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before I went onstage that I should bring it hard .
    Later, I played Nancy in Little Mary Sunshine —a character who has a boyfriend but loves attention from any and all men. One of my songs is “Naughty Nancy,” and in another I sang about wanting to be like a spy who seduces men for information. Oh what a wicked girl was she, that’s the kind of girl I want to be.
    My friend Dave, who was in the theater group with me, said I probably got the part because I had the “figure” for it. Even at eleven years old Dave talked like he was a grown man. A few years later he would ask me if I knew my boyfriend “in the biblical sense.” You mean like fucking?
    I continued to perform throughout high school, and we did fewer musicals in favor of “real” plays. The better parts started to go to kids whose parents gave the most money to the theater, we heard, and my parents gave nothing. On the last day of our last performance the woman who had taught and directed me from third grade on, who had the same name as my mother, gave me a card saying she was proud of me, listing off some of the roles I’d had over the years. Later, after the show, I compared mine with that of another friend who was also a senior. Except for the list of roles, the inscription in her card said the same thing that mine did word for word. A few other people, those who played more main characters, got messages that were longer, more personalized.
    MY DAUGHTER IS NERVOUS. SHE’S FIVE YEARS OLD, BUT SHE knows that once she turns six, she’ll have to dance on a real stage in front of a real audience for her ballet performance. Right now, at the end of the year, parents take off their shoes and file into a small ballet studio and sit in folding chairs up against the mirrored wall and watch their children perform in the same room that they learn in weekly. We watch these tiny humans dance and jump around with complete abandon and joy. They wave to us, trip and fall, their headbands falling down around their eyes, and they don’t care because their parents and grandparents are right there smiling and taking pictures.
    But when they turn six, the performance moves to a stage—a fact that both thrills and terrifies Layla. She wants to be a “real ballerina” but is afraid of all the people watching her. I tell her not to worry because the people in the audience are on her side. They will be thrilled just to see her dance happily.
    She wants to know if her teacher can come up with her, if she can wait in the wings or just dance like she normally does—for her parents, in a room with her friends. The night before her last performance as a five-year-old child I have a dream about being in a play that I never bothered to learn the lines for. A dream about yellow highlighters and scripts bound in three-ring binders that I desperately thumb through in the moments before I’m supposed to step onstage.
    I want to tell her that she can quit, that she doesn’t need to perform if she doesn’t want to. But I know it’s bad advice,setting a bad example. I also know that she might like being onstage. Sometimes the best moments are right before a performance when you’re backstage putting on makeup that you would normally never wear and fixing your hair in a certain way and looking at the lineup of costumes you’ll have on. And then when it’s done, when you get onstage, the hot lights make you sweat but the way people look at you, look to you, for how they should feel and what to do is a power of sorts. I have always liked it, despite the fear.

MEASUREMENTS
    I WAS WALKING FROM THE CITY HALL SUBWAY STATION TO MY high school on Chambers Street when I noticed my nipples sticking out. The white shirt with the small bow on the neckline had seemed sweet when I put it on that morning, but outside of the darkened train tunnels I could see the outline of my areolas when I looked down.
    I had