Everybody wants to be Sandy. I understand it. Sandy gets the transformation, the last number, the boy. She walks out in the black pants at the end and the whole gym loses its mind. If you're sixteen and you've been waiting your entire life for a room full of people to look at you and be glad, Sandy is the part.
But Sandy is easy. Ms. Janis says so in my book, and I stand behind her. Innocent girl in love with a boy. Romeo and Juliet without the bodies. All she wants is to fit in — and fitting in is on the mind of every single person in that building already. You don't have to reach for it. You just have to remember what Tuesday felt like.
Rizzo is the part with something underneath it. Think about what she's actually carrying. She's afraid she's pregnant. She's in love with a boy she can't admit she's in love with. She's watching her friends plan a future she doesn't believe in, in a town she's already outgrown, and she has decided — consciously, strategically — that if she is unkind first, nobody will ever get close enough to hurt her. That's not a mean girl. That's a girl with a system.
And then she stands there and sings There Are Worse Things I Could Do, which is one of the few honest songs ever written about being a teenage girl, and the whole gym goes quiet because they weren't expecting the funny one to have a floor underneath her.
That's why I gave Mary that part instead of the one she wanted. Mary spends the first half of my book certain she's been robbed. Sandy was hers. It was supposed to be hers since the fourth grade, and instead she gets handed the cynical one, the loud one, the one in the pink jacket — and it feels like an insult right up until the moment she sits down and actually looks at her.
"Maybe Rizzo is not that hard for me to play," Mary says. "I know her. She's me."
The parts we don't want are usually the parts that fit. I think about this with my students constantly. The kid who wanted to be the lead and got the ensemble. The one who wanted the solo and got the harmony. Every time, without fail, the disappointment is real and the assignment is right.
Not because there's some cosmic plan, but because we are all terrible judges of what we're good at, especially at seventeen, especially when we've been rehearsing one version of ourselves since elementary school.
Sandy gets the transformation. But Rizzo is the one who was already telling the truth, and just needed someone to sit still long enough to hear it. Find your shade of pink. It's probably not the one you had in mind.