Free Unscripted by Jayne Denker Page B

volume—as he navigated me in circles that made me dizzy. Or maybe I would have been dizzy without the dance steps. “I learned the waltz when I was a kid, and it’s the only formal dance that’s stuck with me.”
I could just picture him as a preteen, awkwardly stumbling around a dance floor with a girl half a foot taller than him. So cute. “Charm school?”
His lopsided smile resurfaced. “No. For a play.”
“You did theater?”
“Sure did.” He navigated me smoothly around a couple of crew members who were just doing the standard middle-school stand-and-shuffle slow dance in the middle of the floor.
“I didn’t know that about you.”
“Well, there’re a lot of things you don’t know about me.” He said this with a twinkle in his eye that made me want to jump him right there in the middle of the club. “Yeah,” he went on, “I love live theater. It’s the only medium where an actor really finds out what he’s made of, you know?” I nodded, even though I hadn’t set foot on a stage in my entire life. “Acting without a net, without a second take—anything could happen. What a rush. And you really get into a role, you know? It’s not like television, where we memorize the lines in five minutes, spit them out, and then move on.”
I stared. I didn’t think I’d ever heard him say more than ten words at a time unless he was reciting the ones laid out for him in my scripts. He looked abashed—he might have even been blushing, but the dim light made it hard to tell—and glanced away.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Don’t be.”
“I don’t mean to knock television. It’s been great for me so far.”
“I just never knew you had such a love for the theater.”
“It’s so real, Faith.”
Maybe I was more buzzed than I thought. Because normally that sort of earnestness from anyone, even Alex McNulty, would have started me sniggering and spouting sarcastic remarks. But I just nodded. The song ended, and he led me off the floor, steering me straight to an empty booth. I slid in and he followed. Even though the booth was a nice large semicircle, he sat so close to me our hips were touching. I could barely breathe. A bottle of champagne appeared from somewhere, and he poured two glasses.
“So, not a theater person, then?” he asked.
“Well, I like theater, but . . . you know . . . this is Southern California!” I tried to laugh, but I sounded like a hysterical loon. I made myself stop.
“There’s theater here too.”
I took a gulp of champagne, squinting as the bubbles went up my nose. “Oh, I know. It’s just that my background has always been in TV and movies.”
“Oh yeah, your mom.”
I raised my glass. “The inimitable Mona Urquhart-Sinclair-Tompkins-Hijuelos . . . um . . .” I paused, then remembered my current stepdaddy’s last name. “. . . -DiNoto.”
“Impressive.”
“She gets around.”
“She’s still in the business?”
“No.” I took another drink. Wow, look—the bottom of the glass. Somebody must have drunk it all when I wasn’t looking. No worries; Alex filled it back up again. “She’s retired, living in Palm Springs now.”
“People still retire to Palm Springs?”
“Old-school retirement, right? I told her she could have bought a thousand-acre compound in Costa Rica for the price of the house she bought there. Wouldn’t go.”
“It’s just as hot.”
“Yeah, but Palm Springs is a dry heat. Whatever that means. No trench foot, maybe.”
Alex took a sip of champagne. “Maybe she wants to be close to the action, in case she decides to come out of retirement?”
I shrugged. “Anything’s possible, I suppose. She did love the biz.”
“So she, like, helped you out with Modern Women ?”
As usual, I felt myself bristle whenever someone suggested the obvious, but it was dulled a bit by the champagne, and because this time it was coming from Alex. I knew I’d forgive him more readily than I’d forgive anyone else. “No. The show is all mine. I did it