Description: Regretting not paying attention in English class when they had studied Shakespeare, Eve Jones tries her best as Juliet in her mock audition. With handsome Glenn Sabine playing the part of Romeo, will she be able to survive it?
The Miss Teenager Pageant. PART 17.
Rehearsing Romeo and Juliet with Glenn Sabine as Romeo should have been a dream come true. In his perfectly pressed suit and tie, and that deep all-consuming voice, he had captured Eve’s heart as if he were Clark Gable himself. Trying to evade his subtle advances when she was already in desperate need of rescuing from this nerve-wracking mock audition was becoming downright impossible.
Now this. The role of Juliet. In love with her Romeo! How would she ever be able to pull it off?
Eve knew that the role should be played with a certain amount of emotional intensity, as with all of Shakespeare’s plays. The problem, however, was that she had hardly ever taken a passing glance at Shakespeare. In English class in high school, she had preferred to giggle to Deirdre about how sensually handsome Rickie Sundance’s wavy hair simply floated on top of his head like goose feathers. Now she regretted her hormone-driven schoolgirl antics, and she was paying the price.
“‘Thou are thyself, though not a Montague,’” quoted Mr. Sabine with an accent that was thicker than life and born for the theater. “Go on, Miss Jones,” he continued. “These immortal lines virtually speak themselves.”
The lines may have spoken themselves, Eve observed, but they didn’t help a hill of beans when it came to reading Juliet. “What’s Montague?” she bumbled.
Eve knew that Shakespeare was tough, but my goodness, she thought, was this even English?! She exhaled and swallowed hard. Come on, Eve, she told herself, you got this. She forced herself to focus on reading correctly rather than making a total dunce of herself by acting out the part and fumbling the words.
“‘O, be some other name!’” she quoted with her eyes fixed on the page. “‘What’s in a rose? I mean, ‘a name!’” She was blowing it and she knew it. Would now be a good time to start bawling? Maybe pity would distract him from the fact that she was proving how little talent she really had as an actress.
The good news for Eve was that pity was actually working in her favor, and might just have been in that moment her superpower. Although it was not her intention to flub every word, she believed that Glenn… uh, Mr. Sabine… was trying to help.
“There, there,” he said as if speaking to a stray cat that was too spooked to return home to a warm house. He ended with a gentle gesture of touching her cheek. As soon as his fingers grazed her delicate skin, she gasped softly. It wasn’t just his touch, however. He had had her at “there-there.”
“Even the most experienced of us fluff a line now and then,” he said gently. “Start over, my dear. And slowly, majestically.”
