Maybe the Moon by Armistead Maupin Read Free Book Online Page A

parties. One of the performers, a girl clown of average height, had just left for a job in television, and they were looking for a replacement.
    Arnie assured me I didn’t have to be a clown. I’d be free to create my own character, maybe even sing, as long as the boss was happy. Mostly, it involved handing out candy and putting up with the kids. If I liked the sound of this, he said, I could start work the following weekend.
    I didn’t hate the sound of it, especially the part about my predecessor leaving for a job in television.
    At least it was show business. Sort of.
    I thought about it overnight, at Arnie’s suggestion, and called back the next morning to accept.
    “This is just a start,” he said.
    Then why did it feel so much like the end?
     
    My mood grew bleaker as the day wore on. I found myself brooding over the Corsos, people I hadn’t thought about for years, a retired midget couple who had been in show business but hadnothing to show for it when I met them except a few battered scrapbooks and an apartment full of odd mementos. Like me, they had worked in a movie that had enchanted the world, but no one ever knew that unless the Corsos took the trouble to tell them.
    Mom latched onto Irene and Luther in the mid seventies at a Little People of America convention. They had presented a slide show on their long-dead career. Mom was so convinced of their wonderfulness that she drove me all the way to Phoenix so I could see them in their natural habitat. I was a moody teenager in those days, struggling more than most with my identity, so I guess she thought the experience would be inspirational.
    The Corsos were both in their late fifties and lived on the seventh floor of a suburban high rise. Luther loomed over me at nearly four feet. He had a face like a dried apple and wore plaid trousers with a button-down shirt. A recent stroke had impaired his speech, so Irene, who was aggressively lilac-haired and even taller, did most of the talking. It centered on their kids, as I remember, and their bridge game, and their fleeting moment of glory almost forty years earlier as Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz .
    Their living room was awash in Ozabilia: plastic Tin Men, stuffed Lions, Wicked Witches out the wazoo. Even the bricks on their balcony had been painted that unmistakable shade of yellow. I’d always loved the movie (still do) but couldn’t for the life of me connect its legend with these hopelessly prosaic people. These were Munchkins in flip-flops, for God’s sake, without benefit of Deco. Munchkins with a microwave, who ate Pop-Tarts and watched golf tournaments on TV. It just didn’t scan.
    Part of the problem was their size. Irene and Luther had been teenagers at MGM, and since then they’d each grown over a foot, fleshing out considerably in the process. A lot of the Munchkins were taller now, Irene told me, a shocking revelation I absorbed without comment, feeling somehow betrayed. Most of the Munchkins had been midgets, I remembered, not dwarfs, and thus proportional, so the right punch to the pituitary would have madegrowth possible. When you got right down to it, the Corsos weren’t like me at all.
    Irene brought us Cokes and Ding Dongs (get it?) and rattled off the well-worn particulars of their days in Oz. She and Luther had met on the all-midget cross-country bus chartered by Papa Singer, the full-sized procurer and “handler” of the Munchkins. When they arrived in California in early 1938, they were booked with the others into the Culver Hotel. The building’s still there, by the way, though it’s full of offices now. When we drive by and I imagine the old days, I can’t help thinking of it as a sort of Ellis Island for my people.
    Like a lot of other actors signed for Oz, the Corsos first worked on a turkey called The Terror of Tiny Town , the world’s first and last all-midget musical western. Irene was in chaps and riding a Shetland pony the day Luther proposed to her. She was thrilled