Sequence of Events (part fourteen)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sequence of Events

Chapter Two

Mud in Your Eye

 

 

 

“Nah,” The Blonde said. “Just talk to me slow.”

She was not blonde without her stage wig; her hair was auburn, cut shorter than Freda had seen any woman’s. Her voice lowered to its usual pitch. “But they axed the joke. They figured no one in the audience would get it. I say they’d get a professor uses fancy words, right?”

“Allow me to adumbrate,” the man at the piano said. Chuckling, as he quoted, giving a broad read to The Professor’s stage diction.

“Hey, Mr. Orne! If I’d knew you knew, we could’ve done the whole bit…”

Mr. Orne reached to pat her arm, but shouted: “Jessie, get over here!”

Jessie was gaminesque, done up for show, and pretty for it—lips magenta, eyes rimmed, headband silver lamé. And was she, or was she not…?

Freda looked across the room at Martin’s back.

He called her a friend. Jessie had furnished the tickets; meeting Freda she’d said, “Marty, who is this?”—with glances round the company, and too much warmth for a jealous girlfriend. Jessie, moving Freda aside to squeeze in at the piano, gave her a little hug.

They were a snug lot, the theater people.

Loyal, so far, to his unsociability, her escort waited only for a signal. A waiter of the Hotel Grenadier would come out to smoke a cigarette; by this, Martin would know the service door was unlocked.

“I will play,” Orne said. “And Jessie will sing, and you will imagine the strings. However…it’s better with strings.”

 

You and I

Addled by the heady sent of lilac in May

Find our foolish lovers’ fancy wand’ring astray

These enchanted butterflies live only a day

Until chilled by the fall

What becomes of it all?

 

Fade; a syncopated rhythm:

 

Infatuation in its fugacity

Furnishes proof of our heart’s capacity

For hopeless romance

Futile endeavors desperately striven for

Souls in perdition linger left living tor―

mented by hopeless romance

 

Tell me why

When birds in the sky trill gaily

And somewhere a band is playing

The vow that I swore

To love never more

Goes tripping down the garden path

To sprawl upon its clownish prat

 

You and I

Wiser in the wintertime of once youthful dreams

 

“Enough,” the composer said. “See the show again…wouldn’t hurt the box office. Tell em Mr. Orne sent you, they’ll put you in the good seats. Make that stiff treat you to a steak dinner.”

“So why,” Freda ventured, “do they allow fugacity?”

“Cause when you hire Orne, you get Orne. Louis Guion knows better than messing with my lyrics.”

 

 

14

 

 

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Mud in Your Eye

Sequence of Events (part one)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Stephanie Foster, 2017, 2021, 2026)