Dyan Sheldon - Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

“Mrs Higgins!” screamed Mrs Baggoli. “Mrs Higgins, will you please take your place on stage!”

Carla turned around, her beautiful face flushed with embarrassment and confusion. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Mrs Baggoli,” she gushed. “I didn’t hear you. I was so wrapped up in perfecting my tone.”

Although Carla acted as though this announcement was something worthy of the evening news, Mrs Baggoli took the information in her stride. Carla was still constantly perfecting something at rehearsals. If it wasn’t her tone, or her accent, or her motivation, it was someone else’s. Professor Higgins walked out once because Carla suggested that he didn’t understand his own character. Personally, if she didn’t stop trying to help me with my performance I was going to have to kill her.

“Try perfecting your tone on stage,” said Mrs Baggoli. She looked over at me as I got into position in the wings. “No script today, Lola?”

I shook my head. “I think I know it cold.” I should have. I’d been doing nothing else every night for weeks. If I hesitated over a line for a nanosecond, Carla would start hissing it at me.

Mrs Baggoli smiled.

Carla gave me a scornful look, threw her script on a chair, and climbed up on the stage.

We were going through Act Five, where Henry Higgins goes to his mother’s house after Eliza leaves him and discovers that she’s there.

Mrs Baggoli took a seat in the front row. “All right,” she called. “Let’s start where Mrs Higgins tells Henry and Pickering why Eliza left.”

Carla started off. Even I had to admit that she was a good Mrs Higgins. Probably because they were both used to bossing the servants around. Jon started to come in too soon and cut Carla off in mid-sentence. She sighed and gave Mrs Baggoli a look filled with patient suffering. Mrs Baggoli told her to start again.

Carla started again but stopped almost immediately. She had a question about Mrs Higgins’s feelings. Mrs Baggoli told her to trust her instincts. This time both Jon and Andy got a few lines in before Carla had a question about Henry Higgins’s character. I relaxed. This was Carla’s big scene. It would take hours.

I drifted off again, thinking about the concert. I had everything more or less worked out. Ella and I had agreed to tell our mothers that we were spending the night with each other. I know a lot about celebrity parties, and they never end till eight in the morning. That meant we could go straight to the station after the party, and be back in Dellwood in time for lunch. Simple but foolproof. Getting into the show wasn’t a big deal. It would wipe out my personal savings, but I figured I had enough for a ticket from a tout, the train fare, cabs and necessary nourishment. But I hadn’t done much thinking about clothes, which, as Carla had been pointing out ad nauseam , were particularly important. Should I look elegant and sophisticated like the models and movie stars Stu Wolff usually hangs out with? Or should I look natural and unpretentious but unique, so he’d know right away that I was different to other girls? I was still mulling this over when I realized that Mrs Baggoli was calling me.

“Lola! Lola!”

I looked over. Everyone was staring at me, but the only one who wasn’t smiling was Mrs Baggoli. “Lola!” she repeated. “That was your cue!”

“Maybe you shouldn’t put your script away just yet,” advised Carla.

The house was in its usual state of hysterical chaos when I got home. My family may be hopelessly ordinary, but they’re not quiet. My mother and my sisters were in the kitchen, screaming at each other. Two of them were crying. None of them paid any attention to me.

I stood in the doorway for a few seconds, thinking of poor, only-child Ella, all alone in her big quiet house with her doting parents listening to her every word. Boo hoo.

My close female relatives suddenly noticed me standing there. Not that it occurred to them to say “Hello” or “How are you?” or anything like that. Instead, the three of them immediately began telling me what had happened as quickly and loudly as they could. It was hard to follow – and not worth the trip. As far as I could make out, Pam took something of Paula’s and broke it, so Paula hit Pam, so Pam ran crying to my mother, so my mother yelled at Paula, so Paula started crying, and then, while my mother was giving them Lectures 288 and 289: Sharing and Violence, Pam threw an apple at Paula and my mother whacked Pam with the dish-towel.

“Ah, Lola,” I shouted into the general din. “How was your day? How did rehearsals go? What will you be wearing on opening night?”

Paula and Pam kept shrieking, but my mother stopped talking and looked at me for less time than it takes a spark to die in a tornado.

“I should think you’d be wearing your costume on opening night.”

I gestured despairingly. “I mean after . At the cast party.”

“This isn’t Broadway,” said my mother. “You have a closet full of clothes. Wear whatever you want.”

What I wanted was a drop-dead gorgeous dress that would make me look twenty-five and so sophisticated I should have a perfume named after me.

“But everyone’s going to be really dressed up,” I informed her. “Carla Santini—”

“Please,” begged my mother. “Not Carla Santini again. Isn’t there anyone else at your school?”

You’d think she actually listened to me now and then.

“It’s my big night,” I reminded her. “I want to look right.”

“Forget it,” said my mother. “There’s no way you’re getting a new dress, Mary. Last week it was the boiler, and this week it’s the car. I can’t afford it.”

“Who asked?” I snapped back. “I didn’t ask for anything. God knows I would never expect anyone in this house to worry about me . To care about how I look on one of the most important days of my life. I’ll just don my usual rags, shall I? Maybe you’d like me to wear a bag over my head as well. That way no one will be able to report you to the NSPCC for neglect of a minor.”

Paula looked at my mother. “What’s Mary talking about?”

My mother rolled her eyes.

Pam looked at me. “Why are you wearing a bag over your head? How are you going to be able to see?”

My mother patted Pam’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, honey,” she said kindly. “Mary can cut eyes in the bag.”

“How typical!” I proclaimed. “How typical that you would mock me in my torment.”

“What does torment mean?” asked Paula as I turned on my heels and marched from the room.

“It means Mary’s had a bad day,” said my mother.

Ella hadn’t thought about what she was wearing, either.

“I’m trying not to think about it,” she admitted. “I get cold chills every time I do. It makes it seem so real.” She shuddered. “I just know something’s going to go wrong.”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” I assured her. “My plan is awesome in its simplicity.”

Ella would ask her mother if she could stay over at my house; I’d ask my mother if Ella could stay at ours. Mrs Gerard would call my mother to make sure it was all right. Then, after that was all settled, I’d tell my mother we’d changed our minds and I was going to Ella’s instead. My mother would never think of calling Mrs Gerard to make sure it was all right. She’d just assume that it was.

I flopped down on the couch beside Ella. Mrs Gerard wasn’t there. Mrs Gerard was taking a course in aromatherapy. She said essential oils helped her to de-stress. I couldn’t see that Mrs Gerard had the kind of life that stressed you out, but, as the great philosophers say, everything is relative.