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IF ONLY JESSIE’S MAGIC was real, Samantha thought that evening, she could’ve cast a spell to improve Mrs. Borman’s bad temper. The director kept saying, “My nerves, my nerves!” and popping Rescue Remedy tablets into her mouth, though they didn’t seem to be doing much to calm her down. Although the production was coming along very well, Mrs. Borman was now fretting because the matric pupils in the cast seemed to be thoroughly distracted by the upcoming final examinations and, especially, by the matric farewell dance.
The matric dance — due to be held at the Izintaba town hall — was a joint dance with the matriculants from Clifford Heights. Everywhere in the school, cliques of girls excitedly discussed dresses and dates and hairstyles. Samantha had been nervous about Jessie’s reaction to finding out that James had asked Chelsea to be his date for the dance, but Jessie merely said airily, “Well, the matric boys aren’t allowed to ask junior high girls, so what do you expect? It’s such a stupid rule!”
Samantha and Nomusa had exchanged concerned looks. They seemed to be doing this a lot around Jessie recently.
When the evening of the dance arrived, Samantha, Nomusa and Jessie joined the throng of girls gathered at the doors of the school entrance to watch the procession of matrics to the bus which would take them to town. In their expert makeup and gorgeous evening gowns, they seemed taller, more graceful and almost unrecognisable from the girls who slumped about the school scowling at the juniors.
“Wow,” Nomusa said. “They look so lovely.”
“Not bad, I suppose,” Jessie said flatly.
Chelsea was walking past them just then and in her elegant black and silver dress, she looked very beautiful and much older than her eighteen years.
“Well, thank goodness the dance will be over tonight!” the unmistakable voice of Mrs. Borman exclaimed from behind Samantha. “I sincerely hope, that from tomorrow we’ll all focus on the production.”
Costume fittings for The Sound of Music were held during rehearsals the following week. Samantha was amazed to see herself and Nomusa disappear into the long, black nuns’ habits that were their costumes.
“How bizarre is this?” Samantha said, walking over to where Jessie was being fitted. “We could be anyone for all you can see of us in these outfits.”
“How bizarre is this?” exclaimed Jessie, rotating on the spot to show them her costume — a frilly frock with fat puffed sleeves and lace-up ankle-length boots. “Kill me now. I look like a complete and utter moron.”
“If the shoe fits ...” they heard another nun say. It was, unsurprisingly, Cindy.
“You don’t look like a moron, Jess, just a pre-war, young Austrian girl,” Samantha said.
Jessie looked longingly at the anonymity of the nuns’ costumes. “Want to swop parts?”
But the teacher who was checking their appearance spun Jessie around again and began playing with her hair, holding up a bunch of curls on either side of Jessie’s head.
“I wonder if it’s too short to put into pigtails, like this? And then we could put matching ribbons in, like this, see?”
Jessie checked her image in the mirror and blanched.
“No, Miss, please,” she implored.
“I think you look amazing like that, Jessie,” said Cindy, with a horrible smile. “So attractive! Like a cute little poodle at the doggie parlour. It’s quite an improvement, actually.”
She walked away making barking noises, while Jessie, her face red and her eyes flashing, said to the teacher, “Let me kill her, ma’am, please. We could bury her in the flower beds and Sam here could say her lines. No one need ever know.”
The teacher looked a little startled but, letting Jessie’s curls fall, said merely, “Well perhaps just a plain Alice-band then, like so.”
It took Jessie a while to calm down and she only managed to crack a smile when Samantha said, “Cindy may still have a potty-mouth, but I do think her teeth are looking extra sparkly and clean these days, don’t you?”
The costumes may have looked wonderful at the dress rehearsal held a week later, but in every other way, it was a complete fiasco. The lighting seemed to hit the stage wherever the actors weren’t standing, the pianist and her musicians played at a different tempo than the recorded music to which the cast had rehearsed, and there were a lot of forgotten lines and missed cues. After the run-through, Mrs. Borman, threw what Nomusa called “a major hissy fit” and lectured them for a solid twenty minutes before marching out of the hall.
Mr. Matteson soothed the ruffled feathers and told the cast and crew, “You need to lift your game, peeps. That said, a dreadful dress rehearsal is supposed to mean a fantastic opening night!”
Everyone applauded, but Dan — who was wearing a T-shirt that said Backstage crew do it on cue — muttered, “Oh yeah? Where did he get that crazy idea?”
“In the land of wishful thinking,” whispered Jessie.
For Samantha, the worst part of the rehearsal was Cindy’s blatant upstaging behaviour. Whenever Samantha was centre-stage, Cindy would stand directly in front of her so that she wasn’t visible to the audience. Every time Samantha said a line, Cindy coughed loudly or faked a sneeze and then pretended to wipe mucous off Samantha’s nun’s habit. In one scene where Samantha had to sing a few solo lines while sitting on a bench in the spotlight, Cindy leapt up and began pacing furiously next to the bench, coughing and wheezing like a patient in the end-stages of lung disease.
Afterwards, Dan strolled over to where Samantha, Jessie and Nomusa were standing. “I couldn’t see you at all in that last scene, Sam. You kept hiding behind Cindy.”
“I wasn’t hiding behind her. She was walking and standing in front of me. She’s doing it on purpose!” Samantha said crossly.
“Of course, she is,” Nomusa said. “She’s so jealous of you, she can’t allow you even the teensiest bit of limelight.”
“Jealous? Of me? I seriously doubt that. What’s she got to be jealous of? She’s rich, clever, pretty, popular and can catch balls — what more could she want?”
“I think Nomusa’s right,” Jessie said. “And I also think you need a plan for opening night — if you want the audience to be able to see or hear you, that is.”
“Yeah, Lois is dead right,” Dan said, giving Jessie an approving nod. “We need some kind of strategy.”
They all thought hard for a few minutes, then Jessie almost shouted, “Got it!” Looking around to make sure no-one was near enough to hear, she leaned over and whispered a set of instructions to Samantha and Nomusa, and finished by advising, “But you must only do it on the actual opening night, okay? Else she’ll be expecting it and try to prevent it.”
“Okay,” Samantha said. “I’ll do it.”
Nomusa rubbed her hands together and grinned. “This is going to be great.”
“I’ll help,” Dan said.
“How?” Jessie asked.
Dan gave her an exaggerated wink. “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”
Their opening night fell on a warm spring evening. The fragrance of star jasmine rose from the gardens next to the hall where parents and visitors clustered about, chatting excitedly, before taking their seats in the hall. All the cast were already in costume and were forbidden (“On pain of death!” according to Mrs. Borman) from going to chat to their families or allowing themselves to be seen by any member of the audience. This didn’t stop nuns, Nazis and Von Trapps from peeping out through chinks in the heavy, red velvet curtains to try see where their families were seated.
“I can see my folks,” Nomusa said. “There on the left, about halfway from the front.”
“And my dad’s over there in the second row,” Samantha added.
Jessie scanned the audience. “Now, where’s my ... Ah, my mother’s on the right. Looks like my father couldn’t come. Big surprise. Huge.”
They all jumped when Dan’s voice spoke softly from a small speaker backstage.
“Final call. Everyone in act one, scene one, take your places, please. Everyone else — clear the stage. Final call for act one, scene one.”
A buzzer sounded in the hall, and the audience quieted down as the small orchestra warmed up and tuned their instruments.
Suddenly, Samantha felt enormously, staggeringly nervous. Her mouth was dry, and her stomach was teetering on the verge of nausea. Just breathe, she told herself, just breathe.
“Here we go,” she told Jessie and Nomusa. “Good luck!”
“Are you so ignorant that you don’t even know it’s bad luck in the world of theatre to say, ‘Good luck?’ Don’t know everything then, do you? You’re supposed to say, ‘Break a leg’,” said Cindy, taking up her place next to Samantha.
“Well, then, you be sure to break a leg, Cindy. And I mean that with all my heart,” Jessie said and exited stage right.