A Moll and the Night Visitors

Miss Honoré Jerques barreled through the backstage hallways of the Extravaganza! Theater, scattering dancers and singers right and left. She scowled. She glared at everyone she passed. Her pupils snapped. Molten lava was waiting there, barely held in by her knit brows. She was ready to let it burst on someone. She licked her lips, tasting melting bone and shrinking skin as it shriveled into an undifferentiated, indefinable, revolting sludge when she set it loose.

Miss Honoré chain-smoked cigarette after unfiltered cigarette in solitary, foul, inhuman inhalations. She reduced each one to ash and flicked its residue away. A trail of fluttering paper fragments littered the hall behind her like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. Except, in this case, it was the witch, not the children, who marked her passage.

Miss Honoré Jerques had just received a visit from a previously winning and charming young Human Resources executive named John Windall. John Windall was definitively, until his audience with Honoré, on his way up; he was famed at the Grand Hotel for his good disposition, his solid confidence, his knowledge of every Resource subject that even vaguely touched on Human. It was unfair, unjust, a travesty and sin that after this one night, he’d be reduced forever to a slump-shouldered, shambling hulk of a junior executive, never again promoted or transferred, who’d spend the next forty years cowering behind his three-quarter size desk in his windowless office deep in the bowels of the Grand Hotel, where the only light was sickly fluorescent and the only wall color was nicotine-tan. His hour with Honoré would leave him with facial tics so virulent, his individual features would appear to be wrestling with each other. He’d manifest shaking spells to shatter coffee cups by the dozen.

John Windall had the wholly undeserved duty of informing Honoré that Nadja Kluckenheim, twenty-year-old dancer on Rachel Ferguson’s former row, had become pregnant and been ordered by her doctor to stop dancing.

Rachel’s row, in the days after her and Testy’s exit, had not faired well. The girls had arrived for work the next night and found an unfamiliar and unfriendly new dresser named Lina bulking massively all over Testy’s old chair. Lina had been a star women’s ice hockey player from somewhere behind the Iron Curtain when it still draped half of Europe. She’d fallen deeply and unrequitedly in love with a sportscaster, defected, and then found herself stranded in a shockingly non-socialist regime where her language wasn’t spoken and her skills weren’t valued. She had a low opinion of dancers and strictly Spartan ideas about how much help they deserved getting dressed and on stage.

Linda, in particular, had been resentful of the change in regime. She’d exhumed every rumor she’d ever heard or made up about Testy Lesbiana’s past, and then she’d gone on to badmouth Rachel and announce that she had no idea why Honoré had signed her for the past year, anyway. Rachel was obviously getting old, and ‘Orrible Honoré had either been hot for her to keep her on or else was getting soft in her old age.

Unfortunately for Linda, ‘Orrible Honoré herself was passing by when she made that announcement, stomping through the girls’ rooms in an effort to terrorize anyone else who was considering disappearing in the night. She paused around the corner as she heard Linda’s gravelly complaints begin, and made her entrance just at the point when the words “hot to lick her pussy” were uttered. Linda was escorted out before Big Bows.

Heddy, who’d been working in Vegas for a decade, was suddenly set upon as she parked her car the very next night. Two men, who turned out to be immigration officials, took her by the arms and hustled her away, and the cast of Extravaganza! was thus tutored in the evils of working for ten years on an expired student visa. The row of six showgirls was thus reduced by half, and the three survivors caroomed uncertainly around their suddenly uncrowded and too-quiet dressing space. They moved their cosmetics and costumes closer together at the furthest end from their Teutonic mistress, spoke in hushed voices, and took care not to complain.

Now, two nights after Heddy’s unintentional exodus, Honoré had been called on her office phone an hour before first show began. A junior executive was coming to talk to her. He’d been in conference with one of her dancers, and not only had he taken on the task of relating her regrettable, though exciting, news to Honoré, but after hearing Nadja’s stories about the tenor of her work experience backstage at Extrav!, he felt a discussion with Miss Honoré was in order. Surely, he told himself, she had no idea that her subordinates felt so overpowered by her. Surely, she couldn’t know how threatening her personal management style was. She was older, perhaps she’d just retained a few too many habits from her earlier days of running shows. He’d offer her the chance to attend training sessions, he thought. He’d educate her as to the most up-to-date theories of directing a staff and getting the most out of them without resorting to intimidation.

Honoré, he learned very quickly, knew all about modern theories. Moreover, she had her own theory to tell him, which was that up-to-date directors of shoddy staffs shunned intimidation only because they weren’t up to it. Miss Honoré, as she demonstrated admirably and immediately, was. If John Windall had been a small, imported car constructed of brightly-painted aluminum and plastic panels, then Honoré was the fully-loaded, diesel-powered highway Goliath that ran him down at full speed. She flattened him, tore him to unrecognizable shreds, chewed through his paint job, melted his plastic parts, and coldly crumpled whatever wouldn’t turn to liquid and run away.

But the end result was still clear. Despite her personal feelings, and despite the fact that Extravaganza! was on the verge of a contract change, anyway, Honoré was going to have to hold emergency auditions and get someone in to– as she screamed at the Head of Wardrobe later that night after she’d watched first show limp along with practically one whole line of dancers missing—fill those goddamned costumes.

NEXT POST: THE CROQUET WICKET OF THE GODS (Friday 10/16/09)