And with all due respect to Augie, that was the first move.
Fondly,
Alejandra
INSTANT MESSENGER
AlePerez: This is the one and only favor I’m ever going to ask you.
TCKeller: you don’t have to set a limit. but i’m flattered anyway.
AlePerez: Is your shift key broken?
TCKeller: no. there’s an ace bandage on my right hand so i have to type with my left. i don’t do question marks or exclamation points either, so keep that in mind.
AlePerez: What happened to your right hand?
TCKeller: hucky made me finger-spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious until he got it right. it took an hour and a half. i still can’t hold a fork. what’s the favor.
AlePerez: You know how baseball players have superstitions?
TCKeller: yes. bo belinsky wore the same jockstrap for 23 days until he started striking out again.
AlePerez: Thanks for the word picture. Don’t take this the wrong way, but it helped having you there at the talent show, so I want to make sure you’re at the auditions tomorrow. Someplace where I can see you.
TCKeller: augie’s already got dibs on my karma, but you can have whatever he doesn’t use. should i be reading anything personal into this.
AlePerez: No. I want that part, and you’re good luck. A horseshoe would probably work just as well, but I wouldn’t know where to find one.
TCKeller: you just made me hit my hand on my desk. ow.
Dear Jacqueline,
At breakfast this morning, my parents asked me if I’d thought about how I intended to spend my summer vacation. This is usually a prelude to announcing the plans they’ve already made for me, but they like to pretend that the whole thing was my idea—as if a ten-year-old is really going to choose eight weeks in the Ukraine with the Peace Corps on her own. Mamita suggested that I intern at the French embassy (translation: Mme. Alphand promised her that the charm-challenged Philippe would be visiting from Hell for the season and probably dangled a Newport wedding as bait); Papa recommended an assignment with the Harvard history department (translation: Their filing has been backlogged since 1968 and they can’t even get a temp to say yes); and Carlos glanced up from The New York Times long enough to utter the ten most astonishing words I’ve ever heard him speak.
“Why don’t you ask Alejandra what she wants to do?” he asked casually before going back to the Arts & Leisure section. I nearly dropped a soft-boiled egg into my lap. Carlos?? Papa and Mamita were evidently as flustered as I was, because they immediately changed the subject to Yugoslavia. They always do that when they’re in conversational denial.
Twelve minutes later I was halfway up Ivy Street on my way to school, still so bewildered that I hadn’t even noticed the season’s first real snowfall already beginning to swirl through Brookline. When was the last time Carlos stood up for me? Uh, October 15, 2000. I’d just mistaken President Chirac for a waiter and asked him for another Diet Coke. But before France could secede from the U.N., Carlos cut in front of me and congratulated His Excellency on delivering such a stirring address at the Earth Summit, which gave me just enough time to sneak away and hide in a closet until it was time to go home. Papa and Mamita never found out about it.
“Hey, Alé! Slow down!” I turned around just as Carlos caught up with me and pulled a familiar-looking flyer out of his chocolate brown Armani coat pocket. “Here,” he said brusquely, handing it over. “You dropped this in the hallway outside your room.” As soon as I recognized the logo, my face drained of color.
THEATRE-BY-THE-SEA
Matunuck, Rhode Island
SUMMER APPRENTICE PROGRAM
“Are you crazy, sis?” he demanded, brushing half a dozen snowflakes out of his eyes. “Never leave anything like this lying out in the open. If you want to work in summer stock, just tell me. I’ll only need about four weeks to get the parents with the program. But talk to me first, would you?” He looked so worried, and we were both so snowy, and his usually perfect curly black hair was so uncharacteristically asymmetrical, none of it made any sense. This simply can’t be happening. The pod people got ahold of my brother.
“It wasn’t—I mean—It’s just a thought,” I stammered.
“Yeah?” he retorted. “Like the dance classes and voice lessons at the Lycée? You’re lucky I check the bills first. Papa’d have a coronary if he ever saw that.” Then he pointed me toward the school and gave me a small push in the right direction. “Now go learn something,” he said firmly. “And break a leg at the audition.”
He left me standing on Longwood Street with my mouth hanging open.
AUDITIONS
KISS ME, KATE
Sign the list and make sure you have a song prepared to sing.
—Mrs. Packer
Since you were in Paris in 1948 and may have missed the original run, Kiss Me, Kate is about a touring theatrical company that’s putting on a production of The Taming of the Shrew. The two leads are Fred and Lilli, who play Petruchio and Katharine in Shrew and who used to be married but aren’t anymore. (Obviously, you don’t have to hear much more than one verse of their “Wunderbar” duet to know they’re going to wind up together again before the show’s over.) Meanwhile, Bill and Lois are a couple of chorus gypsies who fall in love too—he plays Lucentio, she plays Bianca, he gambles, and she flirts. (They have all of the comedy numbers.) So if I was going to get my feet wet in show business, this was definitely the musical to do it with.
The auditorium was jammed with more kids than Mrs. Packer could handle, so she had to keep the auditions moving pretty quickly. Inside of the first three minutes, Lee Meyerhoff and Andy Wexler had earned applause for “Soak Up the Sun” and “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” (which Andy actually delivered without looking at Augie even once), Stu Merliss had been thrown out on his ear after five syllables of the lyrically restored “I Feel Like a Dick,” and Augie—in Lee’s tights, a shirt borrowed from Carlos, and Mamita’s tablecloth—stopped the show cold with Cole Porter’s “Too Darn Hot.” Mr. Disharoon was only supposed to play the first sixteen bars of each song, but everybody so thoroughly enjoyed the swinging-tapping-finger-snapping combination of Hwong and Porter that Mrs. Packer let him finish—and then asked him if he knew “Make ’Em Laugh” from Singin’ in the Rain (!!). He did, and he proved it.
“What a ham,” I whispered to Anthony as we stood at the back of the house together watching the Augie Hwong Show.
“That’s nothing,” he whispered back. “You ought to see what he does with ‘You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun.’”
By the time my name was called and I’d walked up the steps toward the footlights, the stage fright I’d been expecting for two days still hadn’t materialized. And it wasn’t difficult to figure out why. True to his word, Anthony had taken a seat smack in the center of the front row next to Augie, Lee, and Andy—who were smirking, leering, and grinning, respectively. I wondered if this was what Carlos had meant when he told me to “go learn something.” Not only did I have each one of my friends in my corner, but it also turned out that I had a big brother who was taking care of me after all. “If you want to work in summer stock, just tell me. I’ll only need about four weeks to get the parents with the program.” So what on earth was there to be nervous about?!
Then I nodded to Mr. Disharoon, took a deep breath, and began to sing “So in Love With You Am I.”
KISS ME, KATE
Cast List
Fred Graham/Petruchio KEITH MARSHALL
Lilli Vanessi/Katharine ALEJANDRA PEREZ
Lois Lane/Bianca LEE MEYERHOFF
Bill Calhoun/Lucentio AUGIE HWONG
Harry Trevor/Baptista TOMMY LEE
Gremio ANDY WEXLER
Hortensio BENJI BENNETT
Paul NEIL REIMAN
Hattie NANCY BULL
Harrison Howell BILLY MODINE
Doorman SAMMY SHEA
Haberdasher RICARDO BARRERA
REHEARSALS MOND
AYS, WEDNESDAYS, AND
THURSDAYS AT 4:00 P.M. SHARP;
SATURDAYS AT 10:00 A.M.
INSTANT MESSENGER
AlePerez: Did you see Andy’s face when Augie was singing “The Hostess With the Mostes’ on the Ball”?
TCKeller: was that before or after he hid under his chair.
AlePerez: I know Augie takes a little getting used to, but Andy had better sign up for the program before he misses too much.
TCKeller: this is going to sound like i need to get over myself, but when mrs. packer asked you to sing another song and you picked ‘were thine that special face,’ i got the feeling you were sending me a message. i mean, you were looking right at me for most of it.
AlePerez: I had to look somewhere. Trust me, Romeo. I wasn’t sending you anything.
Not much I wasn’t.
And that was the second move.
Fondly,
Alejandra
SportsAmerica
ON DECK
KELLER vs. LANDIS
ONE BOY’S CRUSADE TO CLEAR BUCK WEAVER
by Colleen Wilson
In September 1920, the sports world in general and Chicago in particular were shocked to discover that eight members of the Chicago White Sox—arguably the best team in baseball—had deliberately thrown the 1919 World Series in the most notorious gambling fix of its time. Though a jury acquitted all eight players—Swede Risberg, Chick Gandil, Eddie Cicotte, Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, Happy Felsch, Lefty Williams, and Fred McMullin—the newly named Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, declared that “no player who throws a ball game will ever play professional baseball” and banned all eight Black Sox players for life.
Third baseman Buck Weaver had played his heart out through the entire World Series of 1919. His only “crime,” as it were, was flat-out rejecting an offer from Gandil to participate in the double-cross. However, since he had, according to Landis, “sat in conference with a bunch of crooked ballplayers” and not ratted on his teammates, he was banished under the same cloud of shame that forever shadowed the remaining seven.
Like many others since 1920, ninth grader Anthony Conigliaro Keller believes that Weaver was handed a bum rap. But he’s doing something about it. His “Free Buck Weaver” website has attracted fan support from all across the United States, and it will only be a matter of time before Major League Baseball is forced to take notice.
We recently caught up with Anthony (who prefers to be called “T.C.”) at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, in order to ask him a few questions about Weaver, loyalty, believing in the impossible with all your heart, and—inevitably—the Boston Red Sox.
Dear Mama,
Boy, would you be proud of me. SportsAmerica hit the stands yesterday, and my interview about Buck Weaver is four pages long (including a picture of me and Pop in our 1918 World Champion sweatshirts and one of me and Nehi playing catch). Pop bought 50 copies to mail to all our relatives and friends, Aunt Babe is having it Perma-Plaqued for one of my second-level Xmas presents, and we’ve gotten over 20,000 hits and 6,400 new signatures on our website. I just wish Buck Weaver was around to see how many people believe in him.
It made me a superstar at school too, even though I’m not in Kiss Me, Kate. Mrs. Fitzpatrick bought the magazine for the class to see, and then she passed around Xeroxes of the interview for everybody to take turns reading the T.C. parts out loud. Augie had my voice down perfect (like he shouldn’t by now?), and Lee Meyerhoff hit one over the wall when she decided to work the body language too—she sat back in her chair with her legs sticking straight out and her feet crisscrossed over each other while she ran her fingers through her hair. (Do I do that??) The only ugly part came around when Andy Wexler read the section about my family and got to the line that said “my dad and my brother Augie and my cocker spaniel Nehi and my girlfriend Alé” (which they spelled wrong). Every eyeball in the classroom turned to Alé, and meanwhile all I wanted to do was stick my head in the trash can. How come whenever I start to make progress, something happens to end the inning?? Kind of like what Bucky F. Dent did to the Red Sox—only I keep doing it to myself. First I get her to dance with me, and then I blab to Augie about the “um.” Then she calls me her good luck charm, and I get snaked by my own words in SportsAmerica. I’ll be lucky if she talks to me before 2010 (partly because I said she was my girlfriend, and partly because she got billing after a dog).
Oh, yeah. At the Kiss Me, Kate auditions, she sang a love song to me for three solid minutes and then said it didn’t mean anything because she’d have sung it to a horseshoe too. Does she think I was born yesterday? I know exactly what she’s trying to do. She’s trying to make me crazy on purpose. The only problem is that it’s working.
I love you,
T.C.
From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Reminder. We live in a nation where every man is innocent until proven guilty, and where most of us have been tempered by a hard and bitter peace. You could at least hear my side of it.
Dear Mama,
After 14 times through Mary Poppins, I now know the words better than Augie knows All About Eve. Hucky and I even began signing parts of it to each other, usually after he deliberately lets his bottom jaw drop open and hang there.
ME:
Close your mouth, Hucky. We are not a codfish.
HUCKY:
Spit-spot!
Tuesdays are when we always to go to Amory Park and re-play Game 3 of the 1918 World Series (unless it’s snowing, and then we just sit in The Word Shop Café and draw pictures of it). I’m Wally Schang, Hucky is Stuffy McInnis, and I get to single him home from third. But today Hucky had other ideas. Once we’d hit the sidewalk in front of the Deaf Institute, he grabbed my hand and began yanking me in the opposite direction, while Nehi pulled the bottom of my pants leg toward the park. (I felt like Play-Doh.) I should have known better. Nobody argues with Hucky when his mind is made up. So we followed his lead all the way down Sewall Street, through an outside fruit market, past Brookline Hardware, right up to the double glass doors in front of Toy Mart. That’s when I had to put on the brakes. Uh-oh. Look at that face. He’s wearing “cute and hopeful” all of a sudden. Remember, T.C.—you’re the grown-up. If you have to play Bad Cop, it comes with the turf.
“Sorry, dude,” I said, yanking him away from the red wagon display in the window. “Christmas isn’t for another two weeks. No toys till then, all right? Peace out.” I turned us back toward Amory Park, but Hucky had already squiggled his way out of my grip.
“This is different,” he signed furiously. “And I have my own money—look!” He pulled a chocolate-covered hand out of his pocket and showed me two nickels and a penny. Holy crap—I didn’t realize he was loaded. So I glanced down at Nehi for a second opinion before I changed my mind.
“Should we?” I asked. Double-bark and a tail wag. Like he’d ever say no. Hucky’s the one who feeds him potato chips.
Even though it was a pretty gray day and the leaves were gone from all of the trees, fifteen minutes later we found ourselves sitting in the middle of a walkway in Emerson Garden. Hucky was opening up his brand-new box of colored chalk—which I let him pay for with one of his pennies and 116 of mine—and I was feeling like a pretty cheap gink (who knew that all he wanted was chalk?). I probably should have guessed what he was up to, but when you’re busy watching your dog to make sure he doesn’t pee on a wheelchair with an old lady in it, you’re not always in peak form. So by the time I turned back to the pavement, Hucky had already drawn a picture of a park, a stream, a bridge, and a red-and-white-striped merry-go-round right there on the sidewalk. (Reminder: Teach him how to finger-spell “vandalism.”) Once he’d added a blue and orange frame around the whole thing, he pulled back to make sure it looked just the way he wanted—and then he stood up and jumped right into the middle of it, both feet first. For a second he just kept staring down with half a smile on his face like something w
as supposed to happen—and when it didn’t, he turned his head to me with hurt little question marks in his eyes, as if he was saying “Hey, you. What gives here?”
Suddenly it made sense. Oh, duh. Mary Poppins. The part where Bert draws a chalk pavement picture and the kids and the nanny hop into it with him. But figuring it out didn’t mean I had an easy answer for him—it just meant it was time for the man-to-man talk I’ve been afraid of ever since the eighth time we watched that movie together. (It’s still a little hard to have a whole conversation with Hucky when I only know how to sign every other word—but our imaginations help us understand most of the rest, and this time it was especially important.)
“Come here, dude,” I said, pulling him down beside me. “You can’t get pissed off at a chalk pavement picture. It has the home field advantage.”
“Oh, no? Watch me!” He struggled to stand up and jump into it again, but I held on tight.
“Hey! Look at me,” I ordered, turning his face in my direction. He looked. He wasn’t happy about it, but he looked. “Remember when you were afraid of the dragon in Shrek?”
“So?”
“What did we learn?”
“It’s only a movie.”
“What about the kid with donkey ears in Pinocchio?”
“Only a movie.”
“Right. So isn’t Mary Poppins only a movie too?” Hucky pulled away from me like I’d just grown Lampwick’s ass ears myself. I mean, he was scared.
“No! She’s magic! Why are you asking me that?”
Mama, as soon as I saw the panic start and the tears happen, I forgot all about the man-to-man thing and went right back to boy-to-boy again. I’m too young for this gig anyway. If somebody has to play Bad Cop or tell him the truth, they’d better pick a different hoser because it sure isn’t going to be me. “T.C.! Come quick! Look who’s here! Your balloon came back!” I believed that until I was ten, didn’t I? Then why can’t Hucky have Mary Poppins for as long as he needs her?!