Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen - Dyan Sheldon [18]
You could hear everyone making an effort not to laugh.
Except Mrs Baggoli and Carla Santini.
“No, Lola,” said Mrs Baggoli between hearty chuckles. “It’s set in New York now, remember? You can drop the cockney. Try it again.”
I nodded like the true professional I am. I repeated the line in my head. I took another deep breath.
“Nah,” I said. “Ya got no right t’ touch me.”
This time everyone laughed; though no one louder than Carla Santini, of course.
“Lola,” gasped Mrs Baggoli. “You’re not trying out for Serpico. Let’s do it again.”
I walked over to the edge of the stage. “But Mrs Baggoli, I don’t know what this girl is like any more. I knew who she was when she was an English flower-seller, but I don’t have a clue now.”
Mrs Baggoli’s smile thinned slightly. “I thought this was going to make it easier, not harder,” she announced.
“Yeah, I know.” I shook my head. “But the thing is, I have to know something about this girl.” How could I do Eliza’s accent if I didn’t know anything about her? It was like painting the portrait of someone you’d never seen. “Is she Italian? Irish? Black? Puerto Rican? Vietnamese? Thai? Serb? Czech? Russian?” All Mrs Baggoli had to do was ask and she would have it. After all, I’d lived in New York all my life – excepting my nearly one year in the wasteland of Deadwood – there wasn’t an accent ever heard in those grand canyons of the metropolis that I couldn’t imitate.
“What about Polish?” shouted Bryan Perkowski. “What do you have against us?”
“Never mind the Poles,” said Beth Millstein. “What about the Jews? You have something against the Jews?”
“You know,” chipped in Carla, “she could be Korean. There are lots of Koreans in New York, aren’t there, Lola?”
Mrs Baggoli clapped loudly. “Let’s all settle down, shall we?” She smiled at me. “Her name’s Doolittle, Lola,” said Mrs Baggoli. “She’s just a poor white girl who was born in New York. Use your own accent.”
Nodding, I went back to my place on the stage. I closed my eyes, imagining myself in a red jacket with a name-tag pinned to the pocket: Hi! My name’s Liz. I heard the Muzak and the rumble of shoppers’ conversations; I heard someone drop a bottle of oil on aisle three; I heard kids whining and the packers fooling around; I heard people grumbling about the prices and the state of the tomatoes. I waved a cucumber over the scanner. My fingers touched the keys of the register. I thought about my father, Mr Doolittle. My father was a garbage man and a hopeless drunk. My mother died when I was little, probably from drugs. I left home when I was sixteen. I shared a grungy apartment with two other check-out girls who also came from dysfunctional families. There was a boy I liked who worked on one of the delivery trucks. He had three tattoos and a gold nose ring. I could see this boy clearly. His name was – I opened my eyes. I had no idea what his name was. It could be Tom, or Tony, or Jesus, or Vinny, or Joseph, or Onion for all I knew.
“We’d all appreciate it if you could do this this afternoon,” boomed Mrs Baggoli. “There are other people waiting to audition, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I really am.”
I took a deep breath.
It was Liz Doolittle from Brooklyn who spoke next. But girls from Brooklyn don’t whimper, no matter what the stage directions say.
“F— off, turkey,” snarled Liz Doolittle. “Keep your f—in’ hands off me.”
Everybody cracked up at that. I was afraid Mrs Baggoli was going to choke to death, she was laughing so hard.
“I don’t think the PTA’s going to think very much of that,” she said when she was finally capable of speech. “But I can see that I may need your help polishing the modernization.”
Carla Santini gave me one of her mega, full-dental smiles. I had no trouble interpreting its meaning: It’ll give you something to do – now that you won’t be Eliza.
Mrs Baggoli didn’t let outsiders sit in on the auditions, so Ella waited in the library until I was done.
She started shutting her books as soon as I came