Attack of the Theater People

Attack of the Theater People by Marc Acito Page B

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Authors: Marc Acito
Tags: Fiction
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me, narrowly missing my head and shattering a framed photo of Martha Raye on the wall.
    “My
goddess
,” my mother says when I call to complain. (I figure, with all the long-distance calls the agency makes, no one will notice a few to Sedona, the latest stop on her Magical Mystery Tour. Suffice it to say her spiritual quest has greatly enhanced Natie’s stamp collection, such a Nudelman thing to collect.) “Why would you manifest that?”
    “What are you talking about? I didn’t want him to—”
    “Edward, he aimed for your head. Don’t you see what that means?”
    “He’s a homicidal maniac?”
    “No. You’re so desperate to open your mind, you willed this Irving person to do it for you.”
    “Oh, Mother…”
    “I’m serious. If you don’t find a spiritual outlet you could end up manifesting an aneurysm or a brain tumor. I know you think I’m crazy, but I’m not the one getting paperweights thrown at me, am I?”
    “No, you’re the one in the desert trying to contact aliens.”
    “Zoozook isn’t an alien; he’s a Pleiadian star being.”
    She says it like everyone lives in a teepee on an abandoned ranch in Sedona so they can listen to the hallucinations of a Utah housewife who hears the voice of a five-thousand-year-old Pleiadian star being whenever she turns on her microwave.
    “You’re just like your father,” my mother says. “So earthbound. You really should come to Sedona and experience the healing energies of the vortexes.”
    She means vortices.
    “New York is sucking your soul dry,” she adds.
    She’s got a point. There’s a big, Juilliard-sized vacuum in my life, and working as an assistant to the Prince of Darkness certainly isn’t going to fill it. But how am I ever going to achieve a success large enough to redeem such an enormous failure?
    Naturally, Natie sees my employment as an opportunity for ill-gotten gains. “For Chrissake, you’re his assistant,” he says. “You pick up the phone, you say you’re calling for Irv, and you can go to any audition you want.”
    But the mere thought of auditioning gives me gastric reflux. I compare my résumé, which sucks even when it’s padded, with the hundreds that come across my desk, and I can’t conceive of competing against actors who have more to show for their careers than a summer spent as Chuckles the Woodchuck.
    Still, I can’t help thinking I sound pretty good singing along with the London cast album of
Les Misérables
, which is coming to Broadway next season. I mean, it’s not like I’d expect to get a part, but surely I’m good enough for the chorus, right? Or maybe an understudy. One vocal coach in particular crops up on the better musical theater résumés, so, armed with a spiffy new Walkman-sized tape recorder, I spend fifty bucks for a lesson with Morgan Firestone, who’s responsible for Mandy Patinkin’s voice, though not the part that sounds like musical sinusitis. I choose the song I think of as my personal anthem: “Corner of the Sky” from
Pippin
.
    I’ve got to be where my spirit can run free,
    Got to find my corner of the sky.
    After my particularly heartfelt rendition, Firestone looks up from the piano and says, “That wasn’t bad, but you smile too much for
Les Miz
.”
    It’s not my fault. Two and a half years of orthodontics couldn’t eradicate an overbite, which, to be fair, was so servere to start with I could’ve eaten apples through a picket fence. The photographer who took my head shots said I have a mouth “built for smiling.” I originally took it as a compliment, like I have a congenital capacity for happiness, but, after being called too jazz hands for Juilliard, I worry it means I’m just a lightweight. Of course, this is the same photographer who rendered me virtually unrecognizable by slathering too much foundation on my face. When Irving noticed the shot on my desk one day, he said I looked like I should be down on one knee singing “Mammy.”
    No, I can’t audition

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