AN: And end of the Tony Awards! I cut a lot of stuff out, it was reading like a Twitter. Lots of the grown-up people in this chapter, I hope they're interesting enough to hold your attention, but the kids will be coming into their own next time around! Shorter than the last few chapters have been, but this would have been insane if I did the entire ceremony. As it is, I think I captured the highlights well enough.

Disclaimer: None of the characters from any incarnation of Phantom of the Opera belong to me. Nor am I in charge of the Tony Awards. Any musicals, plays, movies, people or places referenced by me are the property of their respective owners. I am making no money off the utilization of anything with a copyright.

We starve, look at one another, short of breath
Walking proudly in our winter coats
Wearing smells from laboratories
Facing a dying nation of moving paper fantasy
Listening for the new told lies
With supreme visions of lonely tunes

-Hair

It was actually shaping up to be one of the more entertaining awards ceremony in years, so the snark was cut down on considerably as the evening bore on. Of course, everyone still bitched and moaned and laughed at the MC's choice of dress, "How many cows did Neil Patrick Harris have to slaughter to make that suit?" It wouldn't be a party if they didn't do that, but on the whole, their comments were fairly tame and there was very little bickering when bets were won or lost, depending on how the awards were handed out. At least until one particular cast of every hippie's favorite musical got up to shove their crotches in the faces of unsuspecting audience members.

"Everybody shut the fuck up!" Madeline exclaimed suddenly, her drunken antics at Tony Parties a thing of legend in years past. This was actually an off-year for her. "Hair is up!"

"They're not going to win," Tim said flatly. "It's going to be West Side Story and you know it. I feel bad about taking your money."

"No way. No fucking way, Hair is totally timely and well done and they get naked, they're winning," Madeline said with a slightly manic gleam in her eye. "Wanna make a bet about it."

"We already have," Tim reminded her, taking a leisurely sip of his gin and tonic (more gin than tonic at this point in the night).

"Oh, I'm not talking about money," Madeline said, shifting toward Tim, acting like some kind of feverish, drunken riverboat gambler from the turn of the century. Both Erik and Charlie turned toward her, hoping that she wouldn't be too upset if they dragged her from the room to prevent her from betting the house in some kind of manic, musical-theatre induced rush. "If Hair wins, we do it next year."

Raising an eyebrow elegantly, Tim said, "We do it? At Memorial? Need I remind you that it's really a show for twenty-somethings and you're on the wrong side of thirty-five?"

"You needn't," Madeline said. Though she occasionally swayed, stumbled and spilled things while intoxicated, she rarely, if ever, slurred her speech. "I don't care if there's a part for me, I don't care if you have to cast the entire thing off the streets – I don't care if you go down to RISD and grab all the hippies off their grassy knoll, I want us to do Hair. And if they win, we will." Extending her right hand she smiled wickedly and added, "Do we have a deal?"

Tim contemplated her outstretched hand for a long moment. "We have a deal," he said finally, reaching across Chester to give her hand a firm shake. "And if you lose...Hello, Dolly!"

Maddy's eyes narrowed, but she did not pull her hand away until the deal was sealed properly. It was a well-documented fact that Madeline absolutely abhorred the musical and knew that it was inevitable that she would be someday cast as the title character. Really, it was just a matter of when at this point, since Tim had been threatening to put that show in the season's line-up since Madeline had turned thirty. Dropping her director and best friend's hand, she decided to draw all of the innocent bystanders into their agreement. "You're all witnesses!" Madeline shout, pointing to everyone surrounding them, who all nodded quickly, eager to get this weird conversation over with as soon as possible. Charles reached down and grabbed Erik's shoulder to pull him back and hiss in his ear, "Should we have let her do that?"

Erik shook his dad's hand off his shoulder and shrugged, "She didn't bet the house, the car or try and sell me again, like she did when Avenue Q won Best Musical. I think we're okay." Erik actually did not hate Hello, Dolly! It was one of those musicals that he watched when he was home sick from school as a child and everyone looked back fondly on musicals they watched when they had a day out of school and nothing else to waste their time with. It didn't affect him adversely either way. If he was in Hair he would probably just be relegated to swaying with everyone in the background and if they went the Dolly route, then he would play Ambrose and not spend a lot of time on stage anyway.

It was a tense silence that greeted the announcement of Best Revival of a Musical. Tim would probably be cool as a cucumber either way, Madeline was likely to pull an Alice Ripley and flip her shit if she lost...and if she won. Then she was liable to jump around recklessly and topple chairs and human beings. Erik would rather his mother try to sell him to Chester and Tim again as a houseboy than fall on him and splash red wine in his face. When Hair was announced as the winner, the room was still deadly silent. Then, after the briefest half-second of shock, Madeline shrieked happily and jumped up and down in victory (indeed, sloshing red wine all over Ahmed's head, but he wisely said nothing). Tim probably summed everything up best with a single word, "Shit."

The night dragged on, the booze flowed, the sound glitches multiplied and Alice Ripley was crazy. In the first place, everyone in the room was absolutely horrified when she won 'Best Featured Actress in a Musical.' Madeline stood up, slightly unsteady on her feet at that point, to shriek at the television, "You SUCK! You SUCK! That is not acting! Any PMSing pre-menopausal BITCH can get up there and have a nervous breakdown on stage. I have a nervous breakdown once a WEEK, you don't see me winning any awards. YOU SUCK!" Charlie quietly let her back to her chair and handed her another glass of wine which Maddy sucked down greedily as she watched Ms Ripley get on stage and, as Ann put it, "Flip her shit."

It was rather like watching a train wreck in slow motion, or so Erik later decided. You could see, the moment that she arrived on that stage, something was...off. Unlike Angela Lansbury who was sweet and humble, Roger Robinson who was adorably honored and knew he absolutely deserved it, Alice Ripley, managed to be both entitled, pretentious and come off as completely batshit insane. Meg tried to be diplomatic, really, "Well, what would you do if you won a Tony? You'd probably ramble like a crazy person too and she was trying to make a point."

"It's not about making a point," Erik said, utterly exasperated. "If you want to make some kind of crazy point, you refuse to show up for the ceremony - "

"Dolly was waiting in the lobby," Armand reminded him. "She's not the type to make a political statement at the Tonys."

"Yeah, but she wasn't going to win anyway and she knew it," Erik replied with a dismissive wave of his hand. "But if you want to prove something – which you shouldn't because it's just the height of selfishness to try and make an evening meant to honor the best of Broadway all about you – you refuse to show up and have someone give the politically charged speech in your stead."

Chester snorted and looked down at the children assembled at his feet speculatively, "And if any of you little shits become famous by some miracle and get nominated for one of these things, and then sleep with the judges and win you damn well better accept it. I swear to God, I will hunt you down if you don't and shove the damn award down your throat. I hate fuckers who think they're too good for this shit."

"You must admit that it can be fairly...arbitrary. After all, this is all a matter of opinion and politics," Charlie said reasonably. That was why everyone kept him around, really, because he was always willing to talk sense if anyone was willing to listen. Most did not, but he continued speaking sensibly and hoped they would come around.

Usually, he was disappointed. "Well, yeah, and people like Geoffrey Rush know that, but you don't see him quoting JFK and generally acting like an idiot."

"No, he's just trying to convince us to see an Ionesco," Ann said. "You couldn't pay me to sit through that crap."

"That's because you have no taste," Tim said mildly. He was good at that sort of thing, utterly shooting someone down while making it sound as though the two of them only suffered from a slight difference of opinion. It was what made him such an excellent director, he had people skills coming out of his ears.

The rest of the evening was downright boring after Madeline and Tim's outrageous betting and Maddy's continued lunacy over whether or not Alice Ripley should have her Tony taken away for inappropriate use of quotations in her acceptance speech. Soon the adults had settled into a drunken lull and the children, as they so often did at this stage in the night, began speaking to each other.

"I can't believe you guys had the balls to smoke before you came," Armand said, shaking his head. Armand was a very good boy and, like most good boys, lived in perpetual fear of the anger of his mother and father. He'd never had a drink, never smoked a joint, never even smoked a cigarette (though Erik loudly maintained that pot was better for you than tobacco, citing various scientific studies that he never managed to produce a hard copy of).

"I can't believe you didn't tell me," Charlotte sniffed, clearly offended, as she always was when she was left out of anything. She might be out of the country, but if her theatre friends were hanging out together and didn't tell her (even if they knew she wasn't available to come anyway). She always took it as being some kind of snub or insult and then refused to speak to them – and then just got more pissed off when she was left out of another event because everyone thought she was angry with them and wouldn't want to hang out if they asked.

"It's not like I sent these two written invitations," Freddy said, having lost interest with the awards ceremony entirely and settled on the floor, curled up with his head on his arms, eyes closed as though he planned on dropping off to sleep at any moment. "They just showed up at my work and told me we were driving together. It was incidental. Accidental. I forgot I had some in the glove compartment."

"Oh yeah," Meg interjected, rolling her eyes. "That's legal."

Shrugging as well as he could whilst sprawled on the floor, Freddy did not even open his eyes to look at her before replying, "I live dangerously."

In the interest of keeping the peace, Ahmed said, "Listen, Charlotte, next time we get together, we'll call you, okay? Um...well, Erik and I were going to Seneca Falls. You want to come?"

"Where the hell is Seneca Falls?" she asked, clearly not that enthused about the idea, but determined not to be left out. Probably had something to do with spending her childhood chubby and alone, but Charlotte would be damned if anyone accused her of bully-related PTSD.

"It's the town that Bedford Fallsfrom It's A Wonderful Life is based on," Erik explained. "Also the birthplace of the women's lib movement. The 19th century women's lib movement, that's why we're going. They have statues." He said the word with something close to reverence in his tone. It was only logical. Erik was a self-proclaimed atheist, he had to have something to put his faith in. Some people chose mankind to be their spiritual investment. Erik chose statues. He left it to Ahmed and Freddy to explain the relative merits of donning statues of women in men's clothing and sunglasses since his attention was now entirely consumed by a buzzing in his pocket.

Removing his phone, Erik saw that he had a text message. It read:

r u watching? y r all the ladies showing their boobs? all the mens are gay!!! n aliceripleys so weird!

The text messaging skills of Miss Christine Daee left much to be desired, but Erik didn't mind. He had sent her a text about twenty minutes earlier regarding the fact that the breasts of every woman in attendance were on frightening display that evening. It was a sign that you were in a room filled entirely with theatre people when a pair of healthy mammaries appearing on screen did nothing more than make all of the males assembled feel extremely uncomfortable. As it turned out, he rather liked Christine. She was entertaining in the way that one might be intrigued by a mentally impaired bunny rabbit or some other soft, fluffy, inoffensive creature. It was easy to talk to her – well, write to her, since they had never actually spoken before.

I know. I was sure there would be some sort of wardrobe malfunction.

Erik contemplated the softly glowing screen of his phone. Maybe it was the low-dose radiation given off by the telephone, maybe it was the weed, maybe he was just sick and tired of always doing the same things with the same people, but in that moment, Erik decided that he was going to do something bold, daring and entirely uncharacteristic for him.

What are you doing next weekend?

The reply was a few minutes coming, but Christine did get back to him:

idk, do u want 2 do something?

A few fellow students and myself might roadtrip to Seneca Falls.

in new york?

That would be the place, yes. Do you want to come? I promise we're not kidnappers.

(This was a blatant lie, but Erik could care less.)

k, i'll ask my dad. sounds fun.

And he felt a little flutter of something like excitement at the prospect rise, entirely uninvited in his chest. Erik chalked it up to the ill-effects of smoking and vowed to cut back in the future.