him wherever he went—toppling buildings, felling trees. Breaking hearts?

“You have some seasoning or something in the corner of your mouth,” he said as he reached toward me with his massive thumb, trying to flick away the tiny morsel, which for him was like threading a needle with a braid of rope.

“There is not a single moment when food is not somewhere on my face,” I said.

“Well, I think it’s cute,” Marshall said, stretching out to recline on the floor.

Everything about the evening so far had felt heavy and light. Heavy with the finality of change, light with the flutters of anticipation.

I thought back to the past weeks, when the pieces of my new, surreal life had started to come together. I had watched the Broadway production of
Wicked
from the sound booth and also gone in for something called a “wig fitting,” during which my head was swathed in cling wrap while a man drew lines and circles on it, like a head topographer. I’d also gotten a Facebook message from a cast member named Annie, an email from Michael, the co-company manager, and David, the stage manager, who sent me the
Wicked
script and score in the mail. One day later I tied up loose ends at my (now former) software job, and one day after that I shipped a giant box of stuff to the Orpheum Theater,
Wicked
’s San Francisco home, full of clothes, books, mementos, and anything else I could fit.

Today it was final goodbyes—to my friends, my brother who lived in Brooklyn, and the rest of my family in Rhode Island. We’d phone-chatted earlier for one last check-in.

“Be careful, Fel,” said my dad.

“Take your vitamins!” said my mom.

The only one left was Marshall.

We’d crammed months of dating into three weeks, spending New Year’s Eve together in Philadelphia, where we forged new make-out-in-public territory and shared the first midnight kiss I’d ever had with someone who wasn’t definitely or probably gay. Afterward we’d stayed a few extra days to visit his family, where we cooked wild duck, watched home videos, and shoveled snow.

I’m falling in love with you. –Marshall

Finding his yellow note that one morning had been a knee-weakening surprise. Although technically I’d brought up the L-word a few days before that—entirely by accident, when we were browsing Borders and sportscaster-commentating on random book titles. Later I noted to Marshall how bookstores were perfect locations for dates, since you could first make fun of everything, then “accidentally” wander into the Kama Sutra section.

“It’s a perfect place,” I said, “to go with the one you love.”

At which point I gasped, then ran away, far into the CD section, where I pretended to be deeply interested in the music of Andrea Bocelli. Since then, the L-word had been hanging in the air—a fat, naked cherub of a word, taunting me with its prickly arrows and pudgy ankles.

Then, a week or two later, I found the note.

In time, there was no denying it: we’d fallen in love, like stupid little idiots.

Because now I had to go.

Stupid!

As I collected the rest of my life into a medium-sized suitcase, I realized I had no idea when I’d be back. Like Elphaba imagining her future in “The Wizard and I,” mine too felt “unlimited,” in a mysterious, unpredictable way. I felt myself heading toward an impossible challenge, unsure of how (or if) I’d do it, or for how long, or what it would end up feeling like. And soon, everything I’d known—friends, family, New York, Marshall—would become a shrinking reflection in my rearview mirror.

Goodbye, Kansas.