Colors Insulting to Nature

2 How she will nonetheless remain emotionally available “to whoever the shoe fits.”

3 How her botched suicide proved to herself she was both lucky and indestructible as pig iron.

During their final session, Gerald the Therapist told Peppy he liked the tattoo a whole lot. Peppy blushed with pride.

Peppy embarked on several car trips along the coast of California, intending to move the kids closer to Hollywood, as a baby step toward New York. She got as far as Fairfax, a town on the outskirts of Marin County, near San Francisco, for it was there that she took a pit stop at the Lady Tamalpais Café/Bar and befriended a gay couple in their late thirties, Mike LoBato and Ike Nixon.

Mike had been a pot-smoking Santa Cruz surfer until the Ziggy Stardust album came out and he was cupid-struck by a love of Glam Rock. When he paddled out into the lineup at Steamer Lane early one morning with high orange hair, silver eyeshadow, and a lightning bolt stenciled on his wetsuit, Mike got the shit beat out of him, which prompted him to hitchhike to San Francisco, where he enjoyed all the wild high life of the gay San Francisco 1970s, eventually working backstage for rock-show impresario Bill Graham.

Soft-spoken, compassionate Ike, who had grown up in a farming community in Sebastopol, had been on the fast track to Franciscan priesthood when he met Mike at the Mill Valley lumberyard. Mike was instantly attracted to Ike’s kind, subtle demeanor and gravitas, while Mike’s black-Irish coloring, swimmer’s body, and leather pants put a halt to Ike’s religious ambitions altogether. Ike left the seminary to help Mike carry speakers for the last leg of Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies Tour, and the two were inseparable thereafter.

Finally exhausted by the all-night, rock ‘n’ roll party lifestyle, Mike and Ike were now freelance handymen, comfortably settled down into a quiet, happy suburban degeneracy.

The funky charm of Mike and Ike, in conjunction with the sleepy wealth and cultural intelligence Peppy perceived in Marin County, was all she needed, along with a few Harvey Wallbangers, to put in a bid on one of the town’s dilapidated landmarks: the old Fairfax fire station, a quaint, large, two-story clapboard structure that had been abandoned and had fallen into disrepair after the fire department was given a larger, new, windowless, popcorn-stucco building that looked like an oversize Pizza Hut.

Her love for the building’s “vibrations” made her rash and impulsive. The firehouse had been subjected to the whims of unchecked entropy—extensive water damage made the ceiling of the top floor sag and peel down in the corners like moldy paper, termites had eaten sections of the joists and the main support girder until it was as spongy as coral, cockroaches and earwigs were firmly entrenched in the marrow of the wall studs. The minimal kitchen was embalmed in dusty grease; the bathroom contained a wall of urinals.

“I dunno,” said Ike, blowing a rich, piney vapour of pot smoke down the hole in the second-story floor where the fire pole went through. “Considering what they want for this crate, you’d think they’d at least throw in a couple of firemen. Black firemen.” He smirked, hugging the pole to his plaid chest and squeaking down out of sight.

“They should have torched this dump. Who’d accuse the fire department of arson? Nobody,” countered Mike, following Ike down the pole.

Peppy didn’t care. Her brain was romping on its wheel. Nobody could tell her this firehouse wasn’t the repository of her future good fortune; the promised sunny clearing after suffering through the dark and predatory woods: the castle of the Golden Stag.

To rehabilitate the firehouse Peppy was going to need more money; she eventually bullied Noreen into selling her Reno house to come live with her in Fairfax. Noreen abhorred the idea of giving up the modest security she had so patiently assembled, but her fear of what would happen to Ned and Liza if Peppy raised them alone outweighed her worry about her own future. With great reluctance, Noreen allowed red-jacketed realtors into her home. “A gem,” they proclaimed it. “I know,” Noreen responded, knowing full well how much elbow grease she had frenziedly rubbed in over the years, keeping it free of rust, grime, and decay, and hopefully, sin. When Noreen saw the chewed-up firehouse for the first time, she was shocked by its decrepitude and cried a little. But she liked Fairfax, a little valley tucked inside round, dark green hills that gave the feeling of a soft catcher’s mitt lying open, cool and snug. The air was piney and quenching. Noreen had forgotten about the appeal of green areas, her yard in Reno having contained only a tendrilled century plant, some small cacti in pots, and a ceramic lawn-burro loitering in a semicircle of decorative pink rocks. “The kind of garden you’d have on Mars,” as Ned called it.

“The kind of garden you’d have on Mars if all Martian landscapers were blind,” as Peppy called it.

“And Mexican,” added Liza.

Peppy rejected three pricey contractor bids and hired Mike and Ike to perform the renovation, boldly tearing up her city work permit and opting to do the construction on the cheap and sly. Mike was a reasonably competent plumber and builder; Ike was a talented finish carpenter and master electrician. Dressed identically in plaid lumberjack shirts, red suspenders, and skin-tight jeans, they filled Dumpsters with sooty lath, plaster, and urinals, sistered a few joists, and hammered up fresh drywall. They left the fire pole and installed, where the fire engine once resided, a stage with a proscenium arch, a respectable theatrical “black box,” replete with a backstage area and rest rooms (retaining an original urinal on the downstairs level, after deeming it “quaint and nostalgic”). In the area before the stage, where future audiences would sit, Mike installed a wall of mirrors and ballet barres. The firehouse was painted bright red. Peppy had a brass plaque made, thereby christening the former firehouse:

THE NORMAL FAMILY DINNER THEATRE EST. 1981

Noreen, Peppy, Mike, Ike, Ned, and Liza posed for a photograph next to the sign. It was May; Fairfax was in bloom with furry yellow acacia. They squinted into the bright, cool day, giving the camera a thumbs-up.

The family lived on the top floor. Ned and Liza slept in the room with the fire pole. Noreen had the other little bedroom in the front, separated from the kids’ room by the staircase.

Peppy claimed the master bedroom in the back, where she hung a dramatic array of hats, masks, and feather boas, arranged all of her wig heads on a long shelf, and installed a waterbed (“You sure you need a water-bed?” asked Ike, jumping up and down. “The floor is a little springy.”

“You bet your ass I want a waterbed, honey, and don’t you dare try and stop me. A girl’s got to get some pleasure between the sheets.”)

Once moved in, Peppy set her sights on hiring instructors. It was her intention to start “The Juilliard of the West.”

Mike and Ike became a part of the Normal Family routine; they loved the whole idea of the theatre, and Peppy’s amusing vulgarity promised that it would be something more rambunctious than the average community stage. Ike recruited Ned’s help, sensing that the boy was lonely and underused, and the two of them purchased and hung all the stage lighting: long fly bars on the ceiling, draped with an array of PAR can-lights and a follow spot.

Ike knew theatrical lighting well; he had been the lighting designer and engineer for a San Francisco cabaret/bar called The Brig, where the drag comedy I Hate You, Hannah Kingdom! had played for a nine-month run.

Ike enjoyed his nerdy, informational friendship with Ned, who had a bright, fifteen-year-old geek’s love for intelligent-sounding trivia.

“Hey, Mom, did you know that ‘PAR’ is an acronym for Parabolic Aluminized Reflector? Those are 1,000-watt Fresnels, see, that one is frosted, and that one is stippled, for a wide beam, and did you know that follow spots used to be actual limelights? They were like these burning jets of oxygen and hydrogen pointed at, like, this cylinder made of lime, that rotated.”

“I don’t want anything burning in here, the fire marshal will be on my ass like last year’s ski pants.”

“They don’t use limelights anymore!”

“That’s good. Don’t use them.”

Peppy had bigger things on her mind. Her plan was to start a school for teens, then cull the better talent from the classes and cast them in a full production that would run for the month of August. She put an ad in the Marin Gazette:

FAMOUS?

Spread some of your stardust Teaching kids 11–18 Actors, Singers, Dancers Needed For New Performing Arts School Full Musical Production Impending Submit photo, letter, résumé

Peppy received around fifty application letters, many with headshots; black-and-white 8 X 10 glossies featuring an idealized full-face portrait of the Actor or Actress. The more expensive versions featured a photo-collage, on the opposite side, of the actor in various “roles,” to show the actor’s “versatility.” The headshots seemed to call out for talk-balloons:

“Ladies, I may wear a leather jacket with no shirt underneath for motorcycle riding, but I can also don horn-rimmed glasses and transform into that English professor you wanted to have sex with, or throw on jeans and get a laugh out of washing my Old English sheepdog with several neighborhood four-year-olds. Am I not the Original Man?”

Or:

“Choosy Mom in curlers, executive businesslally (with eyeglass-stem thoughtfully in mouth), oversexed newscaster or just plain Pretty Lady, why, I am Every Woman to all people, especially you, handsome casting agent.”

Peppy had imagined that there were scores of semiretired Broadway, TV, and film stars studding the hills of Marin County who would leap at the opportunity to nobly pass their glitter batons. What she found were careers that had never made it past the embryo stage: (Bob Loquasto, Professional Air Guitarist; Popo the Children’s Clown—Birthdays, Gatherings, Corporate Events). Many chalked up their failures to bad luck, or a lack of “connections,” or had a story of how they’d been “ripped off” by a celebrity who had stolen and was living their rightful lives, e.g., a jittery, chain-smoking comedian who insisted his “entire schtick” had been stolen by the comic Gallagher: “I was the first guy ever to kill a watermelon with a croquet mallet, at the Holy City Zoo in ‘73, when that asshole was just a busboy.”

Some of the people Peppy met were genuinely gifted but too odd-looking, bizarre-acting, or otherwise unfit for mainstream entertainment.

Among these people, there seemed to be a pervasive sense of denial: none of them could admit that the unrolled blueprint of their lives was the green felt of a craps table. None could believe that if they worked hard, nurtured their talent, and persevered heroically despite crushing opposition, their careers in showbiz might go nowhere anyway. This is an unfairness that many artists can’t swallow, having been raised on the “Real Talent Will Win Out in the End” myth.

According to Peppy’s schedule (and the dictates of her draining bank account), the theatre camp would run for five summer weeks. Rehearsals would begin mid-July for the yet-to-be-named Musical—the more talented kids in the classes would be drafted for the production. The show would run for three weeks until the beginning of the school year. During this time. Peppy reasoned, Ned and Liza would be whipped into triple-threat musical theatre prodigies at breakneck speed by trained professionals (Ticking clock, dramatic Obstacle #1). She would zip them off to New York City, and they would audition for the High School of Performing Arts, slay the judges, and go on to live the heightened, Technicolor life of Fame. If anything happened to obstruct Peppy’s plans, these were bridges she would bulldoze when she came to them.

Peppy hired three instructors out of her twenty-some applicants:

Neville Vanderlee, an acquaintance of Mike and Ike’s—a morosely thin whippet of a man with oversize vintage 1950s suits, a platinum swoop-wedge hair-helmet wrought in mousse, and pointy yellow shoes. He would be the camp drama teacher and direct the upcoming musical. Neville had earned local praise as the director, coauthor, and star of I Hale You, Hannah Kingdom!, the production that Ike had done lights for. Neville had thought the success of that production would bring him more legitimate offers, but they never materialized.

Barbette Champlain, aging former ballerina—a regal, imperious, chain-smoking spider of a woman with long, emaciated limbs who Peppy hired to teach jazz dance, tap, and ballet; she would also be “movement coach” and choreographer for the musical. Barbette was vain and miserable, having found herself needing a job after her husband, an investment banker, traded up to a younger model of her as soon as she hit thirty-five. She was a capital-D Dancer, down to her snap-happy, osteoporosis crayon-bones, a victim of all of the steep trade-offs dancers make early on in life for the privilege of being physically superhuman while young. Her personality was whiny and condescending from getting too much slavering attention as an icy young beauty, her mind was weak and spoiled from underuse, her angry black liquid eyeliner and watertight, face-lifting hair-bun were bitterly nostalgic throwbacks to her Swan Lake days. The aging process was the first betrayal by what had been her faultlessly obedient body; her prime had been devoured like a wedding cake, and she loathed all the possible outcomes of her darkening future. But Peppy was impressed by Barbette’s legitimate résumé (all sylphide and cygnet roles that ceased abruptly in 1972) and by the enclosed black-and-white picture of her, a lithesome feral bird, walleyed and starving, arabesque-ing in better days.

Lalo Buarque was a hangdog-looking Brazilian pianist and guitarist, whose sole function, it seemed, was to keep all women within a fifty-mile radius lactating with a romantic need to save him from himself. He was swaybacked, built with long, slender muscles buttered with just the merest quarter inch of subcutaneous fat. His body was the sun-kissed color and softness of blonde calfskin, matching the dirty gold of his oily bed-head. He was preternaturally relaxed to the point of abject laziness. In his musky, faded T-shirts, handlebar mustache, sunglasses, and bleach-frayed, cock-hugging jeans, his entire visage gave the impression that undersea Venus on the half shell finally got sick of him as a lover and rolled him onto a hot beach for the next woman to frustrate herself over. Lalo sang, drank, cried, and smoked unfiltered Camels with a languid sensuality; grown women who could smell his unwashed armpits bit their knuckles and considered abandoning their families for a chance to lick the salt off his neck.

His letter:

This letter is someting I don’t write good, for to tell you my singing is good is no good, you must hear the singing also piano and mime. You can say good that the starlite on osean is beautiful, but with not see the stars or osean, its is not same thing? It is someting, ART, coming from my soul as a man with love and emotianal joy and sad and phisical not with paper and pensil. See me and I will show you someting, this is like big gift to me, I give it to you and to the childrens also.

Peppy would have thrown Lalo’s letter away had there not been a Polaroid photo enclosed of him in whiteface, shirtless, wearing shrunken cutoffs, smiling rapturously in the sun, juggling four grapefruits. Yep, topless juggling can be a wise career move, thought Peppy, moving the letter to the IN pile, deciding that Lalo could be “musical director” and possibly much, much more.

Each instructor was hired with an explicit addendum to their job description: in addition to teaching the regular students, they would also have to help Ned and Liza prepare their auditions for the High School of Performing Arts—one song, one dance, one monologue. “When I say dance, I don’t mean disco ass-wagging,” Peppy told her new employees, solemnly shaking her cigarette at them. “I want them to think the kids have some class.” Neville, Lalo, and Barbette dreaded this aspect of the job, but none of them were in any position to turn down regular employment.

Young people (girls, mostly) and their mothers arrived at the Normal Family Dinner Theatre by the tens, intrigued by the ad:

THEATRE DAY CAMP FOR TEENS 12–18