Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen - Dyan Sheldon [41]
Mrs Baggoli smiled.
Carla gave me a scornful look, threw her script on a chair, and climbed up on the stage.
We were going through Act Five, where Henry Higgins goes to his mother’s house after Eliza leaves him and discovers that she’s there.
Mrs Baggoli took a seat in the front row. “All right,” she called. “Let’s start where Mrs Higgins tells Henry and Pickering why Eliza left.”
Carla started off. Even I had to admit that she was a good Mrs Higgins. Probably because they were both used to bossing the servants around. Jon started to come in too soon and cut Carla off in mid-sentence. She sighed and gave Mrs Baggoli a look filled with patient suffering. Mrs Baggoli told her to start again.
Carla started again but stopped almost immediately. She had a question about Mrs Higgins’s feelings. Mrs Baggoli told her to trust her instincts. This time both Jon and Andy got a few lines in before Carla had a question about Henry Higgins’s character. I relaxed. This was Carla’s big scene. It would take hours.
I drifted off again, thinking about the concert. I had everything more or less worked out. Ella and I had agreed to tell our mothers that we were spending the night with each other. I know a lot about celebrity parties, and they never end till eight in the morning. That meant we could go straight to the station after the party, and be back in Dellwood in time for lunch. Simple but foolproof. Getting into the show wasn’t a big deal. It would wipe out my personal savings, but I figured I had enough for a ticket from a tout, the train fare, cabs and necessary nourishment. But I hadn’t done much thinking about clothes, which, as Carla had been pointing out ad nauseam, were particularly important. Should I look elegant and sophisticated like the models and movie stars Stu Wolff usually hangs out with? Or should I look natural and unpretentious but unique, so he’d know right away that I was different to other girls? I was still mulling this over when I realized that Mrs Baggoli was calling me.
“Lola! Lola!”
I looked over. Everyone was staring at me, but the only one who wasn’t smiling was Mrs Baggoli. “Lola!” she repeated. “That was your cue!”
“Maybe you shouldn’t put your script away just yet,” advised Carla.
ONE OF OUR LITTLE DETAILS DISAPPEARS
The house was in its usual state of hysterical chaos when I got home. My family may be hopelessly ordinary, but they’re not quiet. My mother and my sisters were in the kitchen, screaming at each other. Two of them were crying. None of them paid any attention to me.
I stood in the doorway for a few seconds, thinking of poor, only-child Ella, all alone in her big quiet house with her doting parents listening to her every word. Boo hoo.
My close female relatives suddenly noticed me standing there. Not that it occurred to them to say “Hello” or “How are you?” or anything like that. Instead, the three of them immediately began telling me what had happened as quickly and loudly as they could. It was hard to follow – and not worth the trip. As far as I could make out, Pam took something of Paula’s and broke it, so Paula hit Pam, so Pam ran crying to my mother, so my mother yelled at Paula, so Paula started crying, and then, while my mother was giving them Lectures 288 and 289: Sharing and Violence, Pam threw an apple at Paula and my mother whacked Pam with the dish-towel.
“Ah, Lola,” I shouted into the general din. “How was your day? How did rehearsals go? What will you be wearing on opening night?”
Paula and Pam kept shrieking, but my mother stopped talking and looked at me for less time than it takes a spark to die in a tornado.
“I should think you’d be wearing your costume on opening night.”
I gestured despairingly. “I mean after. At the cast party.”
“This isn’t Broadway,” said my mother. “You have a closet full of clothes. Wear whatever you want.”
What I wanted was a drop-dead gorgeous dress that would make me look twenty-five