“Your pettipants are showing beneath your dress,” Simone informs our sister.
“I told her I didn’t need that size,” Frances laments. “Her” must be Ma, the bane of Frances’s existence back then. Simone says it’s no big deal. She can just roll them up at the waistband.
“How am I supposed to do that out here in public?” Frances wants to know. Simone tells her to go down the alley and fix them while she stands guard so that nobody looks.
When Frances emerges from the alley a few minutes later, her pettipants aren’t showing anymore but she’s still mad at our mother. “They keep falling because they’re too loose since I lost weight.”
“You did?” Simone says. “How much?”
“Almost two pounds. And I could lose a lot more if she’d let me buy Metrecal with my own money. Why can’t I take it out of the bank? I don’t even know if I want to go to college. And how come she says I can’t shave my legs until eighth grade when you already got to and you’re only going into seventh.”
“Because your legs aren’t as hairy as mine,” Simone says. “You’re lucky.”
“That’s not the point. The point is you’re her favorite, he’s her little pet, and I’m just the one in the middle who she always says no to because she hates my guts.”
“Oh, Frances, that’s not true.”
“It is so true! And I’m shaving my legs in seventh whether she likes it or not.” (I have to smile at Frances’s defiant assertion. In college, she embraced feminism so wholeheartedly that she made a political statement by refusing to shave her legs and underarms. Aliza’s diehard feminist mom retired her Lady Schick and went au naturel for a while as well.)
Insinuating myself into this conversation, I tell Frances that Simone is right. Ma loves the three of us the same.
“Pfft. What do you know, dummy?”
I respond to her put-down in verse: “I see London, I see France / I can see your pettipants.” She checks, sees that it’s untrue, and suggests that I go play in traffic. Simone tells her she shouldn’t say things like that, even if she’s kidding.
“Maybe I’m not kidding,” Frances says. When I threaten to tell our parents what she just said, she laughs. “Not if you play in traffic you won’t. Splat!”
“If you two don’t stop, we’re just going to forget about the movie and go home,” Simone threatens. Frances and I dummy up, sticking our tongues out at each other as we walk behind our unsuspecting older sister. But the camera reveals that Frances’s pettipants have in truth come back into view beneath the hem of her sack dress. I watch my younger self notice this but remain uncharacteristically discreet—probably so as not to risk a U-turn back toward our house should Simone make good on her threat or jeopardize my getting a soda once we get to the show. And so, Pinocchio, here we come!
In a bumpy tracking shot (handheld, no doubt; the Steadicam wasn’t even around back then), the camera follows us as we reach the end of Herbert Hoover Avenue and proceed onto Franklin Street. Those mosquito bites I got the night before must be bothering me again because I’m scratching myself without seeming to notice. Simone notices, though. She pulls the Bactine out of her purse and gives me another several squirts.
Then the camera goes full-frame and, from the left side of the shot, who comes staggering into drunken view and heads right toward us but none other than Lush Magoon! I have vivid recall of this incident—the sight of him, the smell—and my body tenses up the way it must have that day. Lush’s fly is down and there’s a big dark spot on the front of his pants where he must have pissed himself. Simone says we’d better cross the street now. The problem is: traffic’s going both ways, and fast. So we just stop. Lush comes up to us and he stops, too, staring at us.
I had never seen him this close before, and the camera’s extreme close-up mimics what my six-year-old eyes were looking at: the horror of Lush’s alcohol-damaged face—his pockmarked nose and red-rimmed eyes, the burst purple veins on his cheeks. I have no recollection of having done this, but my childhood self somehow gets the courage to speak to him. “The post office is open,” I say. Sitting here at the Garde, I’m just as confused by my remark as Lush appears to be. Then the neurons in my brain fire off another memory: Uncle Iggy telling me that if a fella needs to tell another fella that he forgot to zip up, he says the post office is open. It’s like a private message that girls and ladies won’t understand. But Lush ignores my message. He puts his face in front of Frances’s and says “Boo!” She stands there, frozen, in lockjawed defiance.
Lush moves on to Simone. “Who wansa dance? Whaddabout you, cupcake?” She shakes her head and says, “No thank you,” but he grabs her by the wrist anyway and starts trying to engage her in a sidewalk waltz. When I begin to whimper, Frances takes my hand and gives it a reassuring squeeze.
“Please let go of me,” Simone says, but Lush keeps holding onto her and trying to make her dance.
“Jesus Christ, relax,” he says. “You dance worse than a goddamned broom.”
Frances yanks back her hand and sticks it inside Simone’s purse, rummaging for something. When she pulls out the Bactine, she starts squirting Lush in his eyes! Uttering a string of curses, he lets go of Simone and we start running. I keep looking back to see if he’s chasing us, but we’re in luck.
After we get out of breath (Frances, mostly), we slow down to a fast walk. “Is he gonna go blind now?” I ask. Frances shakes her head. She says his eyes are just gonna sting for a while.
“Oh. You were brave.”
“Pfft,” she says. But the camera catches the trace of a smile. “Thanks.”
When we reach the heart of the downtown area, my sisters stop to look at the windows of the LaFrance Dress Shop, the Bostonian, the House of Tee—stores that closed decades ago after the mall was built on the outskirts of town. At the newsstand, Simone and Frances stop again, this time to browse through the movie magazines and read things aloud to each other. “Tab Hunter: Cool Cat or Squaresville?” . . . “Homesick Private Presley Scrubs Latrines, Hopes Fans Won’t Forget Him” . . . “Will Liz Break Eddie’s Heart Like He Broke Debbie’s?”
“Come on,” I whine, pointing to the blinking lights that outline the Midtown Theater’s marquee. But when we get as far as Melady’s Package Store, our progress is arrested yet again. “Fran, look!” Simone says. “The new Rheingold girls!”
A full-frame shot shows the three of us from the back as my sisters study the cardboard picture of the six Rheingold girls propped in the front window; they’re dressed in identical powder blue dresses, waving their white-gloved hands. Inside the store, life-size head shots of the same six women are strung up near the ceiling. Collectively, they declare, “Our Beer Is Rheingold the Dry Beer!” Two of the women are blondes, there’s a redhead and three brunettes. All six have bright red lipstick and dazzling white teeth.
“I’m either voting for Olga Grogan or Flo-Ann Cobb,” Simone says.
“Not me,” Frances tells her. “They both look stuck-up. I want Rita Regan. She looks a little like that singer Anna Maria Alberghetti.”
“Mitzi O’Neill’s pretty, too,” Simone says.
Frances sticks out her tongue. “Yuck. I wouldn’t vote for her in a dog show. She might get it, though. The best one never wins.”
“Are they sisters?” I ask.
“Models,” Simone says. “It’s a contest. You vote for who you want, and the one that gets the most votes wins Miss Rheingold.”
“Rheingold like the beer Pop drinks?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
I start singing the TV jingle. My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer / Think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer. Then I call in to the package store proprietor, whom we knew from church. “Hi, Mr. Melady!” He waves back. When Frances asks him can we come inside and vote, he says sorry but children can’t enter a liquor store without their parents. Frances makes the argument that she and Simone aren’t really children and that I can wait outside. Mr. Melady says we should vote over at the
First National because grocery stores sell beer and kids can go into them on their own.
Simone checks her watch and says we’d better vote after the movie. Then she says, “So who are you voting for, Felix?” I point to the lady on the end and ask what her name is. She says it’s Dulcet Tone.
“Ha! There’s no way she’s gonna win with that corny hairdo,” Frances scoffs. “And why doesn’t she try plucking her eyebrows?” After which, she gasps and grabs onto Simone’s arm. “Oh my god! Oh my god, Simone! Look who it is!” Simone squints at the hanging head shots inside the store and realizes what has just dawned on Frances: that Dulcet Tone is none other than JoBeth Shishmanian’s sister, Shirley. Frances and Simone grab each other by the shoulders and start jumping up and down, squealing in the same way that, five years later, girls will squeal for John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Mr. Melady looks out at them and shakes his head. Then he looks over at me and shrugs. I shrug back. Simone and Frances keep squealing.
In the ticket line at the Midtown, my sisters are still yapping about Shirley Shishmanian. Frances notes that the only other famous person who ever came from Three Rivers was Benedict Arnold. I’m ignored when I ask who that was. “This was the exciting thing JoBeth couldn’t tell us about before,” Simone says. When I ask if the Shishmanians are still getting a puppy or a swimming pool, Frances shakes her head. “This is better,” she says. “Way better. If she wins, Miss Rheingold will be someone who used to babysit us!”
When we get to the front of the line, Simone tells the ticket lady that we need three children’s tickets. (I remember that old crab; she had that job forever and seemed to exist to hassle moviegoers—kids, especially.) “Don’t you mean two children and one adult?” the ticket lady says. “What are you? Fourteen? Fifteen?” Simone tells her no, she’s twelve. The ticket lady says she doesn’t believe her.
“She is so twelve,” Frances chimes in. “She’s going into seventh grade at St. Aloysius. I swear on a stack of Bibles.”
The ticket lady says she doesn’t care what Frances swears on because she knows a high school kid when she sees one.
Frances tries another approach. “You better sell us our three children’s tickets or we’re going home and getting our father.”
“You do that,” she says, pointing her thumb at Simone. “And have him bring her birth certificate while he’s at it because if she’s twelve, then I’m Zsa Zsa Gabor.”
“Hey, what’s the holdup?” some father behind us complains.
Visibly mortified, Simone succumbs. “Okay, fine. Two children’s tickets and one adult.” She pushes the money through the slot and we get our tickets.
Frances leaves the ticket lady with a parting shot. “I hope you know our babysitter’s running for Miss Rheingold!”
“Oh really? Well, let me know if she catches her. Next customer!”
One sister’s huffy, the other’s chagrined, but I’m too excited to be either. We push open the big glass doors and walk the mosaic-floored corridor to the inner sanctum. A uniformed usher rips our tickets in half at the entrance to the lobby (decorated in Art Deco style, I realize now; back then, I just thought of it as fancy). At the concession counter, we get our popcorn. Simone renders her decision about my behavior and says I can get a soda despite Frances’s prosecutorial objections. We enter the auditorium and find seats near the front. The houselights dim and the previews begin: North by Northwest, Rio Bravo, The Diary of Anne Frank, Journey to the Center of the Earth—vintage 1959 films that I will later see and study, but that have yet to be released.
When the houselights go from dim to dark, Jiminy Cricket croons “When You Wish Upon a Star” as he struggles to open a giant storybook. I can see from the close-up of my shadowy face—eyes gone wide, mouth dropped open—that I have tuned out my sisters’ excited whispering about Miss Rheingold, having fallen quickly and deeply into the narrative on the big screen: the Blue Fairy’s glittery descent from the night sky for the purpose of granting the kindly woodcarver his wish; Jiminy’s appointment as the puppet-boy’s conscience; Pinocchio’s kidnapping by a puppeteer more terrifying than Lush Magoon; Geppetto’s imprisonment in the belly of a hostile and voracious whale. I have forgotten all about eating my fair share from the popcorn bag in Simone’s lap and that I’m holding my cup of orange soda. My face conveys the shock I feel at Pinocchio’s errant behavior after his transport to Pleasure Island. He has smoked cigars, told lies, swilled beer until he was tipsy. When he sprouts jackass ears as a result of his transgressions, I am so horrified that I spill soda all over myself.
As an avid moviegoer, and later, a scholar and professor of film, I have screened, studied, lectured on, and written about thousands of movies. Yet I cannot recall a more satisfying ending than the one I viewed on that memorable afternoon when the Blue Fairy, heard only now in voice-over, turns Pinocchio into a flesh-and-blood boy—a flawed but triumphant kindred spirit to the captivated child who sat between his two older sisters, not the least bit focused on his mosquito bites or his soda-soaked clothing. Was I ever again as emotionally engaged by a film as on that August afternoon when I sat watching what, several decades and an education later, I recognize as the mythic journey of Joseph Campbell’s prototypical hero from self-interest to social responsibility? Was this when I began my lifelong love affair with the movies? Was this where and why?
Emerging from the theater, my sisters and I squint as we walk out into the ambient light of mid-afternoon. Simone says she enjoyed watching Pinocchio again and Frances says, “Yeah, it wasn’t that bad.” When I declare that “this was the best movie out of all the movies I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” Frances says, “And how many have you seen? Three? And no fair counting Ben-Hur because you slept through most of that.” I tell her to shut up, and she says, “No, you shut up.” Simone groans and says our next stop is the five-and-ten so that she and Frances can spend their babysitting money.
The camera tracks us en route and then inside the store. At the candy counter, Frances buys a pair of wax lips, a strip of penny candy, and an oversized Sugar Daddy that she says she’s going to bring home and hold over the burner on our gas stove so it will turn soft and gooey and be even more delicious. In the record department, Simone buys a 45 rpm record: Frankie Avalon’s “Bobby Sox to Stockings.” She says she could have gotten two 45s if she didn’t have to buy an adult ticket at the show. With the change that’s left, Simone tells me I can buy a bottle of bubble stuff. “And here,” Frances says. She tears off some of her penny candy and hands it to me. I pull the colorful little bumps of hardened sugar away from the paper, pop them all into my mouth, crunch down, and smile.
Next we cross the street and walk to the First National so that we can vote for Miss Rheingold. Strictly business, Frances approaches a worker stocking shelves. “Where’s the beer at?” she asks him. With a smirk, he tells her the root beer and the birch beer are in aisle 6. We finally locate the ballot box atop a waist-high tower of Rheingold six-packs. Simone demonstrates how to vote for Dulcet Tone and I do the same. Bolder than the two of us, Frances tears a thick wad of ballots from the pad, checks off Dulcet’s name on each one of them, and jams them through the slot in the box. Simone says she’s lucky she didn’t get yelled at.
I’m blowing bubbles and walking back home behind my sisters when the miracle happens. The film I’m watching captures beautifully how I remember it. The soundtrack becomes cacophonous with tooting horns. Cars traveling in both directions pull to the curb as if for an approaching ambulance. Pedestrians stop and stare, pointing at the three gleaming white convertibles coming toward us. On the backs of the cars’ rear seats sit six beautiful women, two per car—visions not unlike the winged fairy who appears to Pinocchio at the beginning of the film and, at story’s end, orchestrates his transmutation from wood to flesh.
It is the Rheingold girls, transmutated from cardboard to flesh, as three-dimensional as life itself, or something you’d see inside your View-Master. As they pass us, the six women wave
their white-gloved hands identically. They wear identical dresses the same shade as the Blue Fairy’s shimmery blue gown. Their red-lipstick smiles are as fixed as dolls’ smiles.
“Hey, Shirley! We just voted for you!” Frances shouts. She grabs Simone by the arm, raises it, and yells, “Her and your sister JoBeth are best friends! She comes over to our house all the time!” Simone yanks her arm back and tells her to keep quiet, but Frances runs out into the road and starts jogging alongside Shirley’s convertible. “Our last name’s Funicello! We’re cousins with Annette Funicello! Remember when you used to babysit us?” The Rheingold girl seated beside Shirley says something to her. Shirley laughs and nods. Then she turns away from Frances, waving to the crowd on the opposite side of the street. Frances stops, staring after her, until a cop tells her to get back on the sidewalk. When she walks back to Simone and me, out of breath, she shrugs. “It’s so noisy she couldn’t even hear me,” she says. Her pettipants are hanging a good three inches below the hem of her sack dress.
SIX
My ghost-director seems to have vanished—at least for the time being. I look up at the screen, staring at the arrested image of Frances, hands on her hips, staring at the backs of the Rheingold girls in their retreating convertibles.
In the years that followed, I heard many analyses from my sisters about how our former babysitter had orchestrated her self-transmogrification from ho-hum Shirley Shishmanian to glamorous Dulcet Tone—how she had, in effect, been her own wish-granting Blue Fairy. There was the pseudonym, of course—the denial of her ethnicity. But in addition there were theories about eye-color-changing contact lenses, falsies and faddish diets, a dye job, a nose bob. (The last of these was verified by a reliable source, Shirley’s sister, JoBeth.) Having forsaken her past identity for her new one as she rode triumphantly through her hometown, Shirley was clearly snubbing my sister that afternoon. However, this did not lessen Frances’s rapture or dissuade her from swinging into action on Dulcet’s behalf. If one of our own could rename herself, move to Manhattan, become a fashion model, and then, with luck and loyalty from her hometown, reign as Miss Rheingold, then anything could happen. Anything! Frances’s future had just lit up with the fireworks of possibility. In response, she did everything in her power to get Dulcet Tone elected.