Dead Darlings
By Cindy Brown
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| Cindy Brown |
Writers know that sometimes we have to kill our
darlings, to cut scenes we love that no longer fit into our books. But what do
we do with those scenes? Someone asked that question at Malice Domestic during
the humor panel where I met Jackie King (who so graciously asked me to post
today).
I like to resurrect those scenes. Sure, some of them
stay in a file marked “Maybe later,” but too often later never comes and my
poor dead darlings languish in the deep freeze. So every so often, I pull one
out and let it run around a bit. I rewrote a bunch of them into monologues and
invited a theater company to read them as part of my launch party for Macdeath. I put one on my blog. I plan to include some short funny bits in my email
newsletter. And what the heck, I’m going to raise
one from the dead right now.
My novel, Macdeath,
a madcap mystery set in the off, off, off
Broadway world of theater. The scene below didn’t really move the plot
forward, but I think it’s a fun little bit that gives you an idea of the book’s
world. To give you a frame of reference, the scene is written from the point of
view of Ivy Meadows, my actress/part-time PI protagonist, and features Linda
(the stage manager), Debbie (the costume designer), and Edward (the
director). I hope you enjoy my dead
darling!
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I strolled into
rehearsal, twenty minutes early. I made a point of walking past Linda so she
could see how wonderfully on-time I was. She looked at her watch, then tapped
it, holding it to her ear.
“Damn,” she said.
“Must need a new battery.”
I smiled at her,
mostly to keep myself from sticking out my tongue, and started toward the
dressing room.
“Since you’re here
on time…” she said.
“Early,” I said.
“I’m here early.”
“Since you’re here a few minutes early,” she conceded, “I’d
like you to go upstairs and see Debbie. She has some wigs for you to try on.”
Debbie was our
costume designer, a big woman with a large laugh and about a zillion costumes
to get done in the next few days. I hadn’t heard her laughing lately.
I ran up the stairs
and poked my head into the costume department. Neatly organized racks of
clothes filled the room. Shelves lined the walls, crammed full of labeled
cardboard boxes. I saw a box labeled “codpieces,” but I didn’t see Debbie.
A petite blonde
woman sat at one of several sewing machines, piecing together a costume made of
striped fake fur.
“Did Debbie leave any wigs for me to try on?”
I asked. “I’m Ivy. Third witch.”
“Didn’t say anything to me, but...”
She waved toward a
counter near the back of the room where several wigheads stared into the mirror
with Styrofoam eyes. Fake hair peeked out from boxes under the counter.
I didn’t know what Debbie
had in mind, but Linda had sent me to try on wigs, so I did.
I
had just yanked off a short blond one that made me look like the mother in the
Brady Bunch, when I saw Debbie stomp into the room, Edward hard on her heels.
“No, no, no! Must I explain the
concept to you again?!” As usual, Edward
gestured wildly as he spoke. Instead of the usual carrot, though, he was
flinging around a bit of brown and green cloth.
The blonde
seamstress slipped out of the room. I slid back between a couple of racks of
costumes from a production of Mame! Completely
hidden by a wool coat and a red gown with a feather boa stitched around the
neck, I could eavesdrop without being seen.
Debbie spoke through
clenched teeth. “I heard you just fine, all five thousand times you’ve
explained it to me. If you would just listen to me for…”
“Then where is the
circus?!” Edward nearly foamed at the mouth. “Where are the tutus, the glitter,
the gaudiness? Certainly not here!”
“The witches are not
wearing any goddam tutus,” she said. “No way. How are they going to crawl in
and out of the caldron in tutus?”
Edward ignored her,
and waved the bit of cloth, which I was beginning to think was a leotard. “This just looks like a bad interpretive
dance costume.”
He minced around,
doing, yes, a bad interpretive dance. He pranced like a deer. “Now, we are the woodland
creatures, blown out of our forest …” The deer twirled around, “And into…” the
deer stopped and stared straight ahead. “Into traffic.”
Debbie crossed her
arms. “Are you saying my costume looks like roadkill?”
Maybe it was a
really good interpretive dance. I
could see Edward as roadkill.
“If the shoe fits,”
he said, dropping the leotard on the floor.
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| Picture from launch party for Macdeath Ivy and Edward |
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Cindy Brown has been a theater geek since her
first professional gig at age 14. Now a full-time writer, she’s the author of
the Ivy Meadows theater mysteries.
Macdeath, the first book in the series is
“a gut-splitting mystery"(Mystery Scene
Magazine). The second book in the series,
The Sound of Murder, comes out this October
Cindy and her husband now live in Portland,
Oregon, though she made her home in Phoenix, Arizona, for more than 25 years and
knows all the good places to hide dead bodies in both cities.
Email newsletter:http://cindybrownwriter.com/the-slightly-silly-newsletter/
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