So Werner is quite amenable to participation in my performance. He is to play the bongos, which he seems to enjoy, sitting on the floor with the drums between his knees, head down, beatnik-style, immersed in slapping out rhythms. We practice with some records, but for the heart of the show I will sing a cappella while I dance in the appropriate costume. We play with different numbers, consider the possibilities, and while I don’t recall the potential songs we discarded, I can’t forget the song I chose as my vehicle, the number I could completely throw myself into, which was a version of Judy Garland singing “Get Happy.”

I must have seen this on Garland’s TV show, which, even at ten, I understood to be an amalgam of glamour and damage so peculiar as to both transfix and unsettle at once. I don’t think we own the record—my parents don’t care for her, not really—but somehow it seems that every word of the tune is already imprinted on my memory, as if I were born knowing it: “Shout hallelujah, come on get happy,/Get ready for the judgment day.” Somewhere I’ve found a red chiffon scarf, just the thing to hold for the performance, and a shiny black cane. I’m planning to locate black stockings and a tux jacket so I can achieve the whole look.

Cut to: film version. The room is dramatically dark, only a small spotlight on Werner as he begins the bongo roll, which crescendos and bursts emphatically, then a two-beat pause and out from behind our makeshift curtain I pop, all legs and angles, strutting sideways, my voice low and quiet, syncopating the song’s opening bars. Then, at a subtle signal from me, the bongos go nuts, and all the contained energy I’ve barely been suppressing breaks loose, my voice rising on the stressed syllables:

We’re GO-ing cross the RI-ver

for to get to the other side,

We’re GO-ing cross the RI-ver

Milk and honey on the other side.

Now I’m in my full stride, my smile wide and glittering in the spot, my fingers spread wide in the air minstrel-style, then flying up to lift my top hat in rhythm. I am amphetamine bright and glittering on the inside, too, possessed by my song. I am entirely a Judy, right down to the prescriptions, in tight black stockings, the tuxedo jacket slicing across her thighs just below the waist, eyes huge with the force pouring out of her gaze now into the music. I begin to wave the long red scarf in the air, making it also dance to my song and the throb of my accompaniment. I toss my cane away and hold the scarf high over my head with both hands. I hold it behind my back and my behind, pull it back and forth in a kind of shimmy.