The Phantom of Oz, Installment #8
Very Curious Business!
Hello! Welcome to Installment #8 of my weekly serialization of The Phantom of Oz. If you missed earlier chapters, you can read Installment #1 here, Installment #2 here, Installment #3 here, Installment #4 here, Installment #5 here , Installment #6 here, or Installment # 7 here. And my apologies: Last week’s newsletter had an incorrect link for Installment #2 (thanks to Steve Kalinowski for alerting me).
If you’re wondering why I didn’t send out a correction after I learned about the issue, it’s because I’m still sick. Thanks to all of you who enquired about my health and encouraged a doctor visit. I’m on the road to recovery.
Some fun facts regarding the writing of this chapter, “Very Curious Business”:
I once played Viola in a production of Twelfth Night. Sort of. We had a fabulous cast and were roaring toward opening night when the guy playing Toby Belch got a film role in LA and quit the show. We couldn’t replace him in time, so the show was never performed in front of an audience. Sigh.
I fell down the stairs at a theatre right before an audition and sprained my ankle. Not sure it was a ghost. I also saw a light chain begin to swing in circles for no apparent reason, in a hotel that was suppose to be haunted. I think that was a ghost.
I love scrappy companies making incredible theatre out of not-much-at-all (like the production Ivy is in). The production of The Tempest shown at the beginning of Episode One of the fabulous Canadian show, Slings and Arrows gives you a good idea of how wonderful theatre-on-a-shoestring can be. I’ve got a link to it at the end of the chapter.
And now, on to Chapter 7. Happy reading!
Chapter 7
Very Curious Business!
My fellow Twelfth Night actresses were all atwitter.
“Did you see the ghost?”
“Did you meet Babette?”
“Do you think the Lady in White was really after Babette?”
“How about, ‘Hey, Ivy, I’m so glad you weren’t killed yesterday?’ Sheesh,” I said as I applied the finishing touches to my makeup in the tiny dressing room. Twelfth Night was being produced by New Vintage Theater, a small company with loads of talent but a limited budget. We were performing in a black box theater that had only two dressing rooms, one for women and one for men. We were lucky. This being Shakespeare, there were just three of us women. The men’s dressing room was so crowded the actors had to take turns using the mirror.
“We’re all happy you’re alive,” said Victoria, who was playing Olivia. “But we can see that. Now we want the juicy details.”
“Okay.” I drew in another eyebrow. Mine were too blonde to be seen onstage. “I did see the ghost. It was right after the chandelier flickered. Isaw something misty-looking. At first I thought it was the stage lights in my eyes. But it seemed to have a form, and it was bending over Babette.”
“Ooh, really?” the women said as one.
“No, not really. Sheesh.” I wasn’t being entirely truthful. I did see that smoky figure. I was pretty sure it was a trick of the light, prompted by all the ghost talk. “Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked them.
“Sure,” said Victoria. “Don’t you?”
Every so often, my actor and detective personas bumped up against each other. This was one of those times. As an actor, I was properly superstitious. I said, “Break a leg” instead of “Good luck,” didn’t whistle backstage, and never ever said “Macbeth” in a theater. As a detective, I knew intellectually that superstition had no place in the world of logic and deduction. Still...
“I’ve noticed that you check to make sure the ghost light is on every night,” said Jessica, our Twelfth Night’s Maria.
“That’s just for safety,” I said. The ghost light is an old theater tradition, a light that’s left burning through the night to keep people from falling over the set and/or the theater ghosts from causing too much mischief. The one at our theater, like many others, was a bare bulb on a stand we placed in the middle of the stage before we left for the night.
“I was once pushed down the stairs by the ghost at Phoenix Theater,” said Victoria. “Sprained my ankle right before an audition.”
I suspected it was less the ghost and more the four-inch heels that Victoria always wore but kept my mouth shut. After all, if there were any ghosts around, I didn’t want to tick them off.
“I think I saw the Lady in White once,” said Jessica.
“Really?” Now this was interesting. “When?”
“I was walking down one of those backstage passages in the Grand Phoenician after a show when this producer approached me. He was from out of town—don’t think you’d know him. Anyway, he’d been a pain in the butt for a while—always making rude comments, pinching my ass, that sort of thing, but I didn’t think he was serious trouble. This time though, he said something slimy like, ‘You know you want it,’ and grabbed my wrists and pressed me up against the wall. He was a big guy and I thought I was really in trouble until...” She stopped, a faraway, wondering look on herface. “A chain hung down from one of the light bulbs in the passage. It started moving, swinging around in circles and slapping the guy in the back of the head. He backed off from me to see what was happening, then his eyes got really big. He pointed down the hallway toward the basement and ran off fast in the opposite direction. I swear I saw the edge of a white gown disappear around the corner. I ran toward it, but when I rounded the corner, there was no one there.” The remembering look faded from her eyes, and she spoke with authority. “I’m sure it was the Lady in White. She saved me.”
#
I wanted Jessica’s ghost story out of my head. Not just because it made me wonder about ghosts and the spiritual realm and what I might’ve seen, but because I had a show to do. I walked backstage to wait for places, pushing the here and now out of my head, thinking instead about love and shipwrecks and lost brothers. In a weird way, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night paralleled my own life. Like Viola, I’d thought my brother drowned; not in the sea, but in an icy pond in Spokane, Washington. My mom had insisted I take Cody ice-skating with me and my girlfriends. I didn’t wanthim hanging around with us big kids (I was all of eleven), so I paid him no attention at all—until he wasn’t there, swallowed by a black hole in the ice. And like Viola’s shipwrecked brother, Cody survived, though he had a brain injury he’d live with forever. I blamed myself. My parents blamed me too. Only Uncle Bob acted like family, doing things like actually asking if I was okay after a big scary chandelier accident at the theater.
Argh. There I was, in my own head again, when I needed to be in Viola’s. No matter what anyone said, this acting thing was not easy.
I had a good show in spite of myself. When it ended a few minutes after ten o’clock, I said a hasty goodbye to my castmates and rushed out the door. I had a little spying to do.
A few minutes later, I pulled into a street parking space near the Berger Performing Arts Center. I ran the few blocks and signed in at the stage door. They knew me, so it wasn’t a big deal. “What’s your business today, Miss Ivy?” asked the security guard.
“I’m meeting Candy MoonPie.”
“Candy?”
“Oh, she’s probably signed in as Candace Moon. New stage name. She’s helping with the munchkin auditions.”
“Yeah, I saw her earlier. Doesn’t look like LA has been kind to her, if you know what I mean.”
I did.
“They’ve all been gone for hours,” he said. “They were only scheduled from six to eight.”
So Candy had lied. I had too, I guessed, about not being able to get to Seamus McCaffrey’s before eleven, since I’d made it to the Berger by ten thirty. “So she left?”
The guard consulted his clipboard. “She signed out at 8:05. And you’ll never guess who was with her. Caused quite a stir around here, let me tell you.”
“Arrestadt Giry?”
“Yeah, he was here too, but he wasn’t the big deal tonight. It was that reality star, Babette the you-know-what.”
Babette was also known as Babette the Bitch because, well, she was.
“Yep, Candy left with her. Looked real buddy-buddy too, the two of them.”
And here’s that link to Episode One of Slings and Arrows:
Watch next week for Installment #9, Chapter 9, “Undergone a Disagreeable Change”
And if you haven’t read the first four books in the Agatha-nominated series:
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