It didn’t take long for Marty to get Mike over to the tasting room. Between them, Brett and Marty explained what they had in mind, and Mike said it sounded like it might be something he could do. He didn’t want to have to put as much time in on it as he thought the whole project would take, but was willing to give this a try.

“Tell you what,” Brett suggested. “Since we haven’t worked together before, let’s do a short reading so we have an idea of how well we can work together. That might tell us how this would go.”

“Sure,” Mike grinned. “It could be interesting.”

Brett and Meredith had only brought one copy of A Marriage Proposal with them, and it was in a book at that, but a copying machine in the winery office soon solved that problem. The five of them settled down around one of the tables in the tasting room and started on the reading.

Both Chubukov and Lomov in the play are pretty histrionic, and Natalia isn’t much less so, although she is, to at least a minor degree, the voice of reason. Lomov, a long-time neighbor of Chubukov, has come to propose marriage to Chubukov’s twenty-five-year-old daughter, Natalia. After he has asked and received joyful permission to marry Natalia, she is invited into the room, and he tries to convey the proposal to her. While Lomov tries to make clear his reasons for being there, he gets into an argument with Natalia about The Oxen Meadows, a disputed piece of land between their respective properties, and it goes on from there.

Neither Brett nor Meredith had actually read the role in a play-like setting. Mike wasn’t even familiar with the play, but it didn’t take him long to get into acting Chubokov, and the others right along with him. In actual fact it didn’t go all that well, since everyone found themselves cracking up and having to stop to laugh and catch their breaths. It went so well that as soon as they got to the end of where Samantha had copied the play, she took the book back into the office and made copies of the rest of it. They were all having so much fun that they didn’t want to stop.

While they waited on the copying machine, Mike commented, “God, this so much more fun that I thought it would be. You think Chekhov, you think dry and dull. The hell of it is that we’re going to have to read through it enough so we can stop laughing at ourselves.”

“That’s always the tough part in something like this,” Brett agreed. “Hell, it’s funny on paper but it’s so much better even doing a sight-reading of it. When we get off the book and have the staging worked out for it, it’s going to be a scream!”

In a few minutes they were back at it, fortified by refilled glasses of some good Curlew Creek wine. It took a while to get through it – they were still cracking up – and it was with a good-natured sorrow that they reached the end of the play.

“All right,” Marty said when he’d caught his breath and passed around the bottle of wine again. “You kids win. I saw Chekhov, and I thought, ‘What have we gotten ourselves in for?’ But holy crapola, you made a believer out of me. Mike, do you think you can work with these kids?”

“Oh, I’m sure I can,” he grinned, taking a sip of the Curlew Creek Pinot Noir. “Look, I have a couple of reservations, and we might as well get them out on the table right now.”

“What’s that?” Meredith asked.

“Let’s face it, I’ve been around plays a long time. I’ve even directed a good number of them, even though they’ve been high school crap where the kids don’t know squat about acting and can’t remember their lines.”

“Been there and done that,” Brett agreed. “But that was where I caught the bug.”

“Me, too,” Meredith added.

“Me three, a long time ago,” Mike smiled. “Look, I don’t know if Marty and Samantha told you that they came to me about this before they found you two, but they did. I just don’t have the time to put into this that you will. I have other things to do, and that’s that. I’ll work with you as I can, but there’ll be times I have to do other things. We may have to work on these plays at odd hours.”

“We can work with that,” Brett said. “It’ll just be the three of us in A Marriage Proposal, and we’ll be living here, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Hermit might be a little more complicated, and we still have a male and a female role to fill, but we can take flexibility into mind when we do the casting.”

“That’s the three of us, plus one, right?”

“Well, no. It’ll be you, me, Kellye Ginther, who you haven’t met yet, and whoever we pick up to fill out the cast. Meredith is going to direct it. It’s a good place for her to get her feet wet.”

“OK, that leads to the other problem, and it’s a problem on my part. Like I was saying, I’ve directed a lot of stuff, and it’s going to be tempting for me to try to take over. That’ll be especially true with a green director, which Meredith, if you haven’t done it before, you will be even if the rest of us know what we’re doing. What I’m saying is that there are times when you’ll have to tell me to shut up and do what I’m told, then make it stick. Since the two of you are half my age, it may not be easy for you, but you’ll have to.”

“We’ll work it out,” Meredith smiled. “I think it’ll be good to have your experience to lean on when we need it. I have to admit, I think it would have been a real problem with the guy we originally asked to take these roles, enough so that we were reluctant to ask him.”

“It would have been pretty hard to tell him to shut up and do it the way we want it,” Brett agreed. “He’s a good guy, but well … it would have been a problem with almost any experienced actor your age.”

“I get the picture,” Mike agreed. “I hope I won’t be as bad.”

“Somehow, I don’t think you will.”

They spent another hour just sitting around talking about things, like the rest of the plays on the schedule. It didn’t take a great streak of genius to realize that Mike would make a great Haley in Plastic Sandwich, and he was penciled in for that, at least in Brett and Meredith’s minds. Best of all, at least as far as Marty and the budget were concerned, he agreed to do the roles for the fun of it, although it seemed clear that there would be some wine exchanged before things were all over with.

Finally they had to bring things to an end. Mike had things he had to do, and for that matter, so did Brett and Meredith – there were still all those dead flies on the floor of the house and plenty else to be done besides, so they knew they had to be getting on with it. Eventually they said their good-byes and headed in different directions.

Brett and Meredith got in the van to drive to the house. “Wow,” Meredith said as soon as they got inside the van, “I never expected that one to get solved that easily.”

“Or that well,” Brett agreed. “I don’t know if he’ll be up for anything after Plastic Sandwich, but he might be, and there are a couple of other roles he might fit just fine. Hell, it’d be a little reach, not a big one, for him to do Victor in Barefoot in the Park.”

“Let’s not make a final decision on that one yet. I’m just a little concerned about Kellye doing Mrs. Banks since it’d be a huge age reach for her.”

“We also have to think about the fact that Kellye may be back in college by the time that one comes along, if we wind up doing it at all,” Meredith pointed out. “But you know who would work for Mrs. Banks? Samantha!”

“It’s something to think about, if she’d be up for it.”

“It’s not that big a role. But boy, does Mike ever do a great Chubukov!”

“Oh, yeah, I haven’t had fun like that in a while. We didn’t get into Emerson, and it’s a totally different character. But I think he can handle it. Physically, he’s not a great fit for Emerson, who was kind of lean and acerbic, where Mike is a bit on the roly-poly side. But hell, it’s a play, after all.”

“Yeah, I don’t think he’d work for Fair Exchange, but that one is still a little up in the air, in my mind anyway.”

“We’ve got time to work it out,” he said as he pulled the van into the driveway of the house. “Well, it’s time we got down to the dirty work.”

“Into each life some rain must fall, and like that,” she agreed. “I guess there’s nothing to do but get it done.”

There was still time that afternoon to get several hours’ worth of work done, and the house needed it. A combination of a push broom and a vacuum cleaner made fairly quick work of the dead flies. That made things seem better right there, but there was still an awful lot of work to do. Since the house was empty of furniture, except for the busted chair they’d seen when they’d been there before, that made things go more quickly. The busted chair was even useful since it gave them something to stand on when they needed it. By the time the day wound down they could both see that they faced at least another day on the project.

Late in the afternoon, Marty dropped by. “I can see you’re making progress,” he told them. “I should have been here earlier to do what I could to help, but I got involved in things over at the shop.”

“It’s not something we would expect you to do,” Brett replied. “You’ve been awful nice to us as it is.”

“Yeah, but still,” he smiled, “you kids are putting in an awful lot of work on this whole thing, and I want you to know Samantha and I appreciate it. There’s more to it than I think either one of us expected, but that’s not why I came up here. Do the two of you have any plans for dinner?”

“We brought some cans,” Brett shrugged. “We’re sort of camping out here, after all. If we didn’t want to use the stove here, there’s a camp stove out in my van, so we can make do.”

“There’s no need for that. Samantha suggested that since you haven’t gotten things organized here yet, you might want to come over for dinner. She has a roast in the crock pot.”

“Talked me into it,” Meredith piped up. “Brett can sit here and eat out of cans if he wants to, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had a good pot roast.”

“I’m in, too,” Brett agreed. “I don’t want to open a can any more than Meredith does.”

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to come in our work clothes,” Meredith pointed out. “I don’t think either of us brought anything other than that.”

“That will be fine. Samantha and I usually try to dress fairly neatly for the sake of the customers, but it doesn’t always work out that way, especially around grape picking time. Things usually get pretty hectic around then.”

“Why is that?” Meredith asked.

“We want to leave the grapes on the vine as long as possible. The sweeter they are, the better the wine. But that means when we go to pick them, we’re almost always looking at a forecast for a heavy frost right in the face, so it’s a mad rush. We usually get around three and a half or four tons of grapes per acre, and cutting the clusters off is all handwork. When it gets to grape picking time, everything else comes to a screeching halt.”

“You know, as a farm boy, I didn’t think an acre was all that much, at least when you’ve got a lot of them,” Brett nodded, “but looked at from that perspective, it sounds like a hell of a lot of work.”

“It is. That’s why no one who raises grapes for us has more than a handful of acres of them. It’s usually pretty tough to find that much help on short notice. It makes for some long days and sometimes even longer nights.”

“I guess I never thought about it,” Brett told him. “I guess it’s a little like milking cows. You do it when it has to be done.”

“Yeah, but at least it’s only a few days once a year. Nerve-wracking days for sure, but only a few of them. Dairy cows with their continual milking, well, that sounds like a real pain in the neck.”

“Not to mention the smell,” Meredith snorted. “Grapes have to be a lot more pleasant.”

That evening Brett and Meredith walked down the hill to Marty and Samantha’s house – it was only a couple of hundred yards. Though it was not a real big house, it was nice and tastefully appointed inside. The house smelled wonderfully of roast beef, and Samantha had their dinner nearly done.

It was a good dinner, too. Brett was of the opinion that no one could beat his mother’s roast beef, but Samantha’s came close. Not to his surprise, after dinner Samantha brought out another bottle of wine, this one a Curlew Creek label they hadn’t tried yet. He reflected that, if nothing else, he was going to come out of the summer with a much better knowledge and appreciation of wine, which isn’t a bad thing in the theater business.

Of course, they talked about the dinner theater plans as they sipped their wine. “Now that you have Mike and this Kellye on board,” Samantha asked, “does that do a good job of filling out your cast?”

“The major roles, at least to get started,” Brett replied. “There are some minor roles, and a couple of them in The Odd Couple aren’t all that minor, but we’re hoping that a local casting call will fill those roles.”

“How soon do you think you need to hold your casting call?”

“Fairly soon,” Meredith replied. “We’re reaching into an unknown pot and we don’t know what we’re going to find. If we don’t come up with some good people for The Odd Couple we’ll have to reach farther out, maybe to other people we know. If so, that’ll give us time to look.”

“How do you hold the casting call? I mean, get the word out?”

“Good question,” Brett said. “Put it in the local paper, I guess. You’d know more about that than I do.”

“The newspaper situation here isn’t simple,” Marty told him. “There’s no county-wide daily, but both Coopersport and Oxford have pretty good weekly papers, and there’s another one in the county over at Centerton. We do a lot of advertising with them, so I’d suspect they’d work with us. We’ve still got a few days if we want to get a news story or an ad in their next issues.”

“How about if we shoot for doing it two weeks from next Saturday?” Brett suggested. “Meredith and I ought to have moved in here long before then, and Kellye should be here by then, too. We’ll still have some time before we have to get real serious about Same Time Next Year. I mean, we know it pretty well, but we’ll have to take some time to brush up on it if we’re going to do it right.”

“That would leave us some time to look around for someone if we had to,” Meredith added. “Besides, the first time we’ll need local people is for Hermit, and if we got really stuck I could do one of the male roles. It might mean a sex swap and a little touching up of the script, but nothing major. But we’re absolutely going to have to have several people for The Odd Couple, both men and women.”

“So we’ve got some time,” Marty nodded thoughtfully. “In fact, time for a second casting call if the first falls flat.”

“Right, and we could spread our nets a little wider on the second one,” Brett agreed. “I’d really like to have people who are pretty local, just to simplify the housing and cast-cost issues. Local people working on a stipend is one thing, but if we have to pull in someone from way out of town, like someone who was involved with the Heatherwood, they’re too far to commute, and they’d have to be around for as much as a month.”

“They could crash with us at the house,” Meredith added. “But for that long it would get to be a problem.”

“And we’d have to pay them more,” Marty nodded. “That seems pretty stupid for a role that’s, oh, twenty or thirty lines.”

“You know,” Samantha said, “you might want to think about leaning on Mike. I know it’s been a while since he’s directed school plays, but I’ll bet he’d know of someone with some ability who would be local. Maybe a kid he had in school home from college for the summer, or something.”

“That’s a thought,” Brett agreed, “but let’s not work directly through him. Maybe just have him suggest that the person could come to the casting call. That would give us a little better look at who is available.”

“All right,” Marty said. “Let’s work up a press release, and Samantha can build an ad from that. She does our graphic work.”

“Let’s just focus on saying that we’re looking for performers for the production of The Odd Couple and other plays without getting into the names,” Brett suggested. “We have our cast for Plastic Sandwich, and the schedule is still a little loose after that, anyway.”

“I think this would be a good time to announce that we’re going to be having the dinner theater anyway,” Samantha suggested. “We need to get people thinking about that. We probably ought to start advertising it soon, and we might as well start selling advance tickets and taking reservations just as soon as Marty can get tickets printed. I’m assuming you don’t want to mention anything after Plastic Sandwich since you’re not totally sure about the schedule. But I think we want to announce what we’re doing as far in advance as we can.”

“You got that right,” Brett agreed. “We have until perhaps the period when we’re running Hermit before we have to make up our minds one way or the other. At least by that time we should have an idea of who is going to be available for our casts.”

“What else do we have to do between now and Same Time Next Year?” Marty asked.

“Oh, there’s a lot,” Brett said. “At this point we only have ideas about how we want to set up the theater. We’ve got those platforms to build, flats to make, lighting to work out, and some other things of that nature. At the moment Meredith and I are thinking that we want to keep the sets pretty simple, both from a cost standpoint and for the sake of allowing the audience to use their imagination. But we’re still going to need sets, there’s no getting around it, at least not for what we’re trying to do.”

“How about lighting?” Samantha asked. “I’m still a little unsure about how you’re going to handle that.”

“Again, pretty simple, although we will need some. What’s more, in an old building like that mill, we’ll have to make sure we’re not overloading any circuits. We’re not going to need a whole bunch of lighting, and none of it is really complicated. I think I told you the other day we had the option of doing it cheap or doing it right. In this case, I think we can get by this year by doing it a little on the cheap side, using hardware store stuff rather than theatrical supply house stuff. That might not be the case in future years, if we have them.”

“Let’s get through this year first,” Marty told them. “At this point everything is still talk and ideas. I think we need a little experience with how things are actually going to work before we start making plans about next year.”

“Well, yeah, that’s a given,” Brett agreed. “It’s also a good reason to try to watch our pennies where we can this year. The box office will tell the tale in the end.”

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