Starry-Eyed (16 page)

ANECDOTE: ALI STROKER

Picture this:

The Jersey shore. Summer of 1994. I was a shy seven-year-old girl with bleached blond hair halfway down my back. I was riding at the time in a gold and green splashed wheelchair.

My family had just moved into a house on the corner of Minnevoy and Oceana. The house was on the corner right across the street from the beach. Our next-door neighbors were introduced to us at the beginning of the summer. They had three kids as well. Their oldest daughter, who was twelve, had just come home from theater camp in the Berkshires. She was captivating, and I remember I was immediately drawn to her.

She was an “older girl,” and I was always drawn to the more mature girls. Rachel announced to the neighborhood kids that she would be directing a production, which was following last summer's production of
The Little Mermaid
. The show would be presented at the end of the summer on our back deck. Rachel asked me to audition by singing a song. I told her I didn't know any songs at all. She asked if I knew the song, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” I couldn't lie about knowing “Twinkle, Twinkle” so I nodded my head slightly and took a deep breath. I sang the song, and at the end she smiled. I knew I had made the cut. The next thing I knew, she told me I had landed the lead role of
Annie
.

We rehearsed day in and day out. I remember watching the movie musical
Annie
, over and over again. Learning and mimicking and studying. The show went up at the end of the summer. We had a full backdrop painted by one of the cast member's moms and we sang to the movie soundtrack on a small tape player. The whole neighborhood lined up for tickets, and the local newspaper even showed up. To me it felt like hundreds.

I remember feeling like I was going to explode. I was ready! I knew my lyrics and lines, but I had never felt this nervous in my life.

The show went spectacularly! When I took my final bow, I felt like the world became silent. Like in one of those movies where it goes into slow motion and you watch the audience cheer and applaud. After the show everyone congratulated me on my performance. Rachel gave out special awards to the entire cast that were handmade with markers and paper plates. I felt like I had won a Tony!

This was the summer I remember my life actually beginning. I don't have clear memories of my life before
Annie
. I became whole when I found musical theater because I no longer had to fear being “the girl in the wheelchair” for the rest of my life. I became a new girl. Ali: the singer and actress. I was given the gift of performance. I had fallen in love with theater! Thank you,
Annie
, and Rachel, for changing my life.

A
LI
S
TROKER
is best known for being a top finalist on the second season of
The Glee Project
. She graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, but she has actually been a New York City actress and singer for more than three quarters of her life. Paralyzed from the chest down, and a wheelchair user since the age of two, she strives to inspire all those with disabilities who want to pursue a career in performance to fearlessly follow their dreams. Ali's favorite role is Olive in
The 25th Annual Putnum County Spelling Bee
. It was a dream come true when she booked the role at Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey. Ali is a spokesperson for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, Be More Heroic, and Colours Wheelchairs.
www.alistroker.com
.

ECHO

Kiersten White

The reflection staring back at me is wrong.

I'm terrified. I
know
I'm terrified. I can barely breathe, hyperaware of my heartbeat, aware that I should not be so aware of it. It can't be healthy, this racing thing my heart is doing. I can feel sweat breaking out along my hairline, feel my eyelids open too wide, feel the sheer horrified panic paralyzing me and keeping me from walking out of the bathroom in time to make my audition slot.

But my reflection doesn't show me the Loti I know. The me in the mirror looks . . . angry?

“I can't do it,” I whisper. “I can't.” I want to—wanted to—but faced with the reality of singing in front of other students at my high school, I know I was wrong to believe I could. I felt so brave, so reckless when I signed my name on the spring talent show audition sheet. But writing my name silently and using the voice that no one in this school would even recognize are very different things.

“I can't I can't I can't,” I whisper, but my reflection spits the words back at me.

Someone bangs into the door and I startle—no one ever uses this bathroom because the stall door latches don't work. My heel catches on a slick spot under the sink and I overcorrect, slipping forward until my head connects with the mirror in a cracking bright burst of pain.

. . . . .

“Are you okay?”

I peel my eyes open, my head ringing. Why am I looking up at a girl I don't know?

I nod and sit, gingerly probing the tender spot at the back of my head where I must have slammed it into the floor. The dirty tile floor of the worst girls' bathroom at Bear Lake High School, where I have apparently been lying for who knows how long.

“Do you want me to call the nurse? You're bleeding.” She shuffles her feet, shoulders hunched around her backpack straps. She keeps glancing at the tampon vending machine, embarrassed. That explains why she'd come to this bathroom; it's probably the only dispenser that stays stocked.

I pull my fingers in front of my face, frowning at them. I'm not bleeding. She nods toward the mirror, and I use the sink to stand, still shaking and disoriented. The mirror I was looking in earlier is cracked, spiderwebbing out in lines from an impact near the bottom right corner. The glass there is smeared with a teaspoon of dark red.

My shattered reflection shows me the small cut on my forehead, with a single trickle of blood disappearing into my hairline, staining the blonde hair above my ear.

“Oh,” I say softly. “I'm okay. Slipped.” I grab some paper towels, getting them wet with cold water to wash my forehead and assess the damage. The girl hasn't left. She's watching me, eyes darting to the dispenser. It's so embarrassing for both of us I don't know what to do. I'm glad I don't know her, that we don't have any classes together.

The blood comes away and reveals a tiny cut, not even stitch-worthy. I don't look at the girl again, and she seems to accept the evidence that I am fine. She digs in her pocket for a quarter, and I slide out of the rest-room as fast as I can.

A head wound is what I get for thinking I could dare to open my mouth. It figures.

. . . . .

That evening I braid Oma's hair, humming to myself. She nods sleepily, the long, silken curls of pure white twisting around my hands.

“How was school today?” she asks in German. She's the only one I'll speak with in German. My parents get mad at me, but I refuse to answer them in anything other than English. I haven't spoken a word of German to them since I was eight years old.

“It was fine,” I answer.

She lets out an annoyed huff I'm familiar with. “You are a terrible liar, my Loti. You wear the truth on your face, and lies twist your mouth into a sad, ugly shape.”

I laugh and lean forward to kiss the top of her head. “You are so sweet, Oma.”

She waves dismissively. “Were those kids mean to you again?”

Those kids she refers to are now teens, not cruel third graders snickering Heil Hitlers behind my back, but I blush anyway. “No one is mean to me.” In order to be mean to me they'd have to know I exist. I've done my best to be invisible in the eight years since we moved from Germany to Idaho, and now, even when I don't want to be, I can't help but make myself disappear.

When I close my eyes, I can see my name on the audition list. Stupid. I desperately want music to be a part of my life, more than just singing at home and filling my small room with the sound of my voice. But like that? In front of my whole school? Of course I bailed. It's one thing to pour your soul out singing along with opera stars in the safety of your own room. For all I know, I suck.

Oma jabs a finger at my chest. “You should be proud of where you come from.”

I sigh. “I am, Oma. Promise.”

The truth is, ever since those kids made fun of me in elementary school, I've done my best to expunge any and all traces of where I came
from. But sometimes a vowel comes out the wrong way, or a consonant isn't formed just so, and I realize I cannot escape my otherness. I'd rather be invisible than a target. My past has an iron grip on my tongue, and iron makes very good prison cell bars.

. . . . .

I slip into school the next morning, early enough to get to my classes without racing, but late enough that the halls are full and I don't stand out.

I drop my backpack at my feet in front of my locker. Grabbing my books for first period English and second period U.S. history, I don't realize the person behind me saying, “Hey!” is talking to me until I'm tapped on the shoulder.

I turn. My mouth drops open. Brianna Johnson is standing there, smiling at me.

“You're Loti, right?”

Correction: Brianna Johnson is standing there, smiling at me,
and she knows my name
. Brianna Johnson. Lead in the show choir. Lead in the last four musicals. Student Body Vice President.

Several seconds too late, I nod.

“Congrats on making callbacks! I didn't know you were a singer. Will you be singing the same thing? I can't decide on my piece. I'm so nervous! Anyway. Just wanted to say congrats and I hope we're in the talent show together!”

She squeezes my shoulder, the brunette embodiment of cheerfulness, and weaves away into the crowd. Her hair is shorter than it was when we were in sixth grade and she invited me to sit by her at lunch. I said no, knowing I'd have to talk if I sat by her, and I've regretted it ever since. The invitation never came again, not from her or anyone else.

I'm so shocked that she remembers my name and talked to me that it takes me a few heartbeats to realize what she said.

I made callbacks.

For the audition I missed while hiding and unconscious in the bathroom.

I dart through the stream of bodies until I hit the double doors leading to the auditorium. Most days I walk by without even looking at them, because they make my heart do this squeezing thing that feels like equal parts hope and hurt.

I have this recurring dream. The stage is there, alone, an island of light in a sea of darkness. And then I'm there, and there's a microphone, calling to me with its silent siren song. Not the fancy headsets the school used a grant to get, but one of those beautiful old ones—sleek silver stand, face-sized capsule at the top, like the screen sirens of another age used. I'm dressed the part, with my hair in gentle waves and a satin dress draping all the way to the floor.

And then I open my mouth, and all the music, all the notes, and all the sound I've bottled inside through the years floods out of me, a torrent of noise, heartbreakingly beautiful and precious because it's
me
, unfiltered, utterly naked in a way that no other music can be. There is no instrument between me and the world, no barrier. Just my voice. Just me.

It is the single most exhilarating feeling I've ever experienced, elation and fulfillment transforming me into something bigger than myself, carrying me outside of myself, freeing me.

After I've sung a song I can never remember afterward, I look out and realize there's an entire audience, silent, watching. I'm filled with equal parts terror and elation, waiting to see their reaction, and then—

I wake up. Always.

Now, that feeling I have at the end of the dream twists in my stomach, making everything around me feel fuzzy and unreal. I am standing outside of the auditorium where there's a sheet taped to the cinderblock wall next to the doorframe. I have to blink several times before the letters make sense. And when they
do
make sense, they still don't.

Brianna was right. My name is on the list, with a five-minute slot today during lunch for my callback performance, to be sung in front of all the
other students who made callbacks.