Late the next day Brent heard Meredith pull into the Wickwire driveway in her old Chevrolet Cavalier convertible. It had long since seen better days, and Brett had never seen it with the top down. In fact, he wasn’t even sure it would go down anymore, but Meredith always swore it got her where she needed to go and took her back – at least most of the time.

He went out the back door into the gray, wet, dingy April day to greet her, noticing that the car was piled high with her things – clothing, probably her collection of wigs, boxes of books, and whatever else. There was room for her to sit, and even room for her to look out the windows if she was able to stretch her neck enough. “So how did it go?” he asked as she got out of the car.

“It went,” she reported. “I don’t think my sister is going to be sorry to see me gone for the summer, but I know damn well she’s going to miss me kicking in on my share of the apartment. It got a little screechy before it was all over with, so I pretty much brought everything except for some shit that I don’t think I’ll need anymore anyway. I sure hope that by fall I can arrange something so I don’t have to move back in with her.”

“No way of telling, but there’s always the chance something will come up.”

“Yeah, I keep telling myself that,” she sighed. “I’ll tell you what, Brett: there’s going to be a hell of a lot for me riding on how this dinner theater thing comes out. I don’t have substitute teaching and substitute milking to fall back on like you do. All I have is burger shacks and shit like that.”

“I don’t know about where you’re from, but in this state you can sub ninety days a year without a teaching certificate, not that the money is anything to write home about. But it would be something.”

“Yeah, well, but can you see me in a classroom full of little brats? How long is it going to be before I tell some kid to go right straight to hell, and give them detailed directions and a kick in the ass to get him started? I don’t like little kids all that damn much, and my sister’s little brat just reminds me of why I feel that way.”

Clearly she was in a mood, Brett realized, and not a particularly happy one, either. Maybe it was best to change subjects. “Does all this stuff have to go in?”

“No, most of it can stay in the car except for the research books and stuff in the back seat, and they’re all in boxes. I’ve got a suitcase over in the passenger seat that ought to hold me for a few days, maybe long enough for us to get over and set up the house.”

“Well, point me at a box or two, I might as well start carrying.”

Between them they carried five boxes and her suitcase inside and up to Shirley’s room.

“There’s some more drama stuff in the car if we need it, but I doubt we will,” she said as they finished up. “With the Internet, we ought to have enough to hold us.”

“Can I get you something to eat?”

“I could stand to eat,” she announced. “I sorta skipped breakfast. I told my sister I was going to be gone again so she’d have to put the brat in day care, and I started loading the car as soon as they were out of sight. I didn’t want to take time to eat after that.”

“Soup and a sandwich maybe? Chicken noodle soup all right?”

She agreed that it sounded good. She took off the Charlie’s Rig Service hoodie and sat at the kitchen table while Brett opened a can. “Would you like something to drink?” he asked. “There’s water and I think Pepsi, juice, and maybe a beer if I looked real hard. And milk, of course.”

“I’m still not ready to face a glass of milk,” she shook her head. “Shit, that was only yesterday morning! It seems like a hell of a lot has happened since then.”

“It has, probably even more for you than for me.”

“So have you made any progress?”

“I slept in a little this morning, but after that I went online and downloaded Chocolate, Roses and Sex”, he said, opening a can of soup, pouring it in a pan, and mixing it with some water as he continued, “That’s a cute play, better than I thought it would be. I could imagine you doing it. Have you read it out loud, trying to block it out a little?”

“I’ve never done the whole thing like that, but I’ve done parts of it,” she replied, a little more brightly now that the topic was back on theater. “Maybe we ought to before we settle on it.”

“We can find the time,” he said, turning to make her a peanut butter sandwich. “We’ll be alone here during the day, but we’d have to do it upstairs or something if we decided to do it in the evening. On the other hand, my folks might be interested enough to give us their opinion on a reading. They understand the ins and outs of this stuff a little more than the average bear.”

“Yeah, maybe. Anything else?”

“Well, I’ve got bad news and good news on Thoreau. The bad news is that The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail takes eleven characters, and just to make things more fun, one of them is black.”

“So we’re screwed on that one coming and going.”

“Big time. We might be able to edit some of them out but not enough to get it down to our size. Besides, the staging isn’t simple. I didn’t bother to go into it more after that.”

“So what’s the good news?”

“It isn’t the only play about Thoreau out there. There are at least a couple others. One of them is a one-actor show like we were talking about.”

“So that screws that idea, too.”

“Maybe. There isn’t much online about it except for the fact that it’s done by some professor somewhere. He does it more as an educational thing than for entertainment, and it’s more Thoreau’s reflections on what the country is coming to in the run-up to the Civil War, rather than on the Thoreau of the eighteen-forties at Walden Pond, which is the part that appeals to me.”

“So your idea might still be a possibility.”

“Yeah, but it’d still take a lot of work, so there’s no way in hell we could do it this summer anyway, and maybe not next summer, either. But the good news is that, as I was scanning down the Google page, what should pop up but a play called The Hermit of Walden. Five characters, two acts, one set. It’s been done a lot, mostly around local or high school-level groups, but it’s supposed to have some funny spots. I haven’t seen the script yet, it’s not online either, but I’ve got a copy on order.”

“How about the cast?”

“Three men, two women, at least according to a newspaper story I read on it. From that, it looks like the women are relatively minor characters.”

“Hmmm,” she smiled. “I hope you bookmarked that stuff.”

“Of course I did.”

“Look, just talking, but do you think we could use local pickups for the women, instead of me?”

“I can’t tell yet,” he said, taking the soup off the stove and pouring it into a bowl for her. “What do you have in mind?”

“I’m thinking I could get a directing credit out of it. It would look good on a résumé.”

“I don’t know enough to say yes or no at this point, but it’s something to consider. If not that one, we’ll come up with something else.”

“On the subject of anything else, what have you come up with?”

“I’ve been busy. I dug out Chekhov’s A Marriage Proposal, and even as a period piece it seems funnier than hell, a real stupid sitcom in modern terms. Two men, one woman, although one of the men is pretty old, but that’s no deterrent. I’m thinking it might make a good companion to Chocolate, Roses and Sex, and the neat part is that it’s old enough that I haven’t been able to find any mention of royalties being required.”

“A few bucks here, a few bucks there, and the budget is going to look even better to Marty.”

“My thinking exactly.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“Honestly, I think we go to the Internet. I think our service here is good enough that it can handle both of us being online. Since you’ve looked at the non-royalty stuff and I haven’t, why don’t you look at the royalty sites, and I’ll look for the free stuff. We can both pick out plays that look interesting.”

“Sounds good, but it might go quicker if one of us is online and the other is looking over a shoulder. That way we can discuss it as we come to it.”

The next three days were long, but fun. They considered at least a hundred plays and probably more, passing over most with no serious thought of using them after just a quick look. There were about thirty where they took a second look, and eleven where they read scripts, either out of their own libraries or online. There were some where they had to order hard-copy scripts, since the full thing wasn’t available online, but under the circumstances Brett was willing to pay for overnight delivery.

Then it got hard. They were able to reject about half upon reading the scripts, for various reasons, mostly that they didn’t think the play would work well at the Curlew Creek Dinner Theater. Sometimes they did readings of the scripts or parts of them, with each of them occasionally having to read several parts; that told them as much as anything. But that still didn’t winnow the list down sufficiently, even with deciding to do eight plays in two-week runs each, which was obviously going to be a hell of a lot of work for both of them.

Finally, late one morning they sat down at the kitchen table of the Wickwire house, with stacks of notes and scripts around them. “All right,” Brett said. “I think we’ve got it beaten down for now, so I think the time has come to start developing a playbill.”

“I think we’ve got a couple holes, but you’re probably right. We need to start thinking in terms of casts, not just the plays themselves. What are your thoughts?”

“We’ve agreed since the beginning to kick off with Same Time Next Year for a running start, and the cast is set on that one.”

“Right, it will buy us some time that we’ll probably need. We need to run through it two or three times just to make sure we have it fresh in mind, and to work out a few details, but I agree it’s the place to start. What’s next?”

“I’m leaning toward the next one being to double up Chocolate, Roses and Sex with A Marriage Proposal.”

“I agree with pairing them up, but why then?”

“Mostly because it will be June, and maybe a little slow. We’ll still be getting started, anyway. I don’t know how it is there, but I’ll bet the peak tourist season will be between the Fourth and Labor Day. My thinking is that we’ll want to have a strong show on the big weekends, and that argues for Neil Simon. I’m still a little unsure about Barefoot in the Park, but putting it on Labor Day weekend gives us a chance to change our minds. That sort of argues for doing the Thoreau play after the double bill, getting it up before the busy season. The Man with the Plastic Sandwich would work pretty well after The Odd Couple.”

“God, that’s a stupid name for a play, but I really like the script.”

“I do, too, especially since the staging is so simple. It’s pretty much set it and forget it. It’s gotten good reviews even if the play is not real well known. I figure we drop in Fair Exchange after Plastic Sandwich. That’s a little heavy on characters, but it’s royalty-free, so we’ll save the cost of an actor there. We’ll probably use a lot of locals on it. Then we wrap it up with Saving Grace and tentatively Barefoot. That leaves our options open at the end of the season in case we decide we want to go a different direction.”

“It sounds like it would work,” she said, thinking about it. “It’s not quite as experimental as I was sort of hoping for, but we should have some fun with it.”

“OK, let’s call it solid, at least for the moment. Now we can start working out who we’re going to need for talent. Same Time, done of course. Almost done for the double bill, except we’ll need one actor, and preferably an older one for the Chubukov role.”

“We probably ought to make a list.”

“Even better, I think there’s a roll of shelf paper in the cabinet next to the refrigerator. Let’s make a working chart on this.”

“Let’s get some of this crap off the table so we’ve got room to work on it. When we work out the chart, let’s see if we can note which roles are going to take lead actors, and which we might be able to get by with local talent.”

It took them over an hour to get it all written out, including royalty costs. “Realistically, the first three plays of the eight are pretty simple,” he summed up. “We can get by with one pro besides ourselves, and he should be an older one.”

“How about Neil Morford?” she suggested. “He’s pretty good.”

“Yeah, he might do,” Brett admitted grudgingly. “He’s a little stuck up, but he ought to be able to do both Chubukov and Emerson pretty well. They both strike me as being a little full of themselves anyway.”

“It’d be a fit,” she agreed. “He’d be a little young for Chubukov and a little old for Emerson, but somewhere near the ball yard. I know he was planning on being at the Heatherwood, but he’s a schoolteacher with the summers free, so maybe he wouldn’t be looking as hard as some others.”

“There’s no doubt he could handle the role, but it might be hard to put up with him for the full run of two shows, plus rehearsal time.”

“He’s good about coming into a play knowing his lines and being off the book, and Marriage Proposal is on the short side, so maybe we could squeeze by without having to do many rehearsals.”

“Oh, I agree, he’s got to be about the first choice of the people we know. But then, we get to The Odd Couple, and there’s nothing for him there.”

“It would get him out of there,” she pointed out. “That’s not all bad.”

“True. Now, The Odd Couple needs six females and only two males. That’s the biggest cast of the summer. Obviously you have to be one of the two leads. The rest of the roles are relatively minor. I could play one of the guys or not, depending on who we have to work with. I think we could get by with locals in all of the minor roles. If so, I’ll just sit back and direct.”

“That one is going to take some work,” she agreed. “Especially if we use locals, but starting it that late gives us some time to find them and do extra rehearsals.”

“Which is another good reason to not have it too near the head of the list,” he agreed. “Do you have any possibilities for the other female lead?”

“Maybe,” she frowned. “Let me think about it for a minute.”

“Now, Plastic Sandwich. I’d obviously have to do Walter, and you’d have to do either Ellie or Lenore. Haley probably needs to be a little older. Neil might work for that, or maybe a local if we find a good one. I wouldn’t mind finding someone other than Neil.”

“Yeaaah … that might work,” Meredith replied, obviously not having paid a lot of attention to him while the gears ground in her head.

“Someone other than Neil?”

“No. For Ellie, and probably for Florence in The Odd Couple. Maybe for Lidian in the Thoreau play, too. It would be a little different, but she’d be tickled to be asked and would probably do a super job.”

“Who’s this?”

“Kellye Ginther.”

Brett thought for a moment, then shook his head. “The name doesn’t ring a bell with me.”

“I don’t know if you’ve worked with her or not. She’s a really good actress, nice, funny, cheerful, and has an excellent sense of timing. I’ve worked with her, oh, two or three times, I’m not sure. She gets her lines memorized and off the book really quickly, good voice, and gets a lot out of the roles she’s had. What’s more, she really loves acting and is good at it. It’s just too damn bad that the directors she’s worked with have never had the guts to cast her in a lead role because she’d be really super in one. Ellie might be a little bit of a reach for her physically, but we could have an absolute ball with me playing Olivia to her Florence.”

“She sounds good, but from the way you talk there has to be a fly in the ointment somewhere.”

“There is,” Meredith replied soberly, some of her enthusiasm tempered. “She’s heavy. In fact, I’d have to be honest and say more on the heavy side, but well over her best weight. She’s not bad looking. In fact, I’d have to say she’s very good looking. But she just isn’t going to be able to play a slender, sexy role, so she gets overlooked a lot and just doesn’t get a taste of the lead roles. It really sucks for her.”

“I’ll bet,” he shook his head, remembering a minor actress in a TV series role that sort of fit that description. She’d obviously been a better actress than the role she had been given, but he’d been impressed with how well she’d done with what she’d had to work with. “I’ve run across guys like that, too. Good actors, but they seem to get passed over for parts because they’re not good-looking young hunks.”

“It sucks, but there it is,” she agreed. “I have to add that Kellye is pretty good off the stage, too. Pretty upbeat most of the time, lots of smiles, lots of laughs. Sometimes the shit she gets handed gets her down, but most of the time she’s able to work her way out of it.”

“Lesbian?”

“No. At least, I don’t think so. I trolled her a couple times but never got a rise out of her. I remember her talking about boyfriends, but I don’t think she’s had a lot of luck with them.” Meredith glanced down the chart. “God,” she continued. “She could have a role in everything else on the schedule after Odd Couple, maybe even the sister in Saving Grace. Brett, she really is that good.”

“Do you think she’d be available?”

“I don’t know but I wouldn’t be surprised. What with her weight, she’s lucky to even get one or two half-assed roles a year. In fact, it strikes me she’s still in college.”

“Younger than us?”

“A little. I think she was out of school for a while, but I don’t know why.”

“Do you think she’d work cheap?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Maybe it’s just me, but somehow I get the feeling I’m being a little oversold. She sounds interesting, though, and you might be right about the roles. I think I’d like to talk to her before we get too far along. You wouldn’t happen to have her phone number, would you?”

“Not right here, but I think it’s out in the car. It may take some digging.”

“Why don’t you go dig? If she’s good and learns her lines well, she might very well make up most of the other female parts we need for much of the summer. There would only be a few holes left, and I think those could be filled with pickups.”

“I think so too. In the first part of the run we only need a guy of lead caliber for Marriage and the Thoreau thing, and then not for a while after that until we get down toward the end.”

“Right, and we might be able to drop locals into at least a couple of those spots.”

“I’ll go see if I can find her number.”

“Need any help?”

“Not really. You’d be more in the way than you would help.”

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