The Fat Lady Sings
The Fat Lady Sings
Books
Scene 1
I'm not saying they aren't gorgeous -- who could miss that fact when she's wearing a top cut so low it's a wonder her naval ring doesn't get caught in the neckline. Whoever her plastic surgeon is does great work. But they're still fake. How do I know? How can anybody not know? Little Miss A-cup is "out sick" for the week after her eighteenth and when she comes back she's busting out all over. What was she sick with? Boob mumps?
"What do you want for your eighteenth, Cynthia honey?"
"Boobs, stepdaddy who's desperately trying to buy my affection."
"Anything for you, pumpkin."
What a charming domestic drama. Makes me want to puke.
You probably want to know why I even care about Cynthia Pirelli's boobs. What about you, Aggie, I hear you saying. You have big boobs, too. True -- but I also have big arms, a big neck, big thighs, and a big butt. No, let me rephrase that, a huge butt. You see, I'm fat. Not pudgy or robust or big-boned or any of the other things the "nice" people try to call you when you're looking in the mirror or dreading the showers after gym class. I'm fat, plain and simple.
Fat. On good days I embrace that word; on good days if someone calls me fat I slap my butt and say, "You bet, and proud of every pound!" On good days every jiggle makes me giggle and I love who I am. And then there are the bad days. On bad days "fat" is a four-letter word; "fat" is everything that is wrong with me and this school and the world. On bad days, fat sucks!
There are two other really annoying things about Cynthia Pirelli.
First of all, she's good at math. Not just so-so, "she could skate along with no effort and get a B" good, but "she could teach the class" good. This is a problem because I suck at math, but I'm taking AP Calculus because Miss O'Brien, the college counselor, says it will "look good on my applications" (am I ever sick of that phrase).
"If you want to go top tier, you've got to have AP Calculus," she told me. I don't care what tier I end up in; I just want to go someplace with an amazing theatre program, but I'm not taking any chances, so I signed up for the stupid class.
So now I'm stuck in it, and the problem is that Cynthia Pirelli, in spite of her fake boobs, is really nice about helping me, even if I text her at two o'clock in the morning when I'm brain fried and don't know my integrals from my differentials. I know this might not seem like a problem, but because of the boobs and the last thing I'm going to tell you, I would very much like to hate Cynthia Pirelli. Her helping me out with calculus, and being so nice about it, makes that hard.
But not impossible.
The last thing you need to know is that Cynthia Pirelli can't act. I realize there's nothing particularly hate-worthy about that. Plenty of perfectly nice people can't act. My step-dad, Karl, for instance, and he's a gay man, so you'd think --
The problem is not simply that Cynthia can't act. It's that in spite of that fact, in spite of the fact that she's probably never been in a play in her life, in spite of the fact that I've been to every audition of my high school career and spent three years in the chorus and playing Messenger Number Three to reach this moment, my moment, Cynthia is, at this very instant, standing on stage auditioning for the part of Dolly Levi -- a role I have been preparing for since birth. And she's reading opposite Roger Morton. Roger Morton! And neither Roger nor Mr. Parkinson seem to notice that she can't act because they're staring at her fresh-out-of-the-oven boobs. I swear Mr. Parkinson is actually drooling. Drooling! I can see it shining in the stage lights like a beacon of moronosity. OK, that's probably not a word, but you get my point.
"Couldn't act her way out of a wet paper bag with a sharpened stick," says Cameron, leaning across my seat at the back of the auditorium. "Nice boobs, though."
"They're fake," whispers Suzanne.
"Well, duh," says Elliot, "But still -- "
"You get what you pay for," says Cameron, eyes on the cleavage.
I stab Cameron in the side with my elbow. What does he care about cleavage anyway?
Crap. Mr. Hart, my English teacher,
says the first character I introduce in a story should be the protagonist, and here I am rattling on about Cynthia Pirelli's boobs. Cynthia is not the protagonist. That would be me.
I'm Agatha Stockdale. Horrible name, right? Apparently my mom read these Agatha Christie mystery novels through the whole pregnancy and "just loved the name." My dad wouldn't fight her on it because he felt guilty about -- well, you'll see. So, Agatha. I mean, if you're going to call me something old-fashioned, at least make it Hippolyta or Hermia or Beatrice -- something Shakespearean, something theatrical. But Agatha? Ugh! To the less tactful students of Piedmont Country Day School, I'm known as Butterball, Crisco, and, in their least imaginative moments, just "the fat girl," as in "shouldn't there be a beeping noise -- the fat girl is backing up." To my friends, all three of them, I'm Aggie.
I'm an actress. I'm also a writer. It's the only way I know to bring a modicum of order to my crazy-ass life. Cameron once called me OCD, but I don't touch parked cars or count how many times the letter "E" appears on a page, and God knows I'm not compulsively neat -- anything but. I just write -- blogs, e-mails, diaries, fan fiction, and occasionally even schoolwork. And sometimes, like when I'm trying to calm my nerves at an audition, I just write whatever I'm thinking.
Cameron has now been called on stage to read for Cornelius Hackl (gee, a gay Cornelius, that'll make for a swell show), Suzanne has gone up to the booth to adjust the lights, and Elliot has moved to the front row (to get a better view of the cleavage miracles of modern science, I'm guessing), so I am sitting here alone writing while I wait for Mr. Parkinson to come to his senses and ask me to read for Dolly.
On the application to the Carnegie Mellon
Summer Theatre Program, which I tragically did not get into, you had to write an essay explaining why you love the theatre (I guess if you're willing to spend your summer in a dark room in Pittsburgh while everyone else is in the mountains or at the beach or schlepping across Europe, they assume you love the theatre).
For me, it started when I was eight years old spending the summer with my dad while my mom went "on vacation" (that's what they told me. I found out later she was in a rehab center trying unsuccessfully to dry out). Most dads leave their wives for a hot young girl. Mine left for a hot young guy. I didn't exactly get it at the time. I just thought "Uncle Karl" was this cool guy who lived with Dad to cut down on expenses or something. I was probably twelve before I started to catch on.
My parents' marriage wasn't one of those "gay guy marries his hag because they both want to have children and who else is he going to have them with," or one of those "gay guy marries his hag because they promised that if they both made it to thirty without a serious relationship they'd get married and what the hell, tickets to Vegas are only $199." No, my parents' marriage was more like, "she's never heard the word 'hag' and he went to a Catholic high school and got convinced he could 'cure' his gayness and he did 'cure' it until she got pregnant and they went to birthing class together and he met her gynecologist." So I guess you could say that I introduced my dad to Karl.
I lead a split life -- half the time with my dad and Karl in their restored historic house and half the time in a past-itsprime ranch with my mom. Dad offered to co-sign on a loan so she could buy a nicer place, but she said she wouldn't take any of his F-ing charity. She said it just like that, "I won't take any of his F-ing charity," like not saying the whole word somehow made it better. Mom's funny that way. She'll rant and rave about Dad and say all sorts of awful things about him and then call him an F-ing S.O.B. I mean the word's not what's bad, right? It's the meaning, and Mom can pack as much meaning into one "F" as anyone I know can put behind a whole word. Of course that's all when she's been drinking. When she's sober she doesn't talk much.
Anyway, falling in love with the theatre. I was eight and Karl was falling all over himself to try to be Mr. Super-Stepdad, so one Saturday night he took me to see his cousin play the role of Drake in a summer stock production of
Annie.
Oh! My! God! I had never seen live theatre before -- I mean my notion of entertainment up to that point was pretty much
Reading Rainbow
and
SpongeBob.
I was totally blown away. And on top of it being my first show and everything, I was feeling all abandoned and alone with Mom gone, and when that girl started singing about the sun coming out tomorrow, I completely lost it. I mean, she was me. I was Annie. Karl looked at me at the end of the number and saw that I was sobbing -- tears literally falling off my chin. He tried to take me out to the lobby, but I refused to budge. I was hooked.
OK, yes, I realize now that it's sappy and stupid and not exactly serious theatre, but I was eight, all right? It made an impression.
So Karl started taking me to the theatre. I'd sit through anything -- Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams (which was no more sordid than my own family life), but my favorites were the musicals. And then a year later we saw Karl's cousin play Ambrose Kemper in
Hello, Dolly!
Well, I might have felt like Annie was who I was, but Dolly was who I wanted to be. She was always confident and always smiling and always sure that everything would work out and that she would be the cause -- I wanted that to be me. I wanted to be as sure of happiness as Dolly was. If I were Dolly, my parents would get back together. If I were Dolly I wouldn't be fat. And if I were Dolly, the cute boy in the second row would like me. Because third grade was the first time I ever saw Roger Morton.
"Aggie! You're up," hisses Cameron.
Crap! I have this way of disappearing into my thoughts, writing in my head or whatever, and the outside world kind of goes all fuzzy. Not a great idea at an audition, but I gather myself and pick up a script from the table and I take the stage -- and I mean TAKE the stage. I'm channeling every grand dame I've ever seen on stage or screen, from Greta Garbo to Margaret Morgan from our local community theatre, who gets every old-lady part from Mrs. Potts to Mrs. Paroo. "Dignity," I say to myself, "always dignity."