You got this, I mouth, holding up a fist to cheer him on.
He takes the box from Chloe, thanks her, and then clears his throat, taking Beth’s hand. “Beth, I—”
“Yes,” says Beth, already profusely crying through her smile.
“Mom!” Chloe protests. “You’re supposed to let them sing first!”
“Oh,” she says, adorably flustered. “I mean—TBD!”
My dad pulls Beth in, and the proposal itself gets pretty much swallowed by the sound of Aerosmith, so only my dad and Beth can hear it. She nods at him, then nods again, then looks over at me and Chloe like she wants to get a yes from us, too.
We give her identical thumbs-ups, and then she turns back to my dad. When he slides the ring on her finger the small crowd that has gathered around us in the park erupts into cheers, but my dad and Beth don’t even seem to hear them, sharing a sweet kiss and then glancing at the rest of us shyly. The Four Suns have long since abandoned their instruments to join in on the cheering. Oliver pulls me in and plants a kiss on my temple, looking every bit as pleased as I am that the whole thing went off without a hitch.
“And to think, all this came about because you went aggressively method for Mamma Mia,” he says, smiling down at me.
“This and … some other nice things,” I say, intertwining my fingers with his.
“I’d say so. And don’t worry,” he says. “I’ve already got my brothers learning all of ABBA’s greatest hits for the wedding.”
My dad and Beth head toward us, punch-drunk with happiness, immediately hugging Georgie and squeezing her hard enough to bruise. What I didn’t know until this past year when Georgie reentered our lives is that she was the one who introduced my dad and Beth in the first place—she and Beth were both a part of the same community theater, since neither of them actually majored in it, and Georgie had been subtly attempting to pull the strings on her dating my dad since they were all eighteen. Beth reuniting with her high school ex might have been a bump in Georgie’s grand master plan, but she got her way in the end.
“It’s about damn time,” she tells them both.
Beth leans in and kisses her on the cheek, and when she steps back, Georgie and my dad do a very dorky series of hand gestures that must have meant something to them in the nineties but makes no sense to any of us now. Georgie grins a full-wattage kind of grin, the kind she’s been smiling a lot lately now that she’s back in our orbit. The kind of smile that would have been a dead giveaway of who she was, if I’d ever seen it last summer—it’s every inch as broad and unrepentant as mine.
It seems like the more I get to know her, the more moments there are like this. But maybe it’s less that I didn’t notice them before and more that she seems to be changing. Loosening up and coming back to some version of herself that my dad must have known. It was a little bumpy at first when she came back into our lives—she emailed my dad mid-September, a few months after I told him. After that she and my dad met up a few times to talk before Georgie started coming over for dinner every week or so, or occasionally hanging out with us all at the Milkshake Club. There are definitely some heavy moments—ones where she and my dad exchange a look over my head that I don’t quite understand, or someone says something about me as a little kid that makes Georgie go stiff—but for the most part, it’s been nice. Having Georgie around is a little bit what having an aunt would have been like if my actual one hadn’t pretty much taken over as my mom.
And if she really has made aunt status, now I’ve got more family than I can count. A stepmom in Beth, a stepsister in Chloe, a somewhat-related cousin in Steph, and I suspect a soon-to-be new aunt in Farrah (who very unsubtly measured my finger the other night, knowing it’s the same size as Heather’s).
“Thank you all for doing this,” says my dad, looking at all of us in turn. A year ago all this attention probably would have killed him on the spot, but he’s found a little bit more of his footing since Beth and Georgie both came back to respectively calm and boss him around.
“Can they do the chalupa song now?” Beth asks, still crying.
“Requests are extra,” says Elliot cheekily, holding out his hand.
Before Oliver can scold him, Teddy pulls out his phone and starts blasting ABBA’s “I Do” through the park, setting off yet another round of cheers from strangers.
Heather whistles to round us all up. Oliver and I reach for each other’s hands at the same time, falling into step with each other as easily as breathing.
“To the Milkshake Bar,” Heather calls. “Millie Mias on the house!”
“That’s what I was hoping she’d say,” says Oliver.
Perhaps the most delicious consequence of all this is that Heather coined a new sundae on the menu based on last summer’s shenanigans. It’s got a scoop of mint chip for me and Georgie, strawberry for Heather and Chloe, vanilla for my dad and Beth, Nutella for Farrah, sea salt chocolate chip cookie pieces for Oliver, and Reese’s Puffs for Teddy. The whole thing is a big ooey-gooey fantastic mess, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are just a gobstopping number of humans to thank, but first a massive acknowledgment to the theater community—from the broader community that shapes and saves so many lives, to the pockets of it that raised me, to the friends I’m gonna have my whole life. I started this book a month before the pandemic began, never imagining what would happen to the world and its effect on theater as a whole; heck, I am writing these acknowledgments at the beginning of April 2021, not even really knowing what’s ahead. But I do know that our love of theater is what has helped so many of us find community and hope through this whole mess, so I will always remember writing this book as a stubbornly joyful love letter to theater throughout it. Writing it was a balm in the scarier moments, and a reminder throughout all of them that no matter what you throw at this community, it was built both to love and to endure.
On that note, thank you to every theater I’ve ever been part of, and especially AfterWork Theater and everyone in it. I’ve always had this very bullheaded conviction that New York is where I belonged, but the day I first stepped into Launch Day was when it finally felt like home. Our production of Newsies might have gotten canceled because of COVID, but I sure did try to bring part of it back in some of these pages, one unrepentantly dweeby reference at a time. I can’t wait to come up with ridiculous backstories for our next cast of characters once it’s safe for us to belt our faces off in the same room again.
Thank you to every single human being at Wednesday Books. To Alex for your support and mutual love of ABBA, and the kind of edits that occasionally make me whisper “Yessssss” to myself like an evil scientist at eight in the morning. To Mara for always having my back, and Meghan and Lexi and DJ for the truly bonkers amount of work that goes into bringing a whole book into the world, and to Kerri and Mar for this beautiful cover that captured Millie body, heart, and soul.
Thank you to Janna, who is here for all my harebrained ideas, even when they’re essentially “I’m going to smush as many musicals as I possibly can into a book and launch it like a glitter rocket into the sun!!!” The last few years have been wild and I am grateful to you for all the coolest parts of them.