Michele Ruby
/spring 2006
RAPUNZEL, RAPUNZEL
“that was my gift to her, my beauty / blossoming through hers.”
BY MICHELE RUBY - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, SPRING 2006
current work
Third Girl from the Left
The evening of the audition found Cindy with hair like shredded wheat and a stray pimple. She knew she could handle the juicy role of the manipulative step-sister, but she entered the theatre with a sense of futility. She never expected ingénue roles, but she was always disappointed not to get cast in roles where appearance shouldn’t have been important. No one could reach the age of nineteen looking as she did without lugging self-awareness with her every step of the way. Directors didn’t cast ugly girls in anything but ugly girl roles—the old lady, the comic best friend. Cindy wanted to stretch. She could certainly act—for about a decade, she’d been acting as if her appearance were just another fact. It had given her depth if nothing else. She was a subtle and moving actor, losing herself readily in a role, growing into it more deeply as she worked and played with the possibilities. Her theatre teachers had told her this, or some version of it. None of them had cast her, however, as anything but wallpaper. Third girl from the left. What she needed was a really nearsighted director. Or one with vision.
She had hoped college would offer her a more varied theatre experience than high school had. Her best friend had offered, “You’re unique, memorable. Be glad you’re not a carbon copy of everyone else.” But so far, college had been a revival of high school, with better production values.
It had taken Cindy more than a semester to summon the nerve to audition. She wasn’t familiar with this director, Carter Lessing, a visiting professor from somewhere else, perhaps somewhere the asymmetry of Cindy’s face would be seen as an interesting bearer of character, her gawky height a contribution to the dynamics of a stage picture. Hope might not spring eternal but it could certainly tap dance when called upon to do so. It was about time something went right. The week so far had offered the phone call from home—Did you go to any socials? Cindy, at least try—and a C on the Western Civ exam she’d practiced her audition piece instead of studying for. And her boss at the dining hall had shifted her from the cafeteria line to clean-up duty. A juicy role would be some compensation.
The usual assortment of actors with good bones waited in the lobby of Cassell Hall, filling out audition cards or warming up with a series of vocal or facial calisthenics. Cindy was momentarily comforted—nobody looked lovely doing facial exercises. The lobby resembled a scene in an asylum.
Soon the doors to the theatre creaked open theatrically, and the hopeful actors entered and settled themselves in the plush maroon seats, sprinkling themselves in twos and threes throughout the house. Cindy sat alone and concentrated on breathing. Each inhaled breath straightened her nose as it traveled up; each exhalation flushed the imperfections from her skin. Auditions were especially difficult because there was so little time to build a character, so first impressions tended to override subtlety. An audition was like a blind date with the director; Cindy could sense in a director the initial unease, the quick and incorrect assessment, the reluctance to finish out the evening.
A licorice whip of a man, very dark and impossibly thin, started making announcements: Call him Carter. Take direction without comment. Do not under any circumstances bore him. First there would be some improvisation so he could see how they moved, how they interacted with each other. Then cold readings from the script. He would not be seeing any prepared monologues; he had his own agenda for them.
He peered over his angular red glasses at the supplicants, and began grouping the actors into trios. The third group contained a bouncy brunette from Cindy’s psychology class, a boy with hair so yellow and spiky, it seemed to have been colored in by a Crayola in the grip of a three-year old, and Cindy. They stared longingly at their prepared monologues before folding them up and stuffing them in backpack or pocket. Then they exchanged heys and waited for instructions. The brunette had a nervous habit of tilting, then righting, her head, and the light slid along her shiny hair every time. The spiked blond had a pointedly cool swagger to match his pointedly cool hair. Both were clad in actor’s armor – black tee shirts and jeans. Black made Cindy’s pale, distressed complexion look post-mortem, so she was wearing an aqua sweater. Also, she didn’t want to look like scene-change crew; it’d be too easy to offer her a position backstage if she were already costumed for it.
“Anybody nervous?” The director raised his eyebrows. “You should be. Embrace that tension. Use it. Show me something with some energy. Here’s what I want. Improv this scene: two of you compete for the attention of the third. Make the third person choose you. Seduce him or her. No dialog in this exercise—I want you to communicate with your face and body. Don’t discuss it beforehand; just do it.” Cindy could feel her face lose its pallor and go red. Did everything always have to be about attraction? The role she coveted had nothing to do with seduction. This was going to be more humiliating than usual. Cindy struggled with the urge to bolt.
The first group climbed the stairs at the far side of the ancient stage, the boys both taking the steps two at a time while the girl tested each step with a platform shoe. The group found its footing in a stereotypical beach scene from a 50s movie, the boys flexing their muscles and jostling each other for position. The girl kicked off her shoes and amused herself by reading a magazine and ignoring the boys until one of them stumbled over her outstretched legs. The other one hastened to help her and in that way, claimed her. Ken and Barbie and Ken at the beach.
In the next group, a pretty woman with corn-rows and dimples pulled a tall boy into a cha-cha, then suddenly walked stage right, crooking her finger at him to follow. Seizing the opportunity, the other group member, a muscular guy with a short beard, winked at the tall boy, who clasped him around the shoulder and walked off stage left with him. More interesting than Barbie and Ken. Not interesting enough to distract Cindy from her panic.
Cindy was not embracing her tension. It was embracing her. Right now it had her in a headlock and was squeezing. Her throat was closing up; only a wisp of air slid through, and the room began to get blotchy. Who would swoon? Someone in a corset at a ball: Why, Harley Fuller, Ah’d adore a sip of lemonade; Ah’m feelin so faint. Someone who hadn’t eaten … someone escaping German soldiers: Go on without me, Rachel; I’d just slow you down. Someone trying to hide an illness: Please don’t tell Richard until after the wedding. Her detour into the possibilities suggested by fainting returned Cindy to a sort of numb calm.
Then her group was called: “Lucinda Rice, Amber Strauss, Jake Underhill.” The journey up the steps to the stage offered Cindy a panoply of scenarios, of which walking the plank was the most persistent, although sleepwalking into oncoming traffic also presented narrative possibilities. At long last, her relentless steps carried her to center stage, where the other two group members waited. Amber began a shtick borrowed from a B-movie, finger-walking up Jake’s chest, touching her finger to his lips and then her own. Jake smiled down at her and threaded his fingers through her shiny hair. Cindy stared at them, paralyzed. This was easy for them. Jake and Amber had done this before, if not with each other, then with facsimiles. Other sweet brunettes had plied Jake with promises; other beefcake men had scooped Amber up like so much ice cream. Cindy’s life had never been, would never be like this, not even on stage.
No words, just action. Carter Lessing’s command.
Cindy strode over to the pair and slapped Jake’s cheek. The flat smack echoed in the cavernous room. The sting felt so good to her hand that she slapped Amber as well. Then she stalked off into the shocked silence, her gait slow and elegant. In the bathroom, she threw up.
As she assessed her blotchy face in the bathroom mirror, someone knocked on the door. “Lucinda? It’s Carlos. I’m the assistant director. Come on out.”
No answer.
“Then may I come in?”
Cindy splashed some water on her face and pushed the door open a half inch. Then a full inch. Then she swung it open just wide enough for Carlos to slip through.
“I thought you had guts. Lots of energy. Wonderful to watch. And Carter liked what little he saw.”
“That wasn’t guts. That wasn’t acting. That was me losing it in front of all those people. Amber and What’s-his-name are probably going to have me arrested for assault.” She started laughing. “I’ll get a reputation for slap-shtick.”
“You should do that more often. Smile, I mean. Great smile. Anyway, you made the scene interesting, and it was a hell of an exit. Come back, finish the audition.”
“How can I face them now?”
“That’s why they call it acting, honey. That’s why they call it acting.”
Cindy took a deep breath, hit a regal pose, and swept back into the auditorium.
a note from the author
When I wrote “Rapunzel, Rapunzel” I was teaching a class in fairy tales for Bellarmine University’s interdisciplinary program, and I was fascinated by the way fairy tales explore maternal archetypes—the good mother, the evil stepmother, and the fairy godmother or other supernatural protector—and the way these roles can overlap or intertwine. In some versions of the Rapunzel tale, the witch is more like a frustrated mother than an evil being, and I wanted to explore that notion in the poem.
The course I taught spent a lot of time on Cinderella, and I became interested in modern retellings in the realm of realism, in which the supernatural element—the agent of transformation for the Cinderella character—was replaced, often by art, especially painting. (Look at the importance of painting in Gregory Maguire’s Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and at the role of Leonardo Da Vinci as a sort of fairy godmother figure in the Drew Barrymore movie Ever After.) At about that same time, I switched from poetry to fiction in my MFA program at Spalding University, and I began writing short stories, many of them inspired by fairy tales. “Third Girl from the Left” is based loosely on the Cinderella arc, and, because I have some experience as an actress, it uses theatre rather than painting as the transformative agent. My exploration of this theme led to the creation of a novel, Curtain Rising, in which a version of this story is a chapter. The novel is currently seeking a champion. “Third Girl from the Left” is also part of a collection of stories about theatre and theatre people.
Michele Ruby is a writer of novels, short stories, poems and short plays. Her work has been featured in print and online, in local, regional and national publications. Michele is a retired instructor of fiction writing at Bellarmine University, and a founding member of the Grasmere Writers in Louisville, Kentucky. She also serves as a fiction editor for Best New Writing. When she's not writing, Michele is tap dancing, making jewelry, or—as a proud Kentuckian—making bourbon candy. She has theatre experience as a dancer, actor, and director, as well. She has taught various manifestations of college English classes over the years, including not only the dreaded freshman comp and intro to lit but also juicy courses in fairy tales, mythology, linguistics, and fiction writing. Michele lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her husband, daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren.
