Chapter 1 #2
Since I started teaching at WRHS, Dallas and I have put up seventeen shows together—nine fall plays and eight spring musicals, with our ninth and final spring coproduction on the horizon.
When he retires at the end of the school year, what’s his will become mine alone.
It’s a legacy so legendary that we still get letters and emails from alumni, thanking him for the way he dared to treat high school theater as more than child’s play.
As the head of our drama department, he’s turned hundreds of self-conscious teens into confident performers—me included—and he’s done it by pushing boundaries with his material and casting choices, never boxed in by gender binaries, or text restrictions, or being located in Garden Meadows of all places.
How else would I have been cast as Mark in RENT my senior year, with Cilla playing Roger?
Dallas will leave massive shoes to fill.
Shoes I’ve spent almost half of my life trying to mold to my own unruly feet.
Framing both sides of the main auditorium entrance are smaller black-and-white pictures of every production Dallas has ever staged here, dating all the way back to his first year of teaching in 1994.
Once a show closes, it’s tradition to hang up an image from a key scene.
Dallas chooses which pictures make it onto this coveted wall, and I’ve been lucky enough to star in my fair share of photos from my time as a student.
Knowing its location by heart, my eyes find the shot of Cilla and me from our senior year.
In the picture, I’m leaning toward Cilla with an eyebrow raised.
Her back is arched so much she’s almost doing a bridge. We’re scowling at each other.
Except for Cilla, I say to the Dallas in my mind. She got everything you always knew she would.
Dallas and I open the auditorium doors together and walk up the carpeted aisle to the soundtrack of our students’ hushed anticipation.
I can still remember the weight of this moment—squirming in my seat as I mentally slotted myself into a handful of different roles, knowing Dallas would be thinking outside the box for whatever show he had chosen.
Would I be Nancy in Oliver!? Or maybe Bill Sikes?
Harold Hill in The Music Man? Gaston in Beauty and the Beast?
When I’m inside this auditorium, I still believe in the person I thought I’d one day become.
She exists only here, and I walk her out like an old dog, letting her spend a few hours each day basking under the warmth of the stage lights.
It’s nice to spend time with her, to feel my cheeks pull back into a wide, sincere smile, to get excited to play my role in creating unforgettable show memories for my students.
“Greetings, my beautiful stars!” Dallas says when we land center stage.
He’s borrowed a projector screen from the computer lab for this occasion, and we position ourselves on either side of it.
“What an exciting time—my final production. There’s so much I could say, and you know by opening night I’ll have made you listen to it all.
But I know you don’t want to hear a word of it right now.
You want to know what show we’re going to create together this spring. So I won’t keep you in suspense.”
He looks up to the control booth, where Jim, the head of our tech crew, waits for the cue. The auditorium darkens as Dallas clicks around on the laptop he’s placed atop a rolling cart. When I look to the projector screen, I expect to see our spring musical’s logo. But a Zoom window pops up instead.
And then, Cilla Cove’s face.
“Hi, guys!” Cilla says, waving with both hands.
For more than a minute, our students lose their minds, screaming and cheering and some of them even crying as Cilla sits there smiling so wide her cheeks crinkle into her eyes.
Her hair is very long now, dark red in a way only high-end salons can achieve, the color of Amaretto.
It’s curled like she’s used a Dyson, but that could be Alice seeping into my thoughts.
The only time I’ve ever willingly taken a curling iron to my own hair was for a play, and I haven’t done one of those in more than eight years.
Cilla has aged well. Or maybe no one ever properly conveyed to us as kids what thirty-four-year-olds would actually look like.
She still has that grin that makes most people want to return the favor, with round, rosy cheeks and that damned twinkle in her eye, every light source somehow bending to her will, even on shitty laptop cameras.
Long gone are her choppy haircuts and her obsession with sleeping in black eyeliner so she could have a perpetually smudgy look she thought made her seem edgy and cool.
Having worked with enough teenagers by now, I can confidently determine she was not achieving either goal.
This Cilla seems to have no makeup on at all. Surely even that is a choice. She wants us to see her as one of us—a humble girl from Iowa who stumbled into the big time without losing her roots. She needs no glamour. No spectacle.
When the roar dies down, she speaks again, using the polished affectation she’s adopted since hitting it big—a weird lilt at the end of certain words that makes every sentence sound rehearsed.
“I’m so excited to be the one to share what Dallas’s last show will be!
” she tells the students. “Dallas reached out to me a few weeks ago and said, ‘Darling, if you can spare little old me a moment, I’d love to have you tell our current thespians the big news.’ ” She does a pretty decent impression of Dallas, managing to capture his essence without overdoing it, which is a notable feat as a white woman embodying a larger-than-life gay Black man.
“I wouldn’t be where I am today without him and the Wilbur Reed High School drama department, so I couldn’t miss the chance to tell you all that this year, for Dallas’s final musical—”
Kids shift in their seats. Jim flickers the lights. It goes on so long that some of the students begin to plead “Tell us! Tell us!” Even I start to feel it—the burning need to know—even though I already do. I’m the one who helped Dallas pick.
“You’re doing Spring Awakening!” Cilla announces.
Jim turns up the house lights to full brightness as the students let out a collective, ear-piercing scream of delight.
Two girls fall over in their chairs, then spring back up, continuing their jumping hysteria with no interruption.
Dallas has his laptop in his hands, and he uses it like a documentarian, turning the screen so Cilla can see the reaction.
He pans the camera to me.
And even though it’s digital, and there’s a lag, and blurriness, and all manner of barriers that prevent us from really seeing each other, Cilla’s smile changes, morphing from something vibrant into something restrained.
“Oh. Hi, Marlowe,” she says. “It’s great to see you.”