| “Voices” Prologue: “Five minutes, Isabelle,” came the call with a knock on my door. “Thank you,” I replied, gazing into the mirror to make one final check, twisting a curl on my wig back into place. **Another night you waste your voice, another night when you could do so much more.** I stiffened at the voice’s insult. For nearly three months I had been hearing it, ever since I joined the New York company of Phantom as Christine. It haunted me, taunting and mocking, and I despised it. I loved working on Broadway and I was truly enjoying playing Christine, but I was growing weary of the voice. I knew I wasn’t going crazy, I wasn’t! Though there really was no other explanation, no other reason to hear the constant insults. Perhaps I was taking my character too seriously…. I stood and as I left the voice tossed one last comment, **You can do better than this.** I slipped out of the wedding dress and pulled on my robe. At least I’d had a good performance, but it was getting harder to ignore the voice, it was starting to make me doubt myself. I went up to my dressing room and, of course, it greeted me with another scathing remark. **Mediocre, at best, a waste of talent.** At that moment Martin, my long-standing, oh-so-patient wonderfully supportive and extremely rich, boyfriend came in, sparing me anymore of the voice. “Hello, darling,” he called out, coming over to kiss me. “Are we still going out?” I asked hopefully. He nodded, “Of course, but first I wanted to bring you these, you had left them at the beach house.” And he handed me a beautiful pearl necklace. I would like to point out two things: one, he has a house in the Hamptons, gorgeous, and two, I had left my pearls there, my fake ones, he’d just handed me a string of absolutely real ones with a diamond set in the clasp. Did I mention he’s positively the sweetest too? “I’ll go and bring the car around, meet you our side in…?” “Twenty minutes,” I replied and with a smile he left. The voice tsked at me, **He is not worthy of you.** Gritting my teeth I remained silent, quickly dressed, and left. As I walked out it suddenly occurred to me that I only heard the voice in my dressing room. I pushed the thought aside, that was just a little to weird for me. |