Life on the Naughty List, or What the Elf!

1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

T hree Years Later

I lifted my head and pulled the hardback book off my face when the sound of my cell phone chirped on the end table next to me on the couch. I reached for the phone, turned it over, and looked at the screen. Brice . Great, my agent’s calling .

“Good afternoon, Brice,” I groused into the phone.

“Erika,” he said, almost too chipperly into my ear. “How’s my favorite client?”

“I don’t know. How is Audra doing? Are we up to twenty Tonys or is it just fifteen these days?”

“Well, I have some good and bad news for you,” Brice said, not taking my bait. Honestly, I was amazed he put up with me after all these years. I wasn’t exactly his best, most profitable, or the most talented client. At one point, I was one of his shiniest new toys, and I had so much promise. Then one day, my world came crashing down around me. And by around me, I mean when I fell through the stage after seeing my boyfriend making out with another guy the night of the opening of my first and last show on Broadway.

That embarrassing little tumble and broken leg took me out of the show. By the time I healed, I’d already been replaced. My understudy, Darla Dabbraccio, won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Asher had been nominated, but thank God, the Tony Award voters hadn’t given him a trophy. It was bad enough that my understudy had won. The Tony Awards had let The Faith Healer’s producers substitute her name for the nomination since, technically, her name hadn’t appeared above the marquee on the night the show had opened.

The most humiliating moment of my life was dragged back into the limelight as award show commentators debated whether Darla Dabbraccio deserved the nomination. The committee had hemmed and hawed, but industry insiders all agreed that the Tony Awards would let the producers do it. On the night of the award show, I was out of the city in Des Moines, Iowa, with my parents.

“Honey, it’s not a big deal,” my mother had said. “That award’s as much yours as it is hers. I’m sure everyone knows it.”

Oh, everyone knew it. The cast and crew had known Darla couldn’t act her way out of a box, but that girl had mimicked me perfectly, which is why she was hired in the first place. Darla hadn’t had an original idea on stage. I never wanted to see the show after the accident, but I had seen enough of her performance on YouTube to know she had even twitched her lip like I do when hitting a high note. She’d make a great impersonator for Forbidden Broadway . How the Tony Awards voters had given her a statue was still one of the universe’s great mysteries.

“So, how is your cabaret act going?” Brice asked. From the way he said it, I knew what he thought about my cabaret act. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of taking the bait yet again.

I sat up on the couch. Slung my legs over the side and stood up as I went to the fridge to grab a water bottle. I know. I should be completely environmentally conscious and not use plastic bottles, but they were just easier. I screwed off the cap. My cat, Bootsy, a white short-haired Norwegian forest cat with black paws, weaved in and out of my legs. “What do you need, Bootsy?” I asked. He looked up at me and meowed, then trotted away.

“Erika…Erika, are you there? Are you listening to me?”

“Sorry, I’m here. Bootsy needed something.” What’s the point of having a furry overlord if you can’t blame them when you need to? “What did you say?”

There was a sudden, audible sigh from the other end of the line. “I said, ‘ I caught some of your performance over the weekend .’”

“You did? Why didn’t you say ‘hi’ or come backstage?”

“I said I ‘ caught some of it ,’ not I saw it live. You’re blowing up on YouTube.”

“What does that mean?”

“What am I going to do with you, Erika? You know you’re hard to manage these days when you won’t pay attention to your own social media presence.”

“I pay attention to my social media presence,” I responded. “I don’t have one. See, I pay attention.”

“And that, my dear Erika, is where you’re wrong. Whether or not you want one, you have a social media presence.”

Something about how he said the last phrase made me pause. “What do you mean, whether or not I want one ?”

“Are you near your computer?”

“Not at the moment, but I can be.”

“Get to it,” Brice demanded. The tone in his voice took me back. I think we’d gone from the friendly banter phase of our afternoon conversation into the serious one.

I walked through the living room and into the guest bedroom. My computer sat atop an old-style rolltop desk I’d found when I’d gone antiquing upstate with a few of my girlfriends one weekend. I’d fallen in love with the piece and paid some local to cart the thing down to Manhattan, then hired some movers to haul it up to my apartment.

I sat down in my ergonomic chair and spun around to face the desk and monitor. I reached out, grabbed the mouse and slid it along the mouse pad to wake the computer up. While it woke, I put my cell phone down on the desk and hit the speaker. “I’m here,” I said.

“Great. I just sent you an email.”

I opened the email. The only thing in the email was a blue hyperlink, so I clicked on it. Immediately, a pirated video of me on stage at 54 Below from the previous weekend started playing. First, I looked good. I’d gone with a simple black cocktail dress and a pair of Manolo Blahnik’s Hangisi Crystal Satin Pumps. Sure, the shoes cost me $1000, but they made my legs look fantastic. The video was a short montage of me singing some of my favorite songs. I looked good, and I sounded even better.

“What’s wrong with this?” I asked. “I look amazing and sound better than ever.”

“True…but wait till the end.”

I kept watching. Right at the end there was a short video message. “ This video of the homophobic Erika Lynsay Saunders’ man-hating cabaret act was shot last weekend. It’s time to tell the cabaret spaces in New York not to book her. Join us in boycotting 54 Below. ”

“What?” I gasped. “Why are they boycotting? I’m not homophobic. I thought we put that nonsense behind us?”

After I caught Asher, my ex, making out with one of our costars on opening night three years ago, I may have said a few things that I regretted later. But I was pissed. And I wasn’t mad at him because of his sexual orientation. I was pissed that he made out with someone on the day our show opened. He knew how important our opening was to me…to us. I don’t understand how he could think so little of me that he did that. Sure, several highly inappropriate words flew out of my mouth in the heat of the moment, but I’m not homophobic. Straight guys scared me more than any gay guys I knew. My agent is gay. My best friend is gay. I work in the gayest field imaginable. I love my gays. I, in that moment, hated Asher, so I may have called him a few choice words that he then released on the Internet while I was still laid up in the hospital. I found out about all that while I was on the mend when my gay nurse showed me the video.

“Gurl,” the nurse had said, coming in one afternoon. “Your boyfriend must be pissed at you. He splayed your fight all over the Internet.”

“He did what?” I had asked. Again, I’m not the most technically savvy person in the world.

“He uploaded that to YouTube.”

That’s right, fucking YouTube! So, here I was again, having another bout of YouTube problems because of Asher. I wasn’t sure which I hated more at that moment, YouTube or Asher.

“So, what now?” I asked Brice. “Did 54 Below cancel the rest of my engagement?”

“Nope. I talked with them this morning, and they’ve seen a spike in tickets, so they’re not planning on canceling this booking. Plus, they know you. They know you ‘love the gays,’ and the ’gays love you.’”

I belted my best Matron Mama Morton impersonation.

“Yes, yes, yes, go on with your bad self, Chicago girl. Oh wait, you turned down the role of Roxy in Chicago last year—“

“In Columbus, Ohio. I wasn’t going to spend six weeks doing stock in Columbus. I’d rather work at Starbucks.”

“If you don’t get a job soon, you’ll be working at Starbucks,” Brice said. I could practically see him rolling his eyes as he leaned back. “How are you doing financially?”

“I’m fine. I’m pretty good with money, and living at the Manhattan Plaza helps keep my budget, despite my occasional splurge on something I shouldn’t own.”

“Trust me, girl. I noticed the shoes in the video,” Brice said in one of his gayer moments.

“Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.”

“You’re playing the game called poverty right now. I need you to get your head in the game and start playing the game of Broadway, capisce ?”

“Since when are you doing a guest role on the remake of The Sopranos ?“ I asked. There was a long pause. I thought my quip was funny, but I could sense Brice’s frustration through the phone. We’d had this exact conversation a dozen times over the past year. I wasn’t ready to audition again. I wasn’t sure if I would ever be prepared to audition again. After my last experience on Broadway, I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready to take that dive into the lion’s den.

I love Broadway. I love musical theater. I don’t think a one-sided relationship is very healthy. And right now, Broadway was the bad boyfriend I couldn’t shake. Every time I thought I’d gotten away and made a clean cut, something would happen, and I would get drawn into another audition, only to have my hopes and dreams dashed against the shore of the Hudson River.

“But really, Erika, I’m worried about you.” I could tell from the change in his voice he had grown serious. “I’m going to have a problem keeping you on as a client. The senior partners keep asking why I’m keeping you on at this point.”

I sighed. I knew this conversation was going to happen eventually. As much as I hated admitting it, I needed to get my act together already. “So, what do you have for me?”

“That’s the spirit!”

Deep in my soul, I knew I would regret this, but I held my tongue.

“There’s a new musical being mounted, and I got you an audition for later today.”

“Today!” What was I going to sing? What would I wear? This was happening faster than I expected. I thought I’d at least have a few days.

Brice went on as if he hadn’t heard my exclamation. “It’s a musical adaptation of a movie from 1940 called Beyond Tomorrow .”

“Never heard of it,” I admitted.

“Most people probably haven’t. The producers went with this property because it’s considered a Christmas movie, even if it is only partially related to Christmas itself.”

“Have you seen the movie?”

“Nope,” Brice confessed. “I Wikipediaed what I know about it.”

Great… My career hung in the balance of Wikipedia. What could go wrong? “What role am I auditioning for?”

“They wouldn’t tell me. Everything right now is hush-hush.” That didn’t raise any red flags at all. “Everyone who is invited to audition is being asked to prepare a song, and beyond that, there’s no other information provided.”

“Okay. What time is my audition?”

“I have you in at 3:00 p.m. That should give you time to get yourself together.”

I looked over at the clock, it was only eleven-thirty a.m., giving me a few hours to get my act together. “Where is the audition?”

“They’re holding auditions at Actors’ Equity. Just go on up to the sixteenth floor. You’re already on the list.” I’d had enough auditions at Actors’ Equity over the years. I knew the routine, so I didn’t bother jotting down the information. “Break a leg.” As soon as he said it, I could almost see him wince on the other end of the line. “I mean figuratively, not literally. Oh geez, I think I’m talking too much.”

“It’s okay. I don’t plan on falling through any trap doors again.”