Page 86 of Not Home Alone

I place the box on the floor, open it, and lift out a nutcracker doll. It’s about four feet long, and I hold it up so the whole house can see it. Inspecting it lovingly for a moment, I say, “He looks like he’s been through something.”

“Indeed. He has.” He addresses the doll, with genuine remorse, “I am sorry it took so long.”

“What is his name?”

Drosselmeyer clears his throat and says, “That is an excellent question for which I have an answer, and I will share it with you when the plot requires it, at a later time.”

I inspect the nutcracker doll’s face more closely, note that he has a very serious face, that I have a serious face too. I talk to the doll, lovingly. Waiting for him to respond, but he doesn’t.

Fritz looks up from his toys and asks if he can play with my nutcracker doll.

“No,” I tell him.

“Can I just hold it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Friedrich—I do love thee. But absolutely not. No.”

“Fine,” he says, harumphing. “Gerald wouldn’t have wanted me to anyway. Which Gerald, you ask? All of them. They are united on this matter.”

“Okay, well. Merry Christmas,” says Drosselmeyer, who leaves to join the grown-up Christmas party.

Act One, Scene Two is The Party. The stage direction just says The party happens. And there’s a list of twenty-three characters, all named, even though those characters don’t have lines in the scene and don’t appear again in the play. Usually, the director will have the ten actors who will later portray the mouse army stand around in fancy clothes, chatting and pretending to drink champagne while music plays.

Since we have a small cast this year, a very limited budget, and shadow puppets for the soldiers and mouse army, I decided to pay homage to the scene in Home Alone, when Kevin McCallister sets up a bunch of things to make it look like there was a party in his living room from outside. But behind the shadow screen. And you can see Timmy, looking like his eight-year-old self, gleefully manipulating ropes to the side of it as if he’s maneuvering everything. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” plays from the speakers, mixed with party sound effects.

The shadow screen is huge, and made of muslin fabric stretched over a PVC pipe frame with work lights placed in very specific positions behind it. My puppeteers use the cardboard Michael Jordan cutout I’m borrowing from my dad’s neighbor. There are four mannequins I’m borrowing from The Hem and Haw Boutique, and a few random stuffed animals from my dad’s basement for whimsy.

I can hear just how much the audience loves it.

Glancing across to the wings on the opposite side of the stage, I look for April, but she isn’t there. There’s still time, of course, but she should be in costume by now. I don’t have time to worry about it, though. The show must go on. If she doesn’t come through for me, I’ll play the Nutcracker Prince.

Scene Three opens with me holding a broken nutcracker doll. I am devastated. As suggested in the stage directions, the lighting is quite dim. “Fritz! How could you? Oh, Nutcracker,” I cry out. “Thou art broken now, as dreams are broken. As promises made by brothers are broken. As the wishbone at Thanksgiving is broken—which will also be a somewhat controversial holiday in America one day, but it is much less romantic. Thy jaw hangs loose and yet thy eyes—thine eyes still look at me with something I can only describe as a look. Sleep now, wounded soldier. Sleep. I shall put thee in the cabinet, which is where things go when they need to rest.”

With great ceremony, I place the broken doll in the cabinet.

Then I exit stage right, saying, “Good night.”

Then, for seemingly no reason at all, except that it’s in the script, I stop, turn back to the empty stage, and repeat, “I said good night.” And then I exit for real and hustle backstage.

The clock strikes twelve. By that, I mean, the Narrator on stage hits a metal triangle. She’s supposed to hit it twelve times, but she always gets distracted and hits it fourteen times. Every time.

And now it’s time for the shitshow…

THIRTY

GRANT

I’m here to save the day, or the play, rather, and Merrily doesn’t know it yet. Didn’t think twice about canceling my flights back to New York when Joy said Merrily needed my help.

That woman is an absolute genius director, but this Nutcracker costume is way too tight for me in the crotch. The costume department, which consists of April, has offered no solutions aside from holding up a safety pin while taking a bite of an apple and half-heartedly asking, “Would this help?”

No. No, it would not.

She also held up a half-eaten gingerbread man and said she had fired her assistant.