Miranda

      She was short, fat, with rolls of flesh that jiggled when she laughed and a jowly face that was broad and greasy with summer sweat. Her light brown face was made even shinier by the huge splashes of garish red make-up she'd unskillfully applied. I couldn't tell where her real eyebrows were because she had plucked them to total bareness and had drawn a thin ,dark pencil line hight above the eye sockets. The sweat had smeared one of the pencil lines into an upward expression of smudged surprise.

      Her neck was bulging with two rolls of fat and dark creases of dirt separated them, even when she threw her head back in a gale of laughter, spreading her large magenta lips into a wide smile. Her teeth were not good. Yellow, bits of whatever she had been eating stuck between them.

      This grotesque, uncomfortable looking Puerto Rican woman, who was maybe forty-five years old, might once have been an actress on one of those Spanish-language stations that abound on cable networks in New York City. Every gesture, as she spoke to her companion on the humid subway platform, was too large, every laugh too pointed and loud. It was that laugh, and her companion's loud "Oh, Miranda!!" in response,  that had attracted my attention , and then I couldn't tear my eyes away from her grandiose and dramatic movements. Miranda was utterly fascinating in her ugliness and seeming discomfort, with her too-tight flowered dress, its stained underarms and the sandals she wore that cut into her chubby feet. Even her toenails seemed painfully painted, with a screamingly bright orange polish that looked like it had been on those toenails too long.

      I marveled that she could have even reached her toes to paint them, her stomach was so big, but the polish looked so old, it occurred to me she may have applied it before she got fat. And then she looked in my direction, and her small , sparkling eyes fixed directly onto mine, and I knew she knew I was staring at her. I managed a weak smile, which she greeted with a small smirk of disdain, and I knew she also knew how harshly I was judging her. Grateful that the subway arrived at that moment, I stepped onto it and felt the relief of its coolness, reminding myself of where I was going: downtown to an important rehearsal studio where I knew I'd be meeting and working with "my kind" of people. When an actor begins a new show, I believe he also begins a new family and, at the very least, a new place for his soul to live begins to be built and furnished. If all goes well, a new home is created for both actor and audience,and I felt confident that this would occur on this new project.  

     The doors opened at my 14th Street stop, and gathering my things, I made my way to the opening doors, dreading the heat that would slap me the moment i left the car, but excited to get to rehearsal. Rushing toward the stairs, the Puerto Rican woman was all but gone from my mind, until I heard, behind me, her loud laugh , and her friend's "Oh, Miranda!" And I was thinking about her toenails, as I pushed open the rehearsal hall doors.