Performance Anxiety. Betsy Burke

you looked just lovely. I’ve always said, and I’ll go on saying until they listen, you have a special quality.”

      Grace was my biggest fan. Even if I was buried in the back of a hundred-voice chorus, she was there to witness my special quality. She got all my complimentary tickets. If I was singing anywhere, she was there in the audience beaming goodwill at me.

      I stashed the paper bag in my knapsack, tied on my apron with its big print of Renaissance cherubs kissing, then went to take on the crush of customers.

      My first cover was a group of men from the Vancouver Stock Exchange. Now, I should tell you, these are the kind of guys who are regularly held hostage by mirrors. They can’t pass one without getting frozen in front of it, momentarily sucked in by the vortex of their own fabulous reflections.

      These men swaggered in like a bunch of action-movie stars and took up way more space than was necessary. You could see it all over them, like a kind of radioactive glow. Money. Money flowing like Niagara. They loved it. It was all-powerful, the perfect aphrodisiac.

      I stood at their table impatiently tapping my pencil against my pad, waiting for them to make up their minds. The Donald Trump wannabe of the group grasped my wrist and said, “I was admiring your balcony and wondered if I could lean on it sometime?” He didn’t even bother with eye contact. He talked straight to my breasts as though they were two nice people who were about to make a big donation to his favorite charity. It was frustrating.

      I was starting to develop a real love-hate relationship with my breasts. Lately, they’d been attracting a lot of attention. Kurt’s attention was just fine. It was the rest of it that got on my nerves. The Curse of the Mammary Glands. My breasts had been total dickhead magnets since I was fourteen.

      My first impulse was to grab the poor guy by the shoulders and shake him till his eyeballs rattled around like dried peas in a tin cup, but while I was on duty at Mike’s, I ignored first impulses. If I played it right, those tips would get my plane as far as Alberta.

      “Waitressing is my life,” I said, and flashed him a little smile. “I wouldn’t think of ruining my dream career by mixing business with pleasure. Sorry. Maybe in another incarnation.”

      He looked a bit confused and let go of my hand. It was clear that slinging hash was not his idea of a dream career. But I believed that if I was going to get any enjoyment out of life at all, then I had to be Buddhist about it, and try to caress the difficult and boring bits of my day, give them a little respect, too.

      I thought of that plane, taxiing down the runway, the roar just before takeoff, and I soared through the rest of the shift.

      By eleven o’clock, the sun shone between billowing white clouds. I exchanged my Doc Martens for Adidas again and jogged off toward the Gastown studio where La Chanteuse and Matilde awaited me.

      Lance Forrester, technician, artistic director and owner of the voice-over company Vox, was outside sitting on the doorstep. His forehead was furrowed and his eyes squeezed tightly shut. He was concentrating intensely on something.

      This is a really profound mental process going on here, I thought.

      Before I was near the step, he stated, “Miranda Lyme,” then opened his eyes.

      “Wow. Lance. How did you do that? How did you know it was me?” I asked.

      “Your smell. You have a great smell. Like a bunch of freesias that have been first rained on then lightly sprayed with fresh sweat.”

      I was standing in front of him now. He shocked me by pulling me down onto his lap and shoving his dark curly beard into my neck, imitating a snuffling animal. “Great, great odor.”

      “Lance. These are female pheromones you’re talking about.”

      “I’m not particular.”

      But I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t particular, and if he was, it was a shame. Lance was a very compelling man.

      “What are you doing out here anyway? Why aren’t you inside working? You know, I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen you in the light of day?” I said.

      “I’m pale. I’ve become a mushroom. Summer has come and gone and I’m a nice shade of silvery white,” he said.

      He’d been concentrating on trying to get his marble-white skin to sop up some sun. That’s what all the profundity had been about.

      I ruffled his messy silver and black curls with my fingers. “You spend all your time indoors, you silly workaholic. You need some fresh air and vitamin D.”

      He said broadly, “Yes, it’s true. I’m doomed.” His voice was thick with pleasure, as though doom were something delicious, like a plate of chocolate éclairs or homemade ravioli. “How’s Matilde today?”

      “Hot to trot,” I replied. “How else would she be?”

      “Yes. I suppose she couldn’t be any other way. She’s the eighth wonder of the world, that Matilde,” said Lance, and he led the way inside.

      We went into the first studio. I pulled the script for La Chanteuse out of my knapsack.

      “It’s just the two of us this morning,” explained Lance. “I think we can get the biggest scene wrapped up if we really concentrate.”

      La Chanteuse was an “art film” set in Paris. I’d done a little work for Lance in the past whenever there was a voice to be dubbed that had to sing, as well, but this was the first time I’d ever seen so much pork in one of our films. Or so much porking, for that matter.

      The protagonist, Matilde, was an opera star who couldn’t perform unless she had sex first. A lot of sex. Megasex. Unfortunately, the man she was in love with was a married pig farmer and she was forever chasing him and his salami all over Paris and outskirts. They had sex everywhere; they rolled in the pigpen mud (when his homely wife wasn’t there), between the prosciutti and ham hocks, they had sex with a side of bacon watching them. Sometimes the pig farmer left his homely wife at home, dressed up and came into town to see Matilde. Then they had sex in the park, on and under the Eiffel Tower, in the corridors of the Louvre, under restaurant tables at the Plaza, on the bathroom floor and in the elevator of Matilde’s apartment. It was awesome. Every time Matilde came, her screaming orgasm would swell and rise and turn into warm-ups, scales and arpeggios. Then when all the heavy breathing had finally subsided, she was away to the Paris Opera for the evening, where she washed off the smell of swineherd and gave the performances of her life.

      La Chanteuse goes along pretty much like that right up to the end, until the homely wife murders them both, makes them into sausages and sells them at the local market. A bit too moralistic for my tastes but I guess there had to be human bloodshed in order for there to be a decent denouement.

      And I have to confess that although it was a truly silly film, there were moments when I could really relate to Matilde’s impossible obsession. I was no stranger to obsessions myself.

      For a couple of hours, Lance and I stood across from each other going over and over the scenes, getting them right, wailing, adoring, whispering, grunting, panting and moaning on cue into the microphones. My arpeggios and vocal ornaments had been well rehearsed beforehand. Lance was a professional. In his dubs you never heard false notes. You never saw the mouths wagging on hours after the sound of speech had stopped. Ours was quality work. But it was a little unnerving that the actress playing Matilde looked a bit like me, with long blond hair and annoyingly large breasts, and the actor playing the pig farmer looked like Lance, a prematurely graying Greek god with iron-poor blood.

      By one o’clock, I was getting hungry. My stomach was starting to rumble so loudly that the microphone picked it up. Lance looked up from the script and then at his watch.

      “Nice work, Miranda. We’ll have to stop now. I have the kung fu kids in about twenty minutes. You’re doing a great job. Low-budget orgasms. They’re such a riot. We still have four and a half of them to go before we get hacked up and made into bratwurst.”

      He