Carla's Pre-performance Jitters

‘Hey!” the man with the pink shirt called me. “Ya wanna interview girls about performance glitters-”

“Jitters, actually.” I corrected.

“Bah! Whatever! Go there and ask for Carla.” he said, pointing to the backstage. I thought he was being helpful but his smirk told me otherwise. I headed to the backstage in search of that girl. I asked a few people if they knew where she was. Everybody seemed to know who she was but none knew where she was.

I walked to almost every room in that area hoping to find her but with no success. In the last room I found a girl crying. She was all alone, nobody to console her. I went inside and pulled out a clean tissue out of my pocket and handed it to her. She took it, not looking up to see who gave it. “Hey, why are you crying?” I asked softly.

“Oh! Nothing.” she said, turning away trying to hide her face. She was a fair girl with auburn hair which was tightly pulled back into a bun. Her cheeks were red and her eyes were puffy from crying.

“It’s okay, stop crying. ” I asked, handing her a chocolate.

“thanks.” she replied.

“Okay, my name is Sean Walker. I’m a journalist and I have to write an article about having performance jitters. Is your name Carla?” 

“Yeah.” she replied.

 “Can I interview you about this? I won’t take long, I promise. It might as well help in calming you down.” 

“Okay. No problem. Anything in twenty five minutes, ‘cause I have my performance in half an hour” she said with a weak and tired smile spreading on her face. But surprisingly her expression was bright. You wouldn't know that she cried hadn’t her eyes been puffy. 

I switched on my audio recorder on my phone and began. “So, Carla, is this your first performance on stage?” I asked.

“No! Of course not. I’ve performed twenty three times before this. This is my twenty fourth performance.”

“Even after so many performances, you still have pre-performance jitters?”

“Yeah.” she shrugged.

“How are your jitters? Like, what do you feel? Do you get a twisty stomach or something?”

“No.” she laughed. “No twisty stomachs, but-” she stopped suddenly. Her face was drained out of her smile. “Excuse me for a second,” she said and dashed to the bathroom. I waited and waited and waited. She came out finally rubbing her belly. 

“What happened? What took you so long?” I asked her, trying to suppress my growing impatience. She gives me twenty five minutes out of which she uses up five.

“Sorry. I felt like puking,” she apologized.

“Did you puke?”

“No.” she said, with a stare of repugnance.

“So, did you ever puke before your performance?”

“No.” again, she shot a look of disgust at me.

“So, how else do you feel before your performance? Any headache?”

“No headaches, but I have a burning sensation in my throat.”

“Do you have it now?”

“Yes.”she said. But I saw no sign of a ‘burning’ throat as she spoke in the most tranquil manner possible. It almost seemed as if she had no performance at all. All the same, she acts as if this was her first performance. 

“Okay, this question is out of curiosity. You seem very calm right now. It almost seems you don’t even have a performance. But again you suddenly seem very nervous.”

“Oh! I’m just used to these jitters now. They are kind of involuntary. Can’t escape them.”

“Oh… interesting. So-”

Carla all of a sudden clutched her throat and her eyes widened. Her heavy breaths immediately turned into long gasps. She began to say something. “Wa- wat-,” 

“Where can I find water?” I ran to the door to look if somebody was there. “Hey! We need help here. Carla is choking. She needs water. Please come fast.” nobody bothered to respond. I waited for someone to get up. But everybody turned away as if nothing had happened. “Doesn’t anybody care? There is a girl choking and I need water.” I shouted louder, outraged by their lack of concern. Still nobody seemed to care. I rolled my eyes and hurried inside to see if there was any water in the thousands of bags thrown in the corner. But to my utter astonishment, Carla sat there applying nail polish as if nothing had happened. 

“Hey, where did you go? I was waiting. You have only ten more minutes.”  she said, tapping her watch. 

“Didn’t you ask for water?”

“No.” she said, frowning as if she was trying to remember if she did. Then she nodded emphatically. 

“Oh… I thought you did. Do you need water now?”

“No thanks.” she said with a short smile.

“Was that also a part of your jitters?”

She simply nodded.

“Can you please just tell me all the things that you face as a part of your jitters?” I asked, tired of surprises.

“Sure.” she said. “First, I start crying a lot. Second, I feel like puking but I never puke. A trip to the bathroom and standing in front of  the sink helps the feeling subside. Then, I have a burning sensation in my throat. After that I choke, and after that-” she broke off. 

“And after that what?” I asked her, looking up from my notebook. Her face became grave and she looked perfectly straight, as if she was in a trance.

 After a few seconds she began laughing hysterically. I sat staring at her in silence thinking it is a part of her jitters. I waited and waited for her to stop, but her laugh seemed to have no cease. Just when I was about to ask her if she could talk, the man with the pink shirt arrived. He lazily entered the room deeply engrossed in his phone and said. “Carla fainted for the second time-” he said. “What are you doing here?” he suddenly asked, looking confused. 

“You asked me to interview Carla. I’m doing that.”I replied.

“Who in the world told ya that she was Carla?” he asked asked looking at me as if I was dumb.

“She did,” I said. She stopped laughing.

“She’s the makeup artist. Carla’s outside.” he said, moving out of the room and motioning me to come with him.

“Well, it was a pleasure to fool you, Sean Walker. Hope we meet again.” the makeup artist said and walked away with the pride of achieving something great. She sounded like acid.

Even before I could say anything scathing, she left the room. “What are ya staring at? C’mon!” the man in the pink shirt said and I followed him. He took me to the room where a girl was there. We entered to see a large group of people surrounding a tiny girl, who might not have been not more than five years old. She was laughing hysterically and the makeup fake-Carla’s laugh was nothing compared to this one. I obviously couldn’t interview a tiny girl like that. So, I decided to ask a person nearby if they knew about her pre-performance jitters. 

I slipped into the crowd and asked a teenager, “Hey, do you know what happened?”

“Yeah. Carla fainted. Poor thing. This is her second performance.”

“Does she always laugh like this?”

“No, it’s a part of her jitters. She did the exact same things last time too.”

“What did she do?”

“She first cries, then she runs to the bathroom saying she has to puke but she doesn’t and then she says her throat is burning and she runs around like she’s out of her mind, but she doesn’t drink water. Never ever. Then she chokes. Oh! It’s just so horrible to see her. She faces so much of torture before her performances. Anyway, after that she faints. After she is woken up, she begins to laugh. Like this,” she said pointing at the little girl who was now on the floor twisting and turning and of course, laughing.

“Sorry, but you might wanna go out ‘cause she needs open air. Ten people are enough to handle her.” she requested.

“I’m sorry…” I mumbled and walked out of the room. I made a mental note to thank the makeup artist for saving me from watching the horrors of Carla’s pre-performance jitters.