ThreeYearsLater
I lifted my head and pulled the hardback book off my face when the sound of my cell phone chirped on the end table next to me on the couch. I reached for the phone, turned it over, and looked at the screen.Brice.Great, my agent’s calling.
“Good afternoon, Brice,” I groused into the phone.
“Erika,” he said, almost too chipperly into my ear. “How’s my favorite client?”
“I don’t know. How is Audra doing? Are we up to twenty Tonys or is it just fifteen these days?”
“Well, I have some good and bad news for you,” Brice said, not taking my bait. Honestly, I was amazed he put up with me after all these years. I wasn’t exactly his best, most profitable, or the most talented client. At one point, I was one of his shiniest new toys, and I had so much promise. Then one day, my world came crashing down around me. And by around me, I mean when I fell through the stage after seeing my boyfriend making out with another guy the night of the opening of my first and last show on Broadway.
That embarrassing little tumble and broken leg took me out of the show. By the time I healed, I’d already been replaced. My understudy, Darla Dabbraccio, won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Asher had been nominated, but thank God, the Tony Award voters hadn’t given him a trophy. It was bad enough that my understudy had won. The Tony Awards had letThe Faith Healer’sproducers substitute her name for the nomination since, technically, her name hadn’t appeared above the marquee on the night the show had opened.
The most humiliating moment of my life was dragged back into the limelight as award show commentators debated whether Darla Dabbraccio deserved the nomination. The committee had hemmed and hawed, but industry insiders all agreed that the Tony Awards would let the producers do it. On the night of the award show, I was out of the city in Des Moines, Iowa, with my parents.
“Honey, it’s not a big deal,” my mother had said. “That award’s as much yours as it is hers. I’m sure everyone knows it.”
Oh, everyone knew it. The cast and crew had known Darla couldn’t act her way out of a box, but that girl had mimicked me perfectly, which is why she was hired in the first place. Darla hadn’t had an original idea on stage. I never wanted to see the show after the accident, but I had seen enough of her performance on YouTube to know she had even twitched her lip like I do when hitting a high note. She’d make a great impersonator forForbidden Broadway. How the Tony Awards voters had given her a statue was still one of the universe’s great mysteries.
“So, how is your cabaret act going?” Brice asked. From the way he said it, I knew what he thought about my cabaret act. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of taking the bait yet again.
I sat up on the couch. Slung my legs over the side and stood up as I went to the fridge to grab a water bottle. I know. I should be completely environmentally conscious and not use plastic bottles, but they were just easier. I screwed off the cap. My cat, Bootsy, a white short-haired Norwegian forest cat with black paws, weaved in and out of my legs. “What do you need, Bootsy?” I asked. He looked up at me and meowed, then trotted away.
“Erika…Erika, are you there? Are you listening to me?”
“Sorry, I’m here. Bootsy needed something.” What’s the point of having a furry overlord if you can’t blame them when you need to? “What did you say?”
There was a sudden, audible sigh from the other end of the line. “I said, ‘I caught some of your performance over the weekend.’”
“You did? Why didn’t you say ‘hi’ or come backstage?”
“I said I ‘caught some ofit,’ not I saw it live. You’re blowing up on YouTube.”
“What does that mean?”
“What am I going to do with you, Erika? You know you’re hard to manage these days when you won’t pay attention to your own social media presence.”
“I pay attention to my social media presence,” I responded. “I don’t have one. See, I pay attention.”
“And that, my dear Erika, is where you’re wrong. Whether or not you want one, you have a social media presence.”
Something about how he said the last phrase made me pause. “What do you mean,whether or not I want one?”
“Are you near your computer?”
“Not at the moment, but I can be.”
“Get to it,” Brice demanded. The tone in his voice took me back. I think we’d gone from the friendly banter phase of our afternoon conversation into the serious one.
I walked through the living room and into the guest bedroom. My computer sat atop an old-style rolltop desk I’d found when I’d gone antiquing upstate with a few of my girlfriends one weekend. I’d fallen in love with the piece and paid some local to cart the thing down to Manhattan, then hired some movers to haul it up to my apartment.
I sat down in my ergonomic chair and spun around to face the desk and monitor. I reached out, grabbed the mouse and slid it along the mouse pad to wake the computer up. While it woke, I put my cell phone down on the desk and hit the speaker. “I’m here,” I said.
“Great. I just sent you an email.”
I opened the email. The only thing in the email was a blue hyperlink, so I clicked on it. Immediately, a pirated video of me on stage at 54 Below from the previous weekend started playing. First, I looked good. I’d gone with a simple black cocktail dress and a pair of Manolo Blahnik’s Hangisi Crystal Satin Pumps. Sure, the shoes cost me $1000, but they made my legs look fantastic. The video was a short montage of me singing some of my favorite songs. I looked good, and I sounded even better.
“What’s wrong with this?” I asked. “I look amazing and sound better than ever.”
