Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas - Maya Angelou [52]
All the singers were in street clothes, as if they had stopped by the theater en route for something more important. Some stood on the empty stage, others stood in the wings or lounged in the front row of the theater.
Billy Johnson, assistant conductor, waited while the musicians warmed up and tuned their instruments in the orchestra pit. Trills and arpeggios of voices came from backstage.
The stage manager, Walter Riemer, had a flashy smile and was as elegant as John Gielgud, whom he resembled. He took a position just off the stage. “Watch me, dear, when I do this”—he waved his hand like a flag in a high wind— “that's your cue.” And he left me.
I sneaked around the curtain and watched as Billy lifted his arms as if he was trying to pull the orchestra out of the pit by invisible strings. The music began to swell, the singers poised.
At a casual indication from Johnson's right hand the voices exploded, ripping shreds in the air.
When Riemer's hand floated my cue, I was laughing and crying at the wonder of it all. I ran on stage, stepping lightly between the singers' notes. If I was supposed to portray a woman carried away by music, blinded and benumbed by her surroundings, enchanted so by the rhythm and melody that she fancied herself a large, gloriously colored bird free to fly rainbows and light up the winds, then I was she.
Three days later, Bob Dustin offered me the job.
I said, as if newly indignant, that the Purple Onion would not let me out of my contract. Dustin commiserated with me and added, “We'll be auditioning people for the next two months. We have to have a lead dancer before we go back to Europe.”
Even my imagination had never dared to include me in Europe. Whenever I envisioned foreign countries, I saw them through other people's words or other people's pictures. London to me was as Dickens saw it, a folk song in a cockney accent, Churchill V-ing his fingers, saying, “We shall fight on the beaches,” and so forth. Paris, in my mind, rang with the hoofbeats of horse-drawn carriages from the age of Guy de Maupassant. Germany was Hitler and concentration-camp horror or beery burghers in stiff white shirts sitting on benches photographed by Cartier-Bresson. Italy was the hungry streets of Open City or curly-haired people singing and eating pasta.
The images had been provided by movies, books and Pathé News, and none included a six-foot-tall Black woman hovering either in the back or in the foreground.
CHAPTER 15
When Porgy and Bess left San Francisco I resigned myself to the night-club routine, and the burden of life was lightened only by twice-weekly sessions with Wilkie and Lloyd and the romping growth of Clyde.
Three days before my contract ran out I received a telephone call from Saint Subber, the Broadway producer, inviting me to come to New York City to try out for a new show called House of Flowers. He said Pearl Bailey would be starring and he had heard I was a great deal like her. If I satisfied him and got the role he had in mind, I would play opposite Miss Bailey.
New Yorkers may love their hometown loyally, but San Franciscans believe that when good angels die they stay in northern California and hover over the Golden Gate Bridge. I appreciated the chance to try out for a Broadway show, but the invitation did not make me ecstatic. It meant leaving San Francisco, without the prospect of Europe with Porgy and Bess.
Mom and Lottie and Wilkie encouraged me to go. The voice teacher and my mother had found that they had much in common and Mother invited him to move into our house. He came bringing his piano, students, huge rumbling voice and his religious positivism. He could cook nearly as well as the two women and the kitchen rang and reeked with the attempts of three chefs to outtalk and out-cook one another.
They would take care of Clyde until I found an apartment and then he could