Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (26 page)

“They’re all crazy,” she’d say, pacing back and forth. “I’d rather chew tinfoil than go back next week.”

But before summer vacation her impatience began to dissipate.

“We’re getting to the meat of it,” she said one night in June. “It’s down to
The Wizard of Oz
or
Frosty the Snowman
.”

Frosty
won. It was the perfect play for the pageant. They could do it without carols or mention of Christian tradition.

“It captures the true spirit of the season,” said the school trustee enthusiastically when the script was sent to her. “It has music. And shopping.”

Morley spent the summer rewriting
Frosty the Snowman,
essentially expanding the play so there would be a part for all 248 children. She added lots of street scenes, and when she was finished, there was a role for everyone, including a cameo for the principal, Nancy Cassidy, whom Morley coaxed into playing a talking pine tree.

In September there was an unexpected registration bubble, and Morley found herself a dozen roles short. She fussed with the script for a week, until, in a flash of inspiration, she added a narrator. She conceived of the narrator as a chorus, a chorus that would easily soak up the twelve new kids and any others who wandered along before Christmas. All her early reluctance had given way to outright enthusiasm. She had her arms up to the elbows in the mud of this play.

“This is fun,” she said to Dave one night as she collated scripts. She couldn’t wait to get going, couldn’t wait to start with the kids.

The Saturday before the auditions were scheduled, parents began showing up at the house offering help. Katherine Gilcoyne was first.

“I’m a seamstress,” she said. “I’m sure there’ll be lots of sewing. I’d love to help with the costumes.” Morley was delighted. They had coffee and talked about the play and then, after an hour, when she was leaving, as if it was just an afterthought, Katherine reached into her purse and pulled out a brown manila envelope.

“This is Willy’s résumé,” she said.

Willy was her son. Willy was in grade five.

It was a twenty-page résumé, including an eight-by-ten glossy.

“He really wants to be a snowman,” said Katherine, standing in the doorway. “Get him to recite his Lions Club speech. He won the gold medal. I think he would make a great Frosty.”

Ruth Kelman arrived about an hour later. Right-to-the-point Ruth. “I heard you weren’t considering girls for the snowmen,” she said, her arms folded across her chest. Her car was in the driveway, still running. Her daughter, Joanne, was sitting glumly in the passenger seat; her husband was in the back.

Seven-year-old Joanne has been the breadwinner in the Kelman family for three years: the star of a series of soap ads and an obnoxious peanut-butter commercial. Ruth spends her life jetting around town with her daughter, lining up at one audition after another.

“What’s the difference,” said Morley sourly when they were gone, “between those auditions and a rug factory. If they got Joanne a job in a rug factory, they wouldn’t have to spend all those hours waiting around at auditions.”

As the rainy mornings of November folded into dark December afternoons, the play gradually took shape. The children were slowly settling into their roles. There were, eventually, four Frostys—two girls and two boys. At the beginning of the month, however, with only three weeks to go before the big night, no one knew the lines by heart, not even Joanne Kelman, whom Morley had cast as a villainous troll. But everyone was coming along, and Morley trusted the kids would eventually arrive where they should. Or close enough. Besides, there was a bigger problem than unlearned lines.

The story, as Morley had rewritten it, turned on a flashback—a scene in which Frosty recalled his days as a country snowman. For the all-important farmyard scene Morley had drafted Arthur and cast him as a sheep. Arthur, a docile and well-behaved dog by nature, did not adjust easily to the stage. The first few times Morley Velcroed Arthur into his sheepskin, he stood in the wings and refused to move, staring balefully out from under his sheep ears in abject humiliation. But as the weeks progressed Arthur underwent a character change. He grinned whenever he saw his costume, curling his lips back so you could see his teeth, flattening his ears and squinting his eyes. It was while he was dressed as a sheep that Arthur sniffed out and ate the contents of every lunch bag from Miss Young’s grade-four class. He had his sheep costume on when he devoured the huge gingerbread house that Sophia Delvecchio had constructed and donated to the school. And it was while he was dressed as a sheep that he snarled at Floyd, the janitor, when Floyd found him padding down the corridor heading for the cafeteria.

The closer they came to opening night, the more problems Morley uncovered. The afternoon they moved rehearsals into the auditorium, it became clear that there was not enough room for everyone on stage.

“The stage isn’t big enough for the narrators,” said Morley to Dave one afternoon on the phone after rehearsal.

It was Dave’s idea to erect scaffolding and put the chorus of narrators on what amounted to a balcony.

“Perfect,” said Morley. “Brilliant.”

Dee Dee Allen’s father, who was in construction, said he could provide scaffolding.

Morley had thought one of the benefits of working on the play would be an opportunity to get to know some of the kids. Mostly she got to know Mark Portnoy. Mark who couldn’t sit still. Mark who spent one entire rehearsal pulling the window blinds up and down, up and down. Mark who tied Jane Capper’s shoelaces together. Mark who brought a salamander from the science lab to technical rehearsal and dropped it into Adrian White’s apple juice.

Late one afternoon when she thought she was the only person in the school, Morley came across Mark in the grade-five classroom. He was going through a desk with a suspicious intensity. She had a feeling it wasn’t his desk.

“Hello, miss,” he said guiltily when he saw her, picking up his bag and leaving the room.

Morley now had a constellation of mothers orbiting her. Alice Putnam, overweight and perpetually cheerful, was in charge of the refreshment committee. Pale, gaunt and efficient Grace Weed was in charge of programs. Patty Berg, loud but trustworthy, was in charge of decorations.

By the beginning of the second week of December, life at the school had built to a fever pitch—all pretence of academics had vanished. Everything was focused on Thursday night’s performance. When the kids weren’t rehearsing, they were waiting to rehearse—or making decorations.

Patty Berg’s decoration committee had transformed the school into a riot of red and green. There were streamers and balloons in the halls and large murals on scrolls of brown paper. Frank Quarrington of Quarrington’s Pizza Palace had donated Santa Claus pictures for the grade twos to color: Santas with their jackets off and their sleeves rolled up—rolling dough and flinging it in the air.

There were five Santa images in all—each one in the pizza motif. The grade twos fell on them with gusto—everyone except Norah Burton, who brought hers to the front in tears.

“I can’t color this,” she said, holding out her paper. It was a picture of Santa Claus standing over a kitchen table, doling out pizza slices to a group of ravenous elves. “Those are anchovies,” said Norah, pointing at the pizza. “I hate anchovies.” And she broke into tears.

“Those aren’t anchovies, sweetie,” said Mrs. Moffat, putting her arm around the little girl. “Those are green peppers.”

“What are these little hairy parts?” asked Norah sobbing.

“They look like anchovy legs. Green peppers don’t have legs.”

“That’s just mold,” said Mrs. Moffat sweetly. “The green peppers have gone off.”

“Oh,” said Norah.

On Wednesday the kids were sent home early with instructions to return at six o’clock with their costumes and props. They were to assemble in the science lab, where they would be supervised by a group of parent volunteers. The parents would use walkie-talkies to maintain contact with the auditorium. They would send the kids to the stage as they were needed.

The kids were told they could bring quiet games to play while they waited for their cues: cards, books, stickers—no Walk mans, no video games.

At five-thirty Morley phoned Dave in a panic. Floyd, the janitor, couldn’t get the P.A. working.

“No one will hear the narrators,” said Morley. “Help!”

As a young man Dave had spent fifteen years on the road with so many rock-and-roll tours he had forgotten half the places he had been to. If anyone could rustle up a working sound system in a hurry, it was Dave.

“No problem,” he said. “I’ll look after it.”

“I love you,” said Morley. And hung up.

The doors to the auditorium were scheduled to open at seven. By six-thirty the room was already half full and beginning to heat up. Half an hour later families were still streaming in.

There is something about sitting on a plastic chair several sizes too small for you that puts you in touch with feelings you never knew you had, especially if you have come to this chair on a cold December night, in a bulky winter coat, and there is no place for you to put the coat, except in your lap. Especially if the room is hot, and getting hotter, and there are little children everywhere, children in constant motion, like fields of seaweed waving on the ocean floor—small sticky children wiggling by you with cupcakes and glasses of lemonade.

You sit in your tiny seat with your coat in your lap, and you have thoughts that you will never share with anyone. Not even your therapist. Because the things you are thinking are so depraved you
couldn’t
share them with anyone. Especially your therapist.

On Thursday night, at a quarter to seven, Pete Eckersall was sitting on one of the chairs at the back of the hall thinking awful thoughts. Pete hadn’t eaten all day—and he was beginning to feel dizzy. Sitting in his tiny seat, his knees up near his shoulders, his parka open, his tie undone, his fedora pushed back on his head, he stared dolefully at the Rice Krispie square he had bought for dinner. It was Pete Eckersall’s sixteenth straight Christmas pageant. He has a daughter in university, a son in grade five and most depressingly a third child, another daughter, who is three. Pete was sitting in his chair doing the addition in his mind. There would be twelve more nights like this one in his life, he thought glumly as he watched the excited young fathers at the front of the room with their video cameras and their babies on their shoulders.

With twenty minutes to go Pete looked up and saw one of his three ex-wives walking down the far aisle—a long green fuzzy decoration that had snagged onto her sweater dragging behind her. He looked away.

At a quarter past eight, fifteen minutes after the concert should have begun, Dave still hadn’t arrived with the sound system. Morley decided to start without him. As long as he got there before the narrators climbed onto the scaffolding at the beginning of act two everything would be fine.