13 Gifts (20 page)

“Um, this is pretty and all,” Emily says, “but how is this supposed to convince me to take the part?”

I’m wondering the same thing. Then the camera pans away from the water. A boy with sandy blond hair and bright white teeth waves at us from a tall beach chair.

“Hi, Emily! I heard that you might play Tzeitel in
Fiddler on the Roof.
If you play Tzeitel, I’ll play the tailor, whatever that guy’s name is. The one who wants to marry Tzeitel.”

Emily looks up at me, gaping. “Is that … is that Jake Harrison talking to me?”

I would answer but I think I’m having an out-of-body experience. I grip the back of Emily’s chair. “So what do you say?” Jake continues. “I’m going to be in Willow Falls that weekend anyway — turns out the producer wants to have our premiere there two weeks before the official opening. You know, to thank the townspeople and all. I know I can’t wait to see it myself. Especially the part where Rory walks into a locker!” He starts laughing and his blue eyes twinkle. “Don’t tell her I said that. Okay, I’ve gotta go, they’re calling me to the set. Look forward to meeting you, Tara. See you on stage, Emily!” He waves again and walks away. The camera lingers for a second on the name
JAKE HARRISON
painted on the back of the tall chair, then pans back to the ocean.

“Jake Harrison just spoke to me,” Emily says, pronouncing each word slowly. “He said my name. And Rory’s name. And
your
name. With his mouth. Jake did. Jake Harrison. He wants to play my husband.”

“I know! How crazy is that?”

“I’m
totally
doing this play.”

“Totally!”

We jump around the room and squeal for ten minutes straight and then watch the video over and over until we’ve memorized it. If Rory can get Jake to not only agree to be in the play, but to film a video and get it to us in ten minutes, well, I can see why Rory isn’t a fan of Jake’s anymore. She’s much more than that. And I couldn’t be happier for her.

The first person to arrive at the First Official Meeting of the
Fiddler on the Roof
Cast and Crew is Rory’s friend Annabelle. She runs into the back room at the community center and gives Rory a hug. I decide that the pang of jealousy I feel is a good step for me.

“Hey! Remember when we took our babysitting class in this room?” Annabelle asks, pushing her long blond hair out of her eyes. “And that teacher? She was like, ‘You must be prepared for any situation. You never know if the child under your care might spontaneously combust!’ “

“She was pretty scary,” Rory agrees. “You haven’t babysat since!”

“True,” Annabelle says. “But that’s because you got the best gig in town with Emily. I’d get the kid who covers the house in peanut butter, then jumps off the roof in a Superman costume.”

Pointing at me, Rory tells Annabelle, “This is Tara. She’s Emily’s cousin and the reason you’re going to be in a play with Jake.”

Annabelle rushes toward me and gives me a big hug. “Thank you, thank you!” I don’t know if I’m supposed to hug her back, so I sort of move my arms up and down and say hello. She’s almost as tall as me, which is a rare thing. Even though she’s gorgeous and bubbly, I decide I like her.

When she finally lets go, she says, “I’m totally excited to do the costumes, but what part do I play?”

“Leo’s bringing the cast list,” I tell her. “I slept through most of the play when I saw it last year.”

“No one’s gonna sleep through this one!” Leo declares, coming in the door with his arms full of folders. He drops everything onto one of the round tables in the center of the room. “I’ve got scripts, lists of characters, props, everything. The director is going to have a really easy job.”

Rory and I look at each other. “Uh-oh,” she says. “We forgot about a director. Leo, do you want to do it?”

He shakes his head. “Can’t. Too risky. I might wind up talking to Amanda without realizing it. I’d be telling her character to take a step to the right and then all would be lost.”

“What would be lost?” Annabelle asks casually.

“You know I can’t say.”

“Hey, can’t blame a girl for trying.” She looks at me and rolls her eyes. But not in a mean way.

“Okay,” Rory says, “so that rules out Amanda, too. It should really be someone who knows what they’re doing.”

“I know!” I tell her. “I’ll go make a call.”

“Hurry, though; the meeting starts in ten minutes.”

“Okay.” I run from the room, pulling out my phone as I go. I
wave to Bucky Whitehead as he walks toward the room with his violin cradled in his arms, a look of anticipation mixed with uncertainty on his face.

The phone rings forever, and just as I assume I’m going to have to leave a message, he answers. “Were you serious when you said what you really wanted to do was direct?” I ask Ray. “Because this is your lucky day!”

Chapter Twenty-one

 

“G’day to you, too,” Ray says.

“Seriously, what do you think?”

“What do I think about what?”

“Would you like to direct a production of
Fiddler on the Roof
that some people I know are putting on?”

“People you know … would those be your mates?”

“Yes, fine, my friends. I have friends. And some grown-ups, too. So what do you say?”

“Is this out of pity because I didn’t get the commercial?”

“Is saying no more likely to get you to agree, or less?”

“I’m not sure,” he says. “Try me.”

“Okay, then no, I just think you’d be great at it. Everyone likes you, and you’re good at doing a lot of things at once.”

“I
am
a good multitasker. So sure, I’ll give it a burl.”

“That’s a yes?”

“Too right!”

“Can you make an effort to speak American as much as you can in your role as director?”

“Don’t fret your freckle,” he says. “I’ll try my best.”

“And can you get down to the community center in ten minutes? We’re in the last room at the end of the hall on the first floor. I’ll give you all the details then.”

I can hear him opening and closing drawers. He was still in his pajamas when I left. “Do I get paid for this?” he asks.

“No … but you get to boss people around and get your name on the playbill.”

“Good enough!”

I hurry back inside and tell Rory the good news. “Great!” she says. “Now all we need is a place to put on the play, and a star. What about Emily, has she told your aunt yet?”

“They went out to breakfast and she said she’s going to tell her then.” At least I hope she is. I look around the room, which is quickly filling up with both familiar and unfamiliar faces. Emily has been trying for two days to get up the courage to tell her mom about the play. I offered to come with her, but she said she wanted to do it on her own.

David comes in the room next, dragging the red wagon behind him. He has all the props piled on there, except for the trunk, which is still at his house. “Guess what?” he says, hurrying over to us. “I know where we’re having the play!”

“Where?”

“Here!”

I look around the room. “We’d have to move the tables out, but I guess this would work.”

“Not in this room,” he says. “Out there, in the main room. On the stage! Since my bar mitzvah party is here the next day, the owner of the center said he’d already have rented all the chairs. All we’d have to do is set them up in rows. And
we have to promise to take all the sets and props down at the end.”

In my head, I’d pictured something a lot smaller. A real live stage is even more pressure to make it good. Besides Emily and David, most of the people who’ve agreed to be in the cast can’t actually sing or dance, although no one has seemed willing to admit that out loud.

Rory beams at him. “Good job, Hamburglar!”

“What did Bee Boy do now?” Amanda says, coming in with a girl I haven’t seen before. She’s wearing a green and yellow shirt that says
WILLOW FALLS GYMNASTICS TEAM
with a cartoon of a girl doing a backflip.

“He found us a way to hold the play here on the stage,” Rory says.

“I did not look like a bee!” David insists.

“Yes, you did,” Amanda says, turning away from him. “Tara, this is my friend Stephanie. She volunteered to be one of the daughters in the play.”

Stephanie reaches over and pinches Amanda’s arm. “You volunteered me, is how I remember it.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Amanda admits.

“What’s the play about?” Stephanie asks.

“Good question,” Amanda says, looking at me.

“Um, well, I didn’t catch all of it, but basically, it’s about this milkman guy named Tevye from a long time ago in, like, Russia I think, and he has all these daughters, and some of them want to get married to people he doesn’t want them to. And they’re Jewish, and their whole community is being driven from the town. And there’s dancing and, um, singing.”

Stephanie faces Amanda. “I have to
sing
? If you weren’t my best friend, you’d owe me big time for this. In fact, you
do
owe me big time for this.”

“All right, everyone,” Ray’s voice booms through the room. “The director has arrived. Let’s all take a seat.”

Clearly he’s got the bossy part down. He must have broken a few speed limits to get here.

“Where’s Emily?” Rory whispers as we find seats.

I’m about to reply that I’m sure she’ll be here any second when in she walks. She scans the room until she spots me. Her eyes light up as she makes her way over and sits down next to me.

“I did it!” she says, unable to keep her voice down. “I asked Mom if it was okay and she really didn’t want me to and I asked her, ‘Why, just tell me why?’ and she said it’s because she doesn’t want me to get hurt like Grandma did, to feel that all my self-worth was tied up in an acting career, and I was like, ‘Mom, I want to be a mathematician, not an actress,’ and she still wasn’t sure, so I showed her the Jake video and she was like, ‘Okay, you should totally do this!’ So now we’re going to go to the beach after the play instead!”

“That’s great, I —”

But Emily has noticed Rory on the other side of me and has lunged out of her seat to tackle her. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Rory peels Emily off of her and laughs. “It’s okay. Jake really wants to do it. But I think Ray is going to fire you if you don’t sit down and pay attention.”

“Are we ready to focus, Miss St. Claire?” Ray asks, peering down at her.

She slinks back to her seat.

Ray walks back and forth, hands clasped behind his back, eying everyone like he’s a drill sergeant inspecting the troops. I’m not sure what a real director would look like, but Ray looks like someone who wandered in from an afternoon hike. He even has a water bottle strapped to his waist. Finally he says, “Okay, folks. I run a tight ship. There will be no mollycoddling of anyone in …” He looks at me and asks, “What play is this again?
Grease
?
The Wizard of Oz
?”

At the mention of
The Wizard of Oz,
Amanda visibly shudders. I’m not a fan of the flying monkeys either.

“It’s
Fiddler on the Roof
,” I reply in a loud whisper.

“That’s right,
Fiddler on the Roof
! That classic tale of tradition, love, and family. At least I think it is. I’ve only seen the movie and you know how they change things. Anyway, as I was saying — cast, crew, you’re all the same in my book. And judging by the number of people in this room, you actually
are
the same. Okay. Now let’s go around the room. Tell me who you are and what you’re doing here. Keep it short. My brain’s already crowded.”

Leo pops up. “I’m Leo. I’ll be playing the part of Perchik, a student in love with Tevye’s daughter Hodel.” He picks up his folders and begins distributing them. “I’ve made each member of the cast a folder that will include the lyrics to the songs that you will be performing. Each member of the crew also gets a folder with your assignments. I did my best to figure out the
costumes and sets, and as many of you know, we have a lot of the props already. Since we have only a little more than two weeks to get this show ready, it’ll be pretty bare-bones. We had to cut out a few of the less essential songs, and we only have seventy-five dollars to spend on incidentals. So look over the lists in your folders and see what you have from home or can borrow.”

He continues handing out the folders and I glance over at Amanda. Her face is glowing with pride. She leans over to me and whispers, “And to think my mom said Leo always has his head in the clouds.” She gets up next and offers to write the cast and crew list on the dry-erase board in the front of the room.

Director: Ray

Producer: Tara

Tevye, the milkman: David

Tzeitel, his oldest daughter: Emily

Hodel, his second-oldest: Stephanie

Chava, his third-oldest: Rory

Golde, his wife: Amanda

Motel, a tailor, in love with Tzeitel: Jake

Perchik, a student, in love with Hodel: Leo

Yente, the matchmaker: Annabelle

Lazar Wolf, the butcher: Connor

Fyedka, a Christian, in love with Chava: Vinnie

Shprintze and Bielke, Tevye’s youngest daughters: Grace and Bailey

Fiddler: Bucky Whitehead

Choreography: Mrs. Grayson

Set design and props: Big Joe

Costumes: Annabelle

Makeup: Bettie

Hair: Sari

 

There are only three people on the whole list who I don’t know — Vinnie (who came in a baseball uniform) is a friend of Leo’s. His ears turned pink when he saw Annabelle so I’m sure there’s a story there somewhere. Then Connor’s sister, Grace, brought her friend Bailey, and Rory brought her friend Sari to do everyone’s hair. Considering Sari’s own hair is a collage of
colors, she and Bettie will no doubt get along swimmingly. Seeing the list in big letters makes it feel so real. This is seriously going to happen. Maybe my immortal soul won’t bounce from cloud to cloud after all!

Sari asks loudly where Jake is, and Rory explains to everyone that he isn’t going to be here until the day before the play, but that he knows his song already. After a few murmurs of disappointment that they won’t be seeing him today, the cast huddles in one corner with their song sheets, while the crew meets with Ray to talk about what supplies they’ll need. Seeing my name up there as producer feels very strange. The first hurdle is done, though — we have the cast, crew, props, and a stage. As the producer, it’s my job to find an audience while everyone else works on putting the actual play together. If Angelina hadn’t said I needed to sell tickets, I would have been fine simply having everyone bring their families.

I wander through the room listening to different conversations. Since choreographing the dances is the hardest part of all, Mrs. Grayson has roped Big Joe into helping her. She has him standing in the center of the room while she flits around him, humming the words to “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” and taking down notes on how the dance should go. Fortunately a lot of the notes on the original script we got from the library were actually hers, so she only has to redo it with the new cast.

I wait until Ray finishes assuring Grace and Bailey that, as the younger sisters in the play, their role as background dancers is very important. Then he tells them to go see Bettie and Sari about their hair and makeup, and that perks them right up.

“Nice work,” I say.

“I was born to direct,” he says, thumping his chest. “It’s all about people skills.”

“Since we know mine are lacking, do you need me here?”

He shakes his head. “Go produce. Or whatever it is producers do. I got it covered.”

I reach into my sock and hand him the seventy-five dollars I volunteered to contribute.

He tucks it in his pocket. “I will use it wisely,” he promises. As I turn to go, he stops me and says, “It’s gonna be a ripper play. You’ll see. People will talk about it for years.”

As I leave the room, I hear Annabelle tell Ray that in order to fully embody her role as the matchmaker in the play, she has the perfect woman to set him up with. That’s the spirit.

Instead of biking straight home to work on the flyers for the play, I take a detour over to Angelina’s shop. I want to update her on the progress of the play and ask if I really need to sell tickets. As usual, the store looks dark from the outside. But this time when I turn the knob, it doesn’t open. I look up to see a sign posted on the door. G
ONE
F
ISHING.

Somehow I can’t picture Angelina standing by the banks of a river casting a fishing line.

I decide on the bike ride home that selling tickets at the door, instead of ahead of time, will be fine. I use the computer in the kitchen to make up some really simple flyers announcing the time and place, and put down that tickets are all six dollars. I figure if it turns out really bad, people won’t have lost too
much money. The flyers don’t say anything about Jake, which is how Rory said he wanted it.

Aunt Bethany comes home as I’m printing out the flyers and says, “We can do better than that.” In ten minutes, she designs some really professional-looking flyers. I hadn’t really stopped to think about where she went each day, but it turns out she volunteers at different organizations around town, helping them with fundraising projects. She sends a copy of the flyer to all her e-mail contacts, posts it on the Willow Falls website, and then drives me into town to do it the old-fashioned way — with tape. We put the flyers in the window of the diner, the music store, the dress shop, the toy store, the library, and nearly every store in between. Each time another flyer goes up, this whole thing gets more real. If I think too much about it, I’m afraid my head will explode.

During the first week, everything moves along steadily. The cast practices their songs, Big Joe works on the sets, and Annabelle has gathered together (or made) almost all the costumes we’ll need. Emily’s very good in rehearsals, having quickly gotten over her shyness. Leo is a very confident performer, too. The others … well, at least they seem to be having fun.

I like watching David stomping around the stage belting out
“Tradition! Tradition!”
in his black bar mitzvah pants, white shirt, and black vest that is doubling for his character’s costume. It’s one of his two solos, and then he has two more songs, one with Amanda and one with Connor. I haven’t seen the one with Amanda yet, but he and Connor spend most of their routine
trying to land on each other’s feet. David’s still the best singer in the play, but it’s nothing compared to when he sneaks over to the pool hole in the evenings. I’ve been sitting by the back door where he can’t see me so I can listen. I’m going to miss hearing the Hebrew songs when his bar mitzvah is over next week. Even though I’m keeping my eyes open for the perfect present for him, I haven’t found it yet. Considering that the need for a gift was the thing that started all this, I really better find something great. And soon.