Meredith came out of Shirley’s room dressed a lot like she had been the day before, if not quite so sloppy. She had on clean, if tight jeans, a different T-shirt, and the same camisole as the day before over it; she was wearing the “Charlie’s Rig Service” hoodie again. Brett wasn’t quite sure what how she dressed meant, but reasoned that she probably didn’t have her normal selection of clothes in her small overnight bag anyway. “I washed my hair twice,” she announced. “I’m afraid it still smells like shit.”

“Actually, from what I can tell from here it smells so much of some fruity shampoo that you could gag a bumblebee.”

“God, Brett, you are so full of shit it’s unbelievable. I may enjoy tweaking people from time to time, but you do it, too. Admit it.”

“Well, I like giving you back some of the same shit you hand out. Sauce for the goose, and like that.”

“Will this go on all summer?”

“I’d rather have you tweaking me than the Ammermans or their wine customers. You do it to me enough, anyway. It’s just that I’ll tweak back if I feel like it.”

“It’s going to be like that, huh? I thought you had some reason to drag me over to that damn barn. God, I may never drink milk again. The smell of that place, wow, that was intense.”

“You know,” he replied thoughtfully, “it strikes me that milk and the theater have quite a bit in common.”

“I’m waiting.”

“The customers, the audience, they see only the end product, and not all the shit that happens to get it to them.”

She smiled and nodded. “You know, you might be right.” She changed the subject. “Are we coming back here tonight, or are you going to take me home?”

“Don’t know. It depends on how late things run, and I suspect they could go late. With the early start we might not want to drive all night to get you home.”

“I’ll take my overnight bag. Give me a minute, and we’ll get on the road.”

A minute or two later she came back out of Shirley’s room carrying her overnight bag. “Aren’t you taking anything?”

“I keep a couple changes of clothes in the van. I never know when I might need them. I mean, hell, some fifth grade twerp could spill chocolate milk all over me in some damn lunchroom when I’m subbing.”

A couple minutes later they were on the road. “I figure we’ll stop for breakfast in a little while,” he told her. “There’s a pretty good place half an hour or so out.”

“Good. I think my stomach ought to be settled enough to eat something by then. Or is this going to be another one of your torture chambers?”

“Well, I think it’s pretty good but it’s not one of the trendy little boutique places you like. It’s just a good workingman’s diner. You’ll probably find something to gripe about, though. Anyway, I saw you were going through The Fourposter pretty seriously.”

“I didn’t get all the way through it. I kept stopping to work out how some of the scenes would have to play. I think it will take some serious acting in some of them. It gets emotional in spots, and we can’t just stand there and mouth the lines. Some of it seems damn silly to me. I don’t mean stupid silly, it’s just things that I can’t quite connect with. Some of the period stuff might be a little hard for a modern audience to understand. Honestly Brett, I’m having my doubts if we should do it.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve been through it, but you might be right. Don’t lose it, ’cause I’ll need to go through it again before we make a decision on it.”

“It’s going to take more rehearsing than we’d need for Same Time Next Year, and we’ll have to work out the staging. In fact, that’s another part that concerns me. For having the same set all the way through, there are major changes to it between each scene and act. That could prove to be a major pain in the ass.”

“Actually, the biggest problem I can see is coming up with an old-style four-poster canopy bed like that. Those aren’t common these days.”

“Oh, they’re out there. It’s just a case of finding them. Maybe we could work out a loan from some antique place in return for a plug.”

“It’s possible,” he agreed. “I have no idea of what might be available over in that neck of the woods, but I’d bet two bits that Samantha would be able to turn up something pretty quickly. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but she strikes me as the kind of person who would spend a lot of her spare time hanging around antique stores.”

“You like them, huh?”

“Pretty much. Samantha strikes me as being a little pompous and gushy, but don’t let that fool you. She’s a hell of a lot sharper than she acts, and Marty is no slouch, either.”

“Do you think they’ll want to exercise a lot of control?”

“Don’t know,” he shrugged. “That’s something that will have to be defined before we finalize the deal. Really, it’s their nickel and that means that if it comes to nose-to-nose, we’ll have to do things their way. On the other hand, they don’t know much about the nuts and bolts of theater, which is why they brought me in for a professional opinion in the first place. That means they’re going to be depending on my, well, on our experience, so I expect we’ll have a lot of latitude to work with so long as things go well. That means we have to be sure they go well.”

“I can see now why you’re trying to move carefully on this.”

“I hope you do. There are a lot of reasons why I want to make this a success.”

“I hate to say this, but it’s going to take more people than just you and me.”

“I’m aware of that, and I think we have to be pretty careful about who else we bring into this deal. But let’s not milk that cow before we get the cups on the teats.”

“God, that’s the most horrible allusion,” she shook her head. “I’ll be lucky if I don’t have nightmares about this morning.”

“Well, you’ve been exposed to it. Now, if acting doesn’t work out for you in the long run, I’ll bet you could train up to be a milker.”

“I think I’ll stick with burger shacks, thank you.”

“Ever been in a slaughterhouse?”

“No, and don’t get any big ideas about taking me to one. I may be off milk for the rest of my life, but I’ll be damned if I want to give up hamburgers.”

Brett drove on as they continued to throw tweaks and zingers at each other. He reflected that he had her on the defensive for once, and it was nice for a change; it hadn’t happened very often in the past. It couldn’t last, though. He was still concerned about what would happen over the course of the summer; he knew he could take much of the stuff she dished out, but it wasn’t fair to the Ammermans or their wine customers to have to deal with it. Realistically, he didn’t see any way this summer could be a success without her help and wholehearted support, but would it be worth the price?

After a while they pulled into Grumpy’s Diner, where he’d had breakfast the previous Friday. The same sassy waitress was on duty, and as flirty as ever. That was kind of fun, but he realized it could get old after a while. Was she that way with her husband? And what did her husband think about it? Not that it mattered to him, but he couldn’t help wondering about it.

At least breakfast was quick and good, and not bad on the price; they were soon back on the road. “God, that’s almost disgusting,” Meredith said.

“I thought it was a pretty good breakfast.”

“Not the breakfast. It was all right, but more how someone can be as cheerful as that waitress at this hour of the morning.”

“It’s not that early,” he pointed out. “We’ve been up for hours.”

“Yes, but this isn’t the time when a normal human being ought to be out of bed. Hell, if I didn’t have something to do I’d be asleep for hours yet.”

“I’ll admit she is a little much for this time of the morning. When most people go into a place like that for breakfast they haven’t been up for long and aren’t all the way awake yet. They’re just looking for enough coffee and calories to help them make sense of the world.”

“That’s sort of what I mean. Hell, I’ve been up for hours and I still haven’t gotten to that point. That was after what really was a pretty good night’s sleep, even though it started early. I’ll admit, I lay awake for a while with some ideas for other plays we could do going through my head.”

“Did you come up with any good ideas?”

“A few. Look, do they all have to be three-act plays? Or at least long ones? Is there any reason we couldn’t do shorter ones, even if there were two of them on the same evening?”

“Yeah, it could be done that way.” He considered it for a moment, holding up a finger to indicate he wanted to think. “Nothing that an audience would recognize comes to mind right off the top of my head but I haven’t been thinking that way.”

“There are a few,” she replied. “Like I know Tennessee Williams did a whole bunch of one-act plays. I don’t know much about them, though.”

“I know he did. I’ve read a couple of them, and to tell you the truth, there’s a good reason why nobody knows much about them. I’m not sure that these would be the right kind of audiences for Tennessee Williams anyway. I know I was thinking about The Glass Menagerie as a possibility since it’s done with a cast of four, but that strikes me as a little too heavy.”

“You’re probably right,” she conceded. “I know we can’t do it, but as long as we’re talking about Tennessee Williams, wouldn’t it be fun if we could do A Streetcar Named Desire some time?”

He looked over at her, and she smiled back. In unison, they yelled Stanley Kowalski’s signature line, “Stellaaaaaaaa!” then broke out laughing together.

It took them a moment to pull themselves back together. “As much as I hate to say it,” he grinned, “I think we’d better give Tennessee Williams a pass. He just wasn’t one for writing light comedies, which is what we really need to be looking at. But I take your point on the one-act plays. While it would be nice to have something that people can identify with, at least once we get this established, I think we could do something that’s pretty much unknown.”

“Right, something experimental, and by that I don’t mean something that’s off-off-off-off Broadway, so Dadaist that it’s totally incomprehensible to everyone, including the players,” she agreed. “I mean, just stuff that’s unknown. You know what would be fun?”

“What?”

“There are plays on the Internet written by total unknowns that have never been produced anywhere. I’ve spent some time going through them, and some of them are pretty good. Some of those writers are just plain desperate to see something of theirs produced. Hell, I’ll bet there are some who would pay us to produce them, just so they could see them on stage.”

“I’ve seen some and glanced at a few, but I’ve never actually gone through them carefully,” he replied, the idea taking root in his mind. It offered possibilities. “I know it’s hard as hell for someone to break into the business and get a play produced. I did a couple of plays like that when I was in college, written by some student, and really, they weren’t that bad. Not exactly Neil Simon, if you get my drift, but not all that far behind, either.”

“Let’s spend some time looking and kicking the idea around,” she suggested. “We might not want to do more than one or two, but I’ll bet it could be a trip, especially for the guy who wrote it.”

“If we pick something good, it might help someone break into doing it for real,” he agreed. “But I don’t know if we have time to do the research right now. I mean, we’d have to go through it, and then maybe you and I block it out in a reading, just to get a feel for it. All that stuff would take time.”

“True,” she agreed. “But it doesn’t mean we couldn’t do it. It just means we couldn’t do it right away. Look, we’re talking about having to do something like six to eight plays over the summer right? Why do we have to decide the whole bill right now?”

“You might have a point,” he agreed. “We might be totally off base on what would work for the audiences we expect. Hell, we’re talking light comedy, and we might discover that what the audiences want is The Glass Menagerie. I doubt it like hell, but the possibility exists. If we don’t schedule the whole damn summer right at the beginning we have the option of changing the cows we’re milking.”

“There you go with the cow allusions again,” she snorted. “Cut that cow shit out. But yeah, you’re right. We need to look into it. How about if we did a single-performer play? That would be something different.”

“For something like this, I’m not sure I like the idea,” he replied after a moment. “They strike me as a bit forced. Granted, we were talking about Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain Tonight yesterday, but that isn’t exactly a play, it’s more a re-creation of the speaking tours Twain did anyway.”

“We could try it as a single panel among three one-act plays,” she persevered. “It might not even have to be a long one, if the one-act multiple-actor plays run a little long.”

“I’m not going to give it a flat no,” he said. “And we might not want an unknown for that sort of thing. We could look into it.”

“Look, damn it, there’s a play I read a while ago that I can just see myself doing. I’m just trying to ease my way into selling it to you, and it was so made for me it wasn’t funny! It’s called Chocolate, Roses and Sex.”

“With that title, it sounds like it might be a little on the risqué side.”

“It’s not, not really, just a woman sitting and standing on stage and talking about how she’s looking for romance and love instead of just hooking up, and she hasn’t had much luck at it. It doesn’t even have much sex in it and then it’s mostly implied. I don’t know why I haven’t tried to block it out, since it seems to fit so well it’s not funny.”

“A lesbian thing?” he frowned. That could get real touchy, real quick.

“No, at least, not much. It could be played that she’s a little bi-curious but there’s nothing there that actually comes out and says it.”

“You know, it’s at times like this that I wish I smoked.”

“Why’s that?”

“I had a drama instructor back in college that would use lighting a cigarette as an opportunity to mull a statement like that over. The way you put it, it sounds like it might be a possibility. That title could be a draw even if it doesn’t actually get near the topic. Maybe I ought to take a look at it. Do you have a copy?”

“No, but it’s on the Internet, with a note from the author that it’s royalty-free.”

“OK, I’ll take a look at it the first chance I get. I’m not saying it’s a done deal, since we’ll have to find another one-act play or two that will match up with it.”

“There has to be something out there.” She sat staring out the window at the passing countryside for a few moments. “Well, I suppose if we wanted to do something intellectual with some name recognition, there’s a play by Chekhov called The Marriage Proposal. I’ve never seen it done, but it’s only three characters, two guys and a girl, and while it’s both a period piece and a translation, it has its moments.”

“I seem to remember reading it, but it was a hell of a long time ago and I don’t remember any of the details. There might be a chance I’d have it at home. I’m not sure.”

“You seem to have a lot of scripts at home.”

“I’ve collected them when I can. I’ve got about forty years’ worth of the “Best Plays” series I found in a used bookstore one time, ten cents apiece. Some library decided they didn’t have the shelf space for them anymore. Those aren’t full scripts, just selections and summaries, but it’s pretty interesting. I’ve picked up some other scripts and books here and there ever since I got interested in drama.”

“I know how that works, I’ve done it, too. There are a ton of plays I’d like to see, and more than a few of them that I’d like to do. Most of them won’t work for what we’re talking about.”

“You know,” he shook his head, “it’s almost stupid of us to be trying to make these kinds of decisions here. We ought to be home, where I have all that stuff available, and with the Internet to help out.”

“You’re probably right, but we’re not trying to make any real decisions right now, anyway. We’re looking for a general philosophy, something that will narrow our search. I mean, when you stop and think about it, does name recognition really mean all that much? We talked about The Odd Couple, fine. Then we talked about doing the female version because too many people would identify with it being on TV. I still think it’s a good idea, but how many of the people who’ll be coming to these know anything about the theater? If you ask most people about stage plays, they’ll either remember something from high school or come up with something like Cats or Phantom of the Opera. That’s fine, plenty of people have heard about them, but we’re not likely to be doing very much that most people would have heard of anyway.”

“Yeaaah,” he replied slowly. “You might have a point about that. There aren’t many people who are going to know plays like you and I do. And you’re right, there’s a danger in doing something that the audience is familiar with from elsewhere. But I think we need to do at least some shows that involve some name recognition, especially at the first.”

“That almost gets us back to Same Time Next Year. Honestly, I don’t see where the adultery issue you were talking about is going to be a big deal with a bunch of wine drinkers. Now yeah, if we were doing it at some Christian camp, you might have a point, but people who are into drinking expensive wine are going to be a little worldlier. I don’t think we’d want to do both The Fourposter and Same Time Next Year, at least not in the same season.”

“I think you’re right on that. It sort of argues for doing Same Time Next Year like we originally talked about. Maybe that and the female version of The Odd Couple and maybe one other play with more of a name might be all we really need to do. We could hunt around for some more obscure stuff for the rest.”

“Once you get past that, there are a lot of possibilities with a limited number of players and simple sets and staging.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are. It’s just that we’ll have to go through and make a few selections. I really think we needed to stay toward the light end of things, light comedies, nothing heavy, no Glass Menageries or things like it.”

“Something with more teeth would be fun to do, but I don’t think we’d want to try it this summer.”

“Right. People will be coming to these productions to get a little lightheaded and have a good time. We wouldn’t want to do something heavy that will cause them to have a cow.”

“There you go with the cow jokes again.”

“Meredith, do you know what cows do for entertainment?”

“Oh Christ, not more of them! I’ll bite, what?”

“They go to the mooooovies.”

“Oh, that’s bad,” she shook her head and grimaced. “I mean, that’s bad. At least they don’t hang out around theaters. I suppose you have more cow jokes.”

“Would you like to hear another one?”

“Not if I can help it,” she sighed. “I’ll be getting them from you all summer.”

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