Rocking the Second Act - Chapter Eight
The Muddled Eggs Manifesto & The Green Room
Recap for those of you with brainfog: Veronica was just folding socks when the girls turned up — Kat, Rose, Tracey, Kirsten — loud, messy, and insistent. By the end of the chapter, they’d hijacked her notebook and set the plot in motion.
Rocking the Second Act is a serialised fiction novel. You can find all chapters here: Chapter index.
Veronica
Some days I felt like a functioning ghost. Other days a volcanic embarrassment — forgetting names, dates, the fact I used to be someone who finished things. I learned to carry on conversations while my brain quietly liquidated, to cry into the kitchen cupboard so the kids wouldn’t hear me from the sofa, answering their questions between silent sobs. I learned to make grocery lists like prayers.
And then, sometimes, writing clawed its way back. Not as cure, not as salvation, but as comfort. A handhold in the fog. I wasn’t doing it to be noticed anymore. I was doing it to stay upright.
Most mornings I’d sit at the kitchen table with coffee gone cold and a head full of characters who looked too much like me: women yelling at kettles, women unravelling in supermarket aisles, women who finally asked — what about me?
One afternoon, stirring soup with my tragically unreliable voice-to-text app open, I tried to capture an idea.
“The quiet power of middle age,” I dictated. “How being unseen can actually be liberating. Maybe a kitchen scene, all four of them talking about the things they stopped doing when they stopped being looked at.”
The screen blinked back: Muddle eggs. Liver train.
I snorted. Jesus Christ. My serious musing on invisibility had turned into a breakfast buffet in hell. But the misfire made me laugh, and more importantly, the idea stuck: when no one’s watching, you can finally stop performing.
I didn’t know it yet, but that thought was about to change everything.
“Who ordered twenty packets of Twisties?” one of the dads bellowed from the backstage kitchen.
“Better than a vat of hummus no one eats,” someone shot back.
I shoved a tray of sausage rolls onto the counter, dusted crumbs from my fingers, and reached for a glass of sauvignon. Afterparties at Make/Shift Youth Theatre always felt like a mash-up of PTA meeting, student disco, and *shudder* improv night.
The hall smelled of varnish and beer, a strange marriage of past and present. The kauri boards beneath my boots had carried decades of gatherings — school socials, twenty-firsts, community meetings, concerts — a whole town’s worth of footsteps rubbed into their grain. My mum, Marion, had been one of them, twirling across this same floor in the late 50s and early 60s. I traced the gouges with my Docs, the little constellations of stiletto punctures, and wondered if any were hers.
Lily brushed past with her friends, cheeks flushed from the performance, arms looped around each other as they made a beeline for the snack table. She caught my eye and grinned — that grin that still knocked the wind out of me — before melting back into the tide of teenagers.
“Good turnout tonight,” came a voice at my elbow.
Bronwyn. Woman in charge of all this. Her moko kauae — the green-black lines tattooed on her chin —carried the weight of generations and inked authority into her smile. Sweat still shone at her temples from shepherding teenagers offstage.
“You were bloody brilliant,” I told her. “The kids adore you. And the show… well, it didn’t make me want to chew my own arm off, which is high praise for youth theatre.”
“That’s the aim,” she smirked. “Wrangling teenagers is ninety percent magic, ten percent threats.”
I laughed, grateful for the out. Then a few parents drifted over, one of the dads shoved a pint into Bronwyn’s hand before launching into questions about her acting work.
“So what’s up next?” one asked. “We gonna see you on telly again soon?”
Bronwyn rolled her eyes. “Caught a part on Southshore Murders. Got to die in a hideous tracksuit.”
We all laughed. Bronwyn shrugged, swirling her glass. “Hannah Overton was in that episode, actually.”
My head snapped around. “Wait — Hannah Overton? You worked with her?” My voice came out too sharp, too high.
Bronwyn gave a little smirk. “One day on set. She’s a machine.”
Heat rushed up my neck. I could feel my hands flapping like I was trying to take off.
Bronwyn shrugged, swirling her glass. “I know Hannah, actually. We were at Toi Whakaari together.”
My head snapped around. “Wait — you went to drama school with Hannah Overton?” My voice came out too sharp, too high.
Bronwyn laughed at my excitement — she was used to it by now. “One year behind me. Absolute weapon — even back then.”
That was all the oxygen I needed. “She’s extraordinary. Boundaries of Blue… that kitchen scene? She looked stripped bare. Raw, complicated, every line in her face telling a story.”
The women nearby hummed agreement, voices overlapping:
“Goosebumps.”
“Finally, a woman who looked fifty.”
“She carried that film like gravity itself.”
My chest thudded with relief. Encouraged, I ploughed on. “Yes! Exactly. That’s what we need more of — real midlife women with messy, nuanced lives. Not another bland archetype written by some thirty-year-old guy who thinks we spend our days guzzling pinot and googling Botox.”
That got a ripple of chuckles. One dad raised his pint in mock salute. But I didn’t stop there. Couldn’t. I could almost hear Rachel’s voice in my head: shut the fuck up, V. She’d be right, but she wasn’t here… and the words were already spilling.
“I’m so sick of it,” I pressed on. “Look at Hollywood — it’s the opposite. Midlife women only get screen time if they’re polished within an inch of their lives. Botoxed, starved, blurred into mannequins. Otherwise, they’re shoved into the sad-divorcee role, the nagging mum, or — if they’re lucky — the cougar. Like those are the only lives we get.”
The laughter thinned. One mum traced her napkin like it was a prayer. A dad cleared his throat. I could feel the shift, the uncomfortable shuffle.
I’d said the quiet part out loud.
But Bronwyn didn’t flinch. She met my gaze over her glass, steady. “You’re not wrong,” she said softly.
Before I could answer, the sound system crackled — and then, blaring out across the hall, Midnight Ashes. Cherry Gasoline.
Pour it on, pour it on, cherry gasoline, the chorus roared, sleazy and triumphant.
Strike a match, watch it burn, you know what I mean.
“Oh my god,” someone groaned. “Core memory, unlocked. High school dance, 1988.”
The tension blew apart. Parents whooped, arms in the air, swaying and mock-strutting. Their kids, loitering at the back, groaned in unison, phones out to record the carnage.
Bronwyn grabbed her beer bottle, tilted it to her mouth like a mic, and started lip-syncing, eyes closed in mock ecstasy.
I gave in, grinning, and, channeling Jasmine Hart, ripped out the filthiest air guitar solo I could muster. The kids heckled, groaning louder, but they were grinning, so we hammed it up harder — two Gen X women throwing themselves into a Midnight Ashes anthem like it was Madison Square Garden.
And then, between the riffs and the laughter, it burst out of me. I leaned toward Bronwyn, shouting over the music but meaning every word.
“What if it was us up there? Women like us, shredding this crap — taking back the songs that objectified us, that promised impossible things? What if we owned it, instead of being the punchline?”
Bronwyn didn’t laugh. She didn’t roll her eyes. She just grinned, slow and sharp, beer-mic still in her hand.
“Now that,” she said, “is an idea.”
The song ended, but the DJ was on a roll. Next came Bon Jovi, then Whitney, then Nirvana. Each track dragged a new pocket of parents onto the floor — dads belting out air drums to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” mums closing their eyes and swaying like it was still the summer of ’92. The kids yelled that it was “cringe'“, but continued to grin, filming every second.
And then, just as the last strains of “Living on a Prayer,” faded, the playlist lurched. A new track blasted through the speakers — a current collab between Yungblud and Aerosmith, all glitchy beats under Steven Tyler’s unmistakeable wail.
The teenagers whooped, finally in their element, surging toward the dance floor. Bronwyn and I caught each other’s eyes across the chaos, twin grimaces curling into grins.
“Christ,” she muttered, leaning close. “How the hell is Steven Tyler still allowed to rock out like that?”
I laughed, the sound bursting out of me. “Yeah, but put a fifty-year-old woman onstage with crow’s feet and stretch marks and see how fast they yank the mic away.”
Her grin sharpened. We clinked glasses in wordless commiseration, the music rattling the walls.
Later, when the hall had emptied and the kids were shooed home, I found Bronwyn in the Green Room, tequila bottle in hand. She clocked me, gestured with the bottle and a raised eyebrow. I nodded and slumped gratefully into the ratty old sofa.
Bronwyn poured a generous splash into a glass and nudged it towards me, her grin softening into something warmer.
“You know,” she said, eyes narrowed. “it feels like you’ve been thinking about the whole Gen X women rocking out for a while.”
I hesitated, the tequila burning a path down my throat. “I… have, actually. I’ve been writing something. Just silly, really. A story on Substack about these women — our age — reforming their high school band. Nobody reads it. Fuck all views. But…” My face heated, words tangling on my tongue. “But I kinda love it. It… it matters.”
Bronwyn didn’t laugh. She didn’t dismiss it. She just topped up her glass, clinked mine, and said, “Then it’s not silly. It’s a start.”
We grinned at each other like teenagers sharing a secret. Somewhere behind us, the bar clinked, laughter rose, the DJ fiddled with the sound desk. But all I could see was the flash of reverence in Bronwyn’s eyes, and the scuffed old floor beneath my feet, stitched with women’s footprints.
***
Bronwyn pinged me the clip later — the one the kids had filmed of us lip-syncing to Cherry Gasoline.
Am I crazy, or are we totally pulling this off? she’d written underneath.
I snorted. Over the top didn’t begin to cover it. Bronnie was flinging her hair like she was auditioning for Whitesnake, and I had my best pout plastered on, hips cocked, eyes locked on the camera like it owed me money. I cringed so hard I nearly dropped my phone.
But then… I watched it again. And again. Somewhere between the fourth and fifth replay, something shifted.
The angles. The swagger. The way we leaned into each other like bandmates. It wasn’t pretty, but it was… right.
Men had been doing this shit for decades — puffed-up poses, sweaty eye contact, pouts you could land a plane on. Nobody laughed at them.
So why was I laughing at myself?
The laughter ebbed, replaced by something sharper, heavier. A flicker of recognition. Maybe Bronwyn was right. Maybe this wasn’t silly at all. Maybe it was the start.
Want to see how midlife reinvention looks from the other side of the stage? Next chapter: Zack.