Colors Insulting to Nature. Cintra Wilson

family lived on the top floor. Ned and Liza slept in the room with the fire pole. Noreen had the other little bedroom in the front, separated from the kids’ room by the staircase.

      Peppy claimed the master bedroom in the back, where she hung a dramatic array of hats, masks, and feather boas, arranged all of her wig heads on a long shelf, and installed a waterbed (“You sure you need a water-bed?” asked Ike, jumping up and down. “The floor is a little springy.”

      “You bet your ass I want a waterbed, honey, and don’t you dare try and stop me. A girl’s got to get some pleasure between the sheets.”)

      Once moved in, Peppy set her sights on hiring instructors. It was her intention to start “The Juilliard of the West.”

      Mike and Ike became a part of the Normal Family routine; they loved the whole idea of the theatre, and Peppy’s amusing vulgarity promised that it would be something more rambunctious than the average community stage. Ike recruited Ned’s help, sensing that the boy was lonely and underused, and the two of them purchased and hung all the stage lighting: long fly bars on the ceiling, draped with an array of PAR can-lights and a follow spot.

      Ike knew theatrical lighting well; he had been the lighting designer and engineer for a San Francisco cabaret/bar called The Brig, where the drag comedy I Hate You, Hannah Kingdom! had played for a nine-month run.

      Ike enjoyed his nerdy, informational friendship with Ned, who had a bright, fifteen-year-old geek’s love for intelligent-sounding trivia.

      “Hey, Mom, did you know that ‘PAR’ is an acronym for Parabolic Aluminized Reflector? Those are 1,000-watt Fresnels, see, that one is frosted, and that one is stippled, for a wide beam, and did you know that follow spots used to be actual limelights? They were like these burning jets of oxygen and hydrogen pointed at, like, this cylinder made of lime, that rotated.”

      “I don’t want anything burning in here, the fire marshal will be on my ass like last year’s ski pants.”

      “They don’t use limelights anymore!”

      “That’s good. Don’t use them.”

      Peppy had bigger things on her mind. Her plan was to start a school for teens, then cull the better talent from the classes and cast them in a full production that would run for the month of August. She put an ad in the Marin Gazette:

       FAMOUS?

       Spread some of your stardust Teaching kids 11–18 Actors, Singers, Dancers Needed For New Performing Arts School Full Musical Production Impending Submit photo, letter, résumé

      Peppy received around fifty application letters, many with headshots; black-and-white 8 X 10 glossies featuring an idealized full-face portrait of the Actor or Actress. The more expensive versions featured a photo-collage, on the opposite side, of the actor in various “roles,” to show the actor’s “versatility.” The headshots seemed to call out for talk-balloons:

      “Ladies, I may wear a leather jacket with no shirt underneath for motorcycle riding, but I can also don horn-rimmed glasses and transform into that English professor you wanted to have sex with, or throw on jeans and get a laugh out of washing my Old English sheepdog with several neighborhood four-year-olds. Am I not the Original Man?”

      Or:

      “Choosy Mom in curlers, executive businesslally (with eyeglass-stem thoughtfully in mouth), oversexed newscaster or just plain Pretty Lady, why, I am Every Woman to all people, especially you, handsome casting agent.”

      Peppy had imagined that there were scores of semiretired Broadway, TV, and film stars studding the hills of Marin County who would leap at the opportunity to nobly pass their glitter batons. What she found were careers that had never made it past the embryo stage: (Bob Loquasto, Professional Air Guitarist; Popo the Children’s Clown—Birthdays, Gatherings, Corporate Events). Many chalked up their failures to bad luck, or a lack of “connections,” or had a story of how they’d been “ripped off” by a celebrity who had stolen and was living their rightful lives, e.g., a jittery, chain-smoking comedian who insisted his “entire schtick” had been stolen by the comic Gallagher: “I was the first guy ever to kill a watermelon with a croquet mallet, at the Holy City Zoo in ‘73, when that asshole was just a busboy.”

      Some of the people Peppy met were genuinely gifted but too odd-looking, bizarre-acting, or otherwise unfit for mainstream entertainment.

      Among these people, there seemed to be a pervasive sense of denial: none of them could admit that the unrolled blueprint of their lives was the green felt of a craps table. None could believe that if they worked hard, nurtured their talent, and persevered heroically despite crushing opposition, their careers in showbiz might go nowhere anyway. This is an unfairness that many artists can’t swallow, having been raised on the “Real Talent Will Win Out in the End” myth.

      According to Peppy’s schedule (and the dictates of her draining bank account), the theatre camp would run for five summer weeks. Rehearsals would begin mid-July for the yet-to-be-named Musical—the more talented kids in the classes would be drafted for the production. The show would run for three weeks until the beginning of the school year. During this time. Peppy reasoned, Ned and Liza would be whipped into triple-threat musical theatre prodigies at breakneck speed by trained professionals (Ticking clock, dramatic Obstacle #1). She would zip them off to New York City, and they would audition for the High School of Performing Arts, slay the judges, and go on to live the heightened, Technicolor life of Fame. If anything happened to obstruct Peppy’s plans, these were bridges she would bulldoze when she came to them.

      Peppy hired three instructors out of her twenty-some applicants:

      Neville Vanderlee, an acquaintance of Mike and Ike’s—a morosely thin whippet of a man with oversize vintage 1950s suits, a platinum swoop-wedge hair-helmet wrought in mousse, and pointy yellow shoes. He would be the camp drama teacher and direct the upcoming musical. Neville had earned local praise as the director, coauthor, and star of I Hale You, Hannah Kingdom!, the production that Ike had done lights for. Neville had thought the success of that production would bring him more legitimate offers, but they never materialized.

      Barbette Champlain, aging former ballerina—a regal, imperious, chain-smoking spider of a woman with long, emaciated limbs who Peppy hired to teach jazz dance, tap, and ballet; she would also be “movement coach” and choreographer for the musical. Barbette was vain and miserable, having found herself needing a job after her husband, an investment banker, traded up to a younger model of her as soon as she hit thirty-five. She was a capital-D Dancer, down to her snap-happy, osteoporosis crayon-bones, a victim of all of the steep trade-offs dancers make early on in life for the privilege of being physically superhuman while young. Her personality was whiny and condescending from getting too much slavering attention as an icy young beauty, her mind was weak and spoiled from underuse, her angry black liquid eyeliner and watertight, face-lifting hair-bun were bitterly nostalgic throwbacks to her Swan Lake days. The aging process was the first betrayal by what had been her faultlessly obedient body; her prime had been devoured like a wedding cake, and she loathed all the possible outcomes of her darkening future. But Peppy was impressed by Barbette’s legitimate résumé (all sylphide and cygnet roles that ceased abruptly in 1972) and by the enclosed black-and-white picture of her, a lithesome feral bird, walleyed and starving, arabesque-ing in better days.

      Lalo Buarque was a hangdog-looking Brazilian pianist and guitarist, whose sole function, it seemed, was to keep all women within a fifty-mile radius lactating with a romantic need to save him from himself. He was swaybacked, built with long, slender muscles buttered with just the merest quarter inch of subcutaneous fat. His body was the sun-kissed color and softness of blonde calfskin, matching the dirty gold of his oily bed-head. He was preternaturally relaxed to the point of abject laziness. In his musky, faded T-shirts, handlebar mustache, sunglasses, and bleach-frayed, cock-hugging jeans, his entire visage gave the impression that undersea Venus on the half shell finally got sick of him as a lover and rolled him onto a hot beach for