Chapter 61

He tells me he has a callback for The Fantasticks, which half the world has seen and the other half has been in. He is wearing multiple shirts, something buttoned over something collared over something T-shirtish.

“I love this time of afternoon,” I tell him, wasting eloquence. “Lavender glazes everything. The violet hour. That’s what playwright Richard Greenberg called it in his play.”

“Who?”

“Richard Greenberg. He wrote The Violet Hour.”

If his look were any more blank, he’d have no features.

“He also wrote Take Me Out…the baseball play with the onstage showers and naked men.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, nodding. “I thought it was called Take It Out.”

“It should’ve been.”

The more we talk, the more meager I discover his knowledge of theater, his chosen profession, to be. He has a corrupt database.

“I worship the score of Evita,” he tells me.

I nod. “I love Patti LuPone, too.”

He screws up his face. “Who’s Patti LuPone?”