grown women who could smell his unwashed armpits bit their knuckles and considered abandoning their families for a chance to lick the salt off his neck.
His letter:
This letter is someting I don’t write good, for to tell you my singing is good is no good, you must hear the singing also piano and mime. You can say good that the starlite on osean is beautiful, but with not see the stars or osean, its is not same thing? It is someting, ART, coming from my soul as a man with love and emotianal joy and sad and phisical not with paper and pensil. See me and I will show you someting, this is like big gift to me, I give it to you and to the childrens also.
Peppy would have thrown Lalo’s letter away had there not been a Polaroid photo enclosed of him in whiteface, shirtless, wearing shrunken cutoffs, smiling rapturously in the sun, juggling four grapefruits. Yep, topless juggling can be a wise career move, thought Peppy, moving the letter to the IN pile, deciding that Lalo could be “musical director” and possibly much, much more.
Each instructor was hired with an explicit addendum to their job description: in addition to teaching the regular students, they would also have to help Ned and Liza prepare their auditions for the High School of Performing Arts—one song, one dance, one monologue. “When I say dance, I don’t mean disco ass-wagging,” Peppy told her new employees, solemnly shaking her cigarette at them. “I want them to think the kids have some class.” Neville, Lalo, and Barbette dreaded this aspect of the job, but none of them were in any position to turn down regular employment.
Young people (girls, mostly) and their mothers arrived at the Normal Family Dinner Theatre by the tens, intrigued by the ad:
THEATRE DAY CAMP FOR TEENS 12–18
Singing, Acting, and Dancing Work with Professional Performers Fairfax Today, Broadway Tomorrow!
These were the miserable children of Marin County parents, mostly the daughters of orthodontists and real-estate agents, at their most horrible stages of adolescence: hateful and lazy creatures with noses jutting out like doorknobs, mouths dark with metal, skin and breasts erupting into sore red boils. Peppy accepted forty new students out of the forty-two that applied—she turned down a precocious five-year-old Suzuki-method violinist, and a very cheerful nineteen-year-old girl in a wheelchair who wanted to be a “sit-down comic.” Most of the boys dropped out in the first three days when they realized how outnumbered they were. What remained was a surly mass of jailbait: thirty-one pouting, slouching, eye-rolling mounds of baby fat and lip gloss between the ages of twelve to sixteen, wearing their ill-fitting bodies like detested school uniforms.
This was Liza’s first encounter with the local teens. She was thirteen, but even the older girls were threatened by her tube top, satin hot pants, flesh-colored nylons, and high, corrugated-plastic-soled platforms that made her look like the child-hooker from Taxi Driver.
There were no other disabled or malformed kids around to deflect scorn from Ned—he was presciently terrified, knowing that it was only a matter of time before the monstrously judgmental girls made his life unlivable.
But both Ned and Liza were floating down Peppy’s plans for them like paper bags on whitewater. The mania of it gave them a strange, hopeful tickle of otherness, which separated and protected them from the rest of their peers (perhaps, thought the bags, we are seaworthy!). Resistance to Peppy’s Master Plan was futile; if their mother believed they could become talented enough to go to the High School of Performing Arts in one summer, well, maybe they could.
Liza, secretly, had already taken the fantasy to its extreme.
Not only would she be admitted into the Fame school, but they would be leveled by her genius. The Fame instructors would be the Redeeming Eyes, her Ideal Audience; they alone would have the proper amount of knowledge and training to recognize the unbelievable talent she knew (as all thirteen-year-old girls know) that she alone possessed. A hush would fall as instructors in other rooms of the building came, like kings to the starlit manger, to witness her song.
Some would be jealous of her, some would weep. Agents would be telegrammed. She would radiate warmly in a bright halo of homecoming.
“I don’t know how to thank you all,” Liza would say in the mirror next to the downstairs firehouse urinal, when she didn’t think anyone was around. “I’ve worked so hard and waited so long for this moment….”
And then she would sing “Superstar” by the Carpenters, a song too sad and personal to sing for anyone but the long-lost family of people who were capable of appreciating her. She would stand in the light of a simple pinspot, wearing a strapless, white leather minidress, white high-heeled cowboy boots, and multiple concha belts slung about her hips.
Yeewur guita-a-a-ar, it sounds so sweet and clear But yew’re not really here, it’s just the radio-o
Don’t chu remember you told me you loved me bab-y Bap-BADDA DAH DAH (Liza would also sing the horn section part) Ya said you’d be comin’ back this way again, bab-y Bap-BADDA DAH DAH Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby,…(she would drop to a whisper) Oh Baby,
A crystalline tear would roll down one cheek.
I lo-o-o-ove you… I ruhlly do…
At 5:20 every evening, on the camp days, cars pulled up and lined the street in front of the theatre, waiting to get their teen talent back. The moms looked expectantly at their daughters, hoping to see them transformed into longer, stronger, thinking people who could enunciate in the king’s English, sing in medieval choral style, and move without looking like they’d been assembled out of water balloons. Day to day, they looked for a change and could see none.
At the beginning of the day, Barbette would lead the class through ballet barre and jazz-inspired floor exercises. She would sit on a tall stool, wearing ginger-colored tights, tan jazz pumps, and a brown, wraparound leotard cut high over her knobby hip bones and low down her fleshless sternum, revealing an abdomen loosening into a gelatinous vodka bulb. Barbette would bang a broomstick on the floor to the beat and berate the resentful girls, disgusted by their clunkiness.
Ned, the only boy, seemed to draw all of Barbette’s dislike of males in general.
“Ned, was that a grande battement or were you trying to shake blood into your foot before it died?”
The girls snickered derisively.
“For God’s sake, Ned, pull your bottom in, you look like you’re trying to dry it over a campfire.”
The girls tssssed and eye-rolled cruelly.
“Ned, pull in your gut, we aren’t doing ‘Dance of the Maytag Repairman.’”
Ned went crimson with shame every time but pretended not to care, and obediently danced on through the rest of the forty minutes even though a crying jag was sitting in his throat like a lump of lye. Since Barbette, an Authority Figure, was mean to Ned, it was perceived by the worthless girls as tacit license to be fiendish to the limit of their abilities. They decided Ned smelled of urine and wouldn’t stand near him. Within days, to be looked at by Ned in class was tantamount to courting disease.
“Eeeu! Ned, your gross eye is looking at me! Stop it!”
(Girls congratulating the insulter sotto voce: “Oh my God! That was so tight.”
“That was so fully harsh.” Giggles.)
Even Liza was helpless to put a stop to their unchecked viciousness; she was on the ropes already, with the crueler girls. They tortured her in the dressing room. Despite Liza’s provocative dress-style (which she was unaware was provocative), being the child of a woman who was essentially a nudist made Liza neurotically modest. She always wore thick underwear under her leotard and tights. (“What are you wearing under there, a diaper?” hissed Barbette.) She hated puberty, hated what her chest was doing, couldn’t abide pubic hair. She used the extent of her flexibility to contort in and