Party Princess (The Princess Diaries 7)

Saturday, March 6, 2 p.m., the Grand Ballroom, the Plaza

Okay, so acting may be a little harder than I thought it was. I mean, that thing I wrote a while back, about how the reason so many people want to be actors is because it’s really easy and you get paid a lot—

That might be true. But it turns out it’s not that easy. There’s a whole lot of stuff you have to remember.

Like blocking. That’s, like, where you move on the stage as you’re saying your lines. I always thought actors just got to make this up as they went along.

But it turns out the director tells them exactly where to move, and even on which word in which line to do it. And how fast. And in which direction.

At least, if that director is Grandmère.

Not that she’s the director, of course. Or so she keeps assuring us. Señor Eduardo, propped up in a corner with a blanket covering him to his chin, is REALLY directing this play. I mean, musical.

But since he can barely stay awake long enough to say, “And… scene!” Grandmère has generously come forward to take over.

I’m not saying this wasn’t her plan all along. But she sure isn’t admitting it if it was.

Anyway, in addition to all of our lines, we also have to remember our blocking.

Blocking isn’t choreography, though. Choreography is the dancing you do while you’re singing the songs.

For this, Grandmère hired a professional choreographer. Her name is Feather. Feather is apparently very famous for choreographing several hit Broadway shows. She also must be pretty hard up for cash if she’d agree to choreograph a snoozer like Braid! But whatever.

Feather is nothing like the choreographers I’ve seen in dancing movies like Honey or Center Stage. She doesn’t wear any makeup, says her leotard was made from hemp, and she keeps asking us to find our centers and focus on our chi.

When Feather says things like this, Grandmère looks annoyed. But I know she doesn’t want to yell at Feather since she’d be hard-pressed to find a new choreographer at such short notice if Feather quits in a fit of pique, as dancers are apparently prone to do.

But Feather isn’t as bad as the vocal coach, Madame Puissant, who normally works with opera singers at the Met and who made us all stand there and do vocal exercises, or vocalastics, as she called it, which involved singing the words Me, May, Ma, Mo, Moooo-oooo-oooo-ooo over and over again in ever-ascending pitches until we could “feel the tingle in the bridge of our nose.”

Madame Puissant clearly doesn’t care about the state of our chis because she noticed Lilly wasn’t wearing any fingernail polish and almost sent her home because “a diva never goes anywhere with bare nails.”

I noticed Grandmère seems to approve VERY highly of Madame Puissant. At least, she doesn’t interrupt her at all, the way she does Feather.

As if all of this were not enough, there was also costume measurements to endure and, in my case anyway, wig fittings as well. Because, of course, the character of Rosagunde has to have this enormously long braid, since that is, after all, the title

of the play.

I mean, musical.

I’m just saying, everyone was worried about getting their LINES memorized in time, but it turns out there is WAY more involved in putting on a play—I mean, musical—than just memorizing your lines. You have to know your blocking and choreography as well, not to mention all the songs and how not to trip over your braid, which, since we don’t have a braid yet, in my case means not tripping over one of those velvet ropes they used to drape outside the Palm Court to keep people from storming it before it opened for afternoon tea, and which Grandmère has wrapped around my head.

I guess it isn’t any wonder I have a little headache. Although it’s not any worse than the ones I get every time they cram me into a tiara.

Right now J.P. and I have a little break because Feather is going over the choreography for the chorus of the song Genovia!, which everyone but he and I sing. It turns out that Kenny, in addition to not being able to sing or act, can’t dance either, so it is taking a really long time.

That’s okay, though, because I’m using the time to plot tonight’s Party Strategy and talk to J.P., who really turns out to know a LOT about the theater. That’s on account of his father being a famous producer. J.P. has been hanging around the stage since he was a little kid, and he’s met tons of celebrities because of it.

“John Travolta, Antonio Banderas, Bruce Willis, Renée Zellweger, Julia Roberts… pretty much everybody there is to meet,” is how J.P. replied, when I asked him who all he meant by celebrities.

Wow. I bet Tina would change places with J.P. in a New York minute, even if it meant, you know. Becoming a boy.

I asked J.P. if there was any celebrity he HADN’T met, that he wanted to, and he said just one: David Mamet, the famous playwright.

“You know,” he said, “Glengarry Glen Ross. Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Oleanna.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, like I knew what he was talking about.

I told him that was still pretty impressive—I mean, that he’d met almost everybody else in Hollywood.