Attack of the Theater People Read Online Free Page B

it!” Willow says. “Why don’t you call yourself the Sweater?”
    For a moment we’re all united in our shared opinion of Willow. “He can’t call himself the Sweater,” Paula says.
    “Why not?”
    Paula begins to explain and I tune out. Willow and I have conversations like this nightly while we lie in our hammocks: “How come, when you pick up a rock and there are all those bugs and worms and stuff underneath, how come they’re not smushed? And how come, in
Cinderella
, the coach and the footmen and the dress all turn back to what they were at midnight but the glass slippers stay the same? And how come…”
    Doug turns to me. “So?”
    “Sew buttons.”
    “Whadja think, man?” he says. “How was I?”
    He cares what I think. Of course, he doesn’t know yet that I’ve been kicked out of school. That my opinion is obviously worthless.
    I look straight into his eyes—all six (seven?) of them.
    “You. Were. Great.” I concentrate on each word to make sure they come out in the right order. “Raw. An’ electric. An’…”
    “And what?”
    “I forgot whut I wuz gonna say. Oh! An’ you were to-talilly in the moment. Totalilly. And I’m not jussayin’ that ’cuz I’m a lipple titsy…a tittle lipsy…’cuz I’m drunk.”
    “Thanks, man,” he says. “That means a lot to me.” He puts his hand on my shoulder, and it takes every bit of self-control I have left not to lean over and lick him.
    I am twenty years old and, thanks to a not unreasonable fear that sex with the wrong person will kill me, I have only gotten laid once in the last two years. Once! And even that wasn’t so great. After a summer sweating inside the woodchuck costume, I finally hooked up with one of the dancers in the Six Flags revue, which we called Six Fags because all of the guys were gay. But he wasn’t really my type. None of them were. Those swishy dancer guys just make me cringe. I mean, if I wanted to date a woman, I would. After all, women are still my second-favorite people to have sex with, but they’re a distant second. I guess you could say I was on the “bi now, gay later” plan.
    I’m brought back into the conversation when I hear Kelly mention a wedding Ziba’s going to. I’m always eager to hear about Ziba’s Persian social life, her “Arabian nights” at trendy bars with private rooms and subtle lighting.
    “Why do you have to be so mysterious?” Kelly says, then announces to the rest of the table, “She’s going to the shah’s wedding.”
    “The shah of Iran?” Marcus says. “I thought he was dead.”
    “It’s his son,” Kelly says, “the one who would’ve been shah if his father hadn’t been deposed.”
    “What do you call the son of a shah?” Paula asks. “The prince?”
    Ziba hesitates just long enough for the rest of us to volley the possibilities:
    Shah Junior
    Shah Lite
    The Man Who Would Be Shah
    I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Shah
    Shah-Nah-Nah
    Shahma-Lahma-Ding-Dong
    George Bernard Shah
    Almost Shah
    When pressed for details, Ziba answers in vague generalities, leaving us all to wonder just how close she is to royalty. Marcus won’t let it go, though, and bores into her with his coal black eyes. “So you’re a monarchist?”
    Ziba opens her mouth just enough to let the smoke out, like when there’s a fire behind a closed door. “Politics bore me.”
    “But you’re going to his wedding. That’s a political act.”
    Paula rests a tiny hand on Marcus’s arm. “Honey, calm down.”
    “Why should I?” he says, rising. “That’s the problem with all of you. You’re too complacent in your bourgeois bubble.” He then embarks on a Marxist diatribe I won’t repeat, mostly because I can’t follow it. Something about the exploitation of the common people by the evil-white-male-military-industrial-corporate complex, which, somehow, is personified by a five-foot-seventeen Persian lesbian. He finishes by marching out without paying.
    Paula apologizes for him. “The