Thursday, March 4, the Grand Ballroom, the Plaza

A lot of people showed up for the Braid! auditions. I mean, a LOT.

Which is weird when you consider that none of the Drama Club people can even audition for Braid! because they’re too busy rehearsing for Hair.

Which means that all of the people who showed up today were theater neophytes (which means “beginner or novice,” according to Lilly), like Lilly and Tina and Boris and Ling Su and Perin (but not Shameeka, since she’s only allowed that one extracurricular per semester).

But Kenny was there, with some of his wonder-geek pals. And Amber Cheeseman, her school uniform sleeves rolled up to show off her apelike forearms.

Even The Guy Who Hates It When They Put Corn in the Chili showed up.

Wow. I really had no idea there were so many aspiring thespians at AEHS.

Although if you think about it, acting is one of the few professions in which you can make a ton of money while having no actual intelligence or talent whatsoever, as many a star has shown us.

So in that way, you can see why it would be such an appealing career option to so many people.

Grandmère decided to actually run this as if it were a real audition. She had her maid hand out applications to everyone who walked through the door. We were supposed to fill them out, then stand for a Polaroid taken by Grandmère’s chauffeur, then hand the Polaroid and our application to a tiny, extremely ancient man with huge glasses and an ascot, who was sitting behind a long table set Jennifer-Lopez-in-her-Flashdance-re-creation-video-for-“I’m Glad”-style in the middle of the room. Grandmère sat next to him, with her toy poodle Rommel shivering—in spite of his purple suede bomber jacket—on her lap.

I went up to her, waving my form and the Number One Noodle Son bag in which I had stowed her birthday gift earlier that day and dragged with me to school.

“I’m not filling this out,” I informed her, slapping the form down on the table. “Here’s your present. Happy birthday.”

Grandmère took the bag from me—inside it were the padded satin hangers I had special-ordered from Chanel for her (Whatever. Dad was the one who’d suggested—and paid for—them.), and said, “Thank you. Please be seated, Amelia, dear.”

I knew the “dear” was entirely for the benefit of the guy sitting next to her—whoever he was—not for me.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” I said to her. “I mean…is this really how you want to spend your birthday?”

Grandmère just waved me away. “When you’re my age, Amelia,” she said, “age becomes meaningless.”

Oh, whatever. She’s in her SIXTIES, not her nineties. Instead of satin hangers, I should have gotten her one of those shirts I saw downtown that say DRAMA QUEEN inside the Dairy Queen logo.

Lilly flagged me down, so I sat with her and Tina and everybody. Right away Lilly was all, “So what’s the deal here, POG? I’m reporting on this for The Atom, so make it good.”

Lilly always gets the best assignments for the school paper. I have totally sunk to special features—i.e. occasional stories on the school band concert or the library’s most recent acquisitions—since I am too busy with presidential and princess stuff to make a regular deadline.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’ll find out when you find out.”

“Off the record,” Lilly said. “Come on. Who’s the little dude with the glasses?”

Before she could ask me anything else, though, Grandmère stood up—dumping poor Rommel from her lap to the ballroom floor, where he slid around a bit before finding his footing on the slippery parquet—and said in a deceptively kind voice (deceptive because, of course, Grandmère isn’t kind), as the room fell silent, “Welcome. For those of you who don’t know me, I am Clarisse, Dowager Princess of Genovia. I am very delighted to see so many of you here today for what will prove, I am certain, to be an important and historic moment in the history of Albert Einstein High School, as well as the theatrical world. But before I say more about that, allow me to introduce, without further ado, the much celebrated, world-famous theatrical director, Señor Eduardo Fuentes.”

Señor Eduardo! No! It can’t be!

And yet…it was! It was the famous director who had asked Grandmère, all those years before, to come to New York with him and star in an original Broadway production!

He had to have been in his thirties back then. He’s gotta be about a HUNDRED now. He’s so old, he looks like a cross between Larry King and a raisin.

Señor Eduardo struggled to rise from his chair, but he was so rickety and frail that he only managed to get about a quarter of the way up before Grandmère pushed him down again impatiently, then went on with her speech. I could practically hear his fragile bones snap under her grip.

“Señor Eduardo has directed countless plays and musicals on numerous prestigious stages worldwide, including Broadway and London’s West End,” Grandmère informed us. “You should all feel extremely honored at the prospect of working with such an accomplished and revered professional.”

“Tank you,” Señor Eduardo managed to get in, waving his hands around and blinking in the bright lights from the ballroom ceiling. “I tank you very, very much. It geeves me great pleasure to look out across so many youthful faces, shining with excitement and—”

But Grandmère wasn’t letting anyone, not even a centenarian world-famous director, steal her show.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she cut him off, “you are, as I said, about to audition for an original work that has never been performed before. If you are cast in this piece, you will, in essence, become a part of history. I am especially pleased about welcoming you here today because the piece you are about to read from was written almost entirely by”—she lowered her false eyelashes modestly—“me.”

“Oh, this is good,” Lilly said, eagerly jotting stuff down in her reporter’s notebook. “Are you getting this, POG?”

Oh, I was getting it all right. Grandmère wrote a PLAY? A play she means for us to put on to raise money for AEHS’s senior graduation?

I am so, so dead.

“This piece,” Grandmère was going on, holding up a sheaf of papers—the script, apparently—“is a work of complete originality and, I am not embarrassed to say, genius. Braid! is, essentially, a classic love story, about a couple who must overcome extraordinary odds in order to be together. What makes Braid! all the more compelling is that it is based on historical fact. Everything that happens in this piece ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE. Yes! Braid! is the story of an extraordinary young woman who, though she spent most of her life as a simple commoner, was one day thrust into a role of leadership. Yes, she was asked to assume the throne of a little country you all might have heard of, Genovia. This brave young woman’s name? Why, none other than the great—”

No. Oh my God, no. For the love of God, no. Grandmère’s written a play about me. About MY LIFE. I AM GOING TO DIE. I AM GOING TO—

“—Rosagunde.”

Wait. What? ROSAGUNDE?

“Yes,” Grandmère went on. “Rosagunde, the current princess of Genovia’s great-great-great-great, and so on grandmother, who exhibited incredible bravery in the face of adversity, and was eventually rewarded for her efforts with the throne of what is today Genovia.”

Oh. My. God.

Grandmère’s written a play based on the story of my ancestress, Rosagunde.

AND SHE WANTS MY SCHOOL TO PUT IT ON.

IN FRONT OF EVERYONE.

“Braid! is, at heart, a love story. But the tale of the great Rosagunde is much more than a romance. It is, in fact—” Here, Grandmère paused, as much for dramatic effect as to take a sip from the glass on the table beside her. Water? Or straight vodka? We will never know. Not unless I had gone up there and taken a big swig. “—A MUSICAL.”

Oh. My. God.

Grandmère’s written a MUSICAL based on the story of my ancestress, Rosagunde.

The thing is, I love musicals. Beauty and the Beast is, like, my favorite Broadway show of all time, and it’s a musical.

But it is a musical about a prince who is under a curse and the bookish beauty who grows to love him anyway.

It is NOT about a feudal warmonger and the girl who strangles him to death.

Apparently, I was not the only one to realize this, since Lilly’s hand shot up and she called, “Excuse me.”

Grandmère looked startled. She isn’t used to being interrupted once she gets going on one of her speeches.

“Please hold all questions until the end,” Grandmère said confusedly.

“Your Royal Highness,” Lilly said, ignoring her request. “Is what you’re telling us that this show, Braid!, is actually the story of Mia’s great-great-great and so on grandmother Rosagunde, who, in the year AD 568, was forced to wed the Visigothic warlord Alboin, who conquered Italy and claimed it as his own?”

Grandmère bristled, the way Fat Louie does whenever I run out of Flaked Chicken or Tuna and have to give him some other flavor of food, like Turkey Giblets, instead.

“That is exactly what I am trying to tell you,” Grandmère said stiffly. “If you will allow me to continue.”

“Yeah,” Lilly said. “But a MUSICAL? About a woman who is forced to marry a man who not only murders her father, but on their wedding night makes her drink from her dad’s skull, and so consequently, she murders him in his sleep? I mean, isn’t that kind of material a little bit HEAVY for a musical?”

“And a musical set in a military base during World War Two isn’t a bit HEAVY? I believe they chose to call that one South Pacific,” Grandmère said, with an arched brow. “Or a musical about urban gang warfare in New York City during the fifties? West Side Story, I believe that one was called….”

Everyone in the room started murmuring—everyone except Señor Eduardo, who appeared to have dozed off. I had never thought about it before, but Grandmère was kind of right. A lot of musicals have kind of serious undertones, if you take the time to examine them. I mean, if you wanted to, you could say that Beauty and the Beast is about a hideously warped Chimera who kidnaps and holds hostage a young peasant girl.

Trust Grandmère to destroy the one story I have ever wholeheartedly loved.

“Or even,” Grandmère went on, above everyone’s whispers, “perhaps, a musical about the crucifixion of a man from Galilee…a little something called Jesus Christ Superstar?”

Gasps could be heard throughout the ballroom. Grandmère had scored a coup de grâce, and knew it. She had them eating out of the palm of her hand.

All but Lilly.

“Excuse me,” Lilly said again. “But exactly when is this, erm, musical going to be performed?”

It was only then that Grandmère looked slightly—just slightly—uncomfortable.

“A week from today,” she said, with what I could tell was completely feigned self-assurance.

“But, Dowager Princess,” Lilly cried, above the gasps and murmurs of all present—except Señor Eduardo, of course, who was still snoozing. “You can’t possibly expect the cast to memorize an entire show by next week. I mean, we’re students—we have homework. I, personally, am the editor of the school literary magazine, of which I intend to print Volume One, Issue One, next week. I can’t do all that AND memorize an entire play.”

“Musical,” whispered Tina.

“Musical,” Lilly corrected herself. “I mean, if I get in. That’s—that’s IMPOSSIBLE!”

“Nothing is impossible,” Grandmère assured us. “Can you imagine what would have happened if the late John F. Kennedy had said it was impossible for man to walk on the moon? Or if Gorbachev had said it was impossible to take down the Berlin Wall? Or if, when my late husband invited the king of Spain and ten of his golfing partners to a state dinner at the last minute, I had said ‘Impossible’? It would have been an international incident! But the word ‘impossible’ is not in my vocabulary. I had the majordomo set eleven more places, the cook add water to the soup, and the pastry chef whip up eleven more soufflés. And the party was such a huge success that the king and his friends stayed on for three more nights, and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars at the baccarat tables—all of which went to help poor, starving orphans all over Genovia.”

I don’t know what Grandmère is talking about. There are no starving orphans in Genovia. There weren’t any during my grandfather’s reign, either. But whatever.