Bruce Wagner - I Met Someone

The amphitheater was graced with revolving sets of forest and castle hall, but the former, with its breeze-twitched bramble, carpet of leaves, and overhang of painted stars, was what captivated Aurora most. The excitable girl, more of a girl at forty than ever, sat in the audience beside her mother, thrilled to teeth and bone by the tin-rattled tempest — courtesy of the forearms of Sir Extra Large — that accompanied the drama. (The scudding drafts of the real storm kicked up their heels in delight at the tin-eared impersonation.) Her manic gaiety was such that Aurora temporarily forgot she had a part to play in the night’s ensemble; Dusty feared she’d spent a greater part of the week preoccupied more by habiliments than the learning of lines. But the resultant outfit, a sensational catchpenny mash-up of punk-royale fairydom, had well been worth it: a tiara of safety pins, waggles of black and bloodred tulle and chiffon, a vintage Belstaff biker jacket, tatty ermine stole, and enormous rhinestone-spangled butterfly wings. She spent hours scuffing her new Capezios, meticulously spattering them with paint, and carried a skull-knobbed scepter with a rocker’s hauteur — half Siouxsie Sioux, half Queen Cersei. Dusty had already emailed pictures to Vivienne Westwood, due in July as a houseguest.

So as not to try the patience of its audience nor the elements, Shakespeare’s romp had been condensed enough to be rendered more conceit than dream. As in the play, actors took on multiple roles, though more multiple in this show than likely meant by the author. The cast comprised manor employees, among them a shepherd (who made all the daughters swoon, as shepherds tend), a gardener’s apprentice (a close swoony second), and the son of a caretaker (not even in the running). A flock of Aurora’s carebirds — minders, P.T.s, and the like — rounded out the company, with hawk-like Edwina divebombing the coveted role of Titania. She proved herself far freer in expression and lighter on her feet than one would have guessed from her strict day-shift demeanor and fighting weight.

A crowd of around forty gathered to watch. When he wasn’t making sly asides to Dusty about how he should liked to have been cast — being a “natural Bottom” and all — Jeremy fought to keep hold of the lap-dancing Wyatt, while the au pair remained ever vigilant of a hand-off. About halfway through, a minder pulled Aurora backstage. When it came time, the shepherd (as Quince, whose beauty prompted Jeremy to remark on all kinds of jellies), addressed the Duke of Athens — though he made his speech directly to the movie star — begging permission to put on the storied playlet of the star-crossed lovers. The wall and the lion soon made their entrance to much applause, then the birthday girl made hers, to an acclamation so raucous it gave pause, even to the trees, who respectfully stopped their thrashing. Aurora blushed and curtsied, and the child’s play, with subtle accompaniment of strings, began. She acquitted herself of cherry-lipped lines whispered to Pyramus through the chink in the wall traditionally represented by scissored fingers — in this case, those of the apprentice gardener who got lost enough in his role to be paralyzed (pruned?) by an unexpected fit of stage fright, made infinitely worse by the traitorous sniggering of those fickle girls who not long before had hung on his every word (and eyelash), so much so that one of Aurora’s posse was forced to stand behind the lad and go unto the breach, dear friends, more than once more, by speaking his lines directly from the text held in the prompter’s hands. In summary, Pyramus saw Aurora-Thisbe’s voice, heard her face, and so forth; the catatonic hole in the wall was kissed by both parties, to an eruption of squeals from the iPhoneless lassies; the lion appeared (assuring the spectators he wasn’t a real lion — not to be alarmed); and at last, a pony Moon clomped dutifully forward, an LED lantern strung from its neck by a lanyard. The king of the forest, no longer defensive about his so-called lionhood and mindful of furthering the narrative, lurched at Aurora, who, in fleeing haste, dropped her scepter, which was promptly retrieved and handed back by the timorous wall itself. Jeremy perspicaciously shouted to Aurora not to forget to let the big cat have her scarf (one of the carebirds was about to address that very issue). The leonine poseur set to bloodying it with a mouthful of tomatoes — causing a hemorrhage of ewwwws! from the younger set — then both lion and girl ran off. The man on the moon, or in its saddle anyway, was left to pronounce his only words: “The lantern is the moon; I, the man in the moon; and this pony, my pony.” (There was, oddly, a shortage of wags, not of ponies.) Much hilarity was thrown at the players, which the banjo, violin, and zither caught, fluffed, and threw jauntily back. An ebullient Pyramus arrived on the scene but upon seeing the bloody scarf buffoonishly took his own life — though not without a gasp from a confused child toward the rear, which set off the car alarms of other baffled toddlers, which triggered a few five-alarm sirens in the form of bawling infants, etcetera, etcetera. When Aurora returned from the wings with a wing of her own inexplicably intact — she was no monarch after all — she saw her hapless love and said, “Asleep my love? What, dead my dove?” and proceeded to unpack the death speech in an effing, ineffably moving way, with a tragicomic flair that no one saw coming. She covered the dead man’s eyes, lips, nose, and cheeks in regret, and then, with that bloodied shroud; by the time she farewell’d her friends and bid the fabled three adieus, Dusty and Jeremy felt stabbed along with her.

A not too distant crack of thunder pretty much said it all.

Any prudish notion of shelter was abandoned as the audience jumped to its feet, roaring and stomping in approval. Onstage, everyone began to dance; the spectators ran up to join them. Through a path between the litter of tumbled folding chairs, Dusty, in pell-mell procession, was ushered to Aurora, and as her daughter led them in a rocky, rocked-out Dionysian jig, the mother’s heart nearly burst at the berserk and joyful travesty of this life. The au pair danced with the Wall, and Edwina with the carebirds; the oldest of the old, with the youngest of the young, and the XXXL, with the Extra Small; the pony moon tangoed amidst a tangle of squealing piglets; and Wyatt bounced on his daddy’s neck with pure, fierce pleasure as the skies emptied themselves, and Nature set about blasting all of Sussex in exaltation, determined to make more than some corner of a foreign field forever England.

—

Nine o’clock—

Aurora’s fast asleep, spent from the day. Her mother can’t remember the house ever being so peaceful at that hour…

Jeremy is off to London in the morning and Dusty needs to be up early to see him off. She loved that he came; it meant so much to Aurora as well. And having him here wasn’t like old times — they were making new times. New old times. Nostalgia could go fuck itself.

She felt hopeful, expansive, resilient.

Every few weeks, her assistant sent a pouch from the States with fan notes and whatnot. She had slacked off on writing people back — burned out. Jeremy said she should just post a video on her website (“Like Ringo did”) saying she was busy living her life and would no longer be responding to letters. “Fans need tough love too. But be sure you add ‘with peace and love’!” In the pouch this time was a folder with a faded Whitmore written on it, in Dusty’s hand. Her assistant found it tucked in a box in the Trousdale garage right before the house was sold. Inside were the letters her father had written from his final place of residence, a flophouse on South San Pedro in downtown L.A. She pulled them out but didn’t really have the energy for a comprehensive look. She plucked one at random.