Front of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle (19 page)

New Year’s Day 2009 found me on the beach at Coney Island in a swimsuit, hopping around and rubbing my hands together to stay warm. Around me, hundreds of other swimmers were shivering in the Arctic January wind.

“Don’t submerge your head. Try to keep your chest above water. Get in and then
get out.
” A member of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club wandered through the crowd and shouted instructions. I took them to heart. The Polar Bears swam in the Atlantic every week even in the dead of winter. If
they
were saying it was too cold for more than a momentary dip, I was going to believe them.

As I shuffled back and forth in my flip-flops and prepared to run, I had a brief moment of lucidity. Why was I doing this, again? It raised money for a cancer charity, true. It was on my list of quirky New York things to do at least once, yes. However, I was about to plunge into the freezing Atlantic Ocean in sub-zero temperatures in January. What the hell was wrong with me?

I knew, really. My cat, Chewie, was dying. That was not hyperbole. On New Year’s Eve, the vet had told me that Chewie had between twenty-four hours and two weeks to live. He had successfully fought lymphoma, but now he was in the final stages of congestive heart failure and his lungs were full of fluid. They’d fixed him up with palliative care so I could take him home for another day to say goodbye to him, but he was about to make his exit. I didn’t think it was going to be two weeks at all. It was Thursday, and he was going to be lucky if he made it to Monday.

I’d had Chewie since I was in high school, and he was my best friend. If that sounds pathetic to you, you’ve never been lucky enough to own a “forever cat.” Chewie had been with me through nearly every ordeal of my teenage and young adult life; he’d been patient and loving even when I had been hard to deal with, and he’d been a gift to me. Chewie had never let me down, and the idea of losing him was devastating. My interlude on the beach was actually one of the only times in the last day that I hadn’t been crying.

I was running into icy cold water because I didn’t care about anything other than Chewie; because I was numb and I wanted to feel something again; because I cared so deeply that I was desperate for something to deaden the pain. It was all of the above and none of it. When the air horn sounded, I let out a battle cry and joined all the others who were charging toward the waves.

Pain. Oh yes, it hurt. I took care to follow the instructions I’d been given; I kept my head and chest well above the water. I bounced around for a few moments, hollered and cheered with the rest of the lunatics, and then scurried back toward the beach. A random man took a photo with me; it was a warm, fuzzy moment.

I had trouble putting my clothes back on because my hands were frozen into odd positions. I felt like the Elephant Man as I tried to maneuver my socks back onto my feet without the use of my fingers. Eventually I was bundled up again in warm, dry clothes. I trudged back to the subway, where the heated train cars were extremely welcome, and headed home. Chewie met me at the door.

It turned out to be his last stand. Before I went to work in the evening, where I showed everyone my insane Polar Bear photo, he was fine. His condition sharply declined in the middle of the night, and by the morning, when large doses of feline morphine were not making a dent for him, I knew he was on his way out.

By midday, we were at the vet’s office for Chewie’s final journey. I stayed with him the entire time; there was no way I could have left. The vet let me sit with him as long as I wanted after he died. I finally returned to my apartment, put Chewie’s toys and food dishes away, met my mother for lunch and completely lost it.

Why is this story in a book about Broadway? It was the pneumonia I never had.

Considering that I was going off on crying jags every few minutes and felt as though my heart had been smashed to pieces, there was no way I was going to be able to work at
Phantom.
Absolutely, positively none. It was a holiday weekend and we had extra performances, so my presence was sorely needed, but it was out of the question. I e-mailed Tom, the house manager at the Majestic, and Erin, my boss at the Shuberts. Both knew of Chewie’s ongoing illness; both understood. They shared their own stories of losing beloved pets. The support I received from the Shuberts management after the death of my cat still ranks as one of the nicest, most compassionate things an employer has ever done for me.

I asked both Erin and Tom to keep the situation confidential. They agreed. We all knew full well that some of the people working at
Phantom
were unbelievably petty and cruel, and that they would have used the situation as a springboard for their jokes and taunts.

When I finally did make it back to work several days later, I discovered that everyone thought that I’d gotten sick from my foray into the Atlantic. And numerous people had been happy about it. They’d chuckled and smiled and thought it was wonderful that I’d ended up with a dreadful respiratory illness. If that doesn’t tell you how much these folks sucked, I don’t know what will.

I never did tell any of them the real story. I privately grieved for Chewie, went about my business and smiled and nodded when my “lung infection” was mentioned. When I felt better I occasionally joked with the house manager about my bout of fictional pleurisy, sat back, and let the gossips dig themselves deeper into their pit of malice.

In March 2010 I developed a respiratory infection for real. The X-rays showed bronchial cuffing; I was gasping for air and coughing up unpleasant substances.

I was overjoyed, because I didn’t have to go to
Phantom.
It had become that bad.

I’d long passed the point of letting other people’s petty prejudices, judgments and venom poison me. I knew that some of my colleagues didn’t like me. I’d wager that a few of them actually hated me, and I knew that those people spent a fair amount of time mocking me behind my back. I honestly didn’t care. It was their wasted time, not mine. I found it pathetic and sad that they didn’t have anything more interesting in their lives to fixate on.

All the same, dealing with it on a day-to-day basis was very draining. Here’s an analogy. Let’s say that you’re locked in house where four-fifths of the people have the Black Plague. You happen to be among the twenty percent who aren’t ill. The others who are healthy try to keep your spirits up, but being around so many who are riddled with Plague, and wondering what’s going to hit you next, is understandably very emotionally exhausting. That’s how it was at the tail end of my
Phantom
run. Even if I let the drama bounce off me, it was tiresome.

Getting a free pass to stay away from Broadway was a blessing to me, even though my time out was unpaid. I stayed home, took my antibiotics and tried to recuperate. To keep my strength up, and to compensate for the loss of the four-mile roundtrip walk I usually did to get to and from work, I bundled up every evening and took night walks. I tried to explore all the nooks and crannies of lower Manhattan, and ended up roaming through dim downtown streets with strange murals, old diners and quaint churches.

My efforts to return to
Phantom
were hellish because I wasn’t fully recovered. Talking to patrons for a half hour used up precious air that I just didn’t have. Walking up and down the aisles and staircases made me dizzy and used more air.

This was compounded by the fact that most of the time the head usher did little to nothing to help me. As a courtesy, ushers with illnesses or injuries were commonly placed in less hectic sections where they didn’t have to walk as much. I, on the other hand, was automatically assigned to my regular spot in the front of the orchestra: the busiest place an usher could be. Adding insult to injury: business was slow, and some nights the other sections didn’t have any patrons at all. I’d pause to cough, look toward the back of the house and see the ushers in those sections just standing around chatting since they didn’t have any customers to seat. And meanwhile, since the front of the orchestra was always full, my aisle partner Penny and I were always scurrying around. Penny was one of the good guys at
Phantom
and she tried to help me as much as possible, but in the front of the orchestra we both needed to be quick and efficient. Sick or not, I wasn’t going to let her shoulder that load on her own, so I did everything I could to keep up.

Every now and then it would dawn on the chief to ask me if I needed to be moved to a slower section, but the most part, I was tossed right back into the fire. And then my lungs broke down from the strain, I started coughing up junk again, and I ended up calling out for the rest of the week.

On the last Saturday I was scheduled to work at
Phantom,
I missed the matinee with an excruciating headache. The substitute house manager told me to take the night off to rest, too.

And that was that. I never went back. I never said goodbye.

On Monday I contacted Erin and told her I was done. I was asked to take a three-month leave to think about it, even though I really didn’t want to return to the show. I didn’t want to work at other theaters, either. I was done with ushering. I didn’t care about the pay; I didn’t care about the convenient schedule. I just didn’t want to be there anymore. I told Erin point-blank that I didn’t want a leave. I’m sure she was right to counsel caution, but I was also sure that I’d made up my mind. It didn’t stick: two months later, the Shuberts wrote to me to ask if I was ready to return from my leave of absence. The chief actually called me. A few of the more hostile colleagues tracked me down on social media or emailed me to try to figure out where I’d gone.

I kept my word: I was done. I withdrew from the ushers’ local of IATSE. I put my scarves and locker key in a manila envelope and dropped them off at the Majestic box office. I looked through my Facebook, picked out almost every friend or acquaintance that was a Broadway usher, sent them a goodbye note, and deleted them. None of the Broadway people had known anything that was actually happening in my life for quite some time since they were already on a tight filter. Still, given the way gossip went around the Theater District, and given that people on Broadway spent hours talking about the stupidest and most insignificant things, I didn’t want any of them to be privy to
any
information about my life from that point on. As much as I liked some of them, I couldn’t trust them to keep anything to themselves. My actions were justified a few days later when someone who hadn’t even received the Facebook goodbye note asked me about it. The new gossip had already made the rounds. The only Broadway person I kept on Facebook, and in my life, was my spirit twin from
Cats
and
The Invention of Love,
Greg. He’d turned out to be a true friend.

I never did get to say farewell to the orchestra team at
Phantom
or the other people I liked there, like Felix the lighting guy. That was a shame, but it was what it was.

When I healed up and started surfing through job ads online, I quickly came across a listing for Cirque du Soleil’s
Ovo.
They weren’t seeking performers; they were looking for people to work in their front of the house, selling merchandise. It was essentially retail work in a cool setting. I scored an interview and was hired on the spot.

Ovo
was a tough gig. The work was more physical than ushering had been, Cirque du Soleil’s rules were stricter, and I had far more to do. My commute to
Phantom
had been about thirty minutes on foot; to get to Cirque du Soleil I needed to leave an hour and a half, to be safe. The circus was set up on Randall’s Island, which was quite a distance from my apartment on the West Side. Every day I walked across town to the train on Lexington Avenue, disembarked at 125th Street, and trekked over the Triboro Bridge on foot to get to work. At night such journeys were not necessarily safe, so I needed two buses and a train to get home. I waited for the M23 at midnight, under the reassuring glow of the sign from the 24-hour Walgreens on Lexington and 23rd.

On the last day of the New York run, the Powers That Be fitted us with hard hats and vests and asked if we would help them take the tents down, so I actually had the experience of disassembling a circus. And I had a blast.

At the end of
The Phantom of the Opera,
the Phantom vanishes. He simply sits down on his throne and goes away. I left Broadway the same way, really: one day I was there; one day I wasn’t.