Dorothy on the Rocks

by Barbara Suter

Genres: Humor & Satire; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

In Maggie Barlow's world, reality is overrated. So what if her singing career has hit a sour note or she's no longer the ingénue that she used to be? So what if she drinks and smokes a bit too much or likes to chat with a fairy godperson who appears to her from time to time? She's the queen of denial and an actress to boot—she can just take on the role of someone she likes better than her sorry self. Regrettably, that role is currently Dorothy in the Little Britches Theater Company's production of The Wizard of Oz.

Dorothy on the Rocks is the story of a funny, lovable, totally self-destructive woman who, after a night of one-drink-too-many, wakes up with a strange man in her bed: confident, handsome, sexy, twenty-eight-year-old Jack. What happens next is what makes Barbara Suter's coming-of-middle-age tale so much fun. For when the make-believe is finally stripped away, our hurt, lonely, and very afraid heroine finally takes center stage and finds herself starring in a totally improbable love story. It just might be the role of a lifetime.

Release date: June 24, 2008

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 325

Sample

The phone rings once, twice. I open my eyes. Morning sun slaps me full in the face. Damn. I pull the sheet over my head and the answering machine picks up.

“Hi, honey,” a familiar voice says, “we’re on the corner at Broadway and Ninety-sixth, waiting for you. Hope you’re on the way.” I sit up and squint at the clock. My left eye twitches and my head begins to throb. Shit. The voice belongs to Dee-Honey Vanderbilt. She produces the Little Britches Children’s Theater. She’s over eighty years old and although no one knows for sure, rumor has it she served with Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War.

“Maggie, dear, are you there?”

I reach for the phone.

“Hi, Dee, what’s up?” I say.

“We’re waiting for you. We have a Wizard in Connecticut. Did you forget? I’m sure you confirmed with me.”

“Oh no, what time is it?” I ask.

“It’s eight o’clock. We’re waiting for you.”

“Uh, I was sick. I was going to call you—food poisoning—had some bad tuna,” I say, lying neatly through my teeth. Truth is I had totally (and perhaps wishfully) forgotten I am supposed to play Dorothy this morning.

“Do you think you can be here in ten minutes? We want to miss the traffic.”

“I don’t know, Dee. My stomach is still queasy.”

“We’ll get you some Pepto-Bismol. Fix you right up. The kids love you as Dorothy, Mags honey, and we can’t disappoint them. We’ll drive down to Eighty-seventh. Meet you right on your corner.” Then she hangs up. Damn and double damn. My cat, Bixby, peers up from his nest at the foot of the bed. He gives me a knowing look.

I definitely need coffee. As I throw my feet over the side of the bed I hear someone in the bathroom and then a flush. My God. Someone has broken into my apartment and is using the toilet! Seconds later a tall handsome young man walks into my bedroom.

“Mornin’, Maggie Mae,” the handsome young man says with a grin.

My head starts to pound louder than the tympani section in the second act of Das Rheingold—the result of shock smacking butt up against big hangover. I force a smile because by now I’m pretty sure he’s not a burglar. Mr. Handsome is barefoot, bare-chested, and holding a pair of Nikes. He sits on the side of the bed and puts on the left shoe then the right. He finds his shirt in a pile of clothes in the center of the floor; I can’t help but notice my black lace Victoria’s Secret push-up bra in the mix. I pull the bedsheet up to my chin and keep smiling and try to quickly reconstruct the night before. I went to the Angry Squire Bar on Twenty-sixth Street and started off slow with a couple of beers. Then someone played Janis Joplin’s “Get It While You Can” on the jukebox, and I switched to scotch. Apparently I got Mr. Handsome and he got me. Thanks, Janis.

“Mornin’ to you too,” I say trying to remember his name, but nothing comes to mind. Then, remembering Dee, I say, “I’ve got to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz today. I forgot all about it.”

“Is that the dog?” he asks, pulling on his shirt

“The dog? No. The dog is Toto. Dorothy is the girl. You know, Judy Garland in the movie?”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“Never seen it?” I ask incredulously. “You’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz? I can’t believe there is a person left on the face of the earth that hasn’t seen The Wizard of Oz.”

“Well,” he grins, “you’re looking at him.”

“Where are you from, Mars?” I ask.

“No,” he says, buttoning his shirt, “Queens.”

“Oh,” I say, still smiling.

“Look, I’ve got to run,” Mr. Handsome says. “I have an appointment downtown. It was great meeting you.” He leans in and nuzzles my neck.

“You too.” I nuzzle him back.

“I’ll call you,” he says over his shoulder as he makes his exit.

“Sure,” I say. And he is gone—out the front door and gone. What was that? I wonder. I shake my head a few times to make sure I’m awake and not dreaming.

The phone rings. It’s Dee.

“How’s it going? We got the Pepto-Bismol.”

“I’m on my way. Can someone get me a coffee at the deli?”

“Okay, but hurry, honey, we’re running late and traffic on the Major Deegan is going to be awful this morning. It’s already backed up.”

“This is a nightmare, Bix,” I say to the cat, going to the kitchen and putting out his food. “I hate playing Dorothy. That damn pinafore is too small, the zipper is broken, and gingham makes me look fat.” Bixby rubs my leg. He doesn’t care if I look fat; he doesn’t care about anything as long as I feed him. I get my backpack, throw in my makeup and my pigtail wig, and shift into high must-get-to-Oz mode.

I emerge from my apartment building to find Dee and the cast waiting on the corner at the end of the block. Randall Kent is leaning against the van, holding a large coffee. He’s been out of town for the past few months doing Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady at Virginia Stage. He works constantly. He’s what they call, in the biz, a triple threat. He sings, he dances, and he acts, all with considerable relish and plenty of ham. His motto: More is better. I met him at a small theater in Wisconsin. I was an apprentice and he was the leading man in every show that summer, including playing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof and Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha. I called him Mr. Kent, and when I moved to New York, he got me a job with Dee-Honey. That was almost twenty years ago.

“Mags, my dear,” Randall declares in his booming actor voice, “how are you?”

“All right,” I say. “Good to see you.”

Randall hands me the coffee. “For the little princess, from your loyal servant,” he says with a bow.

“Thanks, I’ll remember this when your clemency hearing comes up,” I say.

Dee-Honey sticks her head out the window of the van. “Let’s get going. The radio says the traffic’s getting heavy.”

“And mornin’ to you, Dee,” I say, taking my first sip of coffee. The caffeine immediately shoots through my system, and the majority of my molecules snap to attention. The rest turn over and go back to sleep.

“And how was the show?” I ask Randall as we climb into the van and get settled.

“Well the show was fabulous,” Randall says. “I was telling Dee that the girl playing Eliza was wonderful. She’s just out of Juilliard. A lovely voice but needed help with the humor. You’ve got to find it or it’s dull—dull, dull, and duller. And Dylan Ross was playing Pickering. Do you know him, Mags?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.” I’m sitting in the backseat next to Pauline Letts, who plays Glenda, the Good Witch of the North, in our little production and also doubles as Auntie Em. She’s seventy-three, originally from Georgia, and has been playing the Good Witch for the better part of forty years.

“Pauline, didn’t you work with him? At Utah Shakespeare?” Randall asks.

“Oh, yes, he was Polonius when I did Gertrude. Does he still have those nasty dogs? What were they, schnauzers? They were awful. They used to pee in my wig box.”

“Maggie, honey, how are you feeling?” Dee chirps from the driver’s seat.

“Better, I think,” I say.

“What’s the matter, Maggie? Late night, dear?” Eddie Houser asks from the far backseat. He plays the flying monkey and doubles as the munchkin. Eddie, now sixty-five, started with the company when his hair was black and his teeth were mostly his own. He is drinking coffee spiked with bourbon out of his Superman thermos. We all know there is bourbon in the thermos. Dee-Honey doesn’t say anything, she just doesn’t let him drive anymore.

“Careful when you’re spinning on that cellar door. That could really make the old tummy flip,” he says with a nasty chuckle.

“Thank goodness you were able to make it, Maggie,” Dee says. “I might have had to put a wig on Frank and sent him on.”

To Dee, the phrase “the show must go on” isn’t just a catchy saying, it’s the eleventh commandment, carved in stone and delivered down from the Austrian Alps in The Sound of Music by Thespis, the Greek father of actors. Last month I saw her squeeze into the crocodile costume for Peter Pan and crawl on all fours across the stage because Scott Lovelady came down with the flu.

“Anyone have some aspirin?” I ask.

Randall rummages through his bag and hands me an economy size bottle of Tylenol.

“And here’s the Pepto-Bismol,” he says.

“Thanks,” I say, popping two pills and swigging some Bismol.

Dee-Honey does a head count. All the players are present and accounted for, so off we go. I tell myself it’s not going to be so bad. The only thing I have to remember as Dorothy is to hang on to the dog and try to get home.

We arrive at the theater ten minutes before curtain. I find Dorothy’s costume; white puffy-sleeved blouse, the dreaded blue gingham pinafore, and a white crinoline. I start to squeeze in. The costume is too small and the zipper is still broken from last time I did the part. Pauline is right by my side with a box of safety pins.

NOTE TO SELF . . .

If the costume doesn’t fit, suck in your stomach and don’t turn sideways.

“Pull that tummy in, Mags,” she says, coaxing the sides together with the help of the pins. The blouse fits, but the pinafore is hopeless.

“Don’t turn sideways and you’ll be fine,” Pauline says as she scurries off, muttering something about false eyelashes. My head pounds in spite of the aspirin, and now random light flickers on the periphery of my vision. I ask Randall about it.

“I don’t know,” he says, “sounds like the onset of a heart attack or possibly a stroke.”

Frank, our trusty stage manager who almost had to double as Dorothy, calls five minutes.

“Feeling all right, Mags?” he asks.

“A little better, and lucky for you I do. Dee said she would have put a wig on you and made you play Dorothy,” I say.

“And she would have. Forget that I’m sixty and have a mustache,” he says. “Come on, let’s do the door thing and make sure it’s working.”

I follow Frank backstage and we practice spinning the mechanical cellar door, with Frank pulling the cord that turns the wheel and me perched on top. Frank moans and the door turns slightly and Frank moans again.

“Save your energy for the show,” I say.

“Sorry, Mags, but have you put on a few pounds?”

“Frank, we’ve all put on a few pounds.”

“Yeah but it’s only you I have to spin,” Frank grumbles as he totters off to set the rest of the props.

“I heard that,” I say.

“Let’s do this,” Frank announces. “Those kids are getting restless. Places, everybody.” The cast assembles in the wings. I find the stuffed dog that plays Toto and stand stage right. The music starts and Randall squeezes my arm.

“Break a leg, kid,” he whispers.

The curtain opens. I run onstage clutching the little dog and say, “Oh Toto, Toto, what are we going to do?”

I hear a tiny voice in the first row say, “Mommy, I thought Dorothy was a little girl, not a big lady.”

I glare out into the audience. Silence. Followed by more silence. I can’t remember the next line. Frank whispers something from the wings but I can’t understand him.

Then Dee-Honey comes onstage as Miss Gulch. I squeal and run upstage and hide behind the curtain. Lights flash and Frank makes tornado sounds in the offstage microphone. Randall and Eddie chime in with cow moos and chicken clucks. Pauline darts across stage yelling, “Get those animals in the barn. There’s a twister coming.” The lights continue to flash. Pauline disappears stage left and the cellar door is pushed on down right.

“Oh Toto, oh Toto,” I cry and then climb on the cellar door. Frank pulls the rope. It doesn’t budge. “Oh Toto, oh Toto,” I cry again. I shake the dog up and down and circle my head as if lashed by the wind. Frank groans as he tries the rope again. I reach over and brace my hands on the floor and try to propel myself around.

“She’s too big.” It’s that kid in the front row again. “She’s not a little girl. I want to go home.” The child bursts into tears and thankfully the lights go to black. Frank shoves the dead witch’s feet onstage, pulls the back curtain across the traveler. I get up off the cellar door. Lights up and Eddie staggers out as the munch-kin, “W-w-wel-l-lcome to Mm-m-un-s-s-ch-kin-n-nland,” he slurs as Pauline sweeps onstage as Glenda the Good Witch in her long pink chiffon dress with hoopskirt and sequin trim, her magic wand shimmering with glitter. The kid in the front row stops crying and leans forward, suddenly entranced.

“I’m Glenda, the Good Witch of the North,” Pauline says in her honey-buttered southern accent, and in spite of the irony, the show is finally rolling.

When Randall Kent, playing the Wizard, sends me back to Kansas, I start to cry my actress tears, because I don’t want to leave the wonderful land of Oz, but the Wizard assures me he can get me back once a year for a visit. Pauline touches me with her wand and the lights flash. I click my heels and twirl round and round and end up on the cellar door again, back home in Kansas—and realize my actress tears are mixed with real tears because back here in this world I can’t remember the name of the man I spent the night with, I’m wearing a gingham pinafore that doesn’t fit, and I’m being heckled by a six-year-old. Who wouldn’t rather stay in Oz?

“Good show,” Eddie says as I pass him on my way to the dressing room.

“Got any of your coffee left?” I ask. Eddie pours me a Styrofoam cupful and I down it.

“Oh, and sorry I kicked you during the munchkin dance but I got thrown by that damned heckler in the front row. I could have killed her.”

“Forget it,” Eddie says, taking a swig from his thermos. “There’s always at least one of those when I do Pinocchio. Kids have no manners these days. They’re all spoiled brats.”

I sit at the dressing room table and begin to remove my makeup. Frank switches on the overhead fluorescent lights. I look at myself in the mirror, with my pigtail wig and rouged cheeks, and recoil in horror. I look frighteningly like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

“Turn off that overhead light, will you?” I snap to Frank.

“Aren’t we sensitive?” Randall says from the other side of the room.

“My vision is weird today, and that fluorescent light makes my eyes flicker,” I say defensively.

After we change out of the costumes and pack up the props, we pile into the van and head back to New York. I’m in the front seat between Dee-Honey and Pauline.

“You always make such a lovely Dorothy, dear,” Pauline says, and pats my knee. “Just lovely.”

“Pauline, you’re sweet, but I’m forty-one. I think my Dorothy days are over. Did you hear that girl in the front row?”

“She was a thoughtless urchin. No imagination. Look, Maggie dear, to a seventy-three-year-old, forty-one is still an ingénue, isn’t that right Dee-Honey?”

“Oh my yes. You’re practically a teenager.”

“Teenager,” Randall snorts from the backseat. “She’s Lady Macbeth if she’s a day.”

“You hush, Randall,” Pauline hisses. “You just hush.”

“Thanks,” I say to Pauline, then give her a kiss on the cheek. “And I think you’re the real reason that Dorothy makes it back home and it’s not the nasty old Wizard at all,” I say, nodding in Randall’s direction. “It’s Glenda’s good wishes that get her back to Kansas.”

“I’ve always thought that,” Pauline says. “When I give her that final blessing with the wand, I envision Dorothy back home safe and sound. I’m glad you feel it.”

“I always do,” I say.

A few years ago Pauline and I were on tour together in Freddie and his Magic Flute. After too many shots of cheap scotch at the motel bar, I confided to her that I was depressed and feeling like nothing in my life had meaning. She took me by the shoulders and said, “Listen to me, Maggie, you have to go on no matter what, because you never know when something wonderful will happen.” Then she proceeded to tell me about the time, in a fit of despair, she decided to kill herself. It was a cold December day after Christmas. She opened the window of her apartment—a sixth-floor walk-up on West Forty-fifth Street (where she still lives)—and put on her best black cocktail dress (an Ann Roth design she had worn in a walk-on role with Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy), along with her rhinestone earrings, four-inch stiletto heels, and black elbow-length satin gloves. Her plan was to get a running start and hurl herself out the window, down six stories, and onto the front page of the New York Daily News. But just as she was about to get up speed and go, the phone rang. It was a friend, and when she heard his voice she started to cry uncontrollably. The friend (a tall, dark, handsome mystery man is what Pauline leads you to believe) suggested dinner, and since Pauline was already dressed for it, according to legend, they went to the Rainbow Room, then spent the weekend at the Plaza Hotel drinking champagne and eating caviar. That’s the official version; unofficially the word is (and Eddie Houser swears to it) Dee-Honey was the one on the other end of the phone who saved Pauline, and then had her admitted to Bellevue for an extended stay.

I look over at Pauline. She is busily crocheting, making hats and scarves for the homeless.

“You remember Mariah Stacky, don’t you, Dee?” Pauline says.

“Yes, honey, I do. She went on tour with us to Tennessee with Pied Piper,” Dee says. “She was wonderful as the mayor’s wife. Had a lovely soprano. She was the only one that could really hit the F-sharp in the ‘Rats, Rats, Rats’ number.”

“I got a card from her. She’s living in Phoenix. For her health, you know. Terrible asthma.”

“Really? Is she still married to that fire-eater?” Dee asks. “Remember he worked for Ringling?

“Yes, but he retired. Mariah said they’re happy as clams on the half shell.”

“Clams on a half shell?” Eddie yelps from the backseat. “That is just like Mariah to think it would be a hoot to be a clam on the half shell.”

I lean my head back and close my eyes. Where are those ruby slippers when you really need them?

When I get home there is a phone message from Mr. Handsome: “Hey, Maggie Mae, how are you? Sorry I had to take off so early this morning. I had a great time and I want to see you again. How ’bout tonight? You’re so great. I mean hot. You know what I mean. Call me. I’m at home and then I’m out, but I’ll check my machine or you can call my cell. I’ll be free around ten. How was the Dorothy thing? Call me.”

NOTE TO SELF . . .

Be sure to get his name before you climb up on his lap and yell “giddyup.”

I replay the message four times, copying down the phone numbers. Did he mean hot as in exciting, or hot as in hot to touch? I suspect he had mistaken the heat of a pre-premenopausal hot flash for sizzling passion but what the hell. For me it was one of those blurry nights that return in moments of clarity, like freeze-frame pictures. I was sure I remembered that at some point he was wearing a garter belt and I was perched on his lap yelling giddyup. That could explain the bruise I noticed on my left thigh when I was struggling into my Dorothy tights. But what is his name? I can’t remember it, or maybe I never knew it. And he didn’t leave it in the message.

There is also a call from Charles: “Maggie, darling, where are you? It’s Charles. My God, it’s so hot and humid I’m sticking to myself. I just got back from Spain. Olé! And I’m dying to tell you all about it. How about dinner tonight? I’m footloose. My treat, darling. Just love to see you. Call me.”

Charles is the curator of a small art gallery in Tribeca. His taste is very noveau yet very upscale, meaning he knows what sells for big bucks and doesn’t bother with fads. I wish I didn’t bother with fads and that I could make big bucks, but my life has been one fad after another. There was the women’s lib fad and the rock star fad and the downtown leather fad, the spiritual fad and the soybean diet fad and the Hampton fad, and now the too-much-scotch-not-enough-brain-cells-younger-man fad. And all of them ended up costing me, although what I’m not sure. At dinner that night Charles chats nonstop about Madrid and the matadors and the vino and the art.

“Maggie, dear, you should see my newest find. We agreed on a show at the gallery in the fall. He does acrylics mixed with crushed shells on linen. Amazing textures. And what a colorist! Like O’Keeffe. Pure, vibrant. And yet not overbearing. I think they’ll sell like crazy. Very Hampton friendly. You should tell your friend Patty. I think she’d love them. Give me her address and I’ll send her an invitation to the opening. You would not believe the place I stayed.”

Charles proceeds to wax poetic about the hotel and the gorgeous young man he had met in Santa Pola, a resort town on the coast of Spain that is apparently filled with gay men and nightclubs and nude sunbathing. As he talks my mind drifts off to a freeze-frame from last night. I am sure Mr. Handsome had a tattoo on his shoulder, and I am now trying to get it into focus. I think it was some sort of religious symbol . . . or was it an animal? I’m sure it had several arms and legs, or at least what looked like legs. Maybe it was something Hindu.

“Maggie?” Charles snaps at me.

“Sorry?” I say, coming back to attention.

“Hello, earth to Maggie!” Charles says. “I was talking about my new artist.”

“I’m listening, acrylic on linen. I love it. Sounds very Mapplethorpe,” I say.

“What do you mean Mapplethorpe? God, Maggie, Mapplethorpe was a photographer. After all these years of my educating you about the art world, I would think you’d at least get the mediums right.”

“I can only try,” I say. “You have to admit I can pick out a Hockney from a lineup.”

“Hockney’s easy, dear.” Charles smiles at me indulgently.

“Easy for you.” I smile back.

“And then in Barcelona,” Charles continues, “I met a wonderful glassblower. Amazing vases.” He hands me another stack of snapshots.

“He’s gorgeous, Mags,” Charles says, chewing on his olive. “He told me the secret to good skin is hydration. He drinks two gallons of water a day. Can you imagine?”

“No.” I say. “I’d have to wear a catheter just to leave the house.”

“I think he must,” Charles says. “You know people will do anything these days to look young. Have you heard about sheep fat? If you put it in the blender with some sea salt and cucumbers it makes a wonderful restorative scrub and takes off years.”

“Really? I could have used some of that sheep fat this morning. I had to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.”

“Maggie, you’ve got to start singing for real again. Get out of that damn pigtail and pinafore and do cabaret. Put on a silky black cocktail dress and sing Cole Porter.”

“I can barely get into the pinafore anymore, for Christ’s sake. A little girl in the front row heckled me. Called me a big lady, which is code for old and fat. And the cellar door wouldn’t spin. I practically had to get off and walk to the Land of Oz. I’m not the ingénue I used to be.”

“Oh, who is, darling?” Charles says, finishing off his martini. Then he gestures to the waiter for another round for both of us. Charles and I met years ago. He was living with my accompanist at the time, Goodwin Albert DePugh, better known as Goodie, the best piano player to ever come out of Lake Charles, Louisiana. We kicked ass in the East Village clubs doing our Miss Goodie Two Shoes and Maggie the Magnolia act for the extremely hip, the classy cool, and the “true believers,” as Goodie liked to call them. We were the “wildly addictive soul sisters with sass and brass,” said the Village Voice. “Funny and heartbreaking, with harmonies to die for.” Goodie was my best friend; I was Ethel to his Lucy, and he was Rhoda to my Mary.

When Goodie started to get sick, we all knew what it was. We knew it was the Big Sick. The Big Sick that no one could get away from in the eighties and early nineties. It was everywhere, and it was so devastating that no one wanted to look—certainly not me.

Sometimes during a rehearsal Goodie would start coughing and couldn’t stop, and I would find some speck on the wall or crack in the floor to look at and will myself not to think until the coughing stopped and Goodie took a drink of water and said something about allergies. I would rub his back and try not to think about the Big Sick; I’d tell myself that maybe it was just allergies. After all, the pollen count was high and the ozone layer was disappearing at an alarming rate. Charles got Goodie hooked up to some experimental program. Goodie started having lots of colonics, the theory being you could flush the poison out. Get rid of the fluids—pump in healthy stuff. Purify the body. But nothing worked, and Goodie got thinner and weaker and sicker, and finally it got so bad that there was no place to look and pretend it wasn’t happening. Goodie’s brother Joe came up from Texas to help out. He was a civil engineer and we hit it off and became a couple, much to Goodie’s delight.

“You two were made for each other,” he would say with a smile. So Texas Joe and I fell in love while Goodie fell victim to his compromised immune system. By the time the lifesaving “cocktail” came on the scene, he was too far gone. Lousy timing for a guy with rhythm.

Charles and I are having dinner at Ernie’s on Broadway. It’s a big, airy place with windows that open onto the street. Air-conditioning is pouring out of overhead vents.

“They’re cooling the whole damn world; their elec. . .