“Iz,” I said. “Take a wild guess. What’s our new roommate’s favorite show?”
Isadora closed her eyes and pretended to think deeply. “Umm . . . Jekyll & Hyde?”
Candie nodded.
“I thought it closed ages ago,” said Iz.
“In 2001. But I saw it, even though I was only eleven.” Candie touched the poster gently. “It was my birthday present. Then I saw the tour, which was Chuck Wagner, you know, the guy who worked on it before Bob came on? He was amazing. I have all the different recordings.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. She spoke as if this Bob guy were the president or Liza Minnelli or something.
“I saw Chuck do it twice. And last year I played Emma at school.” Candie’s face brightened. “We had to do extra performances; it was really popular.”
“Nice,” I said.
“I wanted to be Lucy, of course, everyone wants to be Lucy—that’s the best part—but I was happy with Emma.” Candie looked up at the creepy picture of the split-personality half-monster guy with love in her eyes. “My boyfriend played the lead. At least, he was my boyfriend during the show. Not that we’re still together.”
As we soon discovered, Candie’s dominant characteristic was that she had no filter. She would lay out her whole life before total strangers. She was obsessed with the whole ex-boyfriend, Jekyll & Hyde experience, and had no ability whatsoever to think that maybe she’d want to present herself as seminormal to the people she’d be living with.
Foremost in her mind upon arriving at Wildewood was finding a good place for her Jekkie memorabilia— of which there were several other items now making their way out of her duffel—and she was unable to think of anything else until she’d finished setting them on her desk. Sheet music, several albums, Playbill s, a karaoke CD, the program from her high school production, and an autographed photo of “Bob” that she told us she had bought on eBay.
She was from New Jersey, exit number eight, ha-ha-ha, that’s a New Jersey joke. She was the youngest child of five; her electives were M-TAP and Costume Design, her ex-boyfriend and she were meant to be and she knew he would come back around in the end because it was fate; she wanted to lose ten pounds—no, maybe fifteen; she hoped we’d all be best of friends; she was nervous about the dance classes; her mom took her into “the city” a month ago to see Phantom of the Opera; and what were we singing for the audition tomorrow?
Because she was singing “Memory” from Cats and she was so nervous she couldn’t even see straight.
Truth was, Candie was acting exactly the way I felt. Thrilled, agitated, curious, a little stupid. But Candie was so wide open, her neediness was so real and sweaty—that my impulse was to pull away.
I was going to be Big at Wildewood. Not a gaping wound of need.
“I’m a mezzo belter,” Iz was saying. “I’m never gonna get those high soprano leads so I don’t even try. I’m doing ‘Sandra Dee’ from Grease.”
“Oh, that’s so great,” said Candie. “I love that show. What are you doing, Sadye?”
“‘Popular,’” I told her, applying eyeliner in the mirror. “From Wicked.”
“You’re a soprano, then?” she asked.
I didn’t know.
What was I doing?
How could I not know?
“We did Grease and West Side Story here last year,” said Iz, before I could answer. “And both times I was the feisty sidekick to the soprano lead. That’s my luck. To be a sidekick forever.”
“You played Anita?” I had entertained myself through many a boring math class by imagining myself as Anita in West Side Story.
“Yeah. I had a dress cut down to here—” Iz indicated a spot an inch or two above her navel.
“Va voom.”
“But Rizzo was more fun, actually.”
“Wait, you were here last year?” asked Candie.
Isadora nodded. “This is my third summer. The first year I was only fifteen, so I got little parts.”
“Like what?” I asked, thinking, How bad does it get?
“I was an orphan in Annie—they made all the youngest kids be orphans ’cuz we were short—and I sang ‘Turn Back, O Man’ in Godspell.”
“Oh, but that’s good!” I blurted.
“It was okay,” said Iz. “The second year was better.”
“Why were you in two shows?” asked Candie. “I thought we were all in one.”
“Godspell and Grease were ten-day wonders,” answered Iz.
“Okay, stop everything,” I declared. “What is a ten-day wonder?”
Iz walked me and Candie down through the green lawns and red-brick buildings to a small beach that bordered a lake at the south edge of campus, and explained how Wildewood functioned. Which was scary.
We’d have an orientation lecture that night, and the next day a tour of the campus, free time to get to know each other, and a dance. “Then the craziness begins,” said Iz. The next two days would be spent in public auditions, technically called Preliminary Songs and Monologues. We’d all go through a dance combination, then sit in the red velvet seats of the Kaufman Theater and watch each other do our sixteen-bar numbers and two-minute speeches. Jacob Morales was the head of the summer institute. He would give the lecture tonight and preside at the auditions—and (according to Iz) he was brilliant. A Broadway director, fresh off the smash of last season’s Oliver! revival.
(At this, I wanted to squeal, though I managed to hold it in. Oliver! Oliver! that Demi and I had been listening to all morning! Why hadn’t it occurred to me to Google the institute faculty?)
Iz had had Morales for acting class two years in a row, and he’d directed her in Godspell and Grease. “He always does the ten-day wonder,” she said. “That’s why it’s good to get cast in it. I learned so much from him.”
“Like what?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. By now we were taking off our shoes to walk in the sand, and she bent down to unbuckle her sandals. “The ten-day wonder is because they want to get people out in front of an audience,” she explained. “The directors want us to have a play of our own right away, before any of the other shows are ready. To get us into the spirit of performance.”
“Okay.”
“After the auditions, everyone’s in a show. And your show rehearses in the afternoon. But some people are in the ten-day wonder also, and then you have rehearsals at night and don’t go to evening rec. You even get out of classes some mornings, because you’re putting up this show as fast as you can.” Iz smiled happily. “It’s so, so stressful.”
“That’s how you did Grease ?” Candie dipped one curvy toe into the icy lake water. Her feet were cute and decorated with sparkly white polish. Dancers never have cute feet.
“And Godspell,” said Iz. “The night after the auditions, Morales and the other directors all meet and argue over casting. They stay up all night—because in the morning, before breakfast, they have to post a cast list for every show.”
There were four musicals, she explained, plus the ten-day wonder, plus a classic straight play, usually Shakespeare. “But you don’t want to be in the straight play,” she said. “Trust me. It’s like the catchall for people with no talent.”
Candie moaned. “If they put me in Hamlet I’ll die.”
“Wait. Did you hear they’re doing Hamlet ?” Iz asked, looking intent.
Candie shrugged. “How would I know? I meant I don’t want to talk Shakespeare,” said Candie. “I can never understand what they’re saying.”
“You have to be able to do Shakespeare if you’re going to be an actress,” I said.
“Say actor,” corrected Iz. “That’s what they say here. Boy. Girl. Everyone’s an actor.”
“Shakespeare’s the greatest dramatist ever,” I told Candie. “You can’t be scared of him or you’ll never make it.”
Candie shook her frizzy curls. “I just want to do a show with music. I wish I could dance.”
“Well,” I said. “D
o you take classes?”
“No.”
“You don’t take dance classes?”
“I said no.”
“Then you haven’t tried. You have to study it for years before you can seriously complain that you can’t dance. Otherwise you’re making excuses.”
I was being awful to Candie, I knew. Condescending. Something in Candie’s naked fear and strange obsessions—something in her awkward, apple-shaped body—made me afraid.
Afraid of being lumped in with her.
I knew I could dance. And yet I also felt like Candie did: I didn’t know if I’d be good enough. And I hated the way Iz had corrected me—“Say actor, that’s what they say here.” Reminding me how little I knew. And it was so, so irritating how Iz’s definition of a bad part was one I’d kill to have (“Turn Back, O Man”) and how she was completely confident of her own worth. “Everyone knows me here,” she said at one point. “You don’t play Anita and Rizzo in one year and not have the teachers know you.”
I don’t mean to make it sound like Iz was horrible. She wasn’t. It was more like she was bursting with stories and tips and excitement, and it was all spilling out of her, the way she knew so much and had been in so many shows. She was helping us, really. She was being generous, but at the same time every sentence she spoke reminded us that she was a longtime veteran, sure of hefty parts in two showy musicals, while we were scared newbies who didn’t even know what a ten-day wonder was until she explained it to us.
There on the beach, what Iz was really telling me and Candie was that she was so good, and so experienced, there was no way we could ever compete with her. And I was telling Candie she hadn’t worked as hard as I had and didn’t have the drive she needed. And Candie was still oblivious to the status game, letting all her insecurities hang out.
Yes, I was mean to Candie.
Yes, I would have been nicer person if I had opted out of the competition and just let Iz ramble on about how talented she was. But that’s not what I did.
I hadn’t come to Wildewood to back down at the first sign of a challenge. I had come to show what I could do, right? To let the Bigness out.
I stood on my hands in the sand and split my legs in the air. A perfect 180-degree split into a front walkover.
Then I did it again.
It shut Iz up.
But only temporarily.
OUR FOURTH roommate was brushing her hair when we returned to get ready for dinner. Her name was Nanette, and she was a strawberry blonde with a pointy chin and a body so small you’d have thought she was twelve. We hadn’t even reached the cafeteria before we learned that Nanette had played Chip in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway when she was seven, followed by a touring production of Annie in which she understudied the lead. She then played Jemima in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, back on Broadway, did a revival of A Little Night Music in Los Angeles, and since then had been traveling the West Coast in a nine-month tour of Fiddler on the Roof. Although she was sixteen, she was so tiny she played the youngest of Tevye’s daughters.
“I’m here to rest,” she said. “I need time off to not be working, you know? But I’d miss the theater too much if I did anything this summer besides come here.”
“Do you go to school?” I asked as we took our trays into the cafeteria and sat down.
“Professional Children’s.”
“What’s that?”
“You never heard of it?”
“No.”
“The Professional Children’s School in New York. It’s for kids who work in the arts; they e-mail your homework to you and stuff, so you can keep up while you’re on tour.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve barely set foot in the place for like the past two years. It’s all been fax and e-mail. They give you a laptop.”
“Does your mom or dad go with you? On tour?”
“My dad used to. I have two sisters and a brother, so my mom couldn’t. But when I got Night Music, my younger sister Kylie had started getting commercials, so my dad had to stay home to manage her audition schedule. And my brother is on a soap, so my dad helps with that, too. But don’t worry”—Nanette laughed at my surprised face—“I had a host family to stay with. And on Fiddler my stage manager looked out for me. She’s the best. It’s like we’re sisters.” Nanette took a bite of a soggy-looking taco and put it down. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
I was startled by her change of topic, but I shook my head. “Boys in my hometown like the plain vanilla,” I said. “I think I’m more mint chocolate chip.”
“Ha!” Nanette barked her laugh. “Love it. This vanilla thing is causing you serious lack-of-boyfriend issues, then?”
I nodded. “I’m hoping to improve the situation this summer.”
“Mint chocolate chip is a good flavor. It’s sophisticated. And it’s green, which is unusual. I think I’m more of a . . . let me see. Toffee. Is that a flavor? Looks like vanilla but has crunchy bits mixed in. Almost a burned flavor.”
“What am I?” asked Candie.
Nanette looked at her appraisingly. “Let’s see. Do you have a boyfriend?”
“I used to.” Candie twirled a curl around her index finger. “But not anymore. I don’t think.”
“You don’t know?”
“He’s not my boyfriend anymore,” Candie said. “But he was for a while.”
“I think maybe you’re strawberry,” I offered.
“Why?”
“You wear pink. You’re like pink and white.”
Candie wrinkled her nose. “I don’t want to be strawberry,” she said. “I want to be something else.”
“I’m chocolate with chocolate fudge ripples,” announced Iz. “And before you ask, yes I do have a boyfriend.”
We all perked up, and Iz told us about her motorcycle-riding, already graduated boyfriend named Wolf, who was waiting for her all summer while she was away; who she’d been to third base with but not the full shebang; who worked in a record store and loved Avenue Q and Coldplay, both. “He knows everything about music,” she told us. “And when I graduate, we’re forming a band and I’m going to be lead singer.”
“Do you have a boyfriend, Nanette?” I wanted to know. Since she started the conversation.
She shook her head. “There were no guys my age in Fiddler. I haven’t even been around any decent boys for like years. It’s a hazard of my profession.” She looked around the cafeteria. “Half these guys are gay, I bet.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But you know what? The other half aren’t.”
“And maybe they like mint chocolate chip.” Nanette smiled.
“Or toffee.”
“Nobody likes strawberry,” moaned Candie. “Strawberry is a kid flavor.”
I felt bad about how mean I’d been to her earlier, on the beach. “You don’t have to be strawberry. You can be cherries jubilee.”
Candie smiled. “Okay, that’s good. Cherries jubilee.”
Iz stood up. “Speaking of—”
“What?”
“Hetero boys,” she said. “That guy over there is exactly a mint-chocolate-chip type of guy. I’m gonna go talk to him, see if I can get him to come by our room later to um . . . have a taste.”
“Gross!” yelled Nanette. “We have to stop this game now, if that’s where it’s leading.”
“Which one?” I wanted to know.
“The one in the green hoodie.”
I looked over at him. He was tall, with a round face and a big smile. Braces on his teeth. Rings on his fingers. Hair spiked up with gel.
“He played Kenickie in Grease,” said Iz, as if that was all I needed to know. “So I’ve already kissed him and can tell you, he’s good. His name is James.”
She bused her tray and crossed the cafeteria, calling out, “Greased Lightnin’!” at the top of her lungs.
Nanette ate a French fry and changed the subject. “I heard they were doing Bye Bye Birdie and Little Shop of Horrors this year.”
We leaned in close. “H
ow do you know?” breathed Candie. “You just got here.”
“My agent knows Jake.” Nanette shrugged. “She called him and asked—and that’s what he told her.”
“Who’s Jake?”
“Jake Morales? Only the director of the program.”
“Oh, right.”
“We’re doing Midsummer, too, because they always have to do one straight play, something classical,” said Nanette.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream?” said Candie, her pink face going pale at the thought of Shakespeare.
“Hello? What other Midsummer is there?”
Candie looked down and took a bite of fruit salad.
“What else?” I asked. “Aren’t there five shows? Wait, no, five plus the ten-day wonder is six.”
“Ten-day wonder?”
Aha. Nanette didn’t know about the ten-day wonder, and Candie and I gleefully informed her, like we were old-timers.
“Jake said Birdie, Midsummer, Little Shop, Show Boat, Guys and Dolls, and . . . oh. Cats,” Nanette went on, counting shows on her fingers.
“Cats!” squealed Candie. “I love Cats!”
“Sweet pea,” said Nanette. “Keep your voice down. You are not supposed to love Cats.”
Iz had arrived back at our table. “Oh, no, not Cats!”
“Yes,” said Nanette, her voice animated with faux dread. “Cats.”
“I saw it at the Winter Garden before it closed,” said Candie. “It was so amazing. Why don’t you like it?”
Okay. In case you haven’t heard of Cats—because it closed ages ago and Candie must have seen it when she was little—it was the longest running Broadway show ever, and involves people dressed up as kitty cats, dancing in feline fashion. There is one sad, aging alley cat who dies and goes to cat heaven, but the rest are happy and leap around singing about themselves.
Cats is one of those shows that everyone thought was great when it came out, because it was based on these T. S. Eliot poems that are actually pretty funny and he’s like a famous poet. Then it became this hackneyed tourist trap that people would come to see because it was a famous spectacle, but not because it was art.
Even Demi and I, in the depths of Ohio, had figured out that it was embarrassing to like Cats. But Candie loved it.