Rapture Practice (36 page)

Crap. I don’t even know how to bring a headshot.

The young woman with the clipboard and the stack of photos hands me an information sheet to fill out, then walks behind a curtain toward where the stage must be.

I sit down and fill out the form. Name. Address. Phone number. Age. Height. Hair color. Previous experience.

Suddenly, I’m terrified. I don’t know why I came. I’m out of my league. It’s one thing to sing songs and do scenes in church for people who are amazed when anyone memorize lines and manages to quote them in order without forgetting.

What am I doing here?

I consider turning around and walking back to the car, but before I can, I hear my name being called. She’s back. With the clipboard. And she’s smiling, and motioning for me to follow her.

I stand and hand her my information sheet.

“Oh, no. Take that to the woman in the front row,” she says, smiling. She holds back the black curtain at the side of
the stage and indicates I should walk through it. “Break a leg!”

I take a step forward. I feel like I am going to throw up. Two more steps forward, and I see a handful of people sitting in the empty theater. Instantly, I feel my church smile snap into place.

Breathe. Shoulders back. You know how to stand on a stage.

There is a silver-haired man with a strong jaw sitting near the seats where I watched
A Christmas Carol
with my family. He seems to be in charge and has a couple of assistants. When he sees me come in, he looks away from the younger man who is whispering in his ear, and tilts his head toward the stage, but says nothing.

A woman in the front row calls out “Hello!” with a smile, and steps toward the stage. I walk to the edge of the platform and hand her my information sheet. She consults it briefly, then calls back to the silver-haired man. “This is Aaron Hartzler.”

“Hello, Aaron,” he calls out. “What are you going to perform for us today?”

I take a deep breath and call back in a strong voice that fills the space:

“I’ll be performing a selection from a humorous interpretation I did recently at the National Fine Arts Competition. It’s called ‘Before a Bakery Showcase.’ ”

“Very well,” says the white-haired man.

I see there is an X made of tape near the center of the stage.

That must be where I’m supposed to stand.

I walk toward the X until I am standing directly on it, and bow my head for a moment. I take a deep breath. When I raise my head, I am the fat lady from the piece, and I perform exactly as I have every other time.

Only this time is different.

This time no one laughs.

I try to assure myself it is because there are only four people in the room. Or perhaps it’s because they’ve seen this piece before. I try to stay in the moment of the piece. I try not to think about what they’re thinking about, but it’s almost impossible.

I had planned to do two characters from the piece, and when I’m done playing the fat lady, I bow my head and prepare to switch characters. Before I can begin the second character I hear a voice from the seats in the theater.

“Aaron?”

I raise my head.

They’re going to tell me to leave.

The man with the silver hair smiles at me from his seat, and holds up a finger. “One moment, please.”

He turns and whispers something to the woman sitting behind him, and then leans over to the younger man at his left, who picks up a legal pad and a pencil.

He turns back to me.

“Aaron, thank you for sharing that with us. Would you mind coming down here for a moment?”

My knees almost collapse.

“Sure,” I say. My heart is racing. I can feel sweat trickling
down my back under my white T-shirt and white dress shirt and Banana Republic tie.

I walk back to where the man with the silver hair is sitting. He indicates the seat next to him, and when I sit, he extends his hand to shake mine.

“Aaron, I’m George Keathley,” he says. I recognize his name instantly from the
Christmas Carol
playbill. He not only directed that show, he’s the artistic director of the entire theater. He’s directed shows in New York, and even a soap opera for several years. His voice is rich, and up close he seems younger than I expected him to be. His smile is kind and handsome.

I shake his hand. His assistant hands me the legal pad and offers me a pencil.

“Aaron, this is highly unusual. Typically, I don’t stop auditions like this, as we’re on a tight schedule, but I felt perhaps you could use a little direction. After all, I’m a director.” He smiles. “It’s what I do.”

“I’m all ears,” I say. He nods. I can tell he likes me.

“You are a good-looking young man. You have a presence on the stage and appear to be someone who may have a future in this business.”

I blink at him and smile, cautiously.

“Aaron, you should never perform that piece at an audition again. Whatever they have you doing in your high school drama class is one thing. In the theater, I can’t cast you as an obese woman, so there’s no sense in you coming here to play one for me.”

I feel my cheeks flush, but I immediately know he is right.
Of course.

“If you’re going to be a serious actor, you need to be reading plays,” he continues, “especially plays that have characters in them who are your age—characters I could cast you as. Those are the monologues you should be looking at.”

I nod again.

“Write this down,” he says.

I ready the pencil.

“Go to the library,” he instructs. “Check out the plays of Neil Simon. You’ll want to read
Brighton Beach Memoirs
and
Biloxi Blues
to begin.”

As I write down his instructions, my hand is shaking. I feel like I might cry with relief.

“Start there,” says George Keathley. “Find a monologue that’s one or two minutes long. Work hard. Come back. Audition for me again.”

“I will.” I tear the sheet from the legal pad and hand it and the pencil back to Mr. Keathley’s assistant. “Thank you,” I say. I stand to leave, and as I shake his hand I meet his gaze. “Thank you for taking the time.”

His eyes are kind and deep, like Mrs. Westman’s. They are full of a meaning I can’t quite decipher. I know somehow this man with the silver hair and the strong jaw cares about me.

“Aaron, if you want this, don’t let anyone try to stop you.”

“I won’t.”

He smiles and I climb the stairs back to the stage. As I
walk through the wings, I gaze up into the rigging that towers over me in the fly space. There is something different going on here, I realize. Something better than “quality biblical drama.” There’s a deep importance about being on this stage I have never felt before on any other. The stage at the Missouri Repertory Theatre leaves me with a feeling of awe.

All of the other stages on which I’ve acted were in a church, or a Christian school. This stage is the first I’ve ever performed on that was not co-opted for theater from a Sunday sermon about Jesus. This is not a place where theater is a tool for telling stories about God. This is a stage where the craft of theater is foremost, and used with reverence for telling the stories of humanity, stories where an audience member can see himself in a character on the stage and know he is not alone.

I want to come back to a stage like this, to perform for a director like Mr. Keathley; to be seen and accepted in this world of professional actors. This audition was my first tiny taste, but I am hooked. All I want now is more. As I step into the parking lot I realize I meant what I said to Mr. Keathley.

I won’t let anyone stand in my way.

“How’d it go?” Dad asks as he turns the car toward home.

“Okay. The artistic director actually called me down from the stage to talk to me.”

“What did he say?”

I tell Dad about Mr. Keathley’s directions, and the plays he said I should read.

“You need to be careful about the advice you follow, Aaron. Those plays may not honor the Lord.”

My heart sinks. On the way to the car, I somehow hoped Dad would be as excited by this development as I am. Tears of frustration spring up in my eyes. I turn and look out the window at the trees whipping by above us, and try not to be angry with Dad, but he is breaking my heart.

I wanted him to be a part of this audition. Acting is something we’ve always shared—something we’ve always done together. This is the next step, the part where I take everything he taught me, and venture into the professional world. I want him to come with me on this journey so badly, to always be my partner.

We are in the same car, but we are heading in different directions. There was a turnoff back at the Missouri Rep, and it’s the one I’m taking. I want to be as excited as I was walking across that stage moments ago. Instead, I feel like I’m losing my dad. He gave me my start, but he can’t come any farther. This is where I finally leave him behind. Acting will now be one more thing we don’t share.

“I’ll be careful,” I promise him.

And I will be. Careful not to let him find the plays by Neil Simon when I check them out at the public library. Careful not to mention this again. Careful not to tell him anything that will give him the chance to say no.

It’s 7:00
AM
on Sunday morning, and I have made it home from Bradley’s.

Barely.

He got home from Iowa for spring break on Friday, and threw a huge party last night. I am standing in the bathroom, staring at my reflection in the mirror. My head hurts so badly, I think I might start throwing up again. When I opened my eyes, I was lying on the couch downstairs in Bradley’s family room, and the ceiling spun around so hard that I had to clamp them closed again for a minute to keep from barfing.

It’s Palm Sunday—the week before Easter. This is the day when we celebrate Jesus’s “triumphal entry” into the city of Jerusalem the week that he was crucified. This is the day when the disciples “borrowed” a donkey and Jesus rode into Jerusalem in a massive crowd of people waving palm branches and shouting “Hosanna!”

My face looks very pale in the mirror. It reminds me of that urban legend Bradley was talking about last night: waking
up alive in a bathtub of ice to find a note that reads
CALL AN AMBULANCE. YOUR KIDNEY HAS BEEN REMOVED.

Anyone in that situation could not look more pale than I do right now. I lean in a little closer to the mirror.

Am I… green?

I turn on the cold water and splash it across my face. Mom is already up. I can hear her in the bathroom getting ready. She’ll be on her way down to fix breakfast, and drizzling green icing across her signature Palm Leaf Pastry within the hour.

I open the medicine cabinet and down a couple Tylenol with a slurp of water from the sink. My tongue is a thick, fuzzy piece of shag carpet. I get into the shower with the water as hot as I can stand it, and brush my teeth while the jets pound my neck. When I close my eyes, I can see the print of the shower curtain in Bradley’s front bathroom where I spent at least an hour bent over the toilet, barfing up tequila sunrises last night. The light orange and purple flowers on the gray fabric materialize and expand like fireworks behind my eyelids: the Jose Cuervo garden of earthly delights.

After the shower, I’m still moving slowly. The Tylenol has started to kick in, but I feel the throb of the headache, muted, lurking somewhere in the very center of my skull. When I walk down the stairs to breakfast in my shirt and tie, my stomach lurches.

The last thing I want to do is go to church.

Or play the piano.

Or eat.

But that’s what we do here in the mornings: eat. As a family. And before the Palm Leaf Pastry, there are hard-boiled eggs.

I look down at the yellow plastic tumbler next to my plate thankfully. Maybe some milk will help settle my stomach. I take a big swig and then realized that the creamy liquid floating before my lips is… green.

“Mom! Why is the milk green?”

“Oh, sugar, it’s only food coloring.” She smiles brightly. “Happy Palm Sunday! Green reminds us of new life in Christ.”

I wipe the corners of my mouth and rub my temples. “Green in my milk reminds me of mold.”

Dad laughs. “C’mon, Aaron, you’d better wake up! You’ve got some hymns to play.”

“Don’t remind me.”

My piano teacher usually plays the piano for the congregational singing, but she’s covering for the organist today. I’m being tapped to fill in for her at the piano. It’s nerve-racking under the best of circumstances. Doing it hungover feels like sheer folly.

“Are you okay, honey?” Mom asks. “This is what I was afraid of if you went to Bradley’s and stayed up too late.” She kisses the top of my head and offers me more eggs. I smile, then cut into the Palm Leaf Pastry. My brothers hold their plates. I make them wait until I’ve given Miriam a slice.

“Thank you for being a gentleman.” Miriam smiles triumphantly at Josh and Caleb.

I smile back at her, and suddenly I feel like a fraud. Now
the guilt is as strong as the nausea. In her clear blue eyes, I can see how much she loves me, how much she admires me. I’m a liar and a cheat.