THE AUDITION
But the audition was the clincher. A friend of my cousin Bethany’s was working on a production of Fiddler on the Roof as interpreted by a stark postmodernist who hoped to strip the show of its “folksiness” in pursuit of the bleak truth at its heart. “Pretty grim,” Bethany said. “No Matchmaker, Matchmaker.”

“No Matchmaker?” I said, mystified. “Is he rewriting it?”

“No, I think it’s just delivered as a monologue. I don’t know. Talk to Karin — she said she thinks she can get you a shot. Gotta go, sugar. Break a leg.”

Busy, busy Bethany, whose heels clicked down the hallways of the law firm where she was rapidly ascending, was meant to be my mother’s daughter, a sentiment unexpressed by anyone but nonetheless quite clear. She was stylish, slim, and possessed straight, shiny black hair that swung casually in a high ponytail or flipped neatly when she turned her head. She was well-read, went to the theater, cultivated artsy friends — in short, she’d put culture in its place: an accessory to be worn by upwardly mobile women with sensitivity and smarts.

“You wouldn’t actually wear a dress made from that pattern,” my mother said once, looking at a bolt of sale fabric I’d brought home from the Sew-Fro. “That’s meant to be an accent. Trim?”

But while my mother believed a classical education and interest in the arts were necessary parts of a woman’s arsenal, Bethany really cared. She gave free legal advice to musician friends stuck in lousy contracts, attended gallery openings in abandoned factory buildings, sat through poetry readings and tried, doggedly, to get me auditions. When I made my brief appearance as “peasant girl sitting at train station” in Haves and Have Nots, she came for three of the six nights, hipster friends in tow, and stayed afterward to eat Spanakopita and lamb kebabs.

As an achiever, Bethany did not understand self deprecation as a humorous form, which caused our conversations to be riddled with missteps. I’d make a crack; she’d gallantly correct my errant self perception. If I characterized my hair as “frizzy” she’d protest that it was the envy of girls with straight hair, and just the style. If I made sport of my own utter lack of drive, she’d note that I had — remember? — had the gumption to move to the big city.

But the audition. Karin’s advice was to find a piece of music that expressed a uniquely female form of loss. Nothing from the actual score — the director didn’t want actor’s interpretations tangling with his own evolving vision of the show.

“ Bethany said he might do Matchmaker as a monologue?” I asked, trying to keep my tone neutral, as though I hadn’t hung out the windows of my parent’s car bellowing the song after seeing Fiddler as a kid. I’d developed a sudden interest in helping with the housework, since sweeping and mopping gave me an opportunity to schmoop around the kitchen throwing yearning glances and singing all three parts: Tzeitel, Hodel, Chava.

“Maybe,” Karin said. “Don’t say anything about it. We’re still in the dramaturgical stage, and he’s very private about his process. You’ll be great. That expression that you had in the Hemingway thing, like that — that type of mood is what he’s looking for, I think.”

“Girl waiting at train station?” I said.

“Yeah. Sort of existential, you know?”

The theater was dark, and I could barely make out Karin’s features. She sat next to a tall, blond man who I assumed was the director, a clipboard balanced on her knees. I followed a feral-looking girl with a dancer’s body who’d done a harsh, mewling Ani DiFranco song about having an abortion, and realized immediately that Karin had given everyone the same advice, and I’d gotten it wrong. All wrong. I’d gotten so caught up with the notion of unique female loss that I forgot I was auditioning for an ingénue role. An ingénue in a sack dress, yes, but a sweet young thing nonetheless. Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” was so clearly wrong I was considering sneaking out the side door when Karin called my name.

I walked down the aisle and up onto the stage, my pulse accelerating so that my face flushed and my palms went damp. Ani DiFranco decided to hang out and watch me, crouched half on/half off a chair, one foot coyly angled toward the other like she might execute a Fosse combination, and I moved toward the pianist, who held one hand outstretched to receive my sheet music, which slipped from my fingers and arced merrily to the floor.

The pianist helped me gather up the pages, and set them up on the stand, squaring his shoulders. My hands desperately sought some place to go, some other body to attach themselves to, chagrined in advance at the performance I would fail to give.

“Uuuckah,” I said, as though a glass of ice water had been poured down the back of my dress, which was also, I saw now, reflected like a ballooning mirror image in the dim faces of the director and Karin, totally inappropriate. I’d meant for it to strike an ironic counterpoint to Sondheim’s swan song for a faded beauty: a lemon yellow frock with a scalloped collar. Now it seemed schizophrenic, an interpretation of irony you might encounter in a street person in large man’s shoes. Which, incidentally, I was also wearing.

“Miss Dowd?” the assistant director prompted, and I nodded, swallowing sand, corneas pinpricked, stomach gone cold and stony as the moon. My hands clutched the skirts of my dress, sweat sticking to the fabric, and I cleared my throat. “Ahehehm.” The pianist began to play. I turned one toe inward, like Rose from the Glass Menagerie interpreting Ani DiFranco’s sassy posture and in that pose, still clutching my dress, I began to warble.

“I-I-I-isn’t it ri-I-I-I-ch….”

“Aren’t we a pai-I-I-I-I-r…”

“Me here at last on the ground…” and then my voice, like a vase tipped off a mantel, plummeted and cracked, the note gone, elusive, and I stopped. The pianist looked pained. He was hurting for me.

“Start over,” he whispered, and began to play the opening chords. “Come on, kiddo.”

His kindness made tears swim up into my eyes and spun the darkened theater, Karin, the director — who was now standing as though he might call the gendarmes to take me away — and the light glinting off the piano into a soup of images. I began again, and got as far as the second line before the tears began sliding down my cheeks, and I hurried off the stage, up into the wings, along a dark hallway, through the lobby and out into the street.