Joy on Stage Part Ch. 01

"No. I'll do it myself." This clearly left me doubtful, and she noticed. "I wouldn't trust someone else to get what I want right. Your hair is a treasure. I'm not letting someone else have their way with it. You don't trust me? I started in hair and makeup in the business, Chelsea—"

"I trust you," I said quickly, unsure if I was telling the truth.

I sat down facing the back of the chair she offered me. Rosemary dictated a few orders to Kris for the crew upstairs and to tell them they could go home and the stage manager hurried to pass those comments on. We were alone and Rosemary huffed out an irritable breath as she wound up the hair on the top of my head and put a rubber band around it. She fixed my hair to her own liking for a few minutes as she figured out how to cut it, remarking to me that she had started cutting hair when she was a kid living on a Japanese military base with her father. He was too cheap to pay a barber, she said with a tired smile, so he expected her to keep his cut clean.

"This fucking day," Rosemary said to me. She started up a pair of clippers and I shivered at the sound. She told me not to freak out, it would look fantastic when it was done, but I had to trust her. I said I did. The clipper got louder as it closed in on my left ear and then it was making my skin vibrate as it worked its way through the side of my hair, just above the ear. Long red strands that had been a part of me fell to my feet, making me feel a little misty-eyed. It was just a look, I told myself, my hair would grow back. All for my art, right?

I couldn't help myself as the haircut continued, and I asked her what we were going to do about the Tracy role. If she was going to hit me with a big change... but then I realized she would hardly cut my hair and then switch my roles on me. It made me smile to realize. The haircut I had been so resistant to was actually job security, the best I could hope for anyway.

"You've been worried about replacing Lynne all night," Rosemary said with a threadbare laugh. "I don't know why you're so upset about it. It's my problem. Do you have a friend or something that you like for the role?"

"No. I never even thought about that," I told her. Gathering my courage in a breath, I confessed, "I kind've thought you were going to give me that role. Cast somebody else as Joy. Somebody better."

"Oh, poor girl," groaned Rosemary, moving the clippers to the other side and evening out my drastic redesign. "Don't let it hurt your feelings, but if you were that bad I'd fire you and just replace both of you. I already said you're not right for Tracy. Do you think you're doing that bad?" I mentioned the mistakes, foregoing self-deprecating and just focusing on the facts of what I got wrong, but she wouldn't let me keep listing. "It's a bad day. That's all. I like you for this role. I don't regret my decision. I think you'll really impress."

It was a bad idea to bring it up, I suspected, but if I had her anywhere near a good mood, I had to know. "What happened to Lynne? Do you know?"

"The bitch quit on me," she said, then laughed, a bit forced. In a more serious tone, she sighed and said, "We worked on the love scene a little bit last night. Just the usual stuff, blocking it as it happened—well, you were there. I sometimes forget when you're just standing back there and watching, statue-like." She pulled my topknot and made me suck in a breath with surprise. "I called her aside before letting her go home... just like I did with you when we talked about the hair... and we talked about the nudity. She said she thought she was comfortable with it, but I pressed her. I had originally told her that she would be doing a topless scene, maybe at the most I'd give the audience... fuck, I got a tangle here... does that hurt? It's alright? Okay... anyway, I said I might give them a flash of her bottom. That was what I was thinking at the time. Then I changed my mind. I have to do what's best for the play. I think twenty or so years ago removing an actress' top might be enough to shock, to really convey vulnerability... maybe not so much now. It was my mistake for thinking it would have that effect. But I told her last night I wanted to look at full-frontal nudity. That sounds weird, but you know what I mean. Tracy on stage, stripped completely naked by Harry... right there in front of the audience, facing them... forcing them to watch this happen to this young girl or to look away. She's thrown to the bed... then Harry disrobes, but it's more like... like a dog baring his fangs."

"I see," I said. Indeed it was hard not to envision. "Walt's... I mean, he's okay with it?"

"Walt's a pro. I informed him during the audition process that they had attempted something like that in the rehearsal stage in New York... it was what Terry wanted for the show, but he couldn't find support from the producers or actors. It's a smaller run here, but I'm determined we'll be more successful. I've been keeping in touch with Terry about it—"

"Whoa, you know Terry Townshend?" Rosemary had to straighten my head again, and I worried for a moment I had fucked up my hair worse. Many more curls had hit the floor while we talked, and I didn't want to see them all until I was done. "I didn't know you actually knew him. You know the guy who wrote the play, you actually talked to him. That's so cool."

"I probably would've thought so at one time," she said. "Terry loves me, I staged Disaster Time when nobody wanted any of his scripts. Of course, that wasn't but four years ago. But he's a cynic and a pessimist. Furthermore, he's a psychological wreck. Makes for interesting writing... maybe... but he's still convinced this play is a disaster and that I won't make it work any better than New York. You don't know how... absolutely crushing it is, Chelsea—oh, this is good. This is cute. Yeah... anyway, you don't know how hard it is to keep a pure and perfect vision in your head when somebody you have a great deal of faith in keeps telling you how you're going to fail."

I said maybe I did. "My dad never wanted me to be an actress. He came out here to be an actor in his twenties... had to give it up when he met my mom and she got pregnant with me. But he's never had any faith that I could do anything like this. I'd never be any good at it, he kept telling me. He wasn't trying to be mean... he had just been hammered down so many times that he stopped believing it happened for people. Like there was an 'us' and a 'them,' and one of us could never be one of them."

"That's very perceptive of you," Rosemary told me, a finger stroking the close-cut field of hair above my left ear. "I think you're right. Some people come out of a shitstorm and all they can smell is shit, all they can see is the shit covering their clothes. Me, I'm a bit more of an optimist. I walk out of a shitstorm, the first thing I think is... 'Hey! I'm out!'"

We both laughed. She prompted me out of the chair and told me I could go upstairs to check myself out in the bathroom mirror. I heard her laughing as I reached the stairs and started up, didn't realize until after I had walked out onto the main hall of the theater that I was in my fucking underwear! I started back down for a second, but I could tell most of the stage crew people who were waiting there to talk to Rosemary had already seen me. To hell with it, I thought, they would see me the same way in a week or so—vanity won out over modesty, probably not for the first time. I popped into the bathroom and checked out my hair in the mirror

It really did look great when I left my overflowing dark red locks hanging over my ears, short and thin, all but a little of the volume now gone, but it was a look I could pull off. Miller watched a lot of anime at home, inadvertently making me a semi-expert on it, and I thought my hair suddenly resembled one of those characters—albeit one of the males and not one of the girls, all of whom had hair down to their asses. When I wet it and stroked it back, I didn't like it much at all, a very '80s corporate asshole look, I thought. But since Rosemary had been half-right already, I assumed she would make the rest of it work.

I emerged from the bathroom and some members of the crew gave me applause. I gave them a mock bow and laughed at myself, then went back to get my clothes.

* * *

Exit Lynne, enter Michelle. She was something incredible. What find she was, confident, super-sexy, full of talent, and as down-to-earth as anyone could ask. She was about 5'6", curvy all over, with dyed hair that everyone could tell was dyed yet still looked gorgeous on her. Her toothy smile maybe helped her pull that off. The story of Michelle, as I heard it, was that she had been in an acting class that Rosemary had taught during her one year trying to teach on a college level, and Rosemary had encouraged her to keep at the craft. They did several productions together. When Michelle graduated, she moved east to do more stage work in New York, she had even gone out for the role of Tracy in the east coast production of our play, but she hadn't gotten it. Rosemary claimed she had enticed her to come out—Michelle paid her own way, trusting the check she would get for the show would compensate her—and gave us the weeks of rehearsal and the performances because she wanted to see the play done better than in New York. It was starting to become a mutual sentiment for all of us, some bar we could set and try to meet.

I found Michelle nice at first, but she was so outgoing that I couldn't see her as a convincing Tracy, not until we really broke into her scenes that Friday. I was won over completely, even invited her to the underwear party since I had invited everyone else from the show, although most of them didn't bother showing up. She did, which made me like her all the more. Oh, and "underwear party" never did sound right when I said it, but she would announce it to me with a funny-but-good English accent that made it sound a lot better.

Miller found Michelle dazzling, but most of the guys did. I found it no problem at all to hang out in my underwear all night, especially when I compared myself to Miller and his too-white body and unflattering cotton briefs. Though Michelle said he was nice, I don't think she had any thoughts of him as other than the guy who kept bringing her beers. I was having a steadily worse night as things went on, waiting for Vaughn and knowing inside that Bobbie wouldn't let him come, but putting way too much stock on it. I had doubted inviting him before I did it, thought there was no way I'd be comfortable with him there looking me over, but I couldn't very well refuse to invite him and then hope he didn't find out about it. I drank more and felt worse as the evening went on.

The next morning I woke up with Chuck in my bed, no clothes on either of us, and I was mortified. I slipped into my underwear again and waited in the living room for him to wake up. I was scared he was going to use it as a rung up the ladder until we were dating or something, but he just came out of my room, covering his cock and balls with two hands, and didn't look me in the eye as he returned to his room. It would have been funny if I had caught him doing the same thing under some other circumstances, something where I wasn't equally incriminated. Neither of us told Miller, believed we never would.

At last we came to the theater ready to work on the stage. My new hair, though I had fought it the whole way, really brought out the Joy aspects of my personality. I felt, really felt like a devil for the first time. There were a couple of nights, after Rosemary clearly determined that Michelle knew exactly what she was doing on stage, where our director drilled me on my blocking, just had me going through every place I was supposed to stand while reading my lines as fast as I could, until I seemed to have it down. I kept rehearsing it for the rest of that week at home, even when I couldn't actually say the lines because I was yawning too hard.

The best thing that happened with my acting was when Rosemary took me aside during a break and asked me to say a line that had been giving me trouble. "Nobody will know. Nobody will care. Do what you want." I said it. She asked me to say it again. I repeated it, very much the same. She said change it up. I repeated the line, with some tinkering on how it sounded. Again, she said. Again, I read it. We did this about ten times, I was sick of the line, I couldn't wait until the break was over.

"You notice that all of your readings on it are essentially the same?" I told Rosemary that was how I thought of it. She suggested I play with it, but I really didn't change it much as I read it five more times. If she was frustrated with me and regretting hiring me, she smiled anyway, then told me, "You're trying to make this character realistic. You're using... basically... Marlon Brando or James Dean style here. You're trying to make it method, how would Chelsea really say this. I think it's a mistake. Joy isn't Chelsea. Joy is pure id. How would your id say something?"

I didn't know. I felt terrible, I felt I had let her down, but Rosemary only messed with my hair a little bit and smiled.

"Looking good," she told me quietly. I had fluffed it myself before coming down to get as close to punk as I could. She asked me if I'd ever seen The Shining. I had. "Okay... imagine poor Danny Torrance running through that snowy maze, trying to get away, scared out of his wits... but instead of Jack Nicholson, he's got a girl in her underwear chasing him."

I smiled, covered my mouth, and nodded. I confessed I was worried I would look silly if I went too big with it.

"I don't want you to be Jack Nicholson up here," she warned me, "but I think a monster who's trying to destroy you would be more in line with what we want to do."

"I've been doing it wrong this whole time," I said, too self-indulgent to do anybody any good, but Rosemary was in the mood to indulge me.

"You read the funny lines perfect. I couldn't ask for better on those. But you've been trying to inject realism into the serious lines... but there's nothing realistic about a half-naked girl whispering your darkest thoughts directly into your head. Joy is a monster. That's your secret and mine, right?"

The cast came back, we took our places, and we went back to work. I dialed the delivery up to 9, sometimes going to 11, thank you, Spinal Tap, and it got a few laughs at times, but I was surprised that it did work pretty well. The last thing I really thought about was being in my underwear during the whole thing.

We skipped the blocking on the sex scene between Harry and Tracy until Wednesday. Although the costumes weren't called for until the following week, Rosemary asked Michelle if she wanted to perform the scene nude and she said she was alright with doing it that way. Rosemary and Walt walked her through the blocking for the scene as they had discussed before with Lynne, and they talked about what they would do from the stripping to the fade of the lights. Then everyone took their places and, as I should have expected, Michelle looked pretty nervous. I couldn't imagine being her place—good god, I told myself, I had actually auditioned for this role.

"Are you here to stay?" asked Harry, putting a hand around her throat that was equally menacing and sensual. Tracy leaned her head to the side as if either lost in the feeling or trying to inch away from him. Both Michelle and Walt were hard to see inside the characters on the stage. "Are you just going to run off again?"

"I'm scared," Tracy whimpered. "But I won't run anymore. I won't. I just..."

He began undoing the buttons on the front of her blouse. During the actual show Walt would tear the blouse and the buttons would just come open, but this shirt was Michelle's, and he accommodated. I was lucky that Rosemary told me to stay in the audience while they blocked it, I wouldn't get a view of the show from this angle again, since I was hiding in the shadows on stage whenever Walt and Michelle had a scene together.

"I'm gonna make you cum so good," he said, breathing down her neck and reaching down to put his hand over the crotch of her jeans. Tracy's chest heaved out and she curled her head toward him. He unbuttoned her pants and pulled the two leaves apart to reveal her white panties. "Don't you want to cum?"

"I want to cum... I do. I just... I don't think it..." Tracy's words stumbled as the actor brought the actress' jeans down to her knees; he had to help her balance as she stepped out of them. I found my eyes glued on the two of them, sweating, imagining what the people who would be sitting where I was through the shows would think when they saw this. How much further would it go? Did they want to see it? How did they feel about it? Michelle took a breath, and Tracy concluded, "I don't think it's going to help us, Harry. I think it might destroy us..."

Her words slowed again as hands started to knead her ass. His face was right there at her waist, then his mouth dipped and kissed her, his teeth tugging at her underwear. These were the characters, I had to remind myself, but it didn't change the fact the actor was doing this to the actress. He wound his fingers around the band of her panties, tantalizing those of us watching, scared and excited that he might take them down at any second, but then he reached up and pulled her shirt off her shoulders. He stood and undid the latch on her bra with stunning speed, Walt seemed to be more of a Casanova than Harry, and then he slid his hands under the cups to caress her breasts.

"This is wrong," she said, shaking all over, not quite crying. I felt real sympathy for her. I wondered how much Michelle drew on the fear she felt, the fear I knew I would feel in her same position. She loomed over the edge of the stage, as if ready to fall if Walt let her, but he held her like an inverted trust exercise. His hands moved up to her neck and brought her back to him. He removed her bra and pinned her arms beside her hips. "This is wrong!"

He held her arms in place as she tried to pull away, feeling him press against her back. I was scared for a moment I was hearing Michelle—wouldn't I feel the same way to be where she stood?—but she raised her head and wailed out as Harry tugged her panties down, fighting their way down through her tightly clenched thighs until they reached her knees and fell. He had her step out of them and pulled back away from the stage, turned her to face him, looked him in the eyes, and then Harry threw Tracy on the bed. Harry knelt, shoved his hand between her legs, and seemed to be penetrating her with his fingers as he smiled down at her.

"Don't," Tracy said softly to him.

I was taken out of the scene only for a moment, as I realized that Walt, too, was taking off his clothes. He worked his fingers down the buttons of his short-sleeve shirt until it fell open. His pecs were a sight to behold, tanned, well-shaped, the kind of male chest you would use as a mold for all of those to follow; his belly was a slab, not defined like a relief map or some kid's drawing of a man, but very attractive. I would have eaten broccoli off it—and I hate broccoli.

Walt unzipped his slacks and reached into his pants through the sly, shifting himself around. I couldn't have been more of a devil at that moment if I had been on-stage and in character. I wanted to see his cock, though I would have been humiliated to be caught watching him. Was this how our audience was supposed to feel?

His pants unfastened, he shook them off. His hard cock already made its way through the fly of his boxers, to my satisfied shock. It seemed to shine, dark skin stretched tightly over it but failing to cover the full tip peeking out the end. He wrestled his underwear off his nail, then down until he stepped from them.