Attack of the Theater People by Marc Acito Page A

who’d be perfect for the part,” I imagine Irving saying as I take dictation. (Not that I know how to take dictation. But, hey, it’s a fantasy.)
    “Who?” I ask. In my fantasy, Irving has slicked hair and a pencil-thin mustache, like Adolphe Menjou in all those 1930s backstage musicals.
    “Who?” he says. “Why, you, of course.” Then he calls Ziegfeld and puts me in the Follies.
    In reality, Irving Fish is a gargoyle with a lint-colored toupee that sits on his head like a nest. He looks like someone you’d meet under a bridge asking you to solve three riddles.
    He doesn’t look up when I come in, but instead reaches into a drawer and flops a blood-pressure monitor onto his desk. Then, without so much as a glance at me, he removes his shirt, revealing the body of a god. Unfortunately for Irving, that god is Buddha. He has the lumpen blobbiness of a half-melted snowman. As he straps the monitor on his arm he says, “So?”
    “I’m Edward Za—”
    “We’ve already got an Edward,” he says. “You’ll need to be somebody else. How about Alan? I had an aunt once named Alan.”
    “I’m not sure I—”
    “So what’s your story, Alan?” he says, still not looking at me. “You banging my client?”
    “You mean Kelly?”
    “No, four-time Tony Award winner Gwen Verdon.”
    “Uh, no,” I say, less heterosexually than I would have liked.
    “Why? You a pansy?”
    I don’t dare reach into the grab bag that is my sexuality for fear of what I might pull out, so I simply say, “We used to date.”
    “Type?”
    “Gosh, I don’t know. I kind of like blue-eyed blondes.”
    “No, you germ,” he says, pumping the monitor. “Do. You. Type?”
    “Oh. A little.”
    “Shorthand?”
    “No.”
    “Keypad?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Maybe?”
    “I don’t know what that is.”
    He examines the gauge, scowling at the results. “I’ll take that as a no.”
    “I’m a very good speller.”
    “Excellent. You can represent us in the bee.”
    “I meant for filing and—”
    “Working pulse?”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    He gives me a look that’s equally malevolent and condescending, Rasputin teaching day care. “Does oxygenated blood empty out of your heart, course through your veins, deposit carbon dioxide in your lungs, which you then expel into the air?”
    “Uh…yeah.”
    “Good. You can start right now by perambulating your body downstairs to get me a Fresca.”
    I learn very quickly why Irving Fish can’t keep an assistant. As valedictorian of the Roy Cohn School of Charm, he oozes into the office every morning with all the vigor of an oil slick, the plants in the reception area wilting and dying as he passes. It’s obvious he hates his job, his life, and, most of all, me.
    And rightly so. I am a clerical disaster. Monks callig-raphing illuminated manuscripts worked quicker. A simple cover letter can take me the better part of the morning. Luckily, Irving’s clients don’t work too much. Famed for having told Meryl Streep she should get her nose fixed, Irving specializes in those who are either on their way up or on their way down, the former dumping him as soon as they hit it big, the latter clinging to him as their careers circle the drain. He’s created an entire cottage industry representing stars who are forgotten but not gone, ex–movie queens who play Mame and Dolly in melody tents all over the country.
    What’s worse, I have to fill in for the receptionist, a high-haired girl from Staten Island who dials the phone with a pencil so she doesn’t break a nail. She takes so many breaks I begin to wonder whether she suffers from a chronic bladder infection.
    I dread these moments most of all, gaping at the phone like I’m a transplanted aborigine:
Ooh, the blinking lights of your magical talking machine frighten and confuse me. Please give me an errand so I may go on walkabout
. One day I accidentally disconnect the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons and Irving throws a paperweight at