AN ESSAY
by Lynn Ahrens
Lynn Ahrens is a lyricist and librettist. For her work on Broadway and in television and film, she has received the Tony and the Emmy Award and has been nominated for two Academy Awards. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications. Her recent essay “One-Man Show,” available in our Archive, was nominated for the Best American Essays and Pushcart anthologies. Ahrens lives in New York City.
FADE IN:
INT. BATHROOM OF A NEW YORK CITY APARTMENT
IT’S A GRAY FEBRUARY MORNING in 1998. From the shower, I hear the phone ring; a moment later my husband, Neil, thrusts the receiver into the steam.
“Come on,” I whine, squinting through shampoo. “Can’t you just take a message?”
“Not this time,” he says.
I swipe suds from my eyes and take the phone gingerly, hoping not to be electrocuted. “Hello?”
“Hi. This is Gretchen Van Benthuysen from the Asbury Park Press. Have you heard the news?”
“I’m in the shower. It’s not even eight o’clock.”
“You’ve been nominated for two Academy Awards—Best Song and Best Score.”
I burble thank-yous, dance my husband and my cat around the bathroom, soap bubbles flying, and race to call my mother.
“How wonderful!” she cries. “It’s an honor just to be nominated!”
And there it is—the “pinprick in the bubble of joy”—my mother’s special way of protecting me from life’s inevitable disappointments. What was I thinking?
We’re up against the biggest movie of all time, James Cameron’s two-hundred-million-dollar behemoth; it’s got a hit song, “My Heart Will Go On,” sung by the steel-voiced Celine Dion, that’s been wailing across the airwaves every thirty seconds for months.
We’re up against Titanic. And we’re going to lose.
DISSOLVE TO:
THREE YEARS EARLIER. My writing partner, the composer Stephen Flaherty, and I have been hired to write the score for 20th Century Fox’s first feature animation, Anastasia. It’s to be a musical, one that will tell the imagined story of Czar Nicholas’s vanished daughter. The plot of the movie goes something like this: A young girl named Anya grows up in a Russian orphanage. She has strange flashes of memory and may or may not be the lost daughter of Czar Nicholas. Two con men and a stray dog convince her to go to Paris, where the royal grandmother still resides; they intend to pass Anya off as the real Anastasia. Meanwhile, Rasputin (who’s risen from the dead after single-handedly starting the Russian Revolution) tries to stop Anya and avenge his own death. He has an albino bat as a sidekick.
Songwriters eager to embark on their first and possibly only major motion picture don’t question historical accuracy, much less whether or not the Russian Revolution “sings.” We pack the requisite tools of the trade—index cards and Sharpies—and embark for Los Angeles on a Hollywood adventure straight out of a screwball comedy.
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