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It was another steamy June day in the Nation’s Capital. The District’s inhabitants appeared to be moving more slowly than their normal brisk trot. The sun’s blazing rays and the soaring humidity made the air as thick as syrup. Lacey settled into the tempo and headed up Seventeenth Street, taking her own sweet time to scout potential candidates for her fashion column.
She spotted a couple of men strolling down the street in seersucker suits, one blue and one gray, bright white shirts, and crisp bow ties. And to complete their summer attire, one wore on his feet light blue bucks and the other light tan. Lawyers, she decided, possibly lobbyists. They carried on as if the heat were no big deal, but at a leisurely pace. Definitely from the South, and a much deeper South than Northern Virginia, she decided. Together they seemed the epitome of preppy self-assurance and retro cool. Or were they heading for a magazine photoshoot somewhere? Maybe for Southern Living?
She observed other men in one of the District’s summer uniforms: khaki pants, loafers or boat shoes, pastel shirts with short sleeves or long sleeves rolled up, and no ties. All covered with a thin layer of sweat. Apparently from cooler climates, they found the heat and humidity oppressive. Women in the muggy D.C. summer fought a never-ending war against frizzy hair, exploding in the humidity. They wore it up and off the neck, clipped back in oversized barrettes, or controlled by the ubiquitous ponytail.
Not everyone seemed exhausted by the heat. Delivery workers in blue and brown looked well put together in their summer uniforms, happily in shorts. For young women who worked in offices, the sleeveless dress was a perpetual winner, in seersuckers, striped or flowered prints, or basic black. It was simply too hot to wear long pants, but she spotted a number of capris and sleeveless tops, as an alternative to the sundress. All had that dashing-to-lunch look. No doubt there were sweaters and jackets waiting for them in their frigidly air-conditioned offices.
Armed with an iced chai to keep her cool, Lacey was still relatively crisp by the time she reached Kinetic. She wanted to touch base with Yuri Volkov and if possible meet the elusive costumer, Nikolai Sokolov. But first she ran into a woman who hadn’t been helpful the day before.
It never failed to impress Lacey that talking with someone in person was so much more valuable than doing it over the phone, or worse, via email or text. The Eye’s shyer reporters, the ones who preferred to stay in the office and cover their beats via C-Span and the Web, didn’t know what they were missing.
Lacey was a throwback to an earlier style of reporting, and she preferred to believe her journalistic brain was better off for her anachronistic skills. Most of the time, she inked her rough notes with fountain pen on paper, saving the computer keyboard for the mad dash to deadline. But she knew working journalists who had lost the ability to write by hand. It was rather like strutting in high heels, she thought. Women who stopped wearing them found their ability and desire had vanished, and they would be stuck with flats forever.
Aha, another Fashion BITE!
Lacey opened the theatre door and stepped into the lobby. A woman edged around cartons of wine stacked in front of the bar for tonight’s show to greet her, and Lacey inquired after Volkov and Sokolov.
“Yuri stepped out for a minute, and I have no idea where Nicky is. I’m DeeDee. Can I take a message?”
“I’m Lacey Smithsonian. From The Eye.”
“Oh hi. We talked yesterday. About Amy.”
“You’re DeeDee Adler?” The woman who couldn’t wait to get off the phone. “I didn’t know you worked here.”
DeeDee was small and muscular, with a gymnast’s physique. Short dark hair and dark upturned eyes made her look a bit like an elf, an elf wearing cutoff blue jeans, a long-sleeved blue T-shirt, and running shoes. She appeared to be in her early thirties.
“I’m the assistant stage manager, and I help out in the costume shop and whatever else needs doing. Looks like I’ll be picking up some more hours now.”
“Because of Amy Keaton’s death?”
“Sadly so. It’s a big job. Well, a lot of responsibilities.” DeeDee waved at the bar stacked with stacked cases of wine. A Trader Joe’s grocery sack sat on the counter, filled to the top. “I just bagged up all the personal items Amy left here at the theatre.”
“Is that it?”
“Yeah. One bag. There’s not that much, mostly stuff from her desk drawers. Her tea collection. She must have had every brand of tea. It’s just that Yuri wants everything of hers gone ASAP. It’s because of the show. Press night jitters. Superstition. You know.”
“That’s pretty cold.”
“You have to understand, Yuri’s a genius. He’s the motor behind everything here. Offstage, he just can’t deal with personal stuff. To him, people are too messy when they’re not on stage. Too much information, or something.”
“I’ll make a note of it. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”
“I guess not.” She scratched her head.
“Was Amy your friend?”
“Yeah, sort of. Not like best friends. We hung out sometimes.” DeeDee paused to stuff some of the overflow back in the Trader Joe’s sack. “This is such a drag. It’s not a cool thing to have to clean up after someone who died suddenly. I’m supposed to give all this stuff to her brother.”
“Her brother?”
“Yeah. Don’t know why he called me. Maybe Amy had an address book at her place? Maybe I was the first name, you know. Adler. Always up front in the A’s. And I had to tell Yuri about Amy dying too. That was a treat.”
“Messy? Like people?”
“You got it.”
“You suggested suicide, on the phone.”
“I have no idea why I said that. She wasn’t a happy person. But turns out it was some freaky accident. That’s what her brother said.”
“So I heard. When was the last time you saw Amy?”
“Saturday. Working the sale.”
“Did you see the fight? Over the red dress?”
“Yeah! What a scene! That lacked dignity.” DeeDee laughed at the memory. “I don’t think Amy even saw the Red Death costume on our rack until that woman bought it. Then she went ballistic. Like a crazy person. Insisted it wasn’t supposed to be in the sale. It wasn’t on the sale inventory.”
“She blamed an intern,” Lacey said.
“Did she? That’s weird. We don’t have any interns right now. They’re a mixed blessing anyhow. All I know is the costume was on the rack and one of our volunteers rang it up. This pretty black woman handed over the cash. I can see why, she’ll look great in it. I told Amy to chill. Wrong thing to say! Boom! I just thought it was her anal side, you know. Us stage managers, born control freaks. But she was all flipped out, like she thought she’d lose her job or something.”
She lost a lot more than that. Lacey didn’t know what to make of DeeDee’s story. Nobody saw the costume on the rack until it was sold? Did someone deliberately hang the dress on the rack, hoping to rid the theatre of it? Was lending it to all those actresses becoming a burden? Did they know how the dominoes would fall? And where did the hollow Lenin medals fit into the whole thing?
“How did you find out she died?”
“The police called her brother and he called me. Some kind of accident. In her apartment. The landlord found her. He had complaints about loud music and said she wouldn’t open the door.”
“Did she listen to loud music?” Amy didn’t seem the type.
“Maybe after a hard day with Yuri.” DeeDee paused and checked her sack again. “Amy meant well, but she could be frantic about details. She got very stressed.”
“Why do you work here?”
“Me? Theatre major in school. Always loved theatre. Working here? You gotta let things roll off your back. Lots of people are intimidated by Yuri. Mostly, I find him funny. He barks at everyone, but he treats people okay. That’s why I’ve been here so long. You have to understand that right now, before a new show, he has to maintain focus. Things like death? Losing his stage manager right before press night? That’s a big deal. Kinda freaks him out.”
Things like death. “What else freaks Yuri out?”
“Oh, man. Missed cues. Misplaced props. Actors. Anything out of place. Basically anything.” DeeDee lifted a small plastic superhero figure out of the Amy Keaton bag. “Wonder Woman. Kind of sad, don’t you think?”
“Very sad.” The contents of a life reduced to a shopping bag struck Lacey as beyond melancholy, right into tragedy. But surely there was more to Amy Keaton than this sack of office detritus? “This was just her job, right? What was the rest of her life like?”
“This job was pretty much her life. She lived in a tiny studio apartment up in Mount Pleasant. She loved the theatre. I’m not sure it loved her back. Oh damn, I forgot her mug, the one she used for tea. I bet it’s still on stage.” DeeDee turned and marched out of the lobby, down one of the side aisles toward the stage. Lacey followed and watched while the other woman picked up a big black coffee mug. It didn’t look valuable.
“Sentimental value?”
“No, I just don’t want someone to walk away with it, or use it. This may sound superstitious, but I don’t want bad luck hanging around just before opening. Nobody does.”
DeeDee boosted herself up on the lip of the stage to sit. Lacey leaned.
“Doesn’t sound any stranger than anything else I’ve heard lately. What can you tell me about Amy as a person?”
DeeDee sighed. As if she couldn’t stay still for very long, she jumped to her feet and adjusted some furniture on the stage, matching it with squares of glow-in-the-dark tape that marked the stage. The set was swathed in drapes of blue velvet and white sheers. She sat down again on the lip of the stage.
“She was a good stage manager. Stage managers aren’t really like anyone else in the theatre,” DeeDee said. “Actors care about their art. Their lines, their marks, their cues, their applause, nothing else. Techies care about physical stuff, like lights and sound and costumes and props and furniture placement and the set not falling down. Nothing else. Directors care about everyone following orders. Nothing else. But the stage manager worries about everything. Everything! About getting everyone and everything on stage, on time, in place, in the right order, and then off again. It’s like running an entire railroad. All night, every night.”
“Big job,” Lacey said. “Will you be the head stage manager from now?”
“Just temporarily, as far as I know. Believe me, it’s intense working directly under all these mad Russians. But dramatic.” She grinned, indicating that was a little joke. “Never boring. I like it when this place is empty, though. It’s amazing that we can create a show out of almost nothing. An empty space, a few pieces of painted wood, some scraps of material and glitter, and a bunch of actors. It’s a kind of alchemy.”
“What do you do, when you don’t work here?”
“I’m working on my master’s in theatre right now, so I can teach and stop living in poverty.” She grinned. “With a little help from the long-suffering parents who are desperate to see me become a valuable and viable member of society. I also part-time at Starbuck’s. And when I can get another paying gig, I help out with lighting, set building, costumes. Whatever.”
“Have you always worked here, at Kinetic?”
“Off and on for years. Since college. A liberal arts degree with a theatre major gives you only so many options. I didn’t want to be somebody’s administrative assistant, so I started working in the shop here.”
“Are you familiar with their production of The Masque of the Red Death?”
DeeDee stared at Lacey for a moment before answering. “Yeah. The Red Death. I worked on it. That was a trip. Kinetic blazed its path to fame and fortune with that show. My first big production out of undergrad. Definitely a trial by fire.”
“You knew Saige Russell?”
She rolled her eyes. “Ah, Parsnips! That’s what we called her, backstage.” DeeDee giggled wickedly. “Her real name was Patience. Didn’t fit her at all. I guess she thought ‘Saige’ was a more interesting stage name, earthier or something. But nothing could make Parsnips more interesting.”
“Parsnips?”
“You know. Like that old song?”
“The song?”
“You know, ‘Parsnips, Sage, Rosemary and—”
“You mean ‘Scarborough Fair’? I thought that was parsley, not parsnips.”
DeeDee laughed again, an unexpectedly musical laugh. “Right, sure, but in my theatre crowd in college we used to sing it as ‘parsnips, sage,’ and Saige was like a vegetable you don’t want on your plate, so she’ll always be Parsnips to me.”
“You didn’t like her, I take it.”
“I didn’t.” DeeDee leaned back on her arms and studied the catwalk and lighting grids. “Parsnips was temperamental and bitchy, and not very good. If she were bitchy and brilliant, well, all right then, but bitchy and bad is a terrible combo. Every time there was a problem, every time she blew a line, Parsnips yapped about how she was a professional. She was the lead. She shouldn’t have to help move props or take care of her costume or clean up after herself. Or God forbid, learn her lines. And she barely had any lines.”
“A professional?”
“When people have to tell you what a professional they are, they aren’t. She wasn’t even Equity. Real pros don’t bitch about the little things.” Lacey had to agree. There were “professionals” she’d had to deal with who were anything but. “I don’t know why Yuri didn’t kill her. Or can her ass. And he was a total madman after Parsnips died.”
“Why? Was he in love with her?”
“Oh, the farthest thing from it. He was just greatly offended that she died in his theatre. Like how dare she.”
“And the night she died, where were you?”
“Oh, I was at the cast party. Didn’t hear about Parsnips till the next day.”
“You were there all evening, then?”
“The whole crew and I. We got to the party really early, ’cause we didn’t have to strike the set. The children’s theatre show was going to use it. If we’d had to strike, we’d have been working till dawn, instead of partying.”
“How was Parsnips in the role?”
“Barely adequate. And that was because everyone was covering her ass. She could dance, but she had no chemistry with Maksym. And that’s weird, because he was such a babe.”
Maksym Pushkin? Lacey recalled the name from the clippings. “The actor who played Prospero?”
“Good memory, Smithsonian. Prospero tries to keep Death out of his castle, but when she appears anyway, he falls in love with her, et cetera. But Maksym couldn’t stand to be in the same room with Parsnips.” DeeDee shook her head and sat up, hugging her knees. “She hated him too. I don’t know what her problem was with him, except he didn’t think she was the stars and the moon. Major offense with her. She was a total narcissist. Like some politicians I could name.”
“She had a wonderful dress,” Lacey said.
“Agreed. And she wore the hell out of it. She looked amazing in it. That costume Nicky made was really something. You could have put a robot in that outfit and it would get raves. And when the spotlights dimmed and the black light hit it, you could hear the whole audience gasp. Every night.”
Even Gregor and Olga were impressed. “So if clothes make the man, costumes make the actors?”
“Sometimes. When Nicky designs them, they do.” DeeDee was loyal. “It made Parsnips seem a lot more fabulous than she was.”
“That’s Nikolai Sokolov? Is he around?”
“He’s been in and out today, but you should probably catch him later. Tensions are running high.”
“Because of Amy Keaton’s death?”
“No. Press night. Well, Amy too. But I’m here, I’ll get it done.”
So press night outranks death. “Can you tell him I dropped by and I’d like to talk to him?” Lacey handed DeeDee her card.
“Sure. You know, if you want to get another insider’s view of Parsnips, I mean Saige, you should talk to Gareth. Maksym wasn’t crazy about her, but Gareth—”
“And Gareth would be?”
“Gareth Cameron. I think it’s a pen name. He’s the playwright who adapted The Masque for the stage. If you want to find someone with another opinion about Parsnips, try him.”
“Playwright? That’s right, the Poe story was only a few pages,” Lacey said.
“Right, it had to be fleshed out. And Kineticized. Honestly, a lot of the visual design was inspired by that cheesy old Vincent Price movie version, did you ever see that? This was sort of an ironic homage, Kinetic style. But Gareth wrote all new dialogue for it in iambic pentameter, in blank verse. Not that anyone noticed. Anyway, Gareth is dreary and miserable enough to adapt Poe.”
“He’s a tortured artist?”
“He’s the tortured playwright’s poster boy. He can write, though. He also adapted our new show, The Turn of the Screw.”
“He sounds perfect for that. Where do I find him?”
DeeDee pulled out her phone and gave Lacey the number. “That’s his work, I don’t have his home. It’s some kind of trade association. Gareth is some kind of assistant to someone who lobbies Congress about—something. Not sure what. He hates it.”
Lacey smiled at DeeDee. “I’d be disappointed if he didn’t.”
Pounding started backstage. It sounded like jackhammers. A few sweaty and sleepy-looking people started trickling into the theatre, armed with large cups of coffee.
“Rehearsal. Caution, Men Acting!” DeeDee grinned. Lacey picked up her tote bag just as Yuri Volkov stormed up the aisle to the stage.
“I was just leaving,” she told him. He pointedly ignored her and jumped up on the stage.
“DeeDee, I have changes, many changes! We must go over these. Now.” He dismissed Lacey with a wave of his hand. “Next time you come to my theatre, Smithsonian, buy a ticket.”
Maybe I should. I’d like to see Kinetic in action. She wondered if there were any cheap tickets available.
I’ll see if Tamsin can get me a comp.
