Who's Kitten Who? by Cynthia Baxter Page A

with a smile, causing two huge, distinctive dimples to appear in her cheeks.
    “Sorry to disturb you,” I began.
    “Not at all. What can I do for you?”
    Lacey’s words were colored with a hint of an accent, one I couldn’t place. “I’m Jessie Popper,” I began. “I’m—”
    “I know who you are,” she replied. “You just joined the cast of
She’s Flying High,
right?”
    “That’s right. I’m a friend of Betty Vandervoort’s. She’s the one who got me involved.”
    Lacey nodded. “Betty’s great. A really terrific dancer too. What about you? Have you done much theater?”
    “Practically none,” I admitted. “But when Aziza dropped out and Elena became Amelia Earhart, Derek and Betty railroaded me into making my stage debut.”
    “Gee, that was awfully nice of you. To help Derek out like that, I mean.” The muscles in her forehead tensed as she added, “That horrid Aziza. It’s so typical of her to do something like that.”
    I recognized an opportunity when it fell into my lap. “Really? I don’t know Aziza very well. What’s she like?”
    Lacey snorted. “Self-centered. Dramatic. Inconsiderate. I mean, look at the way she left Derek in the lurch. After weeks of rehearsal, she walks out two weeks before opening night! Not only do a whole bunch of cast members have to switch roles to accommodate the prima donna; now I have to do major alterations on all their costumes, including yours. You’ll need to try on the Anita Snook outfit tonight so I can see if I have to make any adjustments.”
    Shaking her head disapprovingly, she added, “
Aziza
isn’t even her real name. She made it up. Her real name is Ann or Anna, but that’s too ordinary for her. It just goes to show what a phony she is.”
    “In that case,” I commented casually, “it’s hard to understand what Simon ever saw in her.”
    “You’re telling me,” she said, sounding surprisingly bitter. “Their relationship was practically a play in itself. The drama queen was always picking fights with him over the stupidest little things—like if he was five minutes late or…or if he didn’t look happy enough to see her. She was incredibly possessive too. She was always going ballistic, accusing him of flirting with this woman or that woman. And she sure wasn’t shy about embarrassing him in front of other people. Everybody in the theater company got used to their shouting matches. She was always making a scene over some imagined transgression of Simon’s.”
    I blinked. “So why
do
you think Simon put up with behavior like that?”
    Lacey’s eyes were blazing as she replied, “According to Aziza, it was because he was madly in love with her. When he wasn’t around, she’d go on and on about how she was his muse and how he couldn’t live without her. But I think it was just because Simon was such a nice guy. He had more tolerance for that kind of thing than most people. But none of
us
could understand it.”
    “How long were they together?”
    “About a year, off and on,” she said. “Aziza was constantly breaking up with him, although I’m sure she just did it so he’d beg her to come back to him. Which he did, over and over again. Once, when we were rehearsing another production a few months ago, he even showed up at the theater with an armful of roses. He got up onstage and on bended knee recited Romeo’s famous lines: ‘But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!’” She twisted her mouth into a sneer. “Only he substituted
her
name, saying, ‘It is the east, and Aziza is the sun!’”
    It sounds as if Simon had a flair for melodrama himself, I thought.
    “But every once in a while, he would be the one to break it off,” Lacey went on. “Simon was capable of putting up with a lot, but sometimes even he’d had enough. Of course, that would make Aziza furious. She’d cry, she’d threaten to kill herself, she’d do anything she could think of to convince