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Cover
Table of Contents
Editor's Notes
Donations
Submission
Guidelines
Website
Stories
& Essays
...gone
tomorrow
_ By
jp Rodriguez
Barbie
and the Burn Scars
_ By
Dion OReilly
Bright
Lights
_ By
Nicole Exposito
Cricket Theory
_ By
Sophia Alev
Dieciseis
_ By
Kate Delany
Fines Double In Work Zone
_ By
Brian Stumbaugh
Guy and Doll
_ By
John P. Loonam
Lake
_ By
Erlynda Jacqui Chan
Lala's Diner
_ By
Nicole Exposito
Laundry
_ By
Allison P. Boye
Love Story
_ By
Cynthia Burke
Magic Bags and Forgotten Princesses
_ By
Ken Goldman
Squirrels
_ By
Benjamin Buchholz
Poetry
Baking Bread and Other Subtleties
_ By
Leland Jamieson
Corpus Christi
_ By
Taylor Collier
Early Cold
_ By
Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb
Ekphrasis at the Mall
_ By
James Owens
Games In Your Uncle's Den
_ By
Robin Stratton
My Spanish Rose
_ By
Jose Rivera
Northern Lights, Southern Soul
_ By
E.F. Kramer
Posted on Fifth Avenue
_ By
J.R. Salling
Sirens
_ By
Naiya Wright
Summer Sojourn
_ By
Cheryl Butterweck-Bucher
The Himalayan Sunset
_ By
Rohith Sundararaman
Time Decays, Clots
_ By
Kristine Ong Muslim
Turn
_ By
Terrance Schaefer
Where You Rest
_ By
Stephanie N. Barnes
Art
& Photography
Bissan Alhussein
_ Paintings
E.W. Hung
_ Photography
Papa
Osmubal
_ Drawings
Linda
Pakkas
_ Drawings
Anastasiya Tarasenko
_ Paintings
Filip Wierzbicki
_ Paintings
and Digital Photography
Nancy Xu
_ Paintings
and Drawings
_
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Guy
and Doll
By
John P. Loonam
Ed Bracebridge’s desires grew from
a love of American Musical Theater—the classics of the 40’s
and 50’s: Gypsy, South Pacific, Oklahoma!
He loved their purposeful naďveté, their optimism, their slick
vernacular style, and, of course, their music.
So he sat watching the parking lot of
Kennedy High School fill around him. He watched parents and
grandparents climb out and hurry each other across the lot and
around the corner, towards the front of the building where the
double doors were open under the banner that announced the drama
club’s production of Frank Loesser’s masterpiece, Guys and
Dolls. He waited until the crowd had thinned to almost
nothing. He had no reason to hurry.
Ed owned dozens of original cast
albums, but repeated listening had rendered them lifeless. He had
a few jazz records that included long-winded and self-indulgent
re-imaginings of his favorite songs. The occasional full-scale
Broadway revivals were exciting, but rare—like museum pieces.
He adjusted the mirror to examine the
knot of his necktie—touched its straight edges and returned the
mirror to its rear-view position. He stepped out of the car and,
one hand pressing the tie against his belly, reached back in for
his navy blue sports jacket. It was a warm night in early May, so
he could leave his overcoat behind if he buttoned the jacket’s
brass buttons and walked quickly around the corner with the
thinning crowd of friends and relatives, all talking with excited
pride about their future stars.
He had been truly among them only
once. His niece, Caroline got to play Lola in her high school
production of Damn Yankees, a dozen years ago: Caroline was
divorced now, trying to raise her own daughters. Louise had the
bright idea that they should go: he did love the musical,
and it might be fun. Louise was a highbrow opera lover, and rarely
joined him at the theater. She had made him see Matthew Broderick
in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying alone.
But for her sister’s kid, she would make an exception, and Ed,
she felt, should simply lower his standards.
The production had been abysmal, and
Caroline had been involved in several of the low points. But
sitting in that not-actually-dark theater, watching this
almost-woman try to belt out “Whatever Lola Wants” he had felt
something that polished professionalism had never given him. As he
watched her throw her teenage body into the seduction of the
obviously embarrassed boy grinning stiffly down stage, he felt
Caroline’s desire was as strong as Lola’s. Caroline probably
didn’t know what she wanted, but Ed went backstage to
congratulate her certain that he had seen the moment when she
realized that she wanted something.
“We’re all very nervous tonight
because she was soo flat last night and then flubbed her
cue on the reprise.” The woman ahead of Ed was talking to a man
in a tweedy jacket and a baseball cap, holding two tickets up
high, as if the kids in red bow ties taking tickets might reach
over and usher her in faster if her tickets were elevated. Mother
of the star, Ed thought. He was disheartened by her review: if Mom
thinks the singing is flat, the production had to be pretty bad.
He took no encouragement from her hope for a better show tonight—he
knew that high school productions rarely improved with practice.
Either the kids have it or the audience suffers. He reminded
himself he could leave at intermission.
He did become curious, as always,
about whose parent this was. “Adelaide’s Lament” was the
only song that reprised, and Ed turned to see whether this was the
mother of the stripper. Her anxious voice and the waving of the
tickets told him nothing. That was generic parent. Her mousy brown
hair and the puffing out of her lower cheeks made her appear
matronly—the mother of a saint. But Ed knew perfectly well the
limits of genetic expression. He had seen frosty-haired, demon
soccer moms hugging awkward ingénues often enough to know that
time untied enough of DNA’s connections to make any parent-child
embrace look like strangers wrestling.
Soon after his epiphany with Caroline—in
the steamy dressing room, she allowed her least favorite uncle to
kiss her on the cheek while her hair became undone in wisps under
his nose—Ed realized that there were dozens of high schools
within a short drive of his office. All of them had drama clubs,
all of them put on musicals starring awkwardly beautiful
almost-women. It had taken a bit of research, but Ed Bracebridge
had seen the greatest hits of American Musical Theater every year
since: Anything Goes at Long Beach High School, A Chorus
Line at Plainedge, The Sound of Music in Massapequa
Park.
The lobby was hot and crowded. The
Senior Class had organized to sell sodas to offset the cost of the
prom, but had not organized to get ice. Ed sipped dank cola from a
can and glanced at the crowd—solid middle class in clumps of two
or three, mother, father, sibling or grandparent. A talkative
clutch of students waited by the door, with a line of older boys
against one wall, practicing boredom. Ed noticed the woman from
the line—the man in the tweed jacket standing a few feet away as
if uncertain whether they were together. The man had a copy of Rolling
Stone Magazine and flipped pages absently.
Ed was aware of being alone, and knew
he passed as one of the single fathers, knew everyone would simply
assume Mom had come last night. He was not actually lonely. Louise
had never understood his attraction to these things. She had
little enough patience for what she called “legitimate Broadway”
and her taste in music ran to Maria Callas and Bach cantatas. In
earlier years she would wait up for him and listen patiently to
his review. His descriptions of the sets and the young actors, his
anecdotes about proud grandmothers and clumsy boyfriends tended to
bore her, but some nights she might sing a bit of the romantic
ballad—“I’ve Never Been in Love Before” from Guys and
Dolls, “I Could’ve Danced All Night” if it was The
King and I.
She had a finely fragile soprano, not
really a soloist’s voice, but lovely just the same, and
sometimes while listening to Joan Sutherland records, or after
choir practice at church, she would begin absentmindedly singing
as she puttered in the kitchen, breaking into quiet,
almost-whispered Italian, barely aware of it herself. Ed would
hear it from the other room and stop to listen, breathing in the
air that was filled with her voice, afraid to move, to open a door
or rustle a newspaper, for fear that the sound of the world would
stop her.
(Turn
the page)
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