Choir Girls and French Fries
A quirky, introspective LA teen faces his demons during a choir performance.
"Ladies and gentlemen. In a moment I will have the great privilege of introducing..."
The disembodied baritone drones on as I and the audience take seat, a storm of applause dissipating into a dainty clamor of folding programs and settling bottoms. I give my own a quick adjustment, really quite satisfied with the outcome of another would be-do-nothing Saturday night. Below, as the chatter finally dies, a conductor, who was the recipient of all our commotion, turns on a heel to face his choir, his wiry black arms out to their furthest reach in the settling quiet, as if ready to pull the room down and wrap it around himself like a cloak. His sharp, peninsular chin is angled high, a great beak over his obedient flock. Of them, the maidens stand garbed in a clean, blue silk, covering their wrists to their shoulders and everything down to the brightly finished wood tier beneath their feet. Splitting the two sections of blue were the men, suited in plain black, completing the center of the usual semi-circle. Positioned at the focus, he remains poised in continued pause, collecting the moment, while they wait silent, their gazes like spokes around his being. Must be a good feeling, I imagine.
And I do imagine. More than most. Like a skittle-charged, fidgety little altar boy with the attention span of a Labrador. But I like it. Only the gifted can color their own world, I say. Ramble rabble. But even as I say that I can sense the bulge in my pocket from my little capsule of Xanax. I'm simply capable of extremes. But you have to be to dream great things from time to time - but, preferably, only from time to time. Those dreams can get a little freaky.
Anyway. I really only came to see the inside of the theater (ironically shallow, right?). Ever since it popped up into the LA skyline last year, everyone has raved about how remarkable it is. How beautiful and unique. I'll give it to them, it ain't bad: the walls are made of beautifully curved wood from corner to corner-if you want to call them corners-drawn and pulled in nonsensical ways as if the boards were of wooden taffy. God I love taffy. If I allow myself to think a bit snappily, it gives the impression of a cloudy, indoor evening (it's no wonder the acoustics here are supposed to be so good). Finally, the playful, meandering interior is flawed, or rather ornamented, by a ludicrous organ. Each of its pipes is oriented at a wild angles as if it were in the process of bursting through the wall. It's fairly daunting, actually.
As I sit waiting, it dawns on me that I have no idea what we're seeing. I hadn't thought to ask. Stefanie and I spent the entire car ride coming up with our best tale of an old fisherman boat captain who, quite sadly, was forced into an early retirement, and, begrudgingly, joined the trucking industry. Things go alright, until he is ironically - I love irony - reassigned to a canned tuna company, which serves as a constant, troubling reminder of his briny bygone lifestyle. Anyhow, it so happens that while there he falls in love - or is lured by - the head canner, Sandy Shores, until she tragically slips on a misplaced anchovy, falls into the machines, and gets canned herself. Distraught, our crusty hero grabs up all the lady cans, and, skipping a couple of chapters, takes Fawkes-like revenge by blowing up the cannery with some old floating mines he kept handy. He makes his dramatic getaway as entire fish rain down on the city. He then drives the truck off the end of a pier, it sprouts a full-size sail for some reason, and he floats into the setting sun with a wide, wrinkly grin. Oh, and all this is set to Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You, which Stefanie and I proceeded to sing to a homeless guy over by where we parked, all the way up to the ticket booth. God save the weird. Amen.
I'm cheap, and obviously not an aficionado, so I would only agree to seats at the several rows up in the second tier of the theater. The issue, now that I've so expertly taken in the architecture, is that I actually have to sit through the thing. I've never been much for choirs. Used to be in one as a toddler like all the other nose pickers with mom-combed hair, but I usually spent most of my energy devising new ways to weave fart jokes into gospel music. Notable tunes included "This is the Bidet" and "Make a Joyful Noise," the latter of which I had decided should be a call-and-response number. BUT, I'm here, and they have my money...with some effort I think maybe I can enjoy myself.
From where we are, the singers look very young. Thumbing through the gloss of my program, past each dismissable little ad and preview, I locate the blurb. It is a visiting youth choir. K thanks. From Britain. Interesting. Ages 18-22. They're all my age. Weird.
Oh! movement below. The conductor's arms fall gently from the heights, pulling his torso along, as if he were gingerly setting down a heavy pair of dumbbells. Then whap! Up snaps his spine like an old piano string, and on cue the music begins, softly. It starts with a swell from the female left, soon answered by a harmony from the right, all bound together by a brawny resonance in the middle. Back and forth they go, but without movement, like musical scenery. But scenery accented by this bird-man in the middle who incessantly writhes about as if he's on fire. I can't tell if it's out of rapture or pain. Maybe both. One moment he's waving like seaweed, until a string of staccato notes strike him like gunfire.
As the song grows louder and the voices gather momentum, so do his movements; he first stands upward and outward in stiff victory, until he's overcome by the weight of some phantom burden. Suddenly he lunges forward like a desperate man with glued feet. Now he stops, tucking inward like a gymnast mid-vault and sways like a tropical palm trunk. Finally he bursts up, cursing the heavens with his twisted hands...before I decide to look somewhere else. I didn't pay to watch a seizure - it's just distracting. I cross my arms over the empty seat in front of me and do my best to see past him, hoping to get a cleaner look at all these strange young prodigies.
I'll admit it, this song is pretty...well pretty. I don't have what you would call a trained ear, but I enjoy the ride of all the up and down, the loud and quiet, all tight, all perfect. All the while, I hear a pair of voices somewhere in there, holding onto a single note that rides through the rise and fall like a high rock in the tide. I scan the sea of starry faces to find them, but I can't. Actually, I don't mind. It adds to the magic. From way up here they all seem so picturesque, romantic.
A single voice emerges, singing in lyric. Not in English, but...Latin? I'll go with Latin. Again, out of curiosity I sweep the tuneful rows for that siren with matching lips, but still no luck. No matter - she stops, and another begins. I keep looking, left and right like a bamboozled dog playing fetch.
Ah! There. I've spotted her. Still soloing, clad in indigo like all the others, but with an especially alluring coverlet of auburn hair that tumbles softly down over her neck and left shoulder. She's joined in song by another in the row behind: a taller, fairer-skinned Delilah, with a deeper shade of brown about her frame that makes me think of a tree in autumn. She warbles with a slightly lower, richer voice. What a voice! I've always been a sucker for the artiste. Plus she's beautiful - well, both are beautiful. Plus she's foreign. I have no idea what she--they, are saying, it still being in Latin, but I love it. I love them. I imagine myself afterward in a movie, fixing my slicked hair and knocking resolutely on her dressing room door, tweed-clad with a fresh bundle of spring flowers and a worldly air. Cut the scene forward about a minute, and, as I see it, we'll be rolling around the carpet. On the flowers, actually (it's okay, they were cheap). But, then again, there are what, like 200 girls down there? The dressing room seems unlikely. Also I feel like one would have to be able sing in order to nab a singer. I had to do it once at church last year. It took a month of naked pep-talks in the mirror to keep from vomiting day-of.
I need a name. I reach back for the program, but before I can open it, they stop.
Another girl starts singing. It could be delusion, but I swear her voice is even sweeter than the others! I bounce my gaze across each cluster of eyes and lips, all framed by curls or flowing shine, all lovely. They're ALL gorgeous! Ugh. I drop my chin into my palms and waft in a daze for a while. It's not even an erotic thing (the flowers bit aside). They're just...too untouchable. Like ornate porcelain figures on an unreachable shelf. I really want that shelf.
A burst of tenor punches through the trance, the fizzy touch of infatuation slipping rudely away, leaving me cold. I blink once and a half, knuckle my eyelids, adjust my position. My attention widens back to the room, to the backs of people's heads, back to that zany organ in the backdrop. My watch sits heavily around my wrist. I absent-mindedly unfasten it, tumbling it around in my hands. I press the crown, setting its round face all green ablaze, following the second hand in its forward journey through a dozen short chapters.
Far off, the gentle din meanders back through the spot lit air to my seat, snatches me by the ear and draws me back down there. Still without real focus I ponder their shapes, and imagine their white pages in-hand, bursting away like doves, finding me, and carrying me high above the scene. Carefully they replant me, standing alone in a circular forest of satin blue while sweetly they sing to me. In reality - how I hate it - I listen intently, one ear down, my cheek against the seat padding, my eyes closed as I calm my mind, trying to reconnect with that feminine charm. Gradually I relax, the cogs and whizzers slowing to a lazy turn, and then I let go. I think I may be a choir fan.
A warm contentment begins to wash me over, and I sink back in my chair. Sound comes through like prose; every chord, every key change makes delicious sense as if hunks of wisdom-nugget were chocolate-covered into every note. Their mouths diffuse passion into the particles of the air. The room is thick with it. I breathe it. I want it. I wish I could pipe it into my veins forever and keep it like some sweet disease. But again that girlish harmony swoons, and up rises its deep counterpart. Up, then washed away, back and forth they go and so goes my chest, leaving me light-headed and lost.
By the middle of the song they've gotten me high. Hovering almost. But something changes. I open my eyes, floating down. Someone is speaking English. This time, after my eyes readjust to the light, I spot her quickly. Her. Another brunette, but with shorter, straight hair. As before, I love her. It clouds my mind like a schoolboy's daydream. I can't see her eyes, but I picture them to be green, like mine.
Sightless, the flood, taking falling rising
Her soprano is a livewire to my nerves. I can't sit still. I'll be like the maestro soon. Few could ever compare to her. Wait. Exactly. Quickly I drop my fingertips to the carpeted floors, grasping at nothing around my shoes until my right hand closes around the program. I snap back up, flip through it again, finding the gap in the middle where the staples come through and sure enough, there are several pages of photos and names. It's too dark - back to my watch crown.
...down, the heavenly sea falls to its knees
I trace my index finger across the sopranos. Blonde-straight, brunette curly, blonde curly, the same again, no, no...there! The only match. Sophia Taylor.
...and from among the clouds, joins the full gathering, is shed a tear. A heavy upturn follows from the suits.
I read on. Age 19. University of Warwick. A full two years younger than I. I scan the remainder of the page: Stacey Williams...Jessica Brown...Allison Stoller...Caitlin Wilson. Age 18...20...18...22. All in their early college years. Like me, like me, like me, and like me (I wish they'd like me). All like me. But, they're not. They're all somewhere else. They are an aqua-garbed sculpture garden of dedicated, unflinching features. Every sound uttered is the culmination of a lifetime of warm-ups, critiques, applause, approval. Each is an emblem of national, parental and personal pride. The best at what they do at the age they've reached.
Who the hell am I? I run the corrugated edges of the ticket stub in my pocket, a flimsy little finger-hold just above the bite of introspection (the mind's eye turned inward and loosed is prone to see terrible things).
But even looking away, I feel their eyes - they can see me, sitting here in a badly laundered t-shirt and threadbare jeans with hands on my thighs, fidgeting in the dark on stitched padding. Put me beneath a light; examine my life, dissect all my time spent. Their sterile gazes slice me through and feel around, now studying the bloody specimens of a teenage life come and gone. Blonde Allison wrings out an old jersey between her fists, just revealing the number "27" faded and chipping off. From the dripping twists falls one shoe, then the other, muddied with broken studs, far too small to fit anyone of my size. They clatter across the floor with a sock, a pad, a watch and a smattering of other athletic trinkets. Curley Ms. Brown peruses a small stack of books, all clean as Christmas. There, a journal, scrawled through to the top of page 5, left at some dated blue-ink header with nothing to follow.
Her interest is short, and as she lets that slip down to the floor, splashing face down among the others, she grasps my prized hardback of Tom Sawyer, so often spoken of but barely enjoyed, its glossy binding devoid of crease or any sign of life but prints from the four fingers that placed it on my bookshelf. With an indifferent left hand she tosses what's left, a short stack of scribbled white paper, fluttering down to ruin. Beautiful Stacey cradles a beautiful guitar, deftly threading a new string where the old has always been missing. With a single, fluid twist of the wrist she winds it into tune, raises her face to meet mine, and begins to play. Far off, though she is, I can hear it perfectly, a sophisticated classical ballad I've heard somewhere before but could never name. All the while her eyes are fixed, mocking me, stiff lips half-curled in a red smirk. But more striking to me now, set against the hot scorn of that stare is the still figure to her left, head hanging down. A tumbled-forward curtain of amber all but veils the framed picture gripped between her palms. There, a tiny splash on the glass. She's crying. One, two, three-four drops follow until with loud sob she lifts her head. "Kelsey" I ejaculate, shrinking back in my seat to catch my breath, and to better stand that stale old feeling of shameful stupidity.
I don't want to be here anymore. I feel around for my sweatshirt, grasping at the limp sleeve to wipe the cold moisture off my eyebrows. I tilt my head into my hands, trying to count seconds on my breaths, and try some tense-and-relax muscle exercise a psych student once showed me. I can't be helped. I feel sick, dizzy. My heart drums a deafening beat in my head, and the swirling decor seems to churn, ready to ooze in from all directions and trap me here. I fumble around in my pocket for my precious little pills. Two of my fingers find the smooth plastic, but I make my mistake. In lifeguard training they tell you to do your best to calm a drowning victim first, and here's why: I clamor too desperately for my tiny white buoys and end up knocking them away, yanking my hand out too fast and watching them tumble out of my pocket, and in horror I watch it disappear under the seat in front of me and down, down, down the stepped carpet, each plastic thud striking my nerves with painful frustration. They'll probably to roll lightly into some stupid woman's stupid flats completely unnoticed, kept hostage ten rows down while I writhe up here alone.
Feeling nauseous, I double over and press my knotted eyes into my knees, anxiously rocking my self up and down with my toes in time with my runaway breathing. All around me I hear distant commotion, filled with shuffling feet, dropping papers and muffled voices. I'm losing it. My skin feels cold, and my knees colder as tears soak through my jeans, which pull tightly against my calves as I wrench my hands around them in twists on the sides. I could scream. I might.
Agh! I spout. Startled as something streaks across my back. I open my eyes wide to face it, only to meet Stefanie's concerned eyes, her arm wrapped around me.
"Easy."
"...What?" I manage.
"You alright?"
"Sorry, I..." I sputter, rubbing my eyes hard, "I guess I--I dunno. Why what's up?"
"Dude look," and with that she nods down toward the stage.
I follow to the hall floor, where the show had stopped. Gowns ruffle and patrons murmur loudly as attention turns toward the back, where a singer has collapsed.
"Sucks," Stef mutters, "Happened to me once. Those stage lights can be a bitch when you're wearing all that fabric."
As though on cue, the stage lights are dimmed and the house lights flipped on, while a squad of stage hands scurry out to help the fainted girl. I scan the faces again. To the left a girl yawns, while her neighbor behind takes the moment to admire the room, now visible to her. Elsewhere, a checked watch. Another girl takes relief from her high-heeled shoes. I think I even spy the conspicuous glow of a checked text message from beneath a flowy sleeve.
I check my phone too. The digital numerals read 9:24 PM. The night is very young, and the show mostly over. Stef will probably want to go home after this, and put me back on the way. I spend a minute pondering what work I might do tonight to make the rest of the week easier, but I decide otherwise.
"No more daydreaming," I whisper to no one. I want to write.
Before long, in a quick, fluid trio of strides the conductor is again front and center, unnoticed, until he raises a small wand and in a swift, rigid swing whips the side of his narrow podium. Once more, every binder was back up, bangs were fingered into place, the cell phone snapped shut, and ladies' shoes reentered with a detectable wince in the eyes.
I give my own temples another quick rub, and adjust myself into my seat comfortably. With the aid of her two fellow altos, the fainted girl, noticeably discolored, regains her stance, wipes off her gown and resumes her position in line. She is generously swept over with applause - and that includes even me, not without an appropriate little tingle of inspiration. Gazing up behind her, I have an epiphany, and poke my sister with a wry smirk.
"Hey," and I laugh, "That organ looks like a giant pile of French fries"
The disembodied baritone drones on as I and the audience take seat, a storm of applause dissipating into a dainty clamor of folding programs and settling bottoms. I give my own a quick adjustment, really quite satisfied with the outcome of another would be-do-nothing Saturday night. Below, as the chatter finally dies, a conductor, who was the recipient of all our commotion, turns on a heel to face his choir, his wiry black arms out to their furthest reach in the settling quiet, as if ready to pull the room down and wrap it around himself like a cloak. His sharp, peninsular chin is angled high, a great beak over his obedient flock. Of them, the maidens stand garbed in a clean, blue silk, covering their wrists to their shoulders and everything down to the brightly finished wood tier beneath their feet. Splitting the two sections of blue were the men, suited in plain black, completing the center of the usual semi-circle. Positioned at the focus, he remains poised in continued pause, collecting the moment, while they wait silent, their gazes like spokes around his being. Must be a good feeling, I imagine.
And I do imagine. More than most. Like a skittle-charged, fidgety little altar boy with the attention span of a Labrador. But I like it. Only the gifted can color their own world, I say. Ramble rabble. But even as I say that I can sense the bulge in my pocket from my little capsule of Xanax. I'm simply capable of extremes. But you have to be to dream great things from time to time - but, preferably, only from time to time. Those dreams can get a little freaky.
Anyway. I really only came to see the inside of the theater (ironically shallow, right?). Ever since it popped up into the LA skyline last year, everyone has raved about how remarkable it is. How beautiful and unique. I'll give it to them, it ain't bad: the walls are made of beautifully curved wood from corner to corner-if you want to call them corners-drawn and pulled in nonsensical ways as if the boards were of wooden taffy. God I love taffy. If I allow myself to think a bit snappily, it gives the impression of a cloudy, indoor evening (it's no wonder the acoustics here are supposed to be so good). Finally, the playful, meandering interior is flawed, or rather ornamented, by a ludicrous organ. Each of its pipes is oriented at a wild angles as if it were in the process of bursting through the wall. It's fairly daunting, actually.
As I sit waiting, it dawns on me that I have no idea what we're seeing. I hadn't thought to ask. Stefanie and I spent the entire car ride coming up with our best tale of an old fisherman boat captain who, quite sadly, was forced into an early retirement, and, begrudgingly, joined the trucking industry. Things go alright, until he is ironically - I love irony - reassigned to a canned tuna company, which serves as a constant, troubling reminder of his briny bygone lifestyle. Anyhow, it so happens that while there he falls in love - or is lured by - the head canner, Sandy Shores, until she tragically slips on a misplaced anchovy, falls into the machines, and gets canned herself. Distraught, our crusty hero grabs up all the lady cans, and, skipping a couple of chapters, takes Fawkes-like revenge by blowing up the cannery with some old floating mines he kept handy. He makes his dramatic getaway as entire fish rain down on the city. He then drives the truck off the end of a pier, it sprouts a full-size sail for some reason, and he floats into the setting sun with a wide, wrinkly grin. Oh, and all this is set to Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You, which Stefanie and I proceeded to sing to a homeless guy over by where we parked, all the way up to the ticket booth. God save the weird. Amen.
I'm cheap, and obviously not an aficionado, so I would only agree to seats at the several rows up in the second tier of the theater. The issue, now that I've so expertly taken in the architecture, is that I actually have to sit through the thing. I've never been much for choirs. Used to be in one as a toddler like all the other nose pickers with mom-combed hair, but I usually spent most of my energy devising new ways to weave fart jokes into gospel music. Notable tunes included "This is the Bidet" and "Make a Joyful Noise," the latter of which I had decided should be a call-and-response number. BUT, I'm here, and they have my money...with some effort I think maybe I can enjoy myself.
From where we are, the singers look very young. Thumbing through the gloss of my program, past each dismissable little ad and preview, I locate the blurb. It is a visiting youth choir. K thanks. From Britain. Interesting. Ages 18-22. They're all my age. Weird.
Oh! movement below. The conductor's arms fall gently from the heights, pulling his torso along, as if he were gingerly setting down a heavy pair of dumbbells. Then whap! Up snaps his spine like an old piano string, and on cue the music begins, softly. It starts with a swell from the female left, soon answered by a harmony from the right, all bound together by a brawny resonance in the middle. Back and forth they go, but without movement, like musical scenery. But scenery accented by this bird-man in the middle who incessantly writhes about as if he's on fire. I can't tell if it's out of rapture or pain. Maybe both. One moment he's waving like seaweed, until a string of staccato notes strike him like gunfire.
As the song grows louder and the voices gather momentum, so do his movements; he first stands upward and outward in stiff victory, until he's overcome by the weight of some phantom burden. Suddenly he lunges forward like a desperate man with glued feet. Now he stops, tucking inward like a gymnast mid-vault and sways like a tropical palm trunk. Finally he bursts up, cursing the heavens with his twisted hands...before I decide to look somewhere else. I didn't pay to watch a seizure - it's just distracting. I cross my arms over the empty seat in front of me and do my best to see past him, hoping to get a cleaner look at all these strange young prodigies.
I'll admit it, this song is pretty...well pretty. I don't have what you would call a trained ear, but I enjoy the ride of all the up and down, the loud and quiet, all tight, all perfect. All the while, I hear a pair of voices somewhere in there, holding onto a single note that rides through the rise and fall like a high rock in the tide. I scan the sea of starry faces to find them, but I can't. Actually, I don't mind. It adds to the magic. From way up here they all seem so picturesque, romantic.
A single voice emerges, singing in lyric. Not in English, but...Latin? I'll go with Latin. Again, out of curiosity I sweep the tuneful rows for that siren with matching lips, but still no luck. No matter - she stops, and another begins. I keep looking, left and right like a bamboozled dog playing fetch.
Ah! There. I've spotted her. Still soloing, clad in indigo like all the others, but with an especially alluring coverlet of auburn hair that tumbles softly down over her neck and left shoulder. She's joined in song by another in the row behind: a taller, fairer-skinned Delilah, with a deeper shade of brown about her frame that makes me think of a tree in autumn. She warbles with a slightly lower, richer voice. What a voice! I've always been a sucker for the artiste. Plus she's beautiful - well, both are beautiful. Plus she's foreign. I have no idea what she--they, are saying, it still being in Latin, but I love it. I love them. I imagine myself afterward in a movie, fixing my slicked hair and knocking resolutely on her dressing room door, tweed-clad with a fresh bundle of spring flowers and a worldly air. Cut the scene forward about a minute, and, as I see it, we'll be rolling around the carpet. On the flowers, actually (it's okay, they were cheap). But, then again, there are what, like 200 girls down there? The dressing room seems unlikely. Also I feel like one would have to be able sing in order to nab a singer. I had to do it once at church last year. It took a month of naked pep-talks in the mirror to keep from vomiting day-of.
I need a name. I reach back for the program, but before I can open it, they stop.
Another girl starts singing. It could be delusion, but I swear her voice is even sweeter than the others! I bounce my gaze across each cluster of eyes and lips, all framed by curls or flowing shine, all lovely. They're ALL gorgeous! Ugh. I drop my chin into my palms and waft in a daze for a while. It's not even an erotic thing (the flowers bit aside). They're just...too untouchable. Like ornate porcelain figures on an unreachable shelf. I really want that shelf.
A burst of tenor punches through the trance, the fizzy touch of infatuation slipping rudely away, leaving me cold. I blink once and a half, knuckle my eyelids, adjust my position. My attention widens back to the room, to the backs of people's heads, back to that zany organ in the backdrop. My watch sits heavily around my wrist. I absent-mindedly unfasten it, tumbling it around in my hands. I press the crown, setting its round face all green ablaze, following the second hand in its forward journey through a dozen short chapters.
Far off, the gentle din meanders back through the spot lit air to my seat, snatches me by the ear and draws me back down there. Still without real focus I ponder their shapes, and imagine their white pages in-hand, bursting away like doves, finding me, and carrying me high above the scene. Carefully they replant me, standing alone in a circular forest of satin blue while sweetly they sing to me. In reality - how I hate it - I listen intently, one ear down, my cheek against the seat padding, my eyes closed as I calm my mind, trying to reconnect with that feminine charm. Gradually I relax, the cogs and whizzers slowing to a lazy turn, and then I let go. I think I may be a choir fan.
A warm contentment begins to wash me over, and I sink back in my chair. Sound comes through like prose; every chord, every key change makes delicious sense as if hunks of wisdom-nugget were chocolate-covered into every note. Their mouths diffuse passion into the particles of the air. The room is thick with it. I breathe it. I want it. I wish I could pipe it into my veins forever and keep it like some sweet disease. But again that girlish harmony swoons, and up rises its deep counterpart. Up, then washed away, back and forth they go and so goes my chest, leaving me light-headed and lost.
By the middle of the song they've gotten me high. Hovering almost. But something changes. I open my eyes, floating down. Someone is speaking English. This time, after my eyes readjust to the light, I spot her quickly. Her. Another brunette, but with shorter, straight hair. As before, I love her. It clouds my mind like a schoolboy's daydream. I can't see her eyes, but I picture them to be green, like mine.
Sightless, the flood, taking falling rising
Her soprano is a livewire to my nerves. I can't sit still. I'll be like the maestro soon. Few could ever compare to her. Wait. Exactly. Quickly I drop my fingertips to the carpeted floors, grasping at nothing around my shoes until my right hand closes around the program. I snap back up, flip through it again, finding the gap in the middle where the staples come through and sure enough, there are several pages of photos and names. It's too dark - back to my watch crown.
...down, the heavenly sea falls to its knees
I trace my index finger across the sopranos. Blonde-straight, brunette curly, blonde curly, the same again, no, no...there! The only match. Sophia Taylor.
...and from among the clouds, joins the full gathering, is shed a tear. A heavy upturn follows from the suits.
I read on. Age 19. University of Warwick. A full two years younger than I. I scan the remainder of the page: Stacey Williams...Jessica Brown...Allison Stoller...Caitlin Wilson. Age 18...20...18...22. All in their early college years. Like me, like me, like me, and like me (I wish they'd like me). All like me. But, they're not. They're all somewhere else. They are an aqua-garbed sculpture garden of dedicated, unflinching features. Every sound uttered is the culmination of a lifetime of warm-ups, critiques, applause, approval. Each is an emblem of national, parental and personal pride. The best at what they do at the age they've reached.
Who the hell am I? I run the corrugated edges of the ticket stub in my pocket, a flimsy little finger-hold just above the bite of introspection (the mind's eye turned inward and loosed is prone to see terrible things).
But even looking away, I feel their eyes - they can see me, sitting here in a badly laundered t-shirt and threadbare jeans with hands on my thighs, fidgeting in the dark on stitched padding. Put me beneath a light; examine my life, dissect all my time spent. Their sterile gazes slice me through and feel around, now studying the bloody specimens of a teenage life come and gone. Blonde Allison wrings out an old jersey between her fists, just revealing the number "27" faded and chipping off. From the dripping twists falls one shoe, then the other, muddied with broken studs, far too small to fit anyone of my size. They clatter across the floor with a sock, a pad, a watch and a smattering of other athletic trinkets. Curley Ms. Brown peruses a small stack of books, all clean as Christmas. There, a journal, scrawled through to the top of page 5, left at some dated blue-ink header with nothing to follow.
Her interest is short, and as she lets that slip down to the floor, splashing face down among the others, she grasps my prized hardback of Tom Sawyer, so often spoken of but barely enjoyed, its glossy binding devoid of crease or any sign of life but prints from the four fingers that placed it on my bookshelf. With an indifferent left hand she tosses what's left, a short stack of scribbled white paper, fluttering down to ruin. Beautiful Stacey cradles a beautiful guitar, deftly threading a new string where the old has always been missing. With a single, fluid twist of the wrist she winds it into tune, raises her face to meet mine, and begins to play. Far off, though she is, I can hear it perfectly, a sophisticated classical ballad I've heard somewhere before but could never name. All the while her eyes are fixed, mocking me, stiff lips half-curled in a red smirk. But more striking to me now, set against the hot scorn of that stare is the still figure to her left, head hanging down. A tumbled-forward curtain of amber all but veils the framed picture gripped between her palms. There, a tiny splash on the glass. She's crying. One, two, three-four drops follow until with loud sob she lifts her head. "Kelsey" I ejaculate, shrinking back in my seat to catch my breath, and to better stand that stale old feeling of shameful stupidity.
I don't want to be here anymore. I feel around for my sweatshirt, grasping at the limp sleeve to wipe the cold moisture off my eyebrows. I tilt my head into my hands, trying to count seconds on my breaths, and try some tense-and-relax muscle exercise a psych student once showed me. I can't be helped. I feel sick, dizzy. My heart drums a deafening beat in my head, and the swirling decor seems to churn, ready to ooze in from all directions and trap me here. I fumble around in my pocket for my precious little pills. Two of my fingers find the smooth plastic, but I make my mistake. In lifeguard training they tell you to do your best to calm a drowning victim first, and here's why: I clamor too desperately for my tiny white buoys and end up knocking them away, yanking my hand out too fast and watching them tumble out of my pocket, and in horror I watch it disappear under the seat in front of me and down, down, down the stepped carpet, each plastic thud striking my nerves with painful frustration. They'll probably to roll lightly into some stupid woman's stupid flats completely unnoticed, kept hostage ten rows down while I writhe up here alone.
Feeling nauseous, I double over and press my knotted eyes into my knees, anxiously rocking my self up and down with my toes in time with my runaway breathing. All around me I hear distant commotion, filled with shuffling feet, dropping papers and muffled voices. I'm losing it. My skin feels cold, and my knees colder as tears soak through my jeans, which pull tightly against my calves as I wrench my hands around them in twists on the sides. I could scream. I might.
Agh! I spout. Startled as something streaks across my back. I open my eyes wide to face it, only to meet Stefanie's concerned eyes, her arm wrapped around me.
"Easy."
"...What?" I manage.
"You alright?"
"Sorry, I..." I sputter, rubbing my eyes hard, "I guess I--I dunno. Why what's up?"
"Dude look," and with that she nods down toward the stage.
I follow to the hall floor, where the show had stopped. Gowns ruffle and patrons murmur loudly as attention turns toward the back, where a singer has collapsed.
"Sucks," Stef mutters, "Happened to me once. Those stage lights can be a bitch when you're wearing all that fabric."
As though on cue, the stage lights are dimmed and the house lights flipped on, while a squad of stage hands scurry out to help the fainted girl. I scan the faces again. To the left a girl yawns, while her neighbor behind takes the moment to admire the room, now visible to her. Elsewhere, a checked watch. Another girl takes relief from her high-heeled shoes. I think I even spy the conspicuous glow of a checked text message from beneath a flowy sleeve.
I check my phone too. The digital numerals read 9:24 PM. The night is very young, and the show mostly over. Stef will probably want to go home after this, and put me back on the way. I spend a minute pondering what work I might do tonight to make the rest of the week easier, but I decide otherwise.
"No more daydreaming," I whisper to no one. I want to write.
Before long, in a quick, fluid trio of strides the conductor is again front and center, unnoticed, until he raises a small wand and in a swift, rigid swing whips the side of his narrow podium. Once more, every binder was back up, bangs were fingered into place, the cell phone snapped shut, and ladies' shoes reentered with a detectable wince in the eyes.
I give my own temples another quick rub, and adjust myself into my seat comfortably. With the aid of her two fellow altos, the fainted girl, noticeably discolored, regains her stance, wipes off her gown and resumes her position in line. She is generously swept over with applause - and that includes even me, not without an appropriate little tingle of inspiration. Gazing up behind her, I have an epiphany, and poke my sister with a wry smirk.
"Hey," and I laugh, "That organ looks like a giant pile of French fries"
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