“If I should be in the play, then maybe you should be on the soccer team,” I said, walking to my spot on the field.

“Forevers only,” Berry told me as she backward-jogged.

“So the play isn’t Forevers only?” I called back. It seemed like only Forevers had signed up. So far.

TWE EEET!

“It’s different.” Berry took her place in goal.

I stepped out to what felt like a peaceful and easily avoided corner of the soccer field.

If I was going to audition for the school play—not saying I would—I could also audition with a number from a new piece I’d been working on set to Olivia Newton-John’s disco hit “Xanadu” (featuring ELO).

Olivia Newton-John. Australian actor and singer. Mostly popular in the seventies and eighties. A polarizing figure? For some nerds, yes. I mean, she played a teenager in the hit movie Grease (1978), Davidson’s fave, when she was twenty-nine years old. And yet somehow audience viewers completely accepted her as teen Sandy (the character she played). Maybe because she was appearing alongside actor Stockard Channing, who played the troubled teen, Rizzo, and Stockard was thirty-three years old at the time (and she won a People’s Choice for that role).

Technically movie trivia is not my thing, but it was my friend Danny’s thing, and this was one of his favorite movie facts.

Maybe, I thought, if you play your part with heart and panache, that’s what matters.

Did Olivia Newton-John worry what people would think about her playing a teenager, or did she just do her best to act like a teenager? Although, let’s say it, she didn’t look like a teenager, but she could sin g!

I can also sing, by the way, something that would come up in my audition, if I auditioned. Oh, I thought, I could do a medley of “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” and the Grease finale, “You’re the One That I Want.” Both great songs.

But “You’re the One That I Want” is a duet between Travolta and Newton-John.

Who would I duet with?

After the game, which was a shutout for our team because, as Berry said, nothing got past her in the goal, I was walking back to the locker room when suddenly Gilly jogged up beside me. She ran in long strides that went with her legs that seemed to be as long as my entire body. Given that most of what I had seen of Gilly up until that point was a person who was leaning or keeping her head down next to her horrible friends, it was strange to see her. . .alone.