Unnaturally Green (13 page)

In the one-and-a-half minutes it took David to lead me down the hall to the girls’ dressing room, the version of me that was cool, collected—
modern marvel able to leap social barriers in a single bound
—still existed. In those moments, I still stood a chance of being totally agreeable, or, if we’re aiming high, likeable.

Soon I heard a soft stream of hip-hop music coming from the doorway. I fiddled with my belt, tipped my head back, and put on an expression that oozed warmth and friendliness. One that said, “Nice to meet you, coworkers!” Yes, my plan was to act like a Disney park employee.

David knocked on the door with his knuckles.

“Ladies? Everybody decent?”

Soon we were standing inside the doorway, amidst the pulsing music—louder now—thumping with my heartbeat, while I stood, grinning so wide it tingled.

“This is Felicia, everybody!”

And there I saw civilization, enlivened, filled with people, coming at me in droves.

“Hey there!” “Hello!” “What’s up?” “How’s it going?” everybody chorused back. I tried to match voices to faces but could see only twelve or more people-pillars, with eyes, ears, mouths—all the appropriate parts—somehow impossible to differentiate.

It’s just nerves.

Finally, I stepped forward, in my dazzling muu-muu, and introduced myself.

“Hi, I’m Felicia,” I said, brilliantly.

One by one, with nylon wig caps stretched across their heads, girls began materializing from the crowd.

“I’m Annie,” chirped one, her hair looped in curls. Her smile was wide, like a double-decker bus, square and stacked taller than seemed possible.

“Annie, hi! Thanks for the Facebook message!”

“I’m Kristen, nice to meet you.”

“Allison, hi.”

“I’m Alexa,” said another girl with platinum hair and large breasts who sat next to,

“Laura, nice to meet you,” another girl with large breasts, who sat next to,

“Fiama! Welcome to the cast,” a slightly older woman with large breasts.

Laura, the one in the middle, was the girl I’d be replacing in the ensemble.

“We get to sit next to each other,” confirmed blonde Alexa, in a high-pitched voice.

“Penelope!” “Neka!” “Kehau!”

The roll call continued, kind of like that scene from
The Sound of Music
when all the kids marched forward and shouted their names.

A few minutes into the meet and greet, and it was smooth sailing. I struck up a conversation with Fiama about her husband and young son, mostly to divert my roaming eyes, which kept getting drawn down almost magnetically to the enormous breasts that surrounded me. When it would come time for me to sit among this well-endowed middle row, my own chest was going to look like the only two guppies in a sea of marlins, the only two raisins at the grapefruit stand, the only two (you get the idea).

Still, I was filled with hope. At
Wicked
I could write my own story. Now there was Alexa, Fiama, Neka, Penelope—my new maybe-friends, whose names all by coincidence ended in vowels and sounded vaguely royal.

Who would care that growing up I’d never been so great with the “popular crowd?” That I had a tendency to clam up socially, to go at things on my own, to shy away from others? And what did it matter that everybody here was super-cool, successful, and outrageously attractive? That the dressing room could have been a holding cell for the earth’s most diverse and exhaustive collection of beautiful specimens? (We’re not talking “hot girls” here; we’re talking women who cause heads to turn and fashion-challenged individuals to tingle with a conflicting mixture of jealousy and hero-worship. Not that I knew what that was like.)

Whatever the outcome, so far, on my first day, I felt like I’d arrived. All the mystery, the piecing together, the wondering about who to be, had been overwrought.

The words that Julie had spoken during our coaching session floated back to me.

She’s brave, and sticks her neck out.

It was true.

And if Elphaba could do it, so could I.

8. THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’

January 13, 2010. Felicia’s Blog.

When one is inserted into a pre-existing company, the first few weeks of rehearsal are, in a word, insane. In, like, a good way, but also in a way that makes me want to hide under a rock.

Since I am a replacement cast member, my staging rehearsal has involved the dance captain playing all the other people's roles around me while I try to map out my particular pathways along a grid (there are numbers across the front of the stage to describe stage L versus stage R, and then there are other markings to determine depth of my position). 

Without getting into the nitty-gritty, let me just say that today really made me appreciate just how precise and detail-oriented
Wicked
is.  There is, of course, room for interpretation -- and, dare I say, acting! -- but everything from a head flick to the angle of one's stance is evaluated for its clarity of expression and cohesiveness with the whole.  Musical theater is a veritable playground for those with OCD-like tendencies! 

I need to go shower now because, well -- based the grueling nature of the past two days of rehearsal, I'm sure you can extrapolate just how often I've been able to shower.

Cleanly,

Felicia.

I
had done it: survived my first two weeks of rehearsal.

The main challenge didn’t so much stem from the fact that the days were long (which they were), but that I was learning the entirety of
Wicked
by myself. On a good day, one or two cast members might lend me some of their time, running around, playing a combination of parts, sporadically reciting lines or singing harmonies, while I wandered around in confusion to the damp underscoring of a lone upright piano.

But more often than not, it was just me and the dance captains, Kristen and Allison, who took me under their wings like weary and reluctant governesses in a Victorian novel. As
Wicked
veterans and keepers of its blocking, each had memorized all the “tracks” (or parts) in the show, from the ensemble to the lead characters, teaching incoming cast members their every step, twirl, and gesture, down to the most minute, painstaking detail. Not only that: in addition to teaching, they were incredible performers—subbing in for members of
Wicked
’s ensemble on a near-nightly basis.

Mostly I was obsessed with the fact that you could (in theory) walk up to either of them, shout a moment from
Wicked
, and they could perform it for you, as any character, right before your tired, glossy eyes, while you did a slow clap and gave them accuracy scores. (This never actually happened, but sometimes I dreamed of doing it as a party game.)

On the bright side, I was done with my two-week stint of living in the hospitality hell known as the Hotel Whitcomb. Bidding goodbye to the specter of Jack Nicholson, his Big Wheel-riding son, and the flesh-and-blood maids who cleaned my room at 8 a.m. (if and
only if
I put out my
Do Not Disturb
sign), I finally schlepped my suitcase and cardboard box to a modest studio apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District, which lay south of
Wicked
’s theater. This, by everyone’s account, would be a truly happening neighborhood—providing much-needed relief from the psychological injury incurred by doing hard time on Market Street (campus for the public urinators and coffee-snatchers).

But, alas. My first evening in the Mission I walked by a man playing a broken-stringed guitar and singing about the evils of sodomy. A few blocks later, a woman emerged, completely drenched, holding a mattress and yelling at the top of her lungs. Soon she was coughing and sputtering in my face, and wouldn’t stop spitting until I’d ducked around the corner.

“Wait, what?” Marshall said, gasping. I could see his face contorting on my computer screen, next to the time ticker of our Skype chat that read 74 minutes. We’d been doing the long-distance thing, and so had become obsessed with talking via webcam.

“It’s all true,” I said. “Everyone who has visited San Francisco must be in on some conspiracy; they all say it’s amazing, but no matter where I go, something outrageous happens to me.”

“Should I be worried, Fel? Are you safe?”

“Sure, I’m safe. I think I just, like, need a car. Or an electric scooter.”

“A Segway! You should get one and also wear a giant helmet. For safety.”

“I need
some
kind of vehicle to get around. Everybody in the cast who has a car appears to be really happy.”

“But isn’t there public transportation?” asked Marshall as he sipped from a stout glass of Bourbon. (On Skype date night Marshall went all-out, while I abstained in the service of vocal health, sipping lemon water from a straw.)

I explained to Marshall how in San Francisco “public transportation” was a term used loosely. Everything was so spread out and scattered that after you took a train or bus, you’d end up having to walk really far to your end destination anyway, up and down the steep hills. In the meantime, you’d have no choice but to faceoff with the army of insanity. In short, “public transportation” worked best for people who didn’t actually have anywhere to go.

“I could be your car,” volunteered Marshall, taking a generous sip of booze and swirling it in his mouth. “I’ll carry you.”

“Okay, deal. Are you gas or hybrid?”

“Hybrid.”

“You run on peanut butter and string cheese.”

(These were two of his favorite foods. I know, you don’t have to tell me—I’m
so
good at flirting.)

“Anyway,” I said, recovering, “I’m really excited for next month.”

Marshall and I had been planning his first visit for weeks now. He’d even bought his plane ticket to San Francisco New Year’s Eve weekend, when I’d been visiting his family. Orbitz.com had never seemed so romantic.

“I’m excited, too!”

I began listing a bunch of stuff around the city that we had to visit—the Ferry Building, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Aquarium—when, suddenly, something possessed me to say,

“Seriously? When you come out and visit, you should just stay.”

Marshall snickered, loose from the Bourbon. “I know, I totally should.”

“I mean, think about it,” I said, indulging in the fantasy, “you could just shack up with me. It would be like summer camp. You don’t like your job, so that would be a way out, and you could spend your time here deciding what you really want to do.”

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense. Marshall had been having career doubts since before I’d met him. He’d been working at an e-commerce website that sold men’s pants, where he did their customer service and wrote a style blog (on which, incidentally, I’d started commenting as my male alter ego, Phil Yeesh). Life had been plodding along for him, but from what he’d told me, something was missing. Still, he kept his nose to the grindstone.

“That would be so crazy,” he said, his eyes lighting up.

Marshall and I loved entertaining what-if scenarios, hypothesizing their outcomes to the fullest extent. In the past, we’d tackled such quandaries as,
What if we lived in a barn that was also a post-apocalyptic bunker?
(Conclusion: It would be awesome.)
What if Marshall were Hugh Jackman for a day?
(Conclusion: It would be awesome.)

“Seriously, Marsh, you should just do it,” I said, ever the lemon water-sipping temptress. “You can be my deadbeat boyfriend for a while, find a part-time job, then figure out whatever the next step will be.”

“Ha ha. Well, at least I could cook for you! And carry you everywhere.”

“Marsh, I am serious,” I said, not knowing if I was serious, but worried that I was, and he wasn’t.

“Me too,” he said.

“Okay, good. We agree.”

“It’s happening.”

“I know it is.”

Like all of our other hypotheticals, we concluded that it would be awesome.

But the really funny thing? This one actually came true.