Chapter Seven #2
Sal tutted, smoothing the lapel of his pink jumpsuit. “Can you please go and have fun? Too much sincerity gives me the runs.”
Annie smiled, forcing down one more bite of peanut butter toast.
It was either face the day or fake her own death, and frankly, the latter felt like too much effort.
· · ·
A few minutes later, Annie parked her yellow Bug in front of the playhouse.
New York might have its minutes and moments, but you could always get a parking spot out front of wherever you were going in Rhodes.
Surveying her reflection in the side mirror, Annie wiped cherry lip balm off her teeth and checked her breath, which smelled like peanut butter toast (ugh, great).
After a hung-jury level of deliberation, she’d decided on a squiggly print romper and white sneakers, and had shaved the bottom half of her legs, but not her thighs as Vicky used to insist the hair would grow back thicker if she did.
The past was over. But somehow, it still had a say.
A guy who looked about her age headed up the steps to the playhouse.
Clean-cut, on the shorter side, with a pleasant, open face.
Someone you might see advertising an Apple Watch.
One of the other actors? Annie watched as he paused at the front entrance.
He took a few deep breaths before shaking himself out and pulling the front door open with a smile fixed to his face.
At least she wasn’t the only one feeling first-day nerves.
· · ·
The foyer was brighter and cleaner than last time, the windows all open to let in much-needed fresh air. Annie’s sneakers squeaked over the mopped parquet floors as she made her way toward the chatter bubbling out from the theater itself.
Inside, the wall sconces were lit up, the grand chandelier aglow.
Four long tables forming a square had been set up on the stage, with a dozen or so chairs.
Vicky sat in one corner, intently highlighting her script and scribbling notes into a separate notebook.
Her thick, black hair was pulled into a high pony and she was wearing a boxy, blue-and-white-striped button-down, rolled at the sleeves.
Her crisp cat eyeliner remained flawless.
Across from Vicky, the bleached blond teen with the double eyebrow piercings whom Annie had seen outside the auditions was slouched over their phone.
At the far end of the table, another teenager in Wayfarer glasses and blunt brown bangs sat absorbed in a book.
The bag at her feet was covered in patches and pins.
Apple Watch guy was taking a seat next to—oh boy—Deborah Buttrose, who, spotting Annie, waved and called hello.
Annie was just about to call back when a warm hand grazed her bare arm from behind. “Morning.”
A zingy charge raced through Annie as she met Lola’s gaze.
Which only deepened as Annie took in Lola’s outfit.
A two-piece summer suit in expensive-looking linen the color of wheat, paired with strappy wedge sandals and an alarming amount of gold jewelry.
Her silvery-blond hair was parted dead center, ironed straight.
Lola had always been pretty, but the truly legendary beauty she’d become made Annie feel like a knockoff.
Annie’s ex looked ready for a meeting in L.A.
, not a ragtag table read in a small-town theater.
Impossible that they were the same age.
“Hey.” Annie did not open her arms for a hug. “How are you?”
“Really good.” Lola’s face was as lit up as the chandelier overhead.
“I’d forgotten how brilliant this play is!
And so funny. Isn’t it crazy rereading it?
So much went over my head as a kid, but all the existential questions about fate versus free will are so interesting.
Look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else. That’s just so clever!”
Annie stared back, feeling a creeping sense of worry. “Uh, yeah. So clever.”
“I don’t think I fully grasped the feminist implications of gender-swapping the cast,” Lola went on, pulling a copy of the play from her fancy leather tote.
Unlike Annie’s still-crisp printout, Lola’s was filled with multicolored stickies.
“It makes the questions of power and agency so nuanced, don’t you think?
Like when Guildenstern tries to comfort Rosencrantz in act one by suggesting they don’t have free will or agency—There’s a logic at work—it’s all done for you.
Or when Rosencrantz says, We drift down time, clutching at straws?
From a female character, both of those lines become about how little control we have in a male-dominated world, don’t you think? ”
Annie had no idea what Lola was talking about. “Sounds like you’ve already done a deep dive.”
“Oh, not really, I just read it a few times,” Lola said, flipping through her script. All of Guildenstern’s lines were highlighted neon orange. “Maybe five or six.”
Lola had read the play five or six times? Annie’s creeping worry was now fully upright and wringing its hands.
“So, do you think Jazz was serious when she said I could help direct?” Lola went on, looking hopeful. “I haven’t done it since high school but I can’t stop thinking about it. Anyway.” She gave Annie an encouraging smile. “How’d you find rereading it?”
Annie swallowed hard. “Haven’t finished it.”
Lola looked alarmed. “You haven’t read the play yet?”
Annie’s pulse jackknifed. “No,” she snapped, “because I run a dog salon and you’re a professional actor. Our lives are very different now.”
The air between them turned crispy. Lola blinked a few times, her mouth opening and shutting.
Annie regretted letting her insecurity take the mic.
“Hey, party people.” Thankfully, Dylan loped toward them, hair tousled and falling over one eye, limbs loose in low-slung jeans. Their black muscle tee was emblazoned with Rick’s Garage, Indiana: You break ’em, we fix ’em. Silver chains of various thicknesses circled their throat. “What’s good?”
Annie trailed a chatting Lola and Dylan up to the tables onstage, sitting next to Lola, who sat next to Vicky.
Dylan dropped into the open seat on Vicky’s other side.
Scanning the other performers’ scripts in front of them, Annie quickly realized she was the founding and solo member of the Did Not Read the Play in Advance Club.
“Annie!”
She jumped. Clyde of Clyde’s Grocery was, inexplicably, taking a seat.
“Clyde?” Annie tried not to look as shocked as she felt. “You’re in the show?”
“I’m Gertrude!” Her first boss pulled the script from a Clyde’s Grocery reusable bag. “Already memorized all my lines!”
Okay, that was it. She was screwed. “You’re as conscientious as your commitment to organic produce! As prepared as your to-go sandwiches!” Annie crowed, wondering if this was what a mental breakdown felt like and did she have enough time to speed-read the entire play before Jazz arrived?
Vicky tossed a granola bar on the table with a huff. “Why does everything healthy taste like an old shoe?”
“I don’t remember you being healthy,” Lola commented. “Your idea of breakfast was a Snickers and six cups of coffee.”
“I seriously miss that.” Vicky sipped a bottled green juice then made a face. “Ugh. Like licking a cat. And unfortunately for me, I mean that literally.”
“Vicky.” Amused, Lola nudged her, nodding at the kids seated opposite.
“Check out the Breakfast Club,” Vicky murmured back.
Two more had joined the young pair. One was a thoughtful-looking teen with a heart-shaped face and glossy black hair streaked with lavender, wearing a floaty aquamarine top and silver rings on nearly every finger.
Next to her, an energetic strawberry blonde wore a crop top and hoop earrings.
She gazed out hungrily at the theater’s empty seats before stealing a curious, reverent peek at Lola.
Annie would put money on the strawberry blonde being an Aspiring Actor with a subscription to Deadline who’d seen every single one of Lola’s films.
Another young woman, very short, maybe in her late twenties, took a seat near Apple Watch. She looked tired and a little flustered, immediately getting her phone out to type something, blowing feathery blond bangs out of her eyes.
Walking hesitantly up the aisle toward the stage was a nervous-looking woman in her sixties, whom Annie didn’t recognize. She was wearing minimal makeup and what Annie’s own grandmother would’ve referred to as “church clothes”: a floral-print blouse, long dark skirt, sensible shoes.
Annie scanned the opening stage directions—Two Elizabethans passing the time in a place without any visible character. They are well-dressed—hats, cloaks, sticks, and all. Her hope that the entire play would magically reemerge from muscle memory alone proved futile.
Dylan peeled back the foil from a burrito. The savory smell of eggs and cheese wafted.
Vicky inhaled, her eyes turning desperate. “What is that?”
“Egg-white breakfast burrito,” Dylan said. “With bell peppers and feta cheese.” They took a luxurious, theatrical bite, making a satisfied mmmm.
Vicky groaned. “I’m a plane-crash-in-the-Alps-eating-my-seatmate level of starving. Can I have a bite?”
Dylan took their time chewing, swallowing, and smacking their lips before answering. “No.”
“What?” Vicky asked in outrage, as Dylan took another massive bite. “Why not?”
Once again, Vicky had to wait, dying, until Dylan swallowed. “Because, Vicky. You might have cooties.”
Vicky whacked them. “I don’t have cooties. Please? I’ll give you five bucks.”
“Five?” Dylan looked offended.
“Ten. Fifteen.”
Dylan took another bite.
Vicky made a strangled noise. “Twenty. Thirty.”
Dylan chewed and pointed up with their index finger.
Lola and Annie giggled.
“Greedy much?” Vicky huffed. “Fifty. Fifty dollars for one bite and that is my final offer.”
Dylan swallowed, wiping a fleck of hot sauce but not the amused smirk from their mouth. They handed what was left of the burrito to Vicky. “Seeing you beg was payment enough.”
“Fuck you,” Vicky mumbled, already inhaling the burrito and groaning with relief.
“This might be a good time to tell you,” Dylan spoke seriously, “that I, in fact, have cooties. Chronic condition—doctors are baffled.”
“Shut up.” Vicky was half laughing, half chewing. “God, you are so—”
A hearty, if raspy, voice bellowed from the theater entrance. “Good morning, thespians!”
It felt like falling through layers of time seeing Jazz, in a bright pink muumuu and oversize glasses, ascend the steps to the stage, not bouncing up as she had twenty years ago, but holding the rail.
What hadn’t changed was her enthusiasm, evidenced by the clap of her hands as soon as she sat down.
Enthusiasm Annie desperately wished she shared.
Jazz began a rousing welcome speech. Annie stared at the script in front of her.
How. Had. She. Let. This. Happen?
She was one of two leads in a production that was all but a two-hander. She badly wanted to ask Clyde if spontaneous combustion was real and how one might facilitate it.
“But we are here for the most important reason of all.”
Annie forced herself to tune in to Jazz’s opening remarks.
“We are storytellers,” Jazz emphasized every word.
“Through stories we learn the experience of others. And we more deeply understand the story of ourselves. We are the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves. But here’s the best part, folks—a story is never finished.
We can always rewrite it, add another act, or tear up the ending and start again. ”
Next to her, Lola made a thoughtful hmm noise. Her posture was impeccable. She smelled like the expensive perfume they sold in department stores Annie couldn’t afford to shop in. When they were teenagers, Lola wore lemongrass.
“The story we are telling in four short weeks’ time is a very special one.
” Jazz held her script aloft. “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by the celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard, and still relevant today as we present it, sixty years after its first staging at the Edinburgh Fringe, and twenty years after the Rhodes Players presented it on this very stage, starring these four wonderful performers,” Jazz said as she swept a hand at Annie, Lola, Vicky, and Dylan, “who’ve generously returned to breathe life into these pages, and by extension, the playhouse itself. ”
Deborah, and several of the other adults, broke into applause.
“Before we begin,” Jazz went on, “let’s introduce ourselves, and the part we’re playing.”
The encouraging smile she directed at Annie felt like a shove she wasn’t expecting. “Me? Oh, sure.” Annie superglued a smile in place. “I’m Annie. Lightfoot.” For some reason, she put on an old-timey voice and mimed taking off a hat. “Annie Elizabeth Lightfoot, if you please.”
The twelve other actors stared back with expressions ranging from bemusement to the secondhand embarrassment Annie was already feeling.
She went on in her regular voice, trying not to show how on edge she was. “I’m from Rhodes and I run the Groom Room, up the street? Which isn’t a question as I definitely do. That, or I’m clipping a lot of dogs for free.”
Annie’s anxiety ballooned into panic at the vision of every seat in the nearby audience being filled by people watching her as a lead in just four weeks opposite Lola Wilson, her first love who was also a professional actor.
And so Annie did what she always did when she felt out of her element. She began to babble.
“I’m a Pisces and I’d like to learn to roller-skate.
I love banana splits but I haven’t had one in years, come to think of it.
Bananas, ice cream, whipped cream…fudge?
Do banana splits have fudge? Once, in middle school, I wore a shirt that smelled like soup and one of the boys started calling me Stinky Soupy Annie, which stuck for the rest of the year—Stinky Soupy Annie!
—it was so embarrassing, and I’m not sure why I’m bringing it up as I really don’t want that nickname again but I guess I haven’t found a natural deodorant that totally works so I’m open to any recommendations on that.
I’m not stinky. I like cheese.” She stopped abruptly.
For a painfully long moment, no one said a word. Her entire face flamed. She knew she looked like a chaotic tomato in a romper.
Jazz’s voice was gentle, with a mortifying undercurrent of concern. “And what part are you playing, Annie?”
Annie resisted the urge to stand up, leave the stage, and begin a new life in Switzerland as a goat herder named Svetlana. “Rosencrantz.” Her voice was the size of a teacup Chihuahua. “I’m one of the leads.”