Floodlights

I'm not an actress. I have no talent for forgetting who I am, for letting go and turning into someone else. I've forgotten how it feels to put on a show, simultaneously magnifying yourself to achieve a spotlit reality and being magnified further under the lens of an audience. Maybe performers get used to it after a while. I wouldn't know; I'm not an actress.

I sprint across the cluttered backstage, a basketball court bisected lengthwise by black curtain, tearing the red ribbon from my ponytail. We're thirty seconds into the first scene, and it's time for my second costume. All told, I'll change ten times in the next two and a half hours, twelve if you count the swap of street clothes for costume and vice versa at either end. Switching skirts and stockings and shoes a dozen times seems excessive to me, but then, I'm not an actress; perhaps they do this all the time without batting a heavily-mascaraed (or perhaps altogether false) eyelash.

I think about dance steps and harmony first and then recall characterization; I'm not an actress. But I give the alto notes a brittle edge in the first scene, when the female ensemble plays a gaggle of crotchety old women, and I paste on a smile while trying to hit the right rotation speed on my double pirouette in the overture. My eyes widen in shock as I stare into the balcony, ostensibly watching the longest-hit baseball anyone has ever seen disappear over a distant fence. I take tiny clicking steps in black heels, muckraking to my heart's content, and use the same shoes to approximate as much of a luxurious strut as I can muster three scenes later, dancing with the devil in a kickline. And in fishnets and jazz shoes, I breathe in the sweet chalky thickness of baby powder puffed through a fog machine, tossing my now-unrestrained hair and hoping that neither hot-rollered curls nor strapless cocktail dress choose this night to fall in view of the audience.

I'm not an actress. But starting tonight, I play one on stage.