The Talent Show (13 page)

“Pull the curtain, Don!” Mrs. Marotta ordered.

Don Potash pulled open the big curtain and seven Cape Bluff Elementary School teachers were lined up on the stage in size order—wearing old-time bathing suits. Two held beach balls. One had a boogie board. A huge cardboard sun was pinned to the back curtain.

Mrs. Marotta thought it would be fun to get the teachers involved in the talent show, and was amazed that seven of them were willing to do a silly skit to start things off—stripped down in bathing suits, no less.

When the spotlights hit the line of teachers, the crowd roared with laughter and approval. There's nothing funnier than seeing your teacher in a bathing suit. In the front row, Reverend Mercun looked uncomfortable. Nobody told him there would be a skit featuring half-naked teachers.

“Hey y'all, it looks like a good day for surfing!” said Miss Andrews, one of the third grade teachers onstage. She put on a squeaky, high-pitched voice, like she was trying to sound like a teenager.

“Everybody knows the best surfing in the world is right here in Cape Bluff, Kansas,” said Mrs. Watson, who taught fourth grade.

“Do you think The Big Kahuna will be coming to the beach today?” asked Mrs. McCarthy, the music teacher.

“Oooh! He's
dreamy
!” gushed Miss Proto, a second-grade teacher.

“Are you kidding?” said Mrs. DiMartino, fifth grade. “That guy is a major creepazoid!”

“Who cares about The Big Kahuna, anyway?” said Miss Katz, the art teacher. “Let's catch some waves!”

Jangly guitars blasted out of the speakers and The Beach Boys started singing,
“If everybody had an ocean across the USA …”

The teachers joined in singing “Surfin' USA,” and by the second line the audience was into it, clapping along and stamping their feet. Everybody laughed when the teachers pantomimed surfing or swimming.

When the song came to an end, there was an awkward pause, as if something was supposed to happen next but nobody knew what it was.

Finally, the tip of a surfboard appeared from stage right. The surfboard was on wheels, and it was being pulled across the stage by a rope. A man was standing on it, and when everybody realized
it was Principal Anderson, the crowd went crazy, hooting, whistling, and laughing. He was wearing a brightly colored bathing suit, a tie-dyed T-shirt, flip-flops, and on his arms were those inflatable swimmies that parents put on their toddlers who are learning how to swim.

“It's the Big Kahuna!” gushed Miss Proto, and she pretended to faint.

“Cowabunga!” shouted Principal Anderson. “Surf's up, beach bunnies, and I am majorly amped, fer sure! I think I'll shoot the curl and hang ten on those gnarly waves out there. Who's with me?”

The skit was pretty awful, but everyone seemed to enjoy watching the teachers and Principal Anderson make fools of themselves.

While the skit was going on, in the room behind the stage, Mrs. Marotta was looking around at the kids and noticed for the first time that Elke Villa wasn't there.

“Where's Elke?” she asked a boy standing next to her.

“Beats me,” he shrugged.

“Has anyone seen Elke?” Mrs. Marotta asked.

All the kids looked around. Nobody had seen Elke.

Mrs. Marotta rushed over and peered through the curtain at the side of the stage. Elke's parents were sitting in the third row. Mrs. Marotta quickly climbed down the steps and into the audience.

“Have you seen Elke?” she whispered to Mrs. Villa.

“She's not backstage?” she replied, concerned. “Elke told us we should come here early to get good seats. She said she was going to walk the dog and then ride her bike over here. But she should have been here by now.”

Onstage, the opening skit was finished and Principal Anderson was talking to the audience, welcoming everyone to the talent show.

“Your children and grandchildren have worked
unbelievably
hard preparing for this night,” he said. “We're so grateful that you could all come and see the talented boys and girls we have here at Cape Bluff Elementary School. So sit back in your beach chairs, dudes and dudettes, relax, and enjoy the—”

At that moment, the lights went out. The auditorium was plunged into total darkness.

Somebody screamed. There was a buzz of whispered conversation in the audience. It wasn't
obvious if this was all part of the show, or what was happening. Flashlights clicked on.

“It's a power outage!” shouted Laurent Linn from the back of the room. “I've got no juice at all!”

The audience murmured with worried restlessness. Somebody handed Principal Anderson a flashlight. He pointed it at his own face and hollered to try to get everyone's attention.

“Okay, calm down, everyone!” he shouted. “Nothing to worry about. I'm sure the lights will be back on in a moment.”

Laurent Linn opened the back door of the auditorium and looked outside. The Exxon sign down the street was dark. All the stores on Main Street were dark. The streetlights, too. It was a blackout. The electricity in the whole town of Cape Bluff had been knocked out.

It was still twilight, and the full moon made the sky a little brighter than it normally would be at that hour. In the distance, about two miles away, Mr. Linn could clearly make out something he had seen a number of times before in his life and hoped he would never see again—a dark funnel cloud.

“Not again!” he exclaimed.

The Show Must Go On

The news that another tornado had touched down in Cape Bluff took approximately ten seconds to spread through the packed auditorium. A few seconds later, there was panic in the room. People were yelling out in frustration. Parents were holding their children tightly. Babies were crying. Even
they
sensed something was terribly wrong.

Typically, years and often
decades
would pass between tornadoes hitting Cape Bluff. It was very unusual for two of them to arrive so close together in time.

“Please remain calm, everyone!” Principal Anderson shouted over the sudden worried buzz. “We've all been in this situation before.”

“Remain calm?” said Tom Villa, Elke's father, as he jumped up from his seat. “My daughter is out there! I'm going to go find her.” Elke's mother had lost control and was sobbing hysterically.

Chief of Police Michael Selleck, sitting two rows behind, got up and grabbed Mr. Villa.

“Tom!” he yelled, wrapping his arms around the big man. “Stop! Don't be crazy!”

“Let me go!”

It took three men to hold Tom Villa back and prevent him from running out of the auditorium to look for Elke.

Lucille Rettino, in the front row, stood up. As mayor of Cape Bluff, she knew it was her responsibility to take control in a crisis situation.

“For safety, we need to stay right here,” she announced. “Mike, I'm putting you in charge of finding Elke. Take Mr. Villa and two other men with you. And be careful.”

Police Chief Selleck chose a couple of strong men. The four of them grabbed their coats and rushed out the back of the auditorium.

Reverend Mercun rose from his seat and asked if he might say a few words. A hush fell over the audience as he spoke.

“Dear Lord,” he prayed. “We ask for no material possessions or wealth or fortune to come to any of us in this room. But we beseech you to protect the life of this young girl. And protect all of us.”

“Amen.”

A few minutes passed before Honest Dave stood up.

“What are we supposed to do?” he asked. “Just sit here in the dark doing nothing?”

“Yes,” Reverend Mercun replied. “Let us sit here in the dark and be thankful that this happened when we are all in this room together. God brought us here for a reason. This room will serve as our shelter, our sanctuary, until the storm blows over.”

“What if it blows over
here
?” somebody shouted.

“Let us pray that it doesn't,” the reverend replied simply.

People turned off their flashlights. It was quiet for ten minutes or so while some prayed and others worried about what might be happening outside to their homes, their businesses, their farms, their pets, and above all, that poor girl Elke.

The quiet eventually gave way to restlessness and quiet conversations.

“I was just thinking,” Principal Anderson said calmly as he stood up. “As long as we're all just sitting here … did you ever hear that old saying in show business—the show must go on?”

“How's the show supposed to go on?” asked an old man sitting near him. “I can't even see my hand in front of my face, much less the stage. You're a darn fool, you know that?”

Principal Anderson went to the front of the auditorium and asked the people in the first row to put their flashlights on the edge of the stage and point them toward the curtain. They did. The people in the second row passed
their
flashlights to the people in the first row, who put those flashlights on the stage also. The people in the third row saw what was happening, and they got up to pass
their
flashlights forward too.

And then, like a wave, hundreds of flashlights were passed to the front of the auditorium, where the people in the first row put them into position. The effect was not quite as bright as one strong spotlight, but the stage was surprisingly well illuminated by a bright beam of light.

Mrs. Marotta came out to center stage, getting a nice round of applause.

“It looks like we're going to be here for a while,” she said. “We're all praying for Elke's safety. But Mr. Anderson is right. The show must go on!”

“Yeah!” shouted all the kids backstage.

When the cheer came out of the crowd, Mrs. Marotta went behind the curtain and gathered the kids around her.

“Okay,” she said, “we've got light, but no electricity. That means no CD player. If your act depended on recorded music, you're going to have to improvise. Any amplifiers are useless, so forget about those electric guitars, boys. Drum machines too, Raccoon. Oh, and our microphones won't work either. You're going to have to project your voices.”

“How can we—,” somebody started.

“This is show biz, kids,” Mrs. Marotta told them. “And this is life, too. You never know what's going to hit you. Sometimes life throws unexpected stuff at you, and you've got to deal with it.”

She looked at her clipboard with all the acts listed on it and made a quick decision to juggle the
lineup. Piano and violin players would go on first, because they didn't need any electricity or amplification. With a little luck, the tornado would miss the center of town and power would come back on quickly, so the acts that needed to plug in would be able to go on as planned. Everybody scurried backstage and Mrs. Marotta signaled Don Potash to pull open the curtain for the first act.

Jimmy, the quiet little third grader, came out with his violin to a big round of applause and played Beethoven's “Violin Sonata #7 in C Minor.” The audience loved it. When he was done, Don pulled the curtain closed, and the judges made some notes on the score sheets in front of them.

Jimmy was followed by a girl playing Mozart's “Piano Concerto #21 in C major.” The crowd gave her warm applause. Then there were the Irish step dancers, Abbott and Costello, the juggler, the magician, Ricky the bacon impersonator, the accordionist, a mime, a poet, Amy the crochet girl, the unicyclist, and The Janitors, who threw dirt all over the stage and swept it up, to the amusement of the audience.

When The Drumming Gorillas hit the stage, nobody knew what to expect, least of all The
Drumming Gorillas. They started beating on their garbage cans haphazardly at first, and the crowd had a good laugh. The boys started watching one another as they drummed, and then gradually settled on a regular beat. None of them had ever played drums before, but they must have had some innate sense of rhythm, because soon they were improvising and sounding like they actually knew what they were doing. The crowd began to clap to the beat and stamp their feet. Encouraged, The Drumming Gorillas started banging their heads against their garbage cans, their garbage cans against the floor, and finally against one another. When they were done, they received a huge round of applause. Not bad for a bunch of guys who had never performed anything in their lives before, and didn't even want to be
in
the talent show.

Backstage, the kids who needed electricity for their acts were scrambling to figure out what to do. Raccoon, who always rapped along with his drum machine, would have to keep the beat some other way. Paul took him down the hall to the music room, where they found an old wind-up metronome Raccoon could use. While they
were in there, Paul spotted three acoustic guitars in a closet. Perfect. It would be The BluffTones
unplugged
.

While the early acts were onstage, Mrs. Marotta gathered the Beach Babes and Sand Kittens around her. Both groups were lip synch dance acts, and entirely dependent on recorded music.