Marcia Talley - Dead Man Dancing

‘Don’t be silly, Chloe, you’ll squish your aunt’s sore leg.’

‘Are they going to let us in soon?’ she wondered.

‘I certainly hope so.’

‘I have to go to the bathroom.’

‘It shouldn’t be long now.’ I could have used a chair or the bathroom myself, but the previous evening Hutch and Melanie had appropriated our camp stools. When we arrived at seven, we’d spied the pair hunkered down under the marquee with all the other shivering hopefuls. Over their heads, draped from one end of the marquee to the other was an enormous banner: Baltimore Welcomes Shall We Dance 2008! We’d given our team a thumb’s up sign before hurrying around the corner to take our places in the audience line.

At seven forty-five, leaving Chloe in Eva’s care, I decided to bop out front and check up on Hutch and Melanie.

I found Hutch dozing, his head leaning at an impossible, and most certainly uncomfortable angle against the wall. In contrast, Melanie seemed bright as a sparrow. ‘We’re fine, Hannah,’ Melanie chirped when I asked. She extended her right arm, pulled up the sleeve of her parka. Circling her wrist was a white plastic wristband like the kind you get when they admit you to the hospital. Instead of name, date of birth, doctor’s name and blood type, though, Melanie’s wristband said ‘22’. ‘Hutch is number twenty-one,’ she told me, her face flushed with excitement. ‘We could be in the first round!’

Curious about who had snagged spots one through twenty, I glanced up the line. Dancers one and two were no more than eighteen years old, sporting faux-hawk hairdos and dressed in baggy, saggy hip hop clothing. They guarded their number one slot at the plastic door of an elegant white tent with Palladian-style windows, the kind of tent one rents for wedding receptions and bar mitzvahs. Through the windows, rippled by the plastic, I could see other individuals working in their neon green shirtsleeves. Portable heaters in there, I bet. Lucky dogs.

Further down the line couples waited, some in costumes, some in street clothes, some in outfits so strange it could have gone either way. ‘Are they going to let you change?’ I asked Melanie, thinking of all the time and expense that would go down the drain if they couldn’t wear their costumes.

‘We’ll have the use of dressing rooms, don’t worry.’ She flapped her arms like a scarecrow and laughed. ‘Can you see me dancing a tango in this outfit? The Sta-Puf marshmallow girl meets the Michelin Man.’

I laughed at the image, too. ‘Can I get you guys something to eat?’

‘No thanks. After they gave us the wristbands and collected our forms, they said only one of us had to be in line at all times. So, when the sun came up, Hutch hiked up to Lexington Market – I was absolutely drooling for a Pollock Johnny’s hot dog, all the way, you know, with chili, mustard and that secret stuff they put on it, but, darn it, the market doesn’t open until eight thirty. So I ate some of the chips we brought along.’

She delivered this information in one long, breathless sentence. I felt exhausted just listening. It reminded me of the difference in our ages. Melanie was younger than my daughter, Emily. She probably even knew the names of Brittany Spears’s babies.

My cell phone abruptly launched into ‘Anchors Aweigh’.

Paul. ‘Where are you, Hannah? They’re about to open the doors.’

‘Hold on, I’m coming!’ I gave Melanie a hug, waggled my fingers in the direction of the still napping Hutch, and sprinted to rejoin my family.

By the time I got around the corner, green-shirted SWD staff had already opened the box-office doors and admitted the first group of ten audience members, counting heads as each person went in. When it was our group’s turn, Eva pushed Ruth, and I held Chloe’s hand, with Paul bringing up the rear.

Inside the lobby, adjacent to The Hipp Café (closed, alas, the muffaletta panini is to die for) the organizers had set up a sophisticated security screening station, like at the airport. Before we could enter the theater, we had to pass through a metal detector, beyond which I could see other uniformed staff seated at long tables pawing through audience members’ bags. ‘Are we flying Southwest to Dallas, or coming to see a television show?’ I muttered to Paul as he joined me on the other side of the detector.

While a guard searched her wheelchair for explosive devices and her crutches for switchblade knives, Ruth hopped one-footed through the metal detector. Paul reached out for Ruth’s hand, tucked it under his arm to lend support. ‘Count your blessings, Hannah. If the doctors had needed to put pins in Ruth’s leg, we might never have gotten to see the show.’

‘Ha ha,’ Ruth said. She turned to the guard who had just given the seal of approval to her crutches. ‘Look, I can’t bear messing with that blasted wheelchair in the auditorium. I’m just fine with these,’ she said, adjusting the crutches under her arms. ‘Can you stow the chair someplace until the show is over?’

The guard pressed a button on his walkie-talkie, and a green-shirted staffer arrived almost at once to give Ruth a receipt and take charge of the wheelchair.

We turned over our bags for inspection – even Angelina Ballerina – and after they had been blessed, we were moved along like cattle to a section of the lobby that had been cordoned off with velvet ropes. Once some sort of critical mass was reached – Twenty-five? Thirty? – another SWD staffer unhooked a rope, gave us a come-along sign, and escorted our group into the theater.

‘Oh, wow!’ exclaimed Eva as we traipsed single-file down the aisle behind the staffer. Like me, Eva must have been stunned by the lavish, art deco beauty of the place. Balconies with curtained box seats were stacked to our right and to our left. Behind and above us rose an ornate, multi-layered balcony.

‘I’m glad we came early,’ Eva said as we filed into a row of old-fashioned, red velvet seats. ‘If I’d been in charge of the scheduling, we’d be back in row FF instead of up front in row K.’

Ruth settled into a seat at row’s end, her cast extending into the aisle like a turnstile. ‘Look at this,’ she said as she adjusted her leg. ‘The seat ends are wrought iron. What do they remind you of, Hannah?’

I leaned over for a closer look and smiled. It didn’t take much imagination to see what Ruth saw. ‘The legs on Grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine!’

Paul sat next to Ruth, then came Eva, Chloe and me. ‘Grandma, we have to move!’ cried Chloe just as we were shrugging out of our coats and settling in. ‘This seat already belongs to somebody. See?’ She rubbed a chubby index finger back and forth over a brass plaque attached to the wooden armrest.

‘We don’t have to move, Pumpkin. That’s the name of somebody who donated money to adopt your chair.’

‘My chair is adopted?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘That’s silly.’

‘Do you have your notebook?’ I asked, trying to distract my granddaughter from what was likely to be a discussion of every adopted child among her classmates and every pet we’d ever adopted from the SPCA. We’d taken Chloe out of school for the day on the condition she write a report on her experience. ‘Look up, Chloe,’ I said, and pointed toward the stage. ‘Way, way, up.’

Above the stage was a classical mural – goddesses, muses and nymphs cavorting, or at the very least lounging about an Italian walled garden. The central figure bore a striking resemblance to Jackie O, if the former first lady had gone in for diaphanous robes rather than Oleg Cassini. ‘Write a story about that picture,’ I suggested.

‘OK.’ Chloe hauled out her notebook and a pencil and set to work.