Chapter Two
Two
After feeding and walking Willow, I come back down to the basement to find my mom fast asleep, empty carton of Phish Food on the floor, The X-Files marathon still playing.
I tuck a patchwork quilt around her slender frame and turn off the TV.
The basement, which was meant to be her pottery studio, has become her second bedroom.
An unused pottery wheel still sits behind the couch next to some dust-laden drop cloths.
A guy she went on two dates with bought her a kiln, which she keeps her shoes in. “Like Carrie Bradshaw,” she’d said.
Our house is strangely constructed—it’s rickety and angular.
It has a basement and an attic—two things you rarely find in Texas homes.
It belonged to my grandparents, and the creaking wood stairs and chipped pastel tiles will tell you as much.
Because of the weird layout—four floors but very little space in any given room—it can be hard for my mom to make it up to her bedroom during flare-ups.
I’ve offered to bring everything down here—Mike and his friends would help move her mattress and bed frame in a heartbeat—but she keeps saying she’s feeling better, and to just give it a week.
Only once the kitchen is cleaned, bills are paid, and trash is taken out do I realize it’s ten.
Too late for me to make Ladybird Playhouse’s monthly open mic night.
Depleted, I crawl into bed to watch West Side Story on my laptop.
Now this is the kind of love story I can get on board with: tragic, honest, gut-wrenching.
And the music.
On bad days I like to listen to the entire one-hour-and-eighteen-minute-long album in my car and bawl my eyes out. No album on earth beats the original Broadway cast recording.
In fact, I text that exact sentiment to my fellow musical junkie and best friend, Everly.
Everly Pace: Annie Get Your Gun is better.
Clementine: You’re out of your GD mind.
Everly Pace: There’s No Business Like Show Business is the most famous musical song!
Clementine: Not on any planet!
Clementine: You’re just drunk on country music Kool-Aid.
Everly Pace: It’s true…I want the Gabby Robinson opener job so bad.
I got into theater because my mom couldn’t afford day care and I showed no athletic promise whatsoever.
That’s where I met Everly, and how we grew up doing shows together.
While I devoured all of it—the singing of course, but the acting, dancing, and producing as well—she was only in it for the spectacular riffs and vocal gymnastics.
We both got scholarships to Berklee College of Music, but my mom was too sick to work at the time, so I couldn’t go with Ev.
She studied music theory there and honed her voice.
It’s always been unreal, but now her songwriting’s even better—like pop-punk bubblegum in the heartland. Paramore meets Kacey Musgraves.
She’s spent the last few years touring as a backup singer for different musicians and bands, each one more impressive than the last. On her off months, she records and performs her own original tracks.
She does little gigs in our town and she’s had a few in Austin.
Though they’re usually pretty empty, Mike and I always show up early and bring obnoxious signs.
My favorite was I WANT TO LISTEN TO YOU SING FOREVERLY .
After all her years working as a hired gun, she’d finally gotten the call a month ago. An old professor of hers had mentored massive country music star Gabby Robinson. Gabby was looking for someone up-and-coming to open for her show in Nashville, and he’d sent her Everly’s EP.
Clementine: What about the Halloran tour you already booked?
Everly Pace: He’s an incredible artist. This album is topping every chart.
Everly Pace: It’ll be great exposure, and I doubt Gabby will even listen to my EP…
Before her professor had sent her stuff to Gabby’s team, Everly had gotten the biggest touring opportunity of her life. Backup vocals on the eight-week US tour of Irish megastar Halloran, promoting his second album after a Grammy-sweeping debut. When it rains it pours, and all that.
Clementine: When do you find out about Gabby?
Everly Pace: They said up to a week
Clementine: But Halloran’s tour starts in a few days…
Everly Pace: I know.
Clementine: How are rehearsals? What’s he like?
Everly Pace: Hmm…Kind of quiet. Stupidly talented. REALLY tall.
Everly Pace: His keys player is very hot.
Clementine: YIKES. Be smart.
Clementine: (Do not be smart, and I want details)
Everly Pace: Lollll. You on your way to Ladybird?
Ladybird Playhouse is not only my favorite spot in downtown Austin, but also where Everly and I started doing theater when the annual play at our school wasn’t satisfying our increasing musical cravings.
Everly still works front of house there when she isn’t touring.
She gets discounted tickets to all their shows, which means I get discounted tickets to all their shows.
These days I’ve been too busy with work and my mom to perform in them, so the playhouse’s open mic nights have become my only creative outlet all month.
I check the time—nearly eleven.
Clementine: I think it’s too late.
Everly Pace: Come on babe. No traffic right now. You can make it just in time for last call.
Clementine: I worked a double shift today. I may fall asleep at the wheel.
Everly Pace: You’re not capable of that kind of negligence.
Everly Pace: You have to make time for the things you’re passionate about. Come on, off you go!!
My eyelids are already protesting the sleep I’m putting off. But she’s right. I toss myself from bed and send her another text while I find my keys.
Clementine: …….. Fine.
Everly Pace: Yay! Send me a vid of your set, I miss your face
Everly Pace: And your voice even more duh
Clementine: Have you ever seen a zombie sing show tunes?
Everly Pace: Sounds pretty entertaining.
Everly Pace: Going to pass out, we have rehearsal super early in the morning.
Clementine: LOVE YOU
Everly Pace: xoxoxoxoxoxoxo
The drive to Austin from Cherry Grove is about an hour but I make it in forty-six minutes flat.
My car skids to a halt beneath the brightly lit Live Music sign and I dash inside.
I still smell like chimichangas because I was too tired to shower and I might have pimple spot treatment on my chin but I don’t care—as soon as the swell of piano keys fills my ears I have more energy than I’ve had all week.
“Am I too late?” I ask Everly’s replacement, a frizzy-haired woman with dangling earrings. She’s filing away some sheet music at the host stand.
“Almost. You can close us out.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. “Great.”
“Take a seat,” she tells me. “We’ll call you up shortly.”
The man on the stage is an older gentleman in a fifties bomber jacket.
He plays a swooping jazz melody that’s either Chet Baker or Duke Ellington but I’m too brain-dead to discern which.
Either way, the swinging notes slink deep into my bones and soothe me from the inside out.
I get a bubbly water from the bar and take a seat in the back to listen before I’m up.
I love the blend of people who come to this theater on open mic night.
Everything from young singers hoping to make it in the Austin country scene to aged rock ’n’ rollers who’ve retired in the countryside to die-hard musical nerds like myself.
I’m sure there are bars and clubs just for show tunes somewhere—maybe New York or London—but Ladybird Playhouse is even better because of the hodgepodge crowd.
It’s like a playlist put together by ten people who’ve never met.
A sketchbook shared among strangers. I’m really glad Everly encouraged me to come.
The jazz number ends to heartfelt applause and the woman with the long earrings calls me up. I maneuver through the familiar crowd, propping my phone to record at the lip of the stage.
Ladybird Playhouse is a pretty small venue.
It can only seat one hundred and fifty, but they always allow standing room on jazz, comedy, or open mic nights like this one.
Still, when I step onto the scuffed, tape-marked stage, adjust my mic, and stare out at the darkness, I feel as though I’m singing to millions.
A mass of people awaiting my voice—my chest expands with the anticipation.
Inspired by my conversation with Ev, I’ve cued up the notes to “Something’s Coming.
” It’s a song usually sung by West Side Story ’s male lead, Tony.
I do stray from show tunes every now and then—Fleetwood Mac, Lana Del Rey, Janis Joplin—but I always come back to Broadway.
Especially on double-shift, crummy-date, bad-clinical-trial-news nights like tonight.
Tony’s hopeful notes and that brush of the snare drum pick up and the lifting feeling in my chest doubles.
I open my mouth and am immediately lost in the wonder of it.
A song about all that is to come. That feeling of knowing your life is about to change dramatically for the better—knowing it as sure as you know the sun will rise in the morning.
It’s not a feeling I can relate to, but that’s what’s so magical about musical theater.
About music in general: it’s all the escapism of storytelling but with the added arsenal of slow-building chords and plunging vocals.
You feel it in every part of you—the tap of your feet, the tears in your eyes, the tingle at the back of your neck.
It’s as close to being swept away as one can get.
The chorus belts from my lungs. “Somethin’s comin’, I don’t know what it is, but it is gonna be great…”
Even though the dim lights make it hard to see the audience’s faces, I can sense the entire room is alive. They’d not expected a show tune. Probably cringed at the first few dated, plucked notes—and I don’t blame them one bit—but now…Now they can feel it. The swell, the kick—
That dose of sheer optimism injected into every single line.
Or maybe it’s just me—maybe I’m the only one who feels alive and lit up like a firecracker. Soaring into the sky, bursting at the seams, sending out shots of hot light. Maybe I’m the only one in this entire room that grows brighter and taller and warmer with every verse.
But that’s okay, too. These nights are just for me. They’re for all I’ve given up. All I’ve made peace with never going after. They’re so the music can live inside of me again just for a little while, and so I can remember exactly who I am when that indescribable alchemy occurs.
When I sigh out the final lyrics, the intimate crowd is already on their feet to applaud.