Philadelphia #2
“Oh, so the Malicarn Expanded Universe is art now?” asked Becky. But the other actors resumed their own selfish questions and Jules never answered her.
Sometime after four in the morning, Glenn and Jules staggered out of the bar.
“I bet they’ll be asking after me all day.
Where did Jules go? Did Jules like us?” Jules laughed very loud.
Jules always laughed loud at his own jokes, louder when he was drunk.
Glenn helped hold him up, and Jules slumped against his shoulder.
Glenn inhaled the conditioner in his hair.
Peppermint. Glenn always forgot how strange Jules smelled.
They didn’t want to wait for a cab, so they stumbled to a bus stop.
The driver almost didn’t let them on, but Jules bribed him with a hundred-dollar bill.
By the time they walked off the bus in Manayunk the sun was rising. Jules was hungry, so they stopped in a coffee shop. Glenn ordered a double espresso. Jules ate a plain bagel.
“Don’t you have a flight today?” Glenn asked.
Jules laughed, mid-bite. “Yes, yes, I do. This afternoon.”
“Back to Los Angeles?”
“Nope! Someplace magical!”
“Disneyland?”
“Better!”
Glenn knew Jules was probably going to “the set,” as Jules referred to the franchise’s new Madeira location, but he was really tired and thought he could delay Jules talking too much more about his own job, at least for a while.
He ordered another espresso. “You can shower at my place if you need to.”
“Thanks, thanks. Yeah, I might do that.” Jules chewed slowly. “You were really great, man. I know I haven’t been able to see your work much recently. Things are just so busy, you know. But the show was great. You were great.”
Jules never came to Glenn’s shows. He hadn’t since college.
They were always small productions in some tiny theater, so far removed from the studio backlots and location shoots of Jules’s life that it seemed ridiculous for him to waste time on them.
But Jules was in Philadelphia during Glenn’s last performance of the season, and so Glenn texted him, inviting him to a small, half-sold theater in Old City to watch a bunch of hacks and failures.
Larry Pine, Jules’s boss and an executive producer of the Malicarn franchise, was also in Philadelphia somewhere, taking finance meetings and doing other important business things.
His assistant accompanied Jules to the performance, though afterward he disappeared into the back of a black car before Glenn could say hello or invite him to the cast party.
Glenn didn’t mention it to the other actors. They would have had heart attacks.
“The Tempest usually never works for me,” Jules said. “Too comic and too serious at the same time. But tonight you really nailed it.”
“Thanks.” Glenn smiled. “Thanks a lot.”
The show ran for six weeks and they didn’t sell out once.
Poor reviews hadn’t helped (“an uninspired and limpid take on Shakespeare,” said the Inquirer), though Glenn and the rest of the cast placed most of the blame for that on Connor, the lead, who played Prospero with the presence of a children’s birthday party magician, loud and confidently annoying.
But two hours before last night’s show, Connor ended up with a stomach bug and spent the evening puking into a toilet.
Glenn stepped into the role at the last moment, and somehow energized the cast into a rousing final performance.
“I loved the whole ‘cranky old man’ vibe,” Jules said. “And Larry’s assistant was impressed. I could tell. At intermission he was really excited.” Jules continued to talk and chew his bagel at the same time.
“Listen,” Jules said, “this brain-scanning tech is the future, it is. I know it’s not ‘traditional,’ or whatever. But you should take it seriously. Did you even watch the movie?”
“I watched it, don’t worry. I watch all your stuff.”
“While sharpening knives, right?” Jules laughed, and spit up his bagel all over the counter.
Glenn had indeed watched The Rage of the Red Mage.
He went to a matinee two days earlier after scrounging up enough dollar bills from pants pockets in his laundry bin.
Protestors stood outside the ticketing window, yelling at management and holding signs that said CHRIST, NOT COPIES!
Glenn sat in the front row and tried to remember the plot of the previous films by reading synopses online until someone yelled at him to turn off his phone.
The film was entertaining enough. The script moved nimbly from set piece to set piece.
Glenn recognized Jules’s voice in many of the self-aware jokes characters swapped between action beats, but the larger plot was confusing.
There had recently been a great war of the wizards (Glenn vaguely remembered this from an older film, The Battle of the Morlon Kastaun) and now new and younger characters were being introduced, many with connections to people who had either died or left the series.
The small matinee audience applauded when the character of Prion arrived onscreen.
Marvin Powell was just as regal in his bearing and as fierce in the fight scenes.
The plot revolved around Prion discovering and eventually accepting the fact that he was the true heir to the kingdom, the King of the Malicarn.
The film ended with him defeating the last Evil Red Mage from the old Wizarding War, and the final scene showed Prion hiding in a small village, trying to decide when and where to come forward to announce himself as king.
The film ended, but Glenn knew not to leave yet. Another scene played after the credits rolled. A soldier stood guard in front of an old castle. A dark cloaked figure approached. The soldier looked up, eyes wide. “It is you!” the soldier shouted. “The wizard Gregorian!”
But the screen cut to black before the audience saw the figure’s face. Glenn forgot most of the movie’s details on his way back to his apartment.
“It was interesting,” Glenn said.
“You said that already.”
“Well, it really was! I’m curious how you make sure the characters actually do what you want them to do.”
“Do you want to see how? Come out to the new set?”
“On Madeira? You’re not going to abduct me and wipe my memory, are you?”
“Ha! No. I have to clear it with Larry, but you should come. I’ll tell him about your performance. I’ll get his assistant to vouch, too.”
“I have to work, I—”
“Glenn, come on. Don’t be daffy. I’ll have Larry’s assistant call you with the flight details. They can pay you.”
Glenn thought to ask how much but didn’t want Jules to think he was gauche. “Pay me to do what?” Glenn asked.
Larry’s assistant didn’t call until a week later, in the middle of Glenn’s shift.
Today he was Thomas Jefferson, who did not know about phones or radios or global warming or baseball or invasive insects from Asia.
He knew only what Glenn had taken the time to learn, a few basic facts about life in colonial America and some choice quotations from the Declaration of Independence, spouted off to tourists wandering in front of the Constitution Center from nine to three, four days a week.
Glenn’s phone buzzed loudly in his breast pocket. A sarcastic teenager decided that this was his moment.
“Do your slaves take your phone calls too?” the teen asked, looking not at Glenn but at a girl next to him. “I bet you didn’t give Sally Hemings her own phone?”
The boy laughed. The girl was wildly and explicitly unimpressed. Glenn tried to hit the silence button without being too conspicuous.
“And so,” Glenn continued, “when it came time to compose a written declaration, Benjamin Franklin asked—”
“Did your slaves drive you to work this morning?” The sarcastic teen half laughed, half snorted. His friends were staring at Thomas Jefferson but not really paying attention.
“I was asked to compose it by Mr. Franklin himself. ‘I do not know if I could execute such a task,’ I said to him, ‘for I am but a humble citizen of fair Virginia, no great orator.’”
“Easy to be humble when you have people do all your work for you!”
Glenn leaned forward and looked the boy in the eye. “Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked the teen. “Is that just some quote you memorized to sound cool?”
Glenn blushed because it was, in fact, a quote he memorized to sound cool. He had a couple of dozen lines by Benjamin Rush memorized, too. But he rarely used them, because he hated playing Benjamin Rush. Nobody knew who that guy was.
When his shift ended, Glenn walked back to the employees’ changing room and took off the Jefferson costume: the breeches, the waistcoat, the cravat.
He said goodbye to Betsy Ross on his way out and finally checked his phone, which had several missed calls from Larry’s assistant.
He tried calling back but it went to voicemail.
A delivery drone flew low overhead. A few seconds later a police drone followed.
Glenn didn’t feel like heading back to his apartment—it was trash day tomorrow so the dumpster outside his bedroom window would be extra foul.
Instead he walked into a dimly lit and mostly empty bar.
The television was on, and as he thought about ordering he listened to news about water shortages in Phoenix and an update about the knee injuries plaguing half the Sixers’ starters.
The weather was going to be hot the rest of the week, and there was an accident on 95 near the airport.
He considered texting some of his castmates from The Tempest but decided not to.
One had already gone to Chicago for another production; he knew the director would complain about having to wake up early for his day job as an insurance adjuster; and many of the others had gigs or families or excuses.
That was always the way of things after a show ended. Glenn never kept in touch.