Another opening, another show! It is 7:40 on Thursday evening—T minus twenty minutes—and the sweat-musky pizza-greasy Thursday night cast is jam-packed squirming and squealing into the Meetinghouse Loft rehearsal room. On the ground floor beneath us, filing into the Meetinghouse and filling the wooden benches, are our parents and our teachers and perhaps even some of our classmates if we’re lucky (but the Thursday night cast is never lucky). We want to sneak out and try to catch a glimpse of them from the creaky wood stairs, but if Wanda catches us doing so, she will shout at us. She is shouting at us anyway. “Will you stop singing for one bloody moment?” she is shouting specifically at us, the F&N unit, because we the F&N unit are bashing randomly upon the keys of the piano while belting at the top of our lungs: “Four weeks, you rehearse and rehearse! Three weeks and it couldn’t be worse! One week—will it ever be right? Then out of the HAT it’s THAT BIG FIRST NIGHT!”
We cannot contain ourselves, not when we look and sound and are so marvelous. We’re already in costume: F in an olive-green military uniform accessorized with her slate-blue scarf; N in a sensible pinstripe skirt suit; Bottom shirtless in ripped jeans, with his military uniform stashed backstage for a quick change; Daylily in a frilly white dress that does not have a hoopskirt because Wanda could not procure one in time. Juniper, who is not in the Thursday night cast, has volunteered to do everyone’s stage makeup. She sits at a makeshift makeup table that is already a powdery Ground Zero and applies blush-eyeshadow-lipstick to the pleasure-flushed faces of girls and boys alike. We the F&N unit already have our makeup on. Our cheeks are dusty, our eyelashes sticky, our lips waxy. We take lipsticky little sips of bottled water and then make Juniper retouch us just to be on the safe side.
“Does anyone want to join us in the Coffeepot warm-up?” Bottom calls out from the corner of the room, where he and Daylily have been performing noisy vocal exercises for the last half hour.
“It’s from RADA,” says Daylily.
“What’s RADA?” no one asks, because Daylily and Bottom have been seizing every opportunity to name-drop the fancy Shakespeare camp they attended in London last summer. They have repeatedly attempted to teach the Coffeepot warm-up to the rest of us, but no one gives a shit. Now the two of them chant it alone.
“All I want is a proper-cup-of-coffee, made in a proper-copper-coffeepot! I—may—be off my dot, but I want-a-cup-of-coffee-in-a-proper-copper-pot! Tin coffeepots and iron coffeepots—they are not for me! If I cahn’t have a proper-cup-of-coffee-in-a-proper-copper-coffeepot I’ll have—no I won’t—well, I may—let me think—yes-I-will-I’ll-have-a-proper-cup-of-tea!”
“Or a hot apple cider, as the case may be,” Bottom adds, raising his Starbucks cup.
Even though they’re not in the Thursday night cast, Theo and Christopher are here too, for moral support and free pizza. Theo says to Christopher, “I told you he was gonna do the hot-apple-cider thing.”
“He does it every time,” Christopher agrees.
“Twenty bucks. Pay up.”
“But we didn’t make a bet.”
“I know. This is unrelated. I just want you to give me twenty bucks.”
Just for fun, they’ve let Juniper do their makeup too. Juniper has given Theo the Clockwork Orange look: heavy black makeup on just one eye, with spider legs of lower lashes drawn on in black eyeliner. Christopher’s face is covered in glitter, some of which has somehow spread to Theo’s face as well (!). The boys shimmer like a disco ball at the center of the room.
“I’m not giving you twenty bucks,” says Christopher.
“Okay, fine. Fifty bucks.”
“No.”
“A hundred bucks. Ten bucks. Nothing. It’s free.”
Wanda swoops in. “My little lambkins!” she cries. “Five minutes to curtain! Let’s all form a circle!”
We all form a circle, or a warped approximation thereof, lining the perimeter of the room.
“Go round the circle,” says Wanda, “and shout your favorite line from the play!”
Gleefully, the circle ripples with a string of shouted Shakespeare, mostly of the profane or accidentally profane variety.
“Help, ho!”
“Strumpet, I come!”
“Villainous whore!”
“This is my butt!”
“He says he will return incontinent!”
“Hot, hot, and moist!”
“Pish!”
“Holla!”
“O BLOODY PERIOD!” (That’s a cast favorite, and such a reliable giggle trigger that Wanda has wisely cut it from the actual performance.)
Daylily, humorlessly: “Come, how wouldst thou praise me?”
Bottom, gazing at her: “If heaven would make me such another world / Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, / I’d not have sold her for it.”
Juniper: “No, I will speak as liberal as the north!”
F: “I LAY WITH CASSIO LATELY!”
N: “It doth abuse your bosom!”
Christopher: “My leg is cut in two!”
Theo: “And will as tenderly be led by the nose / As asses are!”
With that, we come full circle.
“Let’s all join hands,” says Wanda.
We all join hands—hot, hot, and moist indeed.
Wanda’s voice hushes to a near-whisper. “The hour is upon us,” she says. “We’re about to achieve something special. Something extraordinary. I don’t say this every year, but I truly believe it now: this is going to be the best production in the history of Idlewild.”
Chills run through our costumed bodies. We believe it too.
“Let’s have a quick silence,” says Wanda. “I’ll pass round a squeeze.”
We close our eyes and wait. The squeeze comes to the F&N unit through Juniper, who squeezes the left hand of F, who squeezes the right hand of N, who squeezes the left hand of Christopher. In the ripe, humid silence, we imagine Christopher passing the squeeze to Theo. We imagine Theo kissing Christopher, Iago kissing Cassio, Othello kissing Iago, girls becoming boys who kiss boys who look like girls. We imagine how much the crowd is going to love us out there. We imagine how good we’re about to be.