Chapter Seven #2
“I didn’t know dance majors took acting classes,” Danny said.
“We don’t!” said Christian. “He was subbing for our history teacher when she was on maternity leave.”
“I’m pretty sure he hates me,” Nina added resignedly. “He used to make me hold on to, like, six folding chairs every time I got up to do a monologue for an entire semester.”
“Why?” Danny asked.
“He said it was because my acting was, quote, too handsy,” she sighed, pulling a strand of hair off her Jackie O–style pastel cardigan.
Don’t use your hands, Danny added to his mental checklist. And find out who Joan Crawford is.
Even Orion, who was generally about as expressive as a bowling pin, visibly shuddered at Mr. Davenport’s name.
“Whatever—I think he’s sexy,” Astoria said provocatively, looking over to Nina. “And he’s right. Your acting is too handsy.”
“Acting is a bloodsport,” Mr. Davenport decreed, snaking his way through the aisles of petrified students in Thursday’s Scene Study class.
No kumbaya box circles here. Mr. Davenport’s students sat in proper desks in proper rows, like they were about to take the SATs.
“Acting is not a hobby,” Mr. Davenport sneered, the word sitting in his mouth like a bad bite of fish. “It’s not a thing to do with your free time. It’s life and death.”
Danny scribbled the words furiously in his notebook. If he was going to survive this saga, he’d have to memorize the monster’s every move.
“I know most of you got involved with theater because you are cute, or flexible, or because you think applause will fill an empty corner of your heart,” he said.
“But please leave your cutesy shtick at the door, because I don’t want to see it.”
The subsequent silence was broken only when a girl with tight blond ringlets snapped a pencil in half, apparently in terror.
“Acting requires discipline,” Mr. Davenport said, weaving his way through the desks.
“And vulnerability—digging in and mining the darkest parts of yourself—the parts that you don’t want anyone to see, the parts that make you embarrassed, or uncomfortable, or angry.
This room is not a place to rehash tricks or bits that you picked up from some cast recording.
The only thing allowed in this room is you—warts and all. ”
Danny had just finished scribbling the monster’s words in his notebook when a shadow appeared over the page. Danny looked up to find a pair of black eyes glaring down at him.
“Daniel Victorio from Sta-ten Island,” the man said, fixing Danny with a flinty stare. “Imagine my surprise when I saw your name on the roster of transfer students for the fall.”
Danny felt a trickle of sweat slide down the back of his neck.
“That decision was certainly not mine,” Mr. Davenport continued.
Danny could feel his classmates lean in from their seats.
“You were unpolished, inexperienced—it was clear to me, if not to my colleagues with softer hearts and lower standards, that you didn’t have what it takes to keep your head above water. ”
Danny refused to break eye contact, though it felt like pressing his eyeballs into a bucket of bleach.
Mr. Davenport finally broke his gaze and turned back toward the chalkboard.
“Let’s see if you prove me wrong,” he said airily.
“All right, scholars, we’ll start the semester with scenes from Sweet Charity, The Apple Tree, and Little Shop of Horrors. Partner up!”
The room immediately buzzed, although in the flurry of bodies seeking a partner, nobody made eye contact with Danny.
Nina gently patted him on the shoulder.
“What, you wanna see a dead body?” Danny groaned. “Trust me, you don’t want me as a scene partner. I don’t want to take you down with me.”
“Oh, whatever!” She rolled her eyes not quite convincingly. “He picks a new target every year. Besides, I wanna be Audrey and you’re one of, like, two viable Seymours.”
Ms. Mellon’s Song Performance class arrived at the end of the week like a care package from his Nonni.
Danny had spent every evening practicing the song “What’ll I Do?
” for his first performance. Finally, he would have the chance to impress his classmates—to prove that he could keep his head above water.
He was pretty sure it was his singing that had gotten him that acceptance letter, after all, and even though he couldn’t do a tour jeté, or recite any of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or remember who the hell Sanford Meisner was, he knew his voice was special, something he could count on, something that might just make him feel like he belonged.
Danny sat on his cube, his fingers curled around his binder, waiting for his turn to get up and perform.
And while he hadn’t been nervous when he entered the room, that changed when his fellow classmates began to take the stage.
First up was a guy named Dustin Parker-Taylor, who was playing Lewis, the dimwitted-but-handsome son in Pippin.
Most of Dustin’s scenes in the show were with Nina’s character, Fastrada, and she was quick to share that Dustin already had his Equity card, whatever that meant.
“I’ll be singing ‘I Chose Right’ from Baby by Richard Maltby and David Shire,” Dustin Parker-Taylor—everyone seemed to call him by all three names—announced at the top, like he was reading headlines on the eight-o’clock news.
He nodded to Jerry, the accompanist, and took in a deep breath as the intro played like his own personal theme song.
The first thing Danny noticed about Dustin Parker-Taylor was his voice and the control he seemed to have with every word.
When he came to a long held note, he pushed into it with a straight tone, then floated it to the end with a gentle vibrato.
And when he got to the higher notes at the top of his range, he wouldn’t slam them out the way Danny would often try to do—he would just lightly touch them in a way that was somehow even more impressive.
He finished the song with a twinkle in his eye, staying in the moment before breaking and turning back to Ms. Mellon.
The whole class applauded and Danny assumed it was over, but Ms. Mellon began asking Dustin a series of questions.
“What was your moment before?”
“What’s your objective?”
“What will happen if you don’t achieve it?”
Danny watched in disbelief as Dustin volleyed back answers without even having to think, coming up with wild circumstances and motivations and backstory.
And when Ms. Mellon asked him to speak the lyrics as a monologue rather than sing them, Dustin didn’t even flinch before launching into an inspiring speech, finding new moments of discovery within the text.
Danny was now a little nervous, but still not too nervous.
He’d memorized the song. Wasn’t that all she’d asked for?
But those nerves grew and grew with every student who took their place at the front of the room—students with poise, who acted like tiny adults and had voices that could fill Yankee Stadium.
“Danny?” Ms. Mellon called, in a voice far too relaxed for a woman who’d just given birth to the next crop of Broadway stars. “Are you ready?”
For a second, Danny honestly considered saying no. She had given him an option, hadn’t she? But before he could say anything, Nina let out a cheer that would have bordered on overly exuberant at a football game.
“Go, Danny!”
And before he could shut her up, he was gathering his binder. And before he could tell his feet to quit, they were crossing to the piano.
“Tempo?” the old man asked, propping up his sheet music.
“Uh,” Danny stammered. “Whatever you think is best.”
It was hard to tell, but Danny was pretty sure he saw the man rolling his eyes behind his thick glasses. Regardless, Danny walked to the center of the room and took his place on the masking tape X.
“I’ll be singing ‘What’ll I Do?’ by Irving Berlin.”
Phew, he thought. Got that out of the way. That was probably the hardest part.
“Whenever you’re ready.” Ms. Mellon smiled, looking up from her notebook and giving Danny a little wink.
Danny nodded to the accompanist and took in a deep breath and closed his eyes.
A strange thing would happen to Danny whenever he’d open his mouth to sing.
Half of the time, he wouldn’t even remember it.
It was like a part of him would leave his body, drifting off into the air vents, and come tumbling back to earth only when awakened by the sound of applause.
Danny opened his eyes and he was back in the room, unaware of the two and a half minutes that had ticked by on the big white clock above the door.
He remembered the intro and that he had come in at the right time.
He remembered the chords beneath him in the chorus, how they had the quiet ache of an old black-and-white movie soundtrack.
And he remembered his hands lifting slightly, the way they always did when the music got inside him.
But the rest of it? Nah. Not even a fleck.
It was Nina who finally broke his trance, slapping her hands together wildly as a wide grin spread across her face.
“That voice!” she heaved, looking side to side at her classmates who had joined in applauding, also clearly impressed.
“Well done, Danny,” Ms. Mellon said. “You have a really beautiful singing voice. I appreciate you being so well prepared. I know it can be scary performing for the first time in front of a new group of people.”
“It was fine,” Danny lied, not sure why.
“Well, that’s great,” Ms. Mellon half laughed. “So let’s jump right in. Tell me, Danny, who were you talking to?”
“Who was I…Sorry, what?” Danny scrunched his face.
“In the song,” Ms. Mellon said. “Were you talking to someone in particular?”
“Uh.” Danny shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess I was just focused on the singing.”
“Totally.” Ms. Mellon nodded with a smile. “And you sounded really great, but let’s try to get a little more specific. This is a love song, sure, but it doesn’t have to be romantic. Is there someone you might sing it to? A friend, maybe. Or a mother?”
She paused for a second.
“…Or a father?”
Danny felt the room freeze.
“No, I guess I was just singin’ to myself,” he mumbled. “That’s what I usually do, I think.”
“Sure.” Ms. Mellon laughed and was joined by a couple of kids in the room. “But in musical theater we have to break a couple of rules sometimes.”
Danny’s hands began playing with the fabric at the bottom of his shirt. His mom had been using a different detergent, one that she’d started buying at the corner store on their block, and it wasn’t until that very moment that Danny realized that he hated the smell.
“You know what might help,” Ms. Mellon said, uncrossing her legs and leaning forward in her chair. “Let’s take this out of context from the music and just think through some of these lyrics.”
Danny nodded, not entirely sure what she meant, but not in a position to be questioning her either.
“Would you mind just speaking the lyrics of the song for me, like how Dustin did?” she said, looking over to the sandy-blond boy, who had crossed his arms and was leaning back in his chair, watching intently.
“Don’t worry about the cadence, er, the, uhh…” She hesitated. “The rhythm of the words. Just say them out loud like you’re having a conversation with someone. Could you try that for me, Danny?”
“Yeah, I could try that,” Danny replied, trying to sound more confident than he felt.
He wiped his hands across the front of the shirt, like maybe that would stop the new laundry smell. When he got home, he decided, he was going to take the whole bottle of detergent and pour it down the drain.
He took a breath.
“What’ll I do,” Danny said in an exaggerated stage voice. “When you are far away and I’m so blue.”
He took in another breath, inhaling the stupid synthetic flower smell.
“What’ll I do.”
The lyrics snagged in his throat.
“With just a photograph to tell my troubles to?”
The words caught on something raw, something he didn’t know was sitting there. He tried to force it down, but Ms. Mellon’s question looped louder and louder in his head.
“A father?” it played. “…Or a father?…Or a father?”
He looked out at the group of students, none of them doing their usual in-between-songs activities. No one was flipping through their sheet music, or taking swigs from their water bottles, or doing anything other than watching a person fight for air with nothing in their way.
“Yeah, I don’t think this is working,” Danny said, swallowing hard, forcing his voice to steady.
“Sorry?” Ms. Mellon said, caught off guard.
“It’s just,” he said, “I don’t think this is gonna help. It’s a song. Why can’t I just sing it?”
“Well,” Ms. Mellon considered, looking away, her eyes searching for the right words. “Sometimes the music can be a crutch. You start thinking about what your voice sounds like instead of thinking about what you’re actually saying.”
It made sense to Danny. It actually did.
“I’d really like you to try the exercise, Danny.”
“Well, I just…,” Danny said, reaching back into his quiver and pulling out the only arrow his fingers could grasp. “I just think it’s kind of stupid. Look, I can sing it again and try harder or whatever, but I don’t need to do some stupid nursery rhyme exercise.”
Ms. Mellon’s eyebrows jumped, the arrow piercing her chest. Danny’s words hung in the air with a heavy weight as every student looked on in wide-eyed shock. Ms. Mellon sat for a moment, processing his words, but then instead of raising a weapon of her own, she simply looked down at the floor.
You worthless piece of shit, the voice said in Danny’s head, sounding just like his father, or the monsignor at St. Pete’s.
You’re fucking worse than pond scum. I knew you couldn’t do it. Just sit your ass back down, you sorry piece of shit.
“I think that can be all for today,” Ms. Mellon said. “Maybe we can try again next week.”