My Very Excited Mother Just Served Us Nine...?

You know what they say: there are no small parts, only small planets.

Only apparently there aren’t. Small planets, I mean. Small parts? They exist. I never believed that fuzzy theater b.s., though I’m not about to disillusion the kid playing Boy Among the Dead #3 in Our Town. I had a small part in my high-school production of West Side Story. One of the Jets’ girlfriends -- not Riff’s. My name was either Patsy or Annette, depending on which source you consulted. The script said Patsy, but our director (whom I still love) consistently referred to me as Annette. “No, no, Annette. Cheat left during the dance at the gym, not right!”

My best friends Hillary and Jessica also had small parts. They were Fernando and Conchita, members of the Sharks gang. During the dance at the gym, they could have danced together -- since Hillary was a boy; Jessica was a girl; and they were both of the appropriate Bernsteinian cult. But our director paired them with other kids. I don’t remember which pseudo-Latina wound up as Hillary’s partner, but Jessica cha-chaed with a middle schooler named Chad, who compensated for his runty height with a voice that might have raised Tony from the dead. “She said cheat LEFT,” Chad hollered. “Not RIGHT.”

There may have been confusion about my character’s name, but at least nobody mixed up my gender. “You’re a GIRL, Hillary,” Chad reminded us. “So you walk with the GIRLS.” But no, Hillary wasn’t a girl. Or Fernando wasn’t. “I’m actually a boy,” Hillary said, patting Chad’s head, which reached her taped chest.

If I were Hillary, I would have protested the random gender assignment, just after I stabbed Chad with a rose corsage. Hillary really did buy into the “small parts” adage, though. After gently correcting Chad, she got right back into character, eyeing me suspiciously across the dance floor. Not only had she memorized the “dance at the gym,” she knew the choreography for the entire show -- from Tony’s opening number through the “Somewhere” farewell sequence. She performed “Cool” as we stood in line for shepherd’s pie at the cafeteria. “Hey, that’s my number,” I protested. “Chill yourself out, peach,” she sneered. “Or I’ll cut you.”

Pluto would do well to take a lesson from Hillary. True, it was not dropped from the Big Nine due to its size. What did they knife Pluto for again? Something about how it interferes with Neptune’s orbit. Were I Pluto, I would tell astronomers to stick it to Uranus. What kind of a name is Uranus? Our middle-school English teacher chose to change Uranus’s name during her Greek mythology unit. After quieting yet another chorus of guffaws, she started calling Uranus by his Roman name, Caelus. I think if Uranus’s title can be altered that quickly, he doesn’t deserve to be a planet. Pluto is a beloved Disney pet, for pete’s sake. Would you shoot a dog?

Obviously, the astronomers pay as much attention to me as Hillary did to Chad. Never mind. To Pluto, I say: keep doing your galactic dance. There’s a place for you. Somewhere.