Page 402 - Some Dance to Remember

372 Jack Fritscher

“That’s a credential?” Solly said.
“Who cares if it’s good or bad,” Ryan said. “Hepburn is the event.” He
stood taller than usual, putting on a certain Attitude, the kind of air that
homosexual men cannot help assuming in a theater lobby.
The incoming theater crowd flowed around us. Small islands of chat-
tering yuppies staked their territory, speaking in clenched-jawed Stanford
voices meant to be overheard. We watched faces. We listened in on passing
conversations. A cluster of gays in screamer tuxes and full leather camped
against the wall nearest us. They were on. They loved Lansbury whose
picture hung in the Coming Attractions poster for Sweeney Todd. They
knew that little Joel Grey was hung bigger than even the superbly hung
Roddy McDowall. They called Edward Albee a “gay hypocrite” because
he refused, for “commercial reasons,” to allow four men to play the two
couples in Virginia Woolf “which was his original concept anyway.” They
loudly dished everything they’d ever read or heard about show biz as if
gossip columns and rumor were theater.
“Why is it,” Solly said, “just because queens take it up the ass, they
think they’re critics?”
He stole the line from a German poem written before the turn of the
century about decadence among chic Berliners. I didn’t call him on it. I
let him get away with his bit of borrowed wit. He and Kweenie and I were
all on the same mission. Ryan needed any distraction we could offer. He
had been hearing new rumors about Kick he did not want to hear. In that
well-lit lobby, Ryan’s face was carefully masked. The three of us stood with
him, minus one, if the subtraction of Ryan’s real face, like the subtraction
of Kick from his life, counted.
What happened that night happens only in theaters. I’ve watched the
scene in a thousand movies.
Ryan insisted we settle into our seats early. He liked to establish terri-
tory by presence, as if being seated first, much like his primogeniture with
Thom, gave us some strange squatters’ power, showing those arriving after
us that they must excuse themselves to us, making them somehow apolo-
getic. After all, they were disturbing us, weren’t they, making us stand and
press the backs of our calves against the flipped-up seats, so they could
crawl and bump, more apologies, through the narrow space between our
thighs and the seat backs of the row in front of us.
It’s an age-old theater game: well-dressed, overfed bodies trying to
make themselves small, crawling, mumbling regrets, toward their assigned
places. Specific seats in the universe for three hours. The authority in the
usher’s flashlight presiding over the ritual, transferring dignity to those of

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