gesture with a long finger. He did nothing to discourage their carrying on in this blue vein unless one of the mothers or Peppy was around, because it made him less bored, and, he reasoned, it “loosened them up.”
Nobody could say that Neville didn’t know where his bread was buttered. He favored Liza shamelessly in class, much to the writhing envy of her classmates, and made it a point to befriend Peppy, watching old movies with her on nights when he was too broke or hungover to go out “whoring in the city.” Mike and Ike would often join them, bringing over buckets of chicken.
If Liza could no longer get any solo song action in Lalo’s class, Neville was glad to give it to her after hours. He made her watch old Streisand films and listen to Julie London, Shirley “Goldfinger” Bassey, Cher, Nancy Sinatra, and Eartha Kitt records, teaching her all the grotesque showmanship affectations he so loved.
“Raise your hand when you draw out a long note with your fingers splayed out, like you’re pulling a baseball-sized wad of gum out of the audience’s hair,” he’d crow, and Liza would do it, to Mike’s and Ike’s laughing approval.
“… and when you sing the word ‘love’ flip your hair around like you can barely stand it.”
“… and when the audience claps, pretend like you’re surprised and like they’re teasing you, then shoo them away, then throw your head back and stretch your arms out straight like you’re trying to hug them all, because you just can’t believe how much they love you.”
Mike, Ike, and Neville would pick up strange, flashy dresses for Liza that they’d find in thrift stores; she was their Barbie doll. It was funny to them to have a girl her age imitate the unintentionally self-satirizing mannerisms of aging show-women on the brink of career death.
Peppy, being a very literal-minded person, had no gift for irony and was just delighted that the boys had taken such a special interest in Liza’s burgeoning talent. It was Neville who taught Liza to say strange, showbiz things, during nights in Peppy’s living room, drunk on jugs of Gallo table wine. Noreen didn’t like it.
“They’re making Liza grow up too fast,” she’d whisper to Peppy.
Peppy was mildly worried that her daughter was becoming a “junior-high fag-hag,” but then again, the attention was wonderful, and everyone was having relatively innocent performance-fun, and it was, after all, a theatre, and they were “theatre gypsies,” in Peppy’s romantic mind. Eventually Peppy would pour herself another goblet of wine, abandon all hope of moral quality control, and shoo her mother off to bed.
The giddy nights when Liza would don a powder-blue chiffon gown, false eyelashes, and one of Peppy’s long wigs, and belt out “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves,” standing on the coffee table while Mike, Ike, and Neville laughed, smoked, drank, and deliriously yelled out new, over-the-top performance tips and absurd stage patter were some of the Normal Family’s happiest moments. Liza was dizzy with joy from the attention, absorbing all the boozy input like a sponge cake.
All of the camp classes were dominated by the talented Baumgarten sisters, Chantal and Desiree, the only children of one of the county’s richest orthodontists. The remote, demure sisters, both svelte beauties, were classically trained dancers who had recently quit the Marin Ballet Company (and its annual production of the Nutcracker, where Chantal had locked up the role of Clara two years running) in order to more seriously pursue acting (their mother, the elegant Serena Baumgarten, had found the Normal Family Dinner Theatre “wonderfully bohemian,” imagining that its low-rent qualities suggested an uncompromised devotion to pure thespian artistry). Liza was half-wild with jealousy over them; she couldn’t understand how any benevolent God could let the exquisite Baumgarten sisters exist in the same world with her, exposing Liza, by comparison, as a loud, inferior clutz and dooming any chances she had to be singled out for starring roles, even at her mom’s theatre.
Peppy, through Serena Baumgarten, arranged for Liza to meet Colette Whelan-Zedd, the local children’s casting agent for commercials, TV, and film in the area. The Whelan-Zedd casting office was in the quaint top floor of a small clapboard Victorian on one of the small commercial streets in Sausalito. Its floral chairs were cobwebbed with the sheddings of two white Persian cats.
Colette, a zaftig “Giorgio”-perfumed woman in a yellow bouclé suit, burst out to meet Peppy and Liza like a large, blousy tea rose. Then she took one look at Liza: her padded-shouldered bolero jacket, fuchsia eye shadow, aggressive lip liner, fishnet tights, black miniskirt, and white pumps that she couldn’t quite walk in, and her whole body snapped into a disproving pucker.
“Wow, if this is you at 9 a.m., I’d love to see your night look.”
“That can be arranged,” said Peppy, smiling, missing the vibrational shift.
“Roman Polanski’s not casting around here, as far as I know,” Colette cracked, her eyebrows arch and high. The comment sailed over Peppy’s wig.
“Liza’s got a great singing career ahead of her. Would you like to hear her do ‘Diamonds Are Forever'?”
Liza shifted her weight uncomfortably, looking at the headshots of thirteen-year-old girls framed on the wall. Unlike her, they were all wearing coveralls, smiling guilelessly with daisies tucked behind their ears, cuddling puppies. There was an especially precious shot of Desiree Baumgarten, her collarbones framed by a white leotard, smiling prettily at the camera, sunlight pouring through her teeth. Peppy pulled a small tape recorder out of her purse, and the speaker fritzed out Lalo’s twangy piano arrangement. Liza snapped into action, spread-eagled on the Berber rug, wailing extremely in the little room. One of the cats leapt into Colette’s lap in fear.
Colette opted not to represent Liza “at this given time” but offered to clue Peppy in to a few upcoming commercial auditions that Liza could try out for, “Just so Liza can get her feet wet.” Colette provided this service in exchange for Peppy agreeing to give “special consideration” to the Whelen-Zedd agency kids when casting productions at the theatre. Peppy didn’t bother to tell Colette that the Baumgarten sisters hardly needed this extra push.
Peppy drew the instructors together for a meeting about the full-production musical. Neville, who had been thinking a lot about a production that could best serve his own whims, suggested a musical version of Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte with Peppy playing the decrepit Bette Davis role, incorrectly assuming that Peppy would, at first, be flattered and agree, then abandon the role when she figured out it had no sex appeal, and then he’d have to step in heroically and play Charlotte himself. Neville had no idea how misguided his plan was. Peppy rejected Charlotte outright for being “camp trash” and announced that the premiere performance of the Normal Family Dinner Theatre would be “a real family wing-ding, something to give the Nutcracker a run for its money…”
They all thought for a moment, then Peppy’s face popped into brightness. “I know, I got it, it’s perfect… you ready? Brace yourselves. The Sound of Music.”
Everyone looked at Peppy, who was suddenly varnished with satisfaction, and realized she was not joking.
“May I ask who you are thinking of getting to play Maria?” asked Neville, suspecting the worst.
“Me, dummy,” Peppy said sternly. “And Lalo? You’re gonna be Captain Von Trapp!”
Peppy turned to Lalo, her eyes twinkling with anticipation at the thought of kissing him every night onstage while people clapped. Lalo smiled weakly, being hungover and sexed-out from the previous night, in which he had been voraciously entertained by two EgyptAir stewardesses. He had no idea what Peppy was talking about; her coral-painted lips were moving, but all he could hear was the warm buzz saw of sleep in his toxic blood.
Peppy was delighted by her plan, and with her own strain of pathological single-mindedness, lock-clamped on it.
“The only way you’ll get her to drop that idea is to hit her in the head with a brick,” moaned Barbette, later.
Neville secretly hoped that Peppy would realize