Chapter 9.
We were reading The Merchant of Venice when Bethany said,
‘I’m impressed that females got such good parts. I think Shakespeare must have been a really liberated sort of guy.’
Ms Cutter laughed. ‘Probably not, Bethany,’ she said. ‘In Shakespeare’s day, all the actors were men as the stage wasn’t considered a suitable place for a woman.’
‘That sucks,’ muttered Janice, who was cherishing dreams of being an actress when she grew up.
‘What about the girls’ parts?’ Mike asked.
‘The female parts were all played by men dressed as women,’ Ms Cutter replied. She should have known that this would set off all the boys. They flounced around and spoke all their parts in high voices with limp wrists after that. Ms Cutter eventually lost her temper, again, and gave all the boys detentions the next two lunchtimes in a row. It was such a relief. We managed to rehearse the witch scene from MacBeth and Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice and they went really well. Sarah had learnt all her lines by now with me helping, and I knew them backwards.
There was a movie on in town about King Lear and we begged Ms Cutter to take us but she wouldn’t because it wasn’t one of the plays we were studying.
I said, ‘It would be very educational, Ms Cutter, because it’s Shakespeare and that it would give us heaps of ideas.’
Ms Cutter shuddered and said, ‘That’s what I am afraid of,’ and changed the subject.
It’s not fair. No one takes our class anywhere. We don’t mean to be badly behaved but things do seem to happen to us. Last year on the bush trek, Joey got tired after the first half hour and went back and sat in the bus. Problem was, he didn’t tell anyone and we spent the rest of the day searching the river and the bush for him. When we finally went back to the bus and found him reading a book the teachers nearly strangled him they were so cross. And that time at the museum it wasn’t Janice’s fault that the door handle broke when she went to the Ladies. And it wasn’t her fault that they had to get a carpenter to take the hinges off the door to let her out. And Melanie can’t help getting bus sick whenever we go anywhere on a bus. It’s not like she does it on purpose.
November seemed to go really fast, what with all the teachers madly rushing to stuff all the work into us that had to be done by the end of the year, and rehearsals taking up every spare minute of time. Suddenly we realised with a shock that there was only one week to go before the performance.
Time is strange, like that. Sometimes it goes really slowly, like when you are waiting for the bus to come and it’s raining and your shoes leak. Other times it’s really fast, like trying to get changed at the end of a PE lesson before the next class comes in, when you can’t find your sneakers and all your clothes are turned inside out and seem to have lost all their buttons. You think you have heaps of time to do something and suddenly it’s now and you wonder where the time went.
We had planned a big rehearsal in the media suite that Saturday with all the class. We would have liked to use the hall but the floors were being polished and we weren’t allowed to go in there. We were going to try and put the show together in order to see how it would go. That would give us an idea of how long it would take and if anything had to be re-written. I was crossing fingers and toes that it wouldn’t.
Actually the rehearsal was a total washout. It started really well because Sarah’s Mum picked me up in her car. It’s a Mercedes. Sarah’s parents are rich. I said to her once that if I had heaps of money like she did I’d buy cupboards full of clothes. Sarah said you could only wear one outfit at a time (she sounded like my father) and where would I wear all those clothes anyway? I looked at her in astonishment.
‘I’d wear them to the next clothes shop, of course.’
So we arrived in style, although Sarah’s Mum drove the car herself. They didn’t have a chauffeur, they weren’t that rich. All of the girls were there, and the ballet girls had all come dressed in their tutus and ballet shoes. Gemma’s Mum was brushing Gemma’s hair.
‘It’s so lovely to have a daughter with naturally curly hair,’ she sighed, making sure it was loud enough for Sarah’s mother to hear. ‘It looks lovely no matter what I do with it.’
Sarah’s hair is dead straight but as it is long and blonde I don’t think anyone has ever considered it a disadvantage. Sarah’s Mum smiled and said nothing while Sarah walked past Gemma as if she didn’t exist.
Gemma smirked. ‘I thought about tying my hair back but I’ve decided to leave it as natural ringlets,’ she said smugly. ‘We are all going to wear our hair loose.’ I noticed that a lot of the other ballet girls had suddenly sprouted curls overnight, so there must have been some serious sessions with hair rollers and curling irons. Some of them were even wearing make-up.The room seemed abnormally quiet and I noticed that none of the boys had turned up.
‘Where on earth are all the boys?’ I asked Sally. ‘They knew about the rehearsal, didn’t they?’
‘Apparently there is a big end of season exhibition rugby game on down at the park and a couple of the All Blacks are going to be at it,’ replied Sally. ‘So of course all the boys have gone along to that instead.’
‘And naturally they didn’t bother to tell us this beforehand,’ Angela added. ‘Oh, and Janice has gone too.’
Janice told us later that she went to the game because she didn’t think it would matter if she missed the rehearsal. ‘I’m not important enough. I’m only a witch, after all. Besides, I even got my brother’s rugby ball signed by one of the All Blacks.’ She was really pleased but the rest of us, though secretly envious, were far too annoyed to be impressed.
However at the rehearsal we did go through all the stuff we could and Mrs Barrington turned up with two enormous bags full of costumes.
‘These are all finished now, so I thought you might like to see them.’
‘Wow, Mrs Barrington, these are amazing!’ We crowded around and helped her to unpack them.
‘Can we wear them for the rehearsal?’ Bethany asked.
‘Because it is just you girls, and I know you’ll be careful, I’ll let you put them on. It‘s good idea to try them out as you’ll find that you have to move a bit differently in some of them. It also can help you to get into character.’
‘Gosh, thanks Mrs Barrington,’ Sarah said and went off with her own pile to put them on. I was really sorry I didn’t have a costume when the others got changed. Sarah looked fabulous in all her outfits, naturally, and the fairies looked amazing. They did this incredible weaving dance with long bits of chiffon, to the floaty tinkly music as it went:
Lulla, lulla, lullaby
Never harm
Nor spell nor charm
Come our lovely lady nigh
The lovely lady was Sarah of course, and even though the song sounds a bit dumb it was really effective. I had to admit Gemma was seriously good; all those hours of practise have obviously paid off. Mrs Barrington gasped and sighed and made the right sort of appreciative noises, and so did the rest of us who weren’t fairies.
Then Sarah did her speech from the Merchant of Venice. She put actions with it, which looked great. She talked about the ‘gentle rain dropping’ and she wriggled her fingers like rain falling gracefully from the sky. Then when she said ‘it is twice blest,’ she crossed her hands over her chest slowly, one after the other. She did it so well I could see her mother getting really proud and excited and trying not to show it too much. Gemma’s mother just sniffed and pretended to be far too busy fiddling with Gemma’s hair and costume to have time to watch Sarah.
Next we did the witches’ scene but it wasn’t nearly as effective without Janice. The costumes were beautifully ghastly though and Mrs Barrington said the witches could wear really way-out makeup so that cheered them up quite a bit.
‘I’m going to have green and silver all round my eyes to make them really stand out,’ announced Angela. ‘Gemma’s Mum said she’d help me do it. She’s really good at
makeup because Gemma has worn it for ballet shows for years.’
Gemma’s Mum smiled and said grandly, ‘I’m happy to help anyone with their make-up.’ Gemma looked a bit sour at this but she could hardly say anything in front of her mother.
On Monday at school, Ms Cutter asked how our big rehearsal went.
‘Fine, only none of the boys came. They were all too busy.’ I glared at Brian. I thought that he, at least, could have made the effort. Brian looked a bit shamefaced. I stood up said, ‘Everyone has to be at the dress rehearsal on Wednesday after school. This will be our last chance to practise because the performance is on Thursday evening. ‘
I could see some panicky expressions on some of the boys’ faces, and some of the girls’ as well. We were all getting fairly excited about the production now, and the girls disappeared into the toilets every chance they could to try out make-up. They used oceans of toilet paper to wipe it all off before they had to be back in class, and the office lady was getting pretty peeved at all the requests for more toilet paper. We figured there would be heaps of time to do the make-up on Thursday, anyway, as our item was on last. The only problem was, we wouldn’t be able to use the stage dressing rooms, as they would be crowded with little kids and their mothers. Mrs Barrington said we could use the Clothing rooms to get dressed in, and they are next to the Hall, so that solved that problem.
I was amazed when everybody turned up to the dress rehearsal. Suddenly the whole thing became real, especially being able to do it on the actual stage in the actual hall. We had pre-recorded the words of the songs; well actually Mr Murdoch had done that for us with Joey and Janice helping. He explained, This is in case you get nervous and forget to sing or in case the parents can’t hear the words over the noise of the dancing.’
‘We ballet girls never make any noise, Mr Murdoch,’ said Gemma indignantly. Boy, is she deluding herself. They come down with a fair wallop at times on the wooden floor. Ty and Hamish sniggered a bit but hastily stopped when Gemma and her cronies gave them the evil eye.
‘The costumes look really good, don’t they Sarah,’ I beamed. I felt proud of what Mum and Mrs Barrington had done in such a short time.
‘They will look even better at night with the lighting on the stage. All the glittery bits will stand out then.’
Sarah looked gorgeous walking round in her Juliet outfit, but she was really pale, so I guessed she would need lots of makeup on the night. We started the rehearsal but when it was Sarah’s turn to speak her lines, nothing happened.
‘Romeo, Romeo,’ I prompted her. Sarah stood there and said nothing.
‘Romeo, Romeo,’ I said again.
Sarah looked at me helplessly for a minute then shook her head.
‘I’ve decided I need to rest my voice so it will be perfect for the performance. I’ll just act the part and you can put in the dialogue.’ So she stood there on stage and did the actions while I said all the words from the side. I thought that was a bit weird but Ms Cutter was getting fairly harassed about the whole thing by this stage and would have agreed to anything Sarah suggested.
The dress rehearsal went okay – almost. A few people, mainly boys, got their entrances wrong or started singing the wrong words, but generally it was fairly good. Ms Cutter said,
‘Never mind, class. A bad dress rehearsal generally means a great performance and I hope you’ll all break a leg.’ We thought that was a bit unkind of her until she explained that it’s traditional to say ‘break a leg’ meaning ‘good luck’ in the theatre. Apparently if you say ‘good luck’ it means bad luck. Weird.
We talked about the performance at lunchtime on Thursday.
‘I reckon we should practise an encore in case the parents want more,’ said Gemma. ‘We always do that in our ballet productions.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Theodora. ‘We always do an encore. You will have to write one for us, Chelsea.’
‘No,’ I said flatly.
‘That is so not fair,’ protested Charmaine.
‘Tough,’ I said. ‘I have no intention of writing anything else.’
‘Oh, you are so not helpful,’ complained Phoebe, and the ballet girls all flounced off in a huff.
Sarah didn’t say anything and then just before the bell went she burst into tears and rushed off to the girl’s toilets. We were all taken aback as we have hardly ever seen Sarah cry before. I ran after her and she was sick in the toilets then said she wasn’t going to do the show.
‘But why, Sarah?’
‘Because I can’t, that’s why.’
‘But you’re the star of the show. We need you.’
Sarah cried harder after that then Ms Cutter came and took her off to the sick bay, and the bell went for Maths. After Maths we had our English class and Ms Cutter announced,’ Sarah has gone home. She isn’t going to be in the show after all.’
‘What?’ We all gasped in astonishment. We couldn’t believe it. According to Ms Cutter, Sarah’s Mum had come to collect Sarah and said that she, Sarah I mean, had been worried about the production for the last couple of weeks. Apparently she’d been having nightmares and really bad migraine headaches she was so worried about it. Now the doctor had given her some tablets and said she wasn’t to do the show if it frightened her so much it was making her ill. Can you believe it? Sarah scared?
‘But she’s been in heaps of shows before,’ protested Brian. ‘She’s never been worried about them.’
‘Yes, and Sarah has always been the leading angel or the princess,’ Gemma pointed out, ‘so what is the difference with this production?’
Well the difference was that angels and princesses don’t speak – they just sit around looking beautiful. Sarah could do that okay, but she couldn’t cope with the words and the acting. Just goes to show that you never can tell. I mean, Sarah’s been my best friend forever and I never knew she got stage fright like that. She said later that the only way she got through the dress rehearsal at all was by knowing she wasn’t going to go on for the show.
‘And anyway, before that we were only in a little room. When I stood there on stage I couldn’t speak. It was like someone had sewn my throat up or stuffed it with cotton wool.’
We thought that would be the end of the show, and some of the kids were muttering a bit about all the work they’d done being wasted, when Ms Cutter announced, ‘Thankfully, Sarah has an understudy. Chelsea will take over Sarah’s part.’