Chapter 26
“Jess, you’re a wonder.”
—Gertrude Chandler Warner, The Boxcar Children
She took a deep breath and pranced into the audience, going through the motions, wiggling her butt and fake-giggling, without
feeling a thing. She stopped by a distinguished-looking older gentleman and bent over enough to let him peer down her cleavage.
“Enjoy the view, lover,” she purred in a pouty baby-doll voice.
The audience stirred. Nobody understood what was happening, and no one was ready to play along. Screw ’em.
She moved automatically, vamping, posing with hands on hips, and blowing a kiss toward the tall man at Kristin Garrett’s side.
“Hey, good-lookin’.”
He seemed perplexed, as did everyone else, even Erin.
Clint stood in the foyer guarding the front door and too far away for her to see his expression.
She slithered toward the end of the aisle where Rory Garrett’s husband was sitting and scooched down so her butt stuck out.
She licked the tip of her index finger and pointed it right at him. “You’re hot.”
He gave her a half-smile, while his wife, Clint’s sister, Rory, shot her a visual fireball.
A little more prancing, pouty lips, baby-doll voice . . . dead-silent audience. She’d lost them. Let this be over soon.
She stepped up on the stage and struck another busty pose for the silent audience. “Nobody,” she cooed, “understands how hard
it is to be a bimbo.”
They regarded her curiously. Trudging on, she let Clint’s dress shirt drift off her shoulders and smoothed her hands over
her body. “The upkeep . . .”
She leaned over to touch her toes. “The exercise.”
She released her bun from its clip and ran her hand through her blond waves. “The chemicals.”
Someone chuckled. Maybe Clint.
“And the clothes.” She moved to the clothing rack, still speaking in her baby-doll voice. “If you want to be a good bimbo,
you need to work hard at it.”
She heard a quick laugh and felt the tiniest spark of energy as she secured a dazzling pink sequined bodice around her rib
cage, using the Velcro fasteners to hold it in place. “What food does he like?” She pulled on a matching skirt and pressed
her index finger to her cheek. “What sports does he watch?” She stepped into towering stilettos. Several women laughed at
her exaggerated wince. “Not that you really care . . .” She yawned and patted her lips. “But a girl”—she kicked up a heel—“has
to pay her rent.”
Mia hit the sound cue like a pro, and Dancy launched into Marilyn Monroe’s breathy blond-bimbo anthem, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
“A kiss on the hand . . .”
She wasn’t a great singer, but she knew how to sell a song, and she could dance, even in five-inch stilettos. As she belted
out the old song, heads began to move in time to the tune, and feet started to tap.
She strutted into the audience, around the stage, flirting with both men and women. She straddled a chair with wide-splayed
legs, playing to an audience that was finally beginning to come along.
The song reached its end. The audience smiled and clapped. A shrill whistle came from the back. Clint. God bless him. A jolt
of adrenaline kicked in. They were with her.
Her lethargy gone, she moved to the clothing rack and hooked her thumbs in the waistband of the skirt but only pulled it down
a few inches. Speaking in her normal voice, she looked thoughtful. “I read in a book somewhere that ‘bimbo’ might be nothing
more than a word people made up to describe a woman who’s better at survival than they are.”
A pretty redhead thrust her fist in the air and hooted. Dancy pointed at her in acknowledgment, stepped out of the skirt,
and faced the audience as herself. “I’m an expert at being a bimbo.” She smiled. “I’ve seduced men . . . and a few women.”
They laughed as she offered up a coy wink. “I’ve wrecked homes”—she opened the bodice an inch at a time—“stabbed lovers, and
destroyed lives.” She hung up her costume. “It’s been an interesting life for a woman who, in reality, is a bookworm and a
serial monogamist.”
The audience was engaged, and so was she, riding high now on adrenaline.
Slipping out of her stilettos, she stood barefoot in the nude bodysuit.
“I’ve posed—only semi-discreetly—for thirst traps long before anyone called them that.
” She pulled a modest brown dress over her head.
It fastened high on her neck and fell to her ankles.
“Those photos paid for the gas that got me to auditions and bought the cigarettes that kept me from gaining weight.”
She caught her hair in a bun and set a modest linen cap on top. “Whenever I was stuck for too long in an uncomfortable pose
for a photographer who only saw me as a body, I’d do what a lot of nerds do.” A long pause. “Recite the periodic table of
elements from memory.”
Open laughter.
“Then mentally calculate base ten logarithms.”
The audience was having fun, giving her more energy.
Plain brown slippers came next. “I was smart.” She looped a white lace shawl over her shoulders. “So why was I wearing a G-string
instead of going to college? Was I betraying my sex?” She walked across the stage in her modest brown dress. “What would Abigail
think?”
She sat at the small desk, propped her elbows on top, and continued addressing the audience, many of whom had begun to lean
forward in their chairs. “Abigail Adams didn’t have to take off her clothes for a man to love her. While her husband, John
Adams, set about the messy business of bolstering a revolution and starting a new country, she raised their six children and
wrote him letters. Lots of letters. Abigail wasn’t afraid to let her freak flag fly.”
Dancy picked up a quill, dipped it into the empty cosmetic jar that served as an inkpot, and began to write as she spoke.
“Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.”
Not all men. Not Clint. He was a leader, but never a tyrant.
She refocused and dipped her quill again. “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
Dancy continued as Abigail highlighted her independent thinking about women and education as well as her deep affection for
her husband, all the while responding to imaginary conversations with the rowdy Adams children, who were seemingly causing
trouble offstage. She concluded the scene by turning back into herself. “If only poor Abigail had known about the babysitting
powers of a Nintendo Switch.”
A wave of laughter enfolded her. She left Abigail behind and traded the modest brown dress for a red flapper gown. Adding
an ostrich fan and cloche hat, she transformed herself into the great Josephine Baker.
She sang a bit of “J’ai Deux Amours,” using the fan to flirt with the audience. After the song, she contrasted the material
privileges of her own childhood with Baker’s rough St. Louis beginnings and set her own fears against Baker’s heroics as a
spy for the French Resistance.
The Women We Are.
The audience stayed with her as she moved from one character to the next. In an elegant black suit, with her hair pushed behind
her ears, she sat center stage in the armchair. Speaking with a posh British accent, chin slightly dipped, she became Princess
Diana in the infamous Martin Bashir interview.
Through Diana, Dancy spoke of the perils of being the wife of a high-profile figure, but she meticulously avoided mentioning Roth by name or disparaging him in any way.
She didn’t allude to his ego or his affair.
This show was about her, not about him. She could have told him that when he tried to blackmail her, but he would never have believed her.
Through the lens of the musical genius Clara Schumann, she addressed creativity. She looked to the diaries of American pioneer
women as inspiration for fortitude. Wearing a crop top and baggy sweatpants, she revealed her own rape through the eyes of
a teenage victim raped by her boyfriend. She’d never felt more vulnerable, or freer. She glimpsed one of the younger audience
members leaning forward, hugging herself.
Sitting at an easel, she became the artist Frida Kahlo, tortured, both physically and emotionally, with the pain of three
miscarriages. She disclosed her own miscarriage, linking herself with women everywhere. She drifted into a Spanish lullaby—only
a few stanzas because she couldn’t trust her voice not to break if she sang more.
It was time to ease the tension she’d built with the most technically challenging part of the show. Wearing jeans and a sweater,
she impersonated half a dozen great female comedians commenting on human nature. Dancy switched voices and physicality for
each one with flawless timing, and the audience roared at the jokes. At the end, she launched into the rock power anthem “Fight
Song” as she stripped back down to her bodysuit.
Only one costume left. She picked up the dress box that had been sitting under the clothing rack and carried it to center
stage. Sitting back on her heels, she removed the lid and took out the ice-blue gown she hadn’t burned.
“Sometimes you have to lose everything before you can fly.” The bodice and skirt were separate now.
She stepped into the skirt first. “Maybe someone you care about dies, or you have a miscarriage, or a kid you love goes off the rails, or you lose your job, or get a divorce . . .” She fastened the bodice.
“Maybe you’ve put on a beautiful blue gown studded with tiny lights .
. .” She flicked the small switch illuminating the fiberoptic lights she’d retooled herself.
“And in front of a few hundred people, you humiliate yourself. The next day you watch your downfall replayed all over the internet.” She offered up a big smile. “It could happen.”
The audience laughed, which gave her courage to plunge on.
“So you cry.” She turned off the lights in the gown. “You get drunk. You forget to eat. In the same pajamas you’ve been wearing
for weeks, you numb yourself with bad reality shows. You know you’re not good enough, smart enough, strong enough. You’re
lost in your own life, and you want to stay there. Since when did depression get a bad name? You deserve this depression.
Finally, something you’re really good at.”
The audience had grown so quiet she could only hear the occasional creak of a chair. “You tell yourself to snap out of it.
Take a walk. Start a journal. Eat kale. But it’s your depression, and you’re going to do it right. Why should you move on
when your life sucks? You go back to bed.”
She glimpsed a woman in the audience wipe her eyes. A man ducked his head to hide his face.
Her voice softened. “But then maybe, if you’re very lucky, you hear a piece of music that speaks to you, or you see a perfect
sunset, or you smell an exquisite loaf of freshly baked bread. And somehow, without meaning to, you take notice of this beauty.
Or maybe, like me, you stumble onto an animal who’s in worse shape than you are. Or a person who has no reason to help you
but holds out his hand when you most need it.” She paused and smiled. “Or maybe it’s just good pharmaceuticals.”
She pressed her palms into her skirt. “Whatever the reason, you begin to come awake. Bit by bit. Painful cell by painful cell. This loaf of bread, this piece of music, this animal, this person, this pill . . . You finally understand that you are . . . useful. You have a place. A purpose.”
Her voice stayed strong, even as her eyes filled with tears. “You get out of your own head long enough to think of the struggles
of others, men and women. Not only Abigail and Josephine, but Frederick Douglass and Neil Armstrong. Anna May Wong and Mr.
Rogers. You remember that these heroes were also human beings just like you, and because of that, because of their humanity,
those heroes also live someplace inside you. Inside all of us.”
Tears slipped down her cheeks. The words felt honest and true. “Finally, you whisper to yourself, to the world . . . “My body’s weak, my mind’s a mess, but here I am.” Here we are. Together with our failings and our strengths. Still here. Still hoping.”
She gestured to the audience. “You. Me. All of us together in our humanity. We’re imperfect, unfinished.” She swallowed the
lump in her throat. “But we’re hopeful. Because we’re human.” In a whisper, “Beautifully, wonderfully human.”
The lights came down. The room went dark. She had nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. The audience began to applaud.
She’d planned her entrance, but not her exit. Any second now the lights would come up. She had no backdrop to hide behind.
No wings to disappear into.
A familiar male voice called out from the back of the room. “Turn it on! Turn on the dress.”
With a strangled, swallowed laugh, she did as he asked. The room stayed dark except for her ice-blue gown.
And the crowd went wild.