I’m taking a break from anything timely or consequential since the times are a bit much for me to bear right now. This is a small happening from a long-ago era when I was young enough to care about only two things: Broadway and boys.
(In a follow-up to a grim conversation about the coming global famine—something I mentioned in last week’s essay—my friend who works in agricultural policy sent me news about the nation of Chad officially declaring a food emergency. The first domino to fall? More on that situation in later posts. Today I need to escape into memoir and pretend the world isn’t falling apart.)
Patti Lupone looked down her long sharp nose at us in our fourth-row orchestra seats at the Broadway Theater and did a double-take, almost imperceptibly. On that spring night in 1980, my sister and I sat side by side in our fancy party dresses and whisper-sang along to every single lyric in Evita. We had the entire show memorized.
Occasionally one or two of the chorus members, dancing right up to the edge of the stage, would look at us and smile. And then it happened. The mighty Miss Lupone herself saw us, too, and in that brief moment of eye contact, with my mouth forming the same syllables as her own, I received her blessing.
It was not her intention to pass the torch to a stranger, a young girl, someone she’d never seen before—but she did. Patti Lupone became my new idol, supplanting even the magnificent Liza Minelli. For weeks afterward, I went around telling my friends at school and in my dance classes about the show, and then imitated the deep, agile, ballerina’s bow that Patti Lupone took at curtain call, throwing herself on the floor in a semi-split with her arms and head bent all the way down to the floor. She humbled herself to her fans, but really it should have been the other way around. We should have prostrated ourselves in awe. Patti Lupone was a shooting star, a goddess. Just like Eva Peron, queen of the people! Minus the corruption and conspiracies, presumably. I would grow up to be her—no, I would be me, inspired by her, and one day she’d be sitting in the fourth row of the orchestra for my show.
Our father was the original Broadway freak of the family. A Chorus Line, Jesus Christ Superstar, All That Jazz, Sweeney Todd—we would end up seeing all those shows with their founding Broadway casts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well as The King and I in one of its many revivals with Yul Brynner. Good seats, expensive seats, the kind of seats a surgeon could afford without stress.
(Or was it really his surgeon wife who could afford it? In later years that was one of my mother’s many constant complaints about my father: He was lazy, uncommitted, and irresponsible, she said. He had never studied hard enough to make it into a cardiac surgery residency; thus he got stuck in the far less glamorous role of thoracic surgeon. It was she who had earned most of the money as a gynecologist, she said, but he was always deciding how to spend it. Etc etc.)
My father sometimes played Broadway cast albums on his cabinet stereo system in the living room, sharing the music with us all. More often he was by himself in his office behind shuttered wood double doors, his ears under headphones as large as coconut halves, connected via a curly cord to the reel-to-reel system. He could be heard from time to time in his rich baritone singing along with Ben Vereen or Len Cariou.
A house filled with music: one might presume a joyful house, a convivial house.
My father would tell the same story once in a while, about having sung an Elvis Presley hit for a talent show, way back in his days at Vellore, the Christian-missionary-run medical school in southern India where my parents met. Like a young Elvis, my father was tall and seemed so commanding. His broad forehead glinted in the light under a widow’s peak of dark brilliant black hair. His face was soft and kind when he was happy but intimidating when he was angry. At that point, I had no reason to question why a grown man with a demanding profession and a family would still be talking about one single performance twenty years after the fact.
For Evita, my father had purchased the 8-track recording to fit the format in our new Oldsmobile station wagon, and on a winter vacation drive from New Jersey to Florida we’d listened to the entire show—ten times, twelve, maybe fifteen in a row. And then again on the ride home, over and over, until we’d memorized the entire thing.
I’d be in the way back, right next to the rear windshield, lying on my back with my knees bent and my legs draped over the top of a large green metal cooler that contained our lunches. I’d lie there and examine my thighs for signs of unwelcome thickening and pick at the fraying edges of my cut-off jean shorts. My little sister would be stretched out across the back seat, her head on a bed pillow against the passenger door, playing a handheld video game in which a stick-figure fireman had to catch stick-figure babies that dropped at an accelerating pace out of a burning building’s upper window. As if instigated by the game itself, I harbored the secret fear that the passenger door would pop open and my sister would go tumbling head first out onto the highway. Or maybe, the way sisters are, it was a sinister hope as much as a fear: a fantasy of impending disaster, a catastrophe befitting children who’d grown up watching The Towering Inferno, Airport, and Earthquake.
My father would have sung along loudly while driving; my mother, I’m not so sure about. She is both a felt presence and a visible absence. I can see my father from this time period with ease but I often have to conjure my mother forcibly, imagining her in the passenger seat, silent, angry, arms folded across her chest, staring out the window, big brown eyes focused on grievances of the distant or recent past.
She is either very fat or relatively thin; it changed from year to year. On vacation she would likely be wearing the same cheaply made, sassily top-stitched Sears jeans, either filled out to bursting or hanging loosely off recently re-exposed hipbones. (From her I learned the womanly art of yo-yo dieting.) She would have started the morning with her usual brusque efficiency, moving through the kitchen before dawn to make a huge plaid-patterned thermos full of sweet, milky, cardamom coffee. In the car, she is subdued but involuntarily nodding her head along to the beat of the music. Maybe her mood has returned all the way to its apparent default, its characteristic darkness. She is staring out the window and muttering in barely submerged rage at her lazy husband, her willful and disobedient children, her no-good brothers who manipulate her—a word she mispronounces manoopilate—as well as the Jewish doctors at the hospital who treat her like a servant or second-class citizen, her nagging mother, her dead-too-young father, and her divine Bapu in Heaven who has apparently forsaken her.
Or maybe this is entirely the wrong picture, and my mother is just as happy and engaged and musical as the rest of us, her smile bright and her dimples dancing—and yet the years have caused me to retrofit the memory with realities that emerged later.
I sang “Rainbow High” from Evita at my audition for the role of Sally Bowles, and sounded pretty good until the second syllable on rainbow, the high note, which came out thin and unsupported. But it hardly mattered because the game was rigged. Miss Gambone had told me in confidence a few weeks prior that she had chosen Cabaret with me in mind for the lead all along. I was only in 10th grade and there were two seniors who auditioned as well, but I was the clear winner anyway. I had the sultry voice, I had the verve with line readings, I had the dancing ability, and most importantly I had—somehow I understood this—the look. Legs and arms and eyelashes for miles, cheeks hollowing out beneath angular bone structure, a face of pleasingly symmetrical planes and shadows. I was still a brown girl in a mostly white world but I’d outgrown my duckling phase into a bona fide swan.
I’d been in the choir and in every annual musical production as a background player, but in ninth grade, I was asked to sing one of the parts in the duet “On The Willows” during our high school performance of Godspell, to take the place of a senior girl who’d come down with mono. I learned the song immediately and convinced myself I sounded better than Miss Gambone’s original choice. In dress rehearsal, I even added a spontaneous bit of business: during the instrumental break, I looked down mournfully, let my long hair cover my eyes, and crossed my arms in front of my chest. A dramatic little self-hug.
In real life, I was quickly falling away from my family’s old-school churchliness, but this Broadway tune was about the death of an ecumenical hippie Jesus, so it was easy to muster the needed sentiment. That was classy! said my popular friend Ricky Weber. Ricky was always full of earnest flattery, telling me that he expected to see me on the cover of People Magazine one day. He seemed to hold me in some kind of special, distant regard, too special and distant for my lonely heart. For the time being, I took what I could get. A decade later Ricky came out of the closet but I still found myself annoyed that he had never chosen me to play the role of pretend girlfriend.
Only many years later did it occur to me that the boys who flirted but kept their distance may have been held back by my not-whiteness. Interracial pairings were probably unimaginable for the average suburban white boy, even if he wasn’t in any real sense a bigot. But on the flip side, white boys were the only kind for me. Never once did it occur to me to love a fellow, dark-skinned person. No black, Asian, Indian, or Hispanic boy made my heart skip beats. No swarthy Mediterranean types, either, for the most part. I liked blonds, mostly, and Sephardic Jews. Sean Cassidy. Bjorn Borg. Occasionally a Dustin Hoffman. Scots-Irish with the telltale Neanderthal trait of reddish hair was catnip. My libido’s white supremacy shamed me even though I felt I couldn’t change it any more than gay people can force themselves straight, or vice versa. For the time being, I was apparently undateable by anyone I’d want to date. I had no readily identifiable value in the teen social-sexual marketplace.
And yet something unique was expected of me. I could sense it but didn’t know why, or know what to name it. Before I even had a chance to properly make out with someone, I’d become exotic. One little letter away from erotic. Through no action of my own, I began occupying a space of pure imagination in the minds of various boys and men. You can just tell Sandy’s into kinky stuff, said an 11th grader named Paul Andersen, apropos of nothing one day during Marine Biology when we were dissecting sand sharks. I was a virgin, and I don’t mean a Southern-girl style virgin, an “everything but” expert in various oral and manual manipulations. I mean a rank amateur who’d never been properly kissed, except for the one time I allowed a dear friend whom I did not love that way to press his face into mine as we stood on my front stoop after a group trip to a horror movie. (Something to do with possessed tarantulas or scheming vipers or demonic flying rats, I can’t quite recall.)
There was absolutely nothing I said or did to make anyone think sluttish things about me. I wore relatively modest clothes that passed muster with my prudish mother and I didn’t even know how to flirt. That didn’t stop a nice boy like Paul Andersen from assuming transgressive things about me.
Wait, I’m lying. I had in fact kissed someone else once, a senior also in the Godspell cast. Will Merrill was absurdly all-American, a standout even in the sea of upper-middle-class suburban niceness/normalcy in which we all swam, the cultural whiteness that molded us, no matter what color our skin or what language our parents spoke in childhood.
Will’s great grandfather had built a five-and-dime store into a famous major retail chain; his father had bought and sold and merged various insurance companies on his way further up the American business hierarchy; and Will himself would soon attend a college where his family had endowed chairs and had sent several generations of fine young future leaders. I knew none of this explicitly at the time, and yet I must have intuited it. Will was the kind of person for whom the word scion was coined. What was he doing hanging out with me? Daughter of people who used their hands to eat balls of mashed-up rice and dhal mixed with crumbled Wise potato chips (because papadums were not easy to source in those days).
Somehow this utterly mismatched boy and I had latched onto each other at rehearsals. I can’t imagine what we could have talked about. Regattas? The Dow Jones? Will exuded the easy charisma of the high-born. At debate demonstrations in front of the whole school, he had everyone laughing with his two-minute extemporaneous speeches on critical topics such as Briefs Versus Boxers. He had a girlfriend, a fellow senior, an equally clean-cut and pretty blonde, prom royalty. From the distance I kept, she seemed a bit cold and uptight, in her wrinkle-free khakis and Fair Isles sweaters and LL Bean duck boots. Will and his girlfriend had the same kind of hair, thick and straight, with sandy highlights, and the same kind of nose, long and sharp. They could have been siblings. There was some talk that they’d eventually get married, and also that she was saving herself until then.
I was only fourteen at the time but already aggravated by the idea of virginity, and the mere rumor of Will’s girlfriend’s abstinence made me resentful. I saw myself as one who wouldn’t be bothering to “wait” longer than I was forced to by the lack of opportunity. So maybe Paul Anderson in Marine Biology wasn’t really that far off the mark. Kinky, I was probably not. Impatient, most definitely.
After the last performance of Godspell there came the late-night cast party at Miss Gambone’s apartment, and all of us were seated, thigh pressed to thigh, along the three squared-off sides of Miss Gambone’s deep, soft sectional couch. Will Merrill was right there with me. Best friends or at least best show-friends. I’d been in enough productions to know that the eternal beautiful bond among cast members, forged by all those coordinated dance moves and shared vocal vibrations, could weaken and fail just weeks after the last curtain call. But for the moment I was right there, among my gang, where I belonged, where we all belonged: the depressives, the closeted gays, and the mumble-mouthed introverts, now briefly in cahoots with a few varsity athletes and future masters-of-the-universe, those who were cool enough to admit they liked to sing and dance without tarnishing their alpha-male images.
Somebody had snuck something strong in the punch. I was three glasses in already. Drunk for probably only the second or third time ever in my life. Primed for an improvisation. I was a vamp, vamping. I maneuvered myself a little closer to Will. His arm was draped around the back of the seat, and now he was letting its weight fall gently around my shoulders as if he and I were together for real. I passed my empty cup across the row of friends and when it magically reappeared in my hand, I took another big swig, half the contents at once, then turned to face my friend. I could barely focus on his eyes because his lips were at my eye level. I lunged at him tongue-first. I basically punched his face with my face. He accepted my wet kiss for about three seconds before pushing me back.
Hey there, he said, almost apologetically, as if he’d been the one to take a liberty. Ever the gentleman. He would later drive me home, give me a chaste one-arm hug on my way out the passenger door, and even call the next day to make sure I was okay. Later still our semi-platonic bond slipped and he would ride off into the rest of his life: business degree, joining the family company, marrying appropriately (albeit not the high school girlfriend), begetting appropriate children, getting involved in multigenerational estate and power disputes that would be written up in The New York Times. I had never belonged to him or to his world, but for a brief moment, I had his attention and the vicarious net worth it conferred on me.
So I had accidentally on purpose kissed my temporary best friend, and some wag in the room had said Oops! and then a few people had laughed.
Coming to my senses, I glanced around to see who’d been watching—short answer: everyone—and then caught the look on the face of my heretofore beloved Miss Gambone, who adored and promoted and believed in me, who was just on the verge of casting—typecasting?—me as Sally Bowles. My champion, my surrogate stage mother, the one who knew my true worth and would launch me into my future stardom.
Her face was terrible. Narrow eyes, pursed lips, broad head shaking. A face of unvarnished scorn and profound judgment. Not a blessing—its exact opposite.
I was very familiar with the look.
Thank you, Sandhya, for this. Every time I read one of your essays, (I may have stated this before) I feel as if I'm present with you ... a free time travel experience. This particular story rekindled so many memories because of the references to Broadway Musicals. My parents attended nearly every production of the '50's, '60's and some '70's and also brought home the cast recordings. Recently I've come across many of the Playbills of performances I've attended, musical and straight drama. I'm waiting till things calm down a bit more before I venture into Manhattan. Miss you!