Simply Alice Read online

  The Weinsteins and some of the cast sang “Shalom Aleichem,” which Mrs. Weinstein explained means “Peace Be Unto You,” and after that Kurt’s dad filled a silver cup with wine and recited the Kiddush. Finally, after lifting the challah bread in the air and reciting a blessing, he cut off a piece for everyone, explaining that the blade of the knife should always tip inward, toward the table, not outward, toward the guests.

  Then we ate—roast chicken, gefilte fish, chicken soup, kugel… . There were more Sabbath prayers and hymns as the evening went on, ending with “Ein K’Elokenu”—“None Is Like Our Lord.” As our parting gift to the Weinsteins, the cast sang one of the songs from Fiddler, the “Sabbath Prayer,” and I had to blink and swallow, it was so moving.

  The great-grandfather, in a voice we could hardly hear, said his Friday nights would never be the same after that. Neither would ours. Sharing the Sabbath with a family who truly understood the traditions would help us make Fiddler on the Roof all the more convincing.

  • • •

  The night of the first performance was gorgeous. Soft April-smelling breezes blew over the parking lot, and a half moon illuminated the cast members who ran into the building, holding their costumes over their arms, calling out to one another. The whole place was a buzz of excitement.

  I loved the energy of it. Faith and I set about checking every prop to make sure it was in place—every chair, every pitcher, every bottle or basket or barrel just exactly where it was supposed to be, so there would be no surprises for the cast once the curtain rose. Molly and the guys were checking the lights, the microphones, the speakers—testing, retesting—and I fell right in beside them, helping out, forcing Richard to look at me so he could see I had survived my humiliation. I can’t say he was exactly chummy, but that was okay with me.

  The orchestra members were filing in, and now and then an instrument would tune up, then two or three at a time, making an awful racket. Faith and I peeked out from behind the curtain as the auditorium filled, families with young children in tow, parents carrying cameras for picture-taking afterward, friends of cast members coming in groups and sitting down near the front, everyone talking and calling out to one another, changing seats, long-legged guys stepping over the backs of one row to get to another.

  Backstage, one of the girls had ripped her skirt, and Molly and I were desperately trying to find enough safety pins to make a new seam. Tevye had a headache, one of the cossacks had the flu, someone had taken the menorah off to be polished and it wasn’t where it was supposed to be, one of the microphones was whistling, and Charlene Verona was being a pill. She had discovered herself. Again.

  Just as Molly and I were trying to get our hands inside the skirt without making the girl take it off, Charlene appeared at our elbows, all aglow, and said, “Isn’t mauve the perfect eye shadow for me?”

  I looked at her and then at Molly as I took another safety pin from my mouth, but Molly couldn’t help herself. “Charlene,” she said, “did you ever hear of Galileo?”

  Charlene looked at her nonplussed. “What?”

  “How the earth’s not the center of the universe?” Molly continued.

  “Of course!” Charlene’s brow wrinkled even more.

  “Well, neither are you,” said Molly. “We’ve got a hundred problems here. Be helpful. If you can’t be helpful, could you at least be quiet?”

  Charlene flounced off, but I don’t think I could have said that in a million years. The menorah reappeared, polished, the skirt got pinned, somebody gave Tevye a Tylenol, an understudy took the cossack’s part, and we all gathered in the wings.

  “Break a leg,” cast members whispered laughingly to one another—the good-luck blessing among actors.

  I decided to focus my second article for The Edge on the tension backstage before the curtain rises—the assorted worries running through people’s heads: Are all the props in place? Do I need a cough drop? Is my fly zipped? Can I remember the words to the second verse?

  The orchestra director took his place in the pit and was going through the official tune-up now. It looked to us as though almost all the seats were filled. Then Harry got the signal to dim the house lights, the audience quieted down, and at last we heard the familiar strains of the lone violin.

  The scene onstage was an open view of Tevye and Golde’s hut, their yard to one side, and a backdrop of trees and other small huts in the village. There would be nine scene changes in act one and eight in act two, so the stage crew really had to hustle. When the lights onstage went off completely, we had to help the actors get to their places without falling over anything, so that when the lights came on again, there they were, the village was going about its business, and Tevye launched into the opening song, “Tradition.”

  When he sang “If I Were a Rich Man,” the audience began clapping along to the rhythm halfway through, and that seemed to make him strut even more. I realized then how the audience takes part in a production—how they react to what’s onstage and the cast responds to their reaction. I’d remember to put that in one of my articles. And when he ended at last on the phrase “ … If I were a wealthy man,” it brought down the house. Later, when the rousing “To Life” was sung by all the guys, the audience really got into it and clapped in time much of the way through. Backstage we all smiled at each other, relieved that it was going so well.

  There were some glitches, of course, and we just hoped the audience didn’t notice. A boy’s beard came unglued and dangled off one side of his face, and another guy’s pillow had slid so far down his abdomen, we were afraid it would slip out the bottom of his tunic.

  “Grab that guy the minute he comes offstage and fix that pillow,” Faith whispered to me, and I was able to get it tied in place again.

  Tevye’s daughters sang beautifully, even Charlene, I had to admit. We were eager to see how the audience would react to the ghost scene, where Lazar Wolf’s dead wife supposedly speaks to Tevye in a dream. Some of the cast, dressed in white sheets, came moaning and keening down the aisle toward the stage while the ghost of the dead wife shrieked out her warning, seated high in the opening of the projection booth at the back.

  The audience did just what we wanted them to do—turned and gasped—and that song got great applause, too. In all, the first night went off just as it should. Everyone whistled and clapped and cheered when it was over, loudest of all for Tevye, and after the cast took their bow, the stage crew were called out, so we linked hands and sort of line-danced our way across the stage in our black jeans and T-shirts, and then the orchestra took the applause and, last of all, the director. One performance down, three to go.

  Dad and Lester came the second night. They were sitting in the second row off to one side. I was watching from behind the curtain when Tevye and Golde were singing “Sunrise, Sunset,” and was surprised to see my father furtively wipe tears off his cheek. Was he thinking about how he would feel when I married? I wondered. Or was he thinking of Sylvia? Of Mom? I saw Eric there too, sitting on the other side of the auditorium, and he came around afterward long enough to tell me we’d done a good job on the scenery and props.

  “You think you cccc-can squeeze me in some w-w-weekend when this is over?” he asked.

  I smiled. “I’ll ask my secretary,” I joked. “It can probably be arranged.”

  One of the cast members drove me home, and Dad and Lester were still up, making grilled cheese sandwiches.

  “How did you like it?” I asked eagerly. “You had good seats.”

  “So close, we got spittle on us all through ‘If I Were a Rich Man,’” Lester said.

  “Orchestra was terrific, Al! And everyone sang with such enthusiasm. It was great!” Dad said.

  “I especially liked the part where a stagehand came out to move a bench between scenes—one of the girls, I think, about your size, actually—and when she bent over we noticed a rip in her pants,” said Lester.

  “What?” I cried.

  “Relax,” said Dad. “It n
ever happened.”

  I gave Lester a look, and after he went to bed I said, “Are you disappointed in me, Dad, because I can’t sing? I really wish I could have been out there onstage, in the chorus, even.”

  “If you could carry a tune, you wouldn’t be you now, would you? And I wouldn’t change you for the world,” he said.

  How is it that fathers can word things exactly right?

  “Well, I wouldn’t change you for the world, either,” I said, and gave him a hug. “Maybe in another life I’ll come back as a canary. Or maybe I’ll sing at the Met.”

  “I’ll settle for whatever you do in this one,” Dad said.

  The whole gang came the fourth night of the production. Charlene, of course, went around backstage before the performance, hugging everyone, getting ready for her bawl when it was finally over, I guess. We noticed that friends of cast members in the audience came carrying single roses and bouquets to give to them afterward, and someone rushed backstage to say that all the programs were gone. We had a full house.

  I suppose the final performance is always difficult because you know you’re doing it for the last time. The audience was even more enthusiastic, and every actor seemed to be adding little flourishes to his performance. We were missing three understudies, including Charlene’s—the flu was making the rounds—but the original cast onstage seemed healthy, and we had only this last night to finish.

  During intermission, though, Charlene, in her usual “watch me” mode, was using backstage as a dance floor. Her face set in concentration as though she wasn’t aware that Mr. Ellis was about and that people were watching her, she folded her arms across her chest and went whirling around and around, her full skirt twirling about her. Then, using every ballet step she knew, she went leaping from one end to the other, but when she turned to go back, she danced too close to a ladder lying on the floor and caught her foot behind a rung. She stumbled, twisting her leg, and fell to the floor.

  I knew she had been trying to show Mr. Ellis that she could not only sing, she could dance. But I hadn’t expected this!

  She howled, and Ed and Devon ran to pick her up, but she was really in pain and somebody joked, “Hey, Charlene, when I said, ‘Break a leg,’ I didn’t mean it!”

  Mr. Ellis came over then and examined her ankle, which was beginning to swell.

  “It’s okay,” Charlene kept saying, clenching her teeth. “I can go on, Mr. E.”

  But when she tried to stand up and put her weight on it, she couldn’t. Suddenly Mr. Ellis grabbed my arm. “Alice, you’re going to have to be Tzeitel in the second act,” he said. “Charlene’s understudy is sick.”

  “What?” I cried.

  “You’ve got her hair, her build. You’ve been here enough, you know what to do.”

  “Mr. Ellis, I can’t sing!” I croaked.

  “You don’t have to. She doesn’t have any songs in the second act, and you can lip-synch along with the chorus. If you don’t know what to do, fake it.”

  Charlene started to cry, and I almost cried with her. I had to admit that of everyone else on stage, I probably looked most like Charlene, and yes, I knew where she stood and what she did, which wasn’t much in the second act. But …

  There was no time for buts. We were already late with Act Two. Charlene cried all the while she took off her costume, and really sobbed as she handed it to me. I was numb with terror. One of her friends handed her a robe we kept backstage, and another located her parents in the audience. Ten minutes later, Charlene was on her way to Holy Cross Hospital, and I was tying her kerchief under my hair in back, and smoothing my apron over the long gingham skirt, wondering if I was going to throw up.

  The guy who played Tevye came over and put one arm around me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll guide you around the stage. Just act like you belong there and no one will know the difference.”

  I would swear that when the curtain rose for Act Two, I heard Pamela gasp, “That’s Alice!”

  I think I went through the whole second act in a trance. I could see the scenes in my mind, and could sort of place where Tzeitel stood, the few places where she had a line to say. Once, when I missed it, somebody else said it for me and it didn’t really matter. I was never, ever, so glad to hear the final chorus, “Anatevka,” and suddenly I began to feel loose and relaxed, and lip-synched my way through it as though I were singing my heart out. I could see Elizabeth and Pamela and Mark and Brian and Penny and Patrick staring at me in amazement from the fourth row. And then I realized that at least part of Lester’s interpretation of my dream had come true: I had done something scary I’d never done before, but I didn’t fall flat on my face.

  To make the whole thing worse for Charlene, I got the bouquets intended for her, and when Tevye’s three daughters held hands and came forward for their own special bow, my friends went crazy and cheered and clapped as though I’d been the star, which was almost embarrassing, but of course everyone else had friends there cheering for them, too. Molly and Faith grabbed me after the final curtain and gave me a hug. “You looked half scared to death, but with the villagers being scattered to the four winds, that was exactly right,” Faith said, and we laughed.

  When the gang gathered backstage, I had to explain how it had happened, and how I’d lip-synched along with the chorus, and then we went out into the hall where parents and friends were taking pictures and cast members were autographing programs. When people came up to me for my autograph, I had no choice but to write “Tzeitel” beside Charlene’s name, and only one of them asked if I was the same girl who played it in Act One. Worse yet for Charlene, Sam was there taking pictures of the cast for the yearbook, and we all went back up onstage and posed for a couple of scenes. My name would appear under the stage crew listing, of course, but my picture would appear over Charlene’s name.

  Mr. E. said the stage crew would be expected to come back to school the next day and strike the set, but that we were all going to enjoy the cast party that night. I took off Charlene’s costume because I wanted to go in my black jeans and T-shirt as part of the stage crew. We all piled in the cars of the juniors and seniors and drove to the home of the girl who played Golde, where her parents had prepared refreshments.

  It was loud and noisy and fun, and there were a lot of silly awards given out—the person who came late to rehearsals most times, the person who took longest to learn his lines—and I was delighted to receive an award for “Most Grace Under Pressure,” for filling in for Charlene. We laughed at all the things that had gone wrong, the last-minute changes the audience didn’t know about, and then we presented Mr. E. with a miniature gold-plated fiddle that I had ordered specially through the Melody Inn.

  It was one of the best times I’d ever had, and it wasn’t until the end, when the cast sang “Sunrise, Sunset,” as our final tribute to our director, that I realized Faith hadn’t come to the party, and I would have bet my last dollar that it was Ron who had kept her away.

  9

  Clearing the Air

  I woke up the next morning smiling at the mementos I saw strewn about my room: the black T-shirt with FIDDLER on the back. A bunch of flowers. A program. A poster. A black balloon from the party. I wandered around in my pajamas pinning things to my bulletin board, taping the poster to the wall. When I went down to breakfast, Lester had gone to play volleyball with some of his buddies, and Dad was looking up painters in the yellow pages because he wanted to have the inside of the house done before Sylvia came back in June.

  “Have a nice time at the cast party?” he asked.

  “Yes! I’ve made a whole new bunch of friends,” I said. “A lot more people I can say hi to in the halls.”

  “It’s nice to see you bloom, Al,” Dad said.

  “Huh?”

  “Bloom. Blossom. Spread your wings.”

  Fathers are so strange sometimes. With Dad I’m either a flower or a bird.

  “I’m going back to school today and help strike the set. I’ll take the city bus
,” I told him.

  “Okay, hon. It’s just you and me for dinner tonight. Les will be out. Why don’t we go somewhere? What appeals?”

  “Let’s try something we’ve never had before,” I suggested.

  “Okay. You pick the restaurant,” said Dad.

  When I got to the high school, most of the crew were there, and it was like another party, but less rowdy. Mr. E. had brought pizza and Cokes for us, and while the guys dismantled the sets, the girls were packing up props, sorting out things from the school’s storeroom, boxing up the things we had borrowed from other people. Even Richard and Devon were more friendly toward me.

  Mr. E. stayed until the backdrops were down and dismantled, and asked if we could finish on our own, which, of course, we could.

  “Hey, Faith, missed you at the party,” Harry called over. “You should have come.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it,” Faith said, and sounded wistful.

  “What could be more important than a cast party?” Molly called from the other side of the stage, where she was wrapping up electrical cord.

  “Oh, Ron had other plans for us,” she said.

  Molly and I exchanged glances.

  We were just finishing the last of the pizza and were going to stack the scenery and take all the stuff to the storage room when we saw Ron walk in through a side door. He stood for a minute with his hands in his pockets, a toothpick between his lips. One of the guys had been teasing Faith, making her laugh, and Ron didn’t look too happy about that. He sauntered over, coming up behind Faith, and clapped one hand over her shoulder. “Hey, babe,” he said. “Let’s go.”