Fortunately the evening milking went well – after several days of milking with Ed they were getting their moves together worked out, so that helped. Still, Brett was tired when they wrapped up. He had every right to be; it had been a long, hard day.

One of the advantages of his folks having been dairy farmers all their lives was that no one was too upset at him coming in and sitting around the table smelling of milking parlor. After all, it was a smell around the farm that everyone was used to, even though the Wickwire farm didn’t have dairy cattle anymore.

When he stopped to think about it, Brett was truly amazed that his parents had been as supportive of his mad pursuit of an acting career as they had been. He knew both of them had grown up on dairy farms – although lots smaller than Ed’s or the Graveline’s – and they had just stayed with it. When they’d finally sold off the herd they’d been a little lost at not having the regular morning and evening chores to do, but they soon got over it and began to realize that there were other things in life besides dairy cows. So, when their youngest son showed an interest in something well beyond milking, it was all right with them.

Or at least Brett suspected it had been all right up to about now. Over the last year or so there had been vague hints about getting married, settling down, and grandchildren, and of late the hints had become a little more pointed. As far as that went, Brett didn’t disagree in principle but the gap between principle and practice was no less than it had ever been.

Dinner was gossipy, mostly about people his parents knew, but Brett didn’t have much to add to the conversation other than to comment that he’d heard from Ed that Tony’s wife was still in the hospital but getting better. He wasn’t clear on the reason, other than the fact that she was sick with something or other, so it didn’t even make for very good gossip.

Toward the end of the dinner his mother said, “Don’t forget, you need to call Diane Graveline back.”

“I know,” he replied with resignation. “I just hope it isn’t really something to do with milking for them.”

“I don’t think it is, but I don’t know for sure. There’s only one way to find out.”

With the last of the chocolate cake dessert finished, Brett realized that the only way he was going to discover the connection between Diane and theater was to break down and call. The television was going in the living room and he didn’t need the background noise, so he went to the wall phone in the kitchen and dialed the number his mother had left on the white board.

Diane answered the phone. “Hi, it’s Brett,” he said. “Mom said you called for me. Something to do with a theater.”

“Good,” she replied. “I’m glad you were able to call right back. Look, it’s a long story, but do you know anything about dinner theaters?”

“I’ve played a few,” he replied. “They used to be real popular, but then they almost died out. The last few years they’ve been on something of a comeback. They run from serious to downright goofy, and there are more of the latter than there are of the former.”

“Then you know more about it than I do. Like I said, this is kind of a long story, but last weekend we went over to visit my old college roommate and her husband, Samantha and Marty Ammerman. They own a small winery a couple of hours from here, and they want to increase traffic through their tasting room. We kicked around several ideas, nothing serious, you know, and then the idea came up of doing a dinner theater.”

“Might be a possibility for them,” he replied. “I wouldn’t want to say if it would fly or not, because there are an awful lot of factors involved.”

“That’s about what we figured, but none of us know enough about theaters to get beyond that. Then, on the way back, I happened to think that you might be able to answer a few questions for them, maybe let them pick your brain. I don’t know if there’d be anything in it for you except maybe a couple bottles of pretty good wine.”

“Let me ask just one simple question. Do they have a place big enough to hold something like that?”

“They do. Their winery plant and tasting room is in a big old rambling building that used to be a feed mill. Part of it was converted to a banquet room before they bought the place, and they rent it out for that occasionally. That was part of what got us to thinking about a dinner theater.”

“Well, then there is a possibility it might work,” Brett conceded. “There’s still an awful lot of other things that would have to be worked out. I’d have to talk to them directly to go very far beyond that.”

“I would think so. Would you like me to give you their phone number?”

“It would be all right, but maybe you’d better call them and tell them you’ve talked to me.”

“I could have them call you.”

“Better not. It’s going to be a few days before I’ll have much free time, and three-thirty in the morning comes pretty early.” While it was the truth, Brett also wanted to send the message that he wasn’t going to be available to do substitute milking for them for a while. Maybe never, if he could manage it – an hour or two of mariachi music was enough to hold him for a long time.

“All right, I’ll call them and tell them I’ve found someone who knows something about theater to fill them in. If they’re interested, I’ll get you the number.”

“Sounds fair to me,” he replied. “I may not be able to help them out in the long run, but maybe I can set them on the right track.”

There wasn’t a great deal more to say, so Brett soon was off the phone; his mother was still putting dinner dishes in the dishwasher. “So what was it all about?” she asked.

“It turns out they have some friends kicking around the idea of starting a dinner theater, but they don’t know anything about it. Dinner theaters are all right, in fact, they can be fun, but there’s a lot to making a success of one. If it’s a once-in-a-while thing, a special event, they can go over pretty well, but an ongoing thing is something different.”

“It doesn’t sound like anything serious, then?”

“Probably not. If these people don’t know anything about theater, they’re probably better off if they give up on the idea. But I can talk to them; it’s no skin off my butt.”

Brett hadn’t been kidding when he said that three-thirty came awfully early in the morning; that meant he had to be getting to bed at a time where some of the shows he’d played in hadn’t started yet. He went into the living room to sit with his father and watch Vanna White turn letters on Wheel of Fortune for a few minutes, then went up to his room to check his e-mail, the first time he’d been able to all day.

There wasn’t much in his e-mail; his service provider did a pretty good job of filtering out spam, and he ruthlessly added anything else that looked like spam to his filter list, which meant that he was pretty much free of ads for fake Viagra and purported weight-loss supplements.

About the only thing left of even mild interest was a casting call from the Maple Valley Theater; they were going to do a summer production of Arsenic and Old Lace. He was familiar with the place as he’d been in the cast of a few of their plays; they usually did one production a month, four or five actual performances over two weekends, mostly with amateurs from the community but bringing in professionals like himself for the lead roles. The pay wasn’t good, but it was what he loved doing, and he could drive over there and sleep in his van to save a few bucks.

But right now he wasn’t interested. His weekends were already spoken for over the summer; he’d managed to pick up a gig at the Heatherwood Repertory Company. That was a much better deal; three productions, about twelve performances each in an old-time opera house over the course of the summer – and frankly, more interesting plays; parts that were challenging, that would stretch him as an actor. Landing that spot had been a serious coup, and the pay was even pretty good. Not real good, but better than anything else anywhere close.

Arsenic and Old Lace was all right as far as it went; it was an old chestnut and still pretty funny, but it seemed like it was on the hit list for every amateur company sooner or later, especially in the summer. Brett had done it twice, and while he would have no problem picking up the role again, he really wasn’t interested in it unless he didn’t have anything better to do – and he did.

But it never hurt to be courteous – there was no telling what could happen up the road – so he sent a quick reply: “Sounds interesting, but I have a previous engagement. Sorry. Keep me in mind for the future.”

There were a few theater-oriented web sites and message boards he would have liked to spend some time cruising, just to see what was happening out there. But Ed’s cows would need milking before dawn tomorrow, like it or not, so the smart thing to do was to say the hell with it and go to bed, which he did.

Even with what for him was a good night’s sleep, the alarm went off all too early. It was another long day, longer than he liked, but a little better than the day before since Peterboro wasn’t nearly as far away as Salem. The good news was that he would be going back to Peterboro the next day, and teaching history, at that. The mixed news was that he was going to be milking morning and evening at Ed’s for at least the next couple days – Tony’s wife was still having problems. That meant at least one more long day, even though the money, such as it was, would be welcome.

Since Brett didn’t have to deal with Mrs. Napolski’s fifth grade demons from the underworld, he wasn’t quite as tired as he had been the evening before. The cows made up for it, though; a couple were balky and one tried to kick him, though he didn’t let her get away with it. Cows did that when they had to deal with a strange milker, he knew, and he hadn’t had enough time working at Ed’s for them to get really used to him. It was one of the hazards of the job, after all.

That evening Diane Graveline called back, right in the middle of dinner with his family, of course. “I talked to both Samantha and Marty,” she reported. “They were interested in the fact that you think it’s something they could possibly do, and they would like to talk to you.”

“It’s a possibility for them,” Brett conceded, not wanting to sound too optimistic. “I didn’t say it would be easy, especially if they don’t know what they’re getting into.”

“Believe me, they’re used to that. If they decide to do this, it won’t be the first time they’ve leaped before they looked, but they’ve seemed to pull through most things they’ve tried so far.”

Brett couldn’t help but wonder what she meant by that but, somehow, he didn’t think he wanted to ask. “OK, it can’t hurt to talk to them,” he replied.

“Make sure you talk to both of them,” Diane warned. “Marty tends to be the more practical one. Samantha, well, she’s on the pompous side and tends to be something of a dreamer. Maybe that’s not the right word. You’ll see.”

Somehow that didn’t sound good to Brett, though he wasn’t sure why – and wasn’t sure it mattered. Still, he was curious. “What do you mean by that?”

“It’s not easy to describe,” Diane sighed. “Samantha well, she’s a real good friend, and we were close in college, but she gets these ideas and they don’t always make a lot of sense. Don’t get me wrong, I love her almost like she was my sister, but she can be a real idiot at times, too. Look, all they want is a little information and you can probably help them.”

“Well, all right,” Brett sighed. “Would it be all right if I called them right now?”

“Oh, I’m sure it would. They’re not exactly early-to-bed, early-to-rise types. Look, Brett, thanks for helping out on this. I’m not sure if this is a good idea for them or not, but maybe you can inject a little reality into it.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Diane gave him the phone number, and they exchanged a couple more sentences, none of which included substitute milker, to his relief.

The call didn’t last long enough for his dinner to get cold, and Brett figured he’d better finish eating before he called; somehow it sounded to him like this could take a while. He ate his slice of chocolate cake – which finished off the cake – helped his mother pick up the dishes, then dialed the number he had been given.

The phone rang a couple of times before a woman answered, “Curlew Creek Winery.”

“Hi, I’m Brett Wickwire,” he replied. “Diane Graveline asked me to call. She said you had some questions about theater.”

“Oh, good,” the woman answered. “We were hoping you would call. I’ll get Marty on the line.” Brett heard her continue as if she’d put the phone on her shoulder, but not blocking it very well, “Marty, the young man Diane told us about is on the line.” Her voice picked back up again; he heard her say, “We’re really hoping you could help us out on this. The more I think about it, the more I think it sounds like an absolutely wonderful addition to our establishment. I think it would lend a lot of cachet to it.”

“Well, it depends,” he replied, already a little dubious. There was something in the way she talked that rubbed him the wrong way, but at this point maybe it didn’t matter. “There are a lot of different factors involved in making any theater anywhere a success.”

“Doubtless you are correct. After thinking about it, I’m impressed with the idea. I’m hoping you’ll be able to tell us if it will work.”

Brett didn’t reply, since there was the sound of someone else picking up the phone. “Hi, I’m Marty,” he said. “I don’t know how much Diane has told you about what we’ve been talking about.”

“Only that you own a winery and are thinking about adding a dinner theater,” Brett explained.

“That’s essentially the idea,” Marty confirmed. “We’re hoping you can help us out.”

“Maybe I can,” Brett replied. “Look, I’ve got to be honest with you. I’ve never run a dinner theater, or for that matter, any kind of a theater. I’ve managed a couple productions and directed a few more back when I was in college. But as an actor, I’ve worked around a lot of different places, and I’ve tried to pay attention to what worked and what didn’t, since I figured sooner or later I was going to end up involved in the management end of things at least part of the time. I think I can tell you some of what you need to know, but don’t take my opinion as the final word.”

“I appreciate that. Diane told us you were a pretty good actor who got around a lot and knows something about theater. That means you have to know more about it than we do. Here’s the deal: we bought this place a few years ago, and it was on the rocks. We’ve managed to bring it back from the brink, but we’d like to see more traffic through the place. The problem is that we’re located on a county road quite a bit off the highway, so billboards and other advertising don’t bring the traffic we’d like to see through the tasting room. Now, as I see it in a business like this, traffic through the tasting room is the key to making the place a real success.”

“I get it,” Brett said. “You’re hoping to use a dinner theater as a way to draw more traffic to the cash register, and you see it as wine sales or theater ticket sales could do it, doesn’t matter which to you, even though you concentrate on the wine.”

“Yes,” Samantha replied. “You have to understand that most customers of a small winery have a certain, shall we say taste that runs toward elegance. I would have to say that most of our customers have a certain refined taste that we have to cater to. A dinner theater, with a good meal and an enjoyable show our customers would appreciate might add favorably to the atmosphere.”

“I think Samantha has a point on that,” Marty added. “I can’t believe that having extra customers around won’t add to our sales.”

“It’s not simple, and it’s not easy,” Brett told them. “Diane said you had the space for a theater, so with that much in place it’s possible to put on a dinner theater. But there are a lot of decisions that have to be made. Would you want it to be a one-shot deal, maybe an annual event, with several showings of one production? If so, no big deal. You might lose a few bucks on the show but get it back through wine sales, depending on how you advertised it. Or is this something you’d want to run, oh, monthly, or even weekly? If so, that’s entirely different.”

“That’s sort of the point,” Marty replied. “We don’t know enough about it to even start making decisions.”

“Then let me ask you this. Are your customers pretty much local? Or do you get a lot of tourist trade?”

“Not as much tourist trade as we would like,” Marty told him. “It’s around, but not right here. We’re within a few miles of places that get a lot of summer tourist traffic, mostly weekends, sometimes people in the area for a week or two. We’d like to draw some more of that traffic to us.”

Brett thought about it for a moment, then replied, “I can tell you this much. You can probably bring in some people you haven’t seen before by putting on a dinner theater. However, my off-the-cuff guess is that in the beginning most of your customers would be your regulars. You have to get past them, out to new people, and the only way you can do that is through advertising, and lots of it. A one-off show, a long weekend with only limited advertising, is only going to draw your regulars, but done right it could still be a fun event that people would look forward to seeing another year.”

“You mean it would be at least partly something to enthuse our loyal customers, and thank them for their patronage?” Samantha asked.

“That’s a good way to put it,” he replied. “It wouldn’t be difficult to put together, and while it might cost you money, my guess is that what you’d lose on one hand you’d get back in the other. You could probably put together a pretty good show just using local talent, maybe bringing in a couple of pros, so long as you have someone who could pull the whole thing together. But if you were to talk about a long-running production, shows every weekend all through the tourist season, well, all I can tell you is that it’s a very different thing, much more complicated. For example, if you depend on tourist trade, you can get away with running the same production all summer long, or maybe two or three different shows just to keep things moving. However, if you’re going to depend on your local customers, you just about have to keep the show changing.”

“It’s why movie theaters have different shows each week,” Marty said. “Even if they had the best show on earth, they’d run through their customers pretty quickly.”

“Exactly,” Brett told him. “Now, I can’t tell you right off the cuff what the best strategy would be, mostly because there are a lot of other factors involved. I can tell you this: you could make a one-shot weekend deal work, even if you had to do it in a tent. Going beyond that, though, well, there are no simple answers and some guesswork comes into play.”

“Say we wanted to do that one-shot thing you were talking about,” Marty said. “Do you think you could help us put it together?”

“Maybe, depending on my schedule,” Brett told him. “My weekends are already booked through the summer, but I could probably help you with the planning stages, maybe putting you together with someone who could put it on. It’s not impossible that there might be some production going on a couple hundred miles away or less that you could bring in as a one-weekend road show, and that would save you a lot of the organizational hassles.”

“Well, that sounds promising,” Marty told him. “If we were to pick up your expenses, do you think you could come over here sometime so we could sit down and talk about it some more?”

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