Saint Vidicon to the Rescue

Chapter 13

It was a very artistic job, actually. The nose putty had been carefully modelled into the shape of a fist with the thumbnail protruding between the first and second finger. That wouldn’t have been a problem if Johnny’s birth name hadn’t been Gianni, and if he hadn’t been Italian. As it was, I only knew what “the fig” was because I’d been in a rather authentic production of Romeo and Juliet and found out why one of the young bloods took offense at another “chewing his thumb.” “Nice work,” I said in my best tone of admiration.

Johnny swivelled to glare up at me. “You call that nice?”

“It’s good modelling.” I looked up at Lon. “Didn’t know you were a sculptor.”

“Me?” Lon stared. “The only chisel I’ve ever held was a slice of cheesecake!”

“I could believe that,” Johnny said, with an acid glare.

“Then do,” I said. “Lon didn’t do this.”

Johnny swung around to stare up at me, disconcerted.

I sighed. The juvenile and the leading man—a natural antagonism if there ever was one. In most companies, the juvenile would nonetheless defer to the leading man’s maturity and experience, but not when they had both graduated the year before.

Johnny recovered and turned back to glare at the nose putty fist. “It’s not that great. I could do that well whittling.”

“With a jackknife and a stick, maybe,” I said, “but with nose putty? I mean, you do a pretty good fake nose for Act Two, but I wouldn’t think they covered fists in your makeup class.”

“They didn’t,” Johnny admitted.

“So somebody in the cast has unsuspected talents,” I said, “but it’s not Lon.”

“No, I suppose not,” Johnny said. Then, as though it were dragged out of him, “Sorry, Lon.”

Lon stared in surprize, then grinned and said, “ ’S okay, Johnny,” and went back to putting on his own makeup.

Not to lose too much face, Johnny glared up at me again. “It could have been one of the crew!”

“I suppose,” I said. “I know a couple of them were acting majors before they saw the light.”

“Saw the light?” Johnny’s glare hardened, and every actor in the room looked up, taking offense.

“Well, I’m technically a techie at the moment,” I explained. “The pitfalls of being a stage manager, halfway between onstage and off. When I’m acting, I knock the stagehands, but when I’m stage managing . . .”

“You knock the actors,” Dulcie said, amused. “Just don’t try to knock on me, Jack.”

“You mean adore?”

“What else would you knock on?”

Everybody groaned and went back to their makeup. I made a mental note that I owed another one to Dulcie.

We were trying out a new comedy, hoping we’d get a big enough box office and good critical reviews to justify opening in New York. If we didn’t, we might have to stay on the road until the production broke even—assuming we weren’t running in the red on every performance. The plot, if you can call it that, was about a group of roommates who get fired from their various jobs and try to make a living by opening their own computer consulting business. They fall afoul of Finagle, of course, but the only flesh-and-blood antagonist is (predictably) the landlord, Mr. Cassandro, who is continually predicting doom for the enterprise and chivvying all the roommates to get honest jobs again, to which they reply, “We’re trying!” again and again, until you’re expecting the audience to join in with them. For an ending, Cassandro comes storming in to claim that one of the kids has parked in another tenant’s space, and, when they deny it and refuse to move the car for the simple reason that none of them has the keys, Mr. Cassandro says he’ll hot-wire the car and goes storming out.

JESSIE: Whose car do you think it could be?

ORIN: A sporty little red model? Isn’t that Alice, down the hall?

NANCY: Oh no, it couldn’t be! You know how paranoid Alice is.

BARRY: So?

NANCY: Well, she thinks her ex-boyfriend has booby-trapped her car, so she’s afraid to start it until the bomb squad gets here.

ORIN: Bomb squad? (HE GLANCES AT THE WINDOW) Maybe it’s a good thing they’ve been making cars you can’t hotwire these last ten years.

BABS: Oh, Alice’s car is older than that.

(AN EXPLOSION IS HEARD OFFSTAGE.)

ORIN: You don’t suppose . . .

Sure enough, Mr. Cassandro stumbles in through the door, face smudged and clothing torn with a steering wheel hanging around his neck (and you can bet that Gertie, our costumer, had a lot of fun with that quick change!). Of course, we had to build the steering wheel out of soft plastic so that Lon could pull it apart, fasten it around his neck, then lock the ends together again. All in all, I was hoping we never missed that last cue. Carl had a backup laptop in his sound booth (assuming whatever theater we were in HAD a sound booth) just to make sure.

This theater did have a sound booth. Well, okay, it was a projection booth, the theater having been converted for movies in the thirties. Fortunately, the conversion had consisted of hanging a movie screen from the flies and walling off the back of the balcony to make a projection booth. When the movies moved out to the malls with twenty-screen “theaters,” the community had made renovating the old theater part of its campaign to save the downtown. They had remoted the lighting controls back to the projection booth and even installed an audio board at one end with a separate window for the audio operator to watch the stage.

They hadn’t bothered modernizing the fly system, of course, so the drops and electrics were still being held up by rope and sandbags. It wasn’t the only hemp house left in the country, but it had to be one of a very few. We all felt as though we were on a field trip for Theater History class.

But because it was an old vaudeville house, we actually had real dressing rooms—old and rickety, but real. And a greenroom, believe it or not, even if the walls had been whitewashed and you could hear the other actors’ footsteps overhead. It was right under the stage, and looking up, you could see the grid of beams with heavy bolts holding the floor in place. Those beams cut the stage floor into squares, and each was numbered—A through E, one through four. They’d been trapdoors once; a touring company could open any one of them for a dramatic exit or entrance. Ophelia’s grave could be anywhere onstage you wanted it. The statue could stomp Don Giovanni down to Hell anywhere within that grid. The financiers could follow the directions of the Madwoman of Chaillot down to the sewers from any point onstage.

That had been one of the abilities they’d lost with the conversion to a movie theater. When travelling troupes stopped coming through, who needed trapdoors in the stage? So they had bolted them all closed to prevent accidents.

Of course, the stairs down to the basement, where all this was, were old, worn, steep, and uneven, but even actors can be careful when the occasion calls for it.

I studied all this carefully, I assure you. As stage manager, I was definitely going to need to know who was in which dressing room, or supposed to be, just in case I needed to send someone to track them down for a late cue—the stage hadn’t been updated any more than was strictly necessary, so there was no PA system into the dressing rooms and greenroom.

At the moment, Dulcie, Britney, and Arlene were in the women’s dressing room while Andy, Lon, and Johnny were in the men’s. There were smaller dressing rooms upstairs, presumably for the stars in whichever 1920s road shows had come through, but they were mercifully filled with old curtains, seats somebody had pulled out to make room for wheelchair access, and a set of antique electrical dimmers—mercifully because their being unusable spared me the sizzling catfight that would have erupted over who got which dressing room to his- or herself, if they’d been available.

I confess to having spent ten minutes gazing at the old dimmers, in awe of the generations of stagehands and stage managers who had gone before me—and shuddered at the thought of electricity ever having gone through those immense old open wheels. Of course, their wires hadn’t been so badly frayed when they were being used—at least, not when they’d been new.

I was down in the actors’ territory on a legitimate errand, of course. “Ten minutes till places!” I called as I went through.

“Who’ve we got in the house, Jack?” Dulcie asked as I sped by, so I put on the brakes and leaned back to look through her doorway long enough to answer, “Bluehairs, Dulcie. It’s a matinee.” Then I was off, leaving a trio of groans behind me.

All for effect, of course. The actresses knew our afternoon audience was most likely to be senior citizens. Who else has time to come to the theater on a Thursday afternoon? The high school kids would be here on Friday, of course—perfect thing for the teachers to do with the little blighters on the day when all their energy is directed toward getting out for the weekend. There would be wolf whistles at each actress’s entrance and a muted roar like a minor earthquake when Dulcie (as Lettie) kissed Andy (as Jerry), and all of us would be fighting the urge to turn to the audience, and yell, “Get over it!”

It was enough to make a fellow call on St. Vidicon. I hadn’t done that—yet. So far, everything could be explained as an accident, and there hadn’t been enough of them to call for saintly intervention. Well, okay, there had, but it still didn’t seem like the decent thing to do. I mean, things do go wrong—right?

They could also, of course, be the result of sabotage, but I didn’t want to even think that one of my cast or Joe’s crew could be trying to make it seem as though the production was jinxed.

Today, though, was going to be problem enough. “Ten minutes till places!” I called as I sailed past the men’s dressing room, then went up the narrow stairs, holding tight to the handrail every inch of the way, and settled down on the high stool behind the stage manager’s desk. There had been one built in; I’d noticed where it had been ripped out to make room for a cabinet in the 1940s. Fortunately, we brought our own folding model.

I turned to the house stagehand (have to have at least one local around—union rules, but a good one; you need to have somebody available who knows the theater), and asked, “Has the asbestos gone up?”

“Half an hour ago,” she said, with the requisite thinly-veiled contempt of the person who knows the local fire laws.

I nodded. Most shows don’t use curtains at the beginnings and ends of performances anymore, so they don’t use fire curtains, either—but this was a traditional play in everything except the amount of innuendo. When the fire curtain had gone up, it had revealed only the grand drape—one that probably hadn’t been replaced since movie theaters actually opened a curtain as the movie started. The set was a very realistic living room with a railed balcony to indicate a second floor. I went through my precurtain checklist—all actors in costume and makeup, preset props in place, all actors present and sober, stagehands at their stations and so forth—then put on my headset, and asked, “Ashley, you there?”

“Of course,” the electrician answered, bored and slightly resentful (even when she’s running the lights instead of hanging and connecting them, she’s an electrician).

“How about you, Rally?”

“Yeah, I’m here, Jack.”

I frowned; our audio tech’s voice sounded funny. I was trying to phrase a delicate inquiry when I heard a cavernous yawn right in my ear. My blood ran cold; a sleepy sound op is not what you really want five minutes before curtain.

Make that two; I glanced around and saw Andy, Dulcie, and Britney standing by the door in the fake wall, waiting for their entrances. “Warn the audience,” I told Ashley.

Through the crack between curtain and proscenium pillar, I could see the auditorium lights dim, then brighten again. Anybody in the lobby would be hurrying in. I counted off the next hundred twenty seconds, then said, “Houselights out,” and the sliver of light darkened completely. The audience’s noise stopped, except for a faint murmur of anticipation; the community might have had amateur theater, but a professional production was rare.

Professionals? Sure we were! We were being paid, weren’t we?

“Curtain up,” I said. Lyle hauled on a rope, and the act curtain rose.

The rising curtain revealed a luxurious living room. The audience murmured in appreciation, and I started feeling optimistic. They were on our side, for a change.

And they stayed on our side. This was an audience who had come to be entertained and were old enough to know that they had to pay attention to get the most out of the performance. The cast felt it right away; Dulcie made her entrance, coming down the stairs in her slip, saying, “Darling, where did you put my pills? I missed today’s dose.”

The look of horror on Andy’s face was priceless—in fact, he couldn’t have bought it if he’d had money. The audience roared, and you could almost see Dulcie and Andy expand.

That’s the way the performance went, from one laugh to another. Somebody even hissed when Lon told the roommates they’d have to move. Whoever it was hissed on his second entrance, too, and you could see him picking up energy. His character started exuding twice its usual amount of slime.

It was the perfect feedback loop, the kind you never get from the movies or TV, the kind that makes you realize live theater will always survive, one way or another. The actors drew energy from the audience’s reactions, and the audience got a better and better performance.

The only thing that worried me was the lateness of the sound cues. Nothing serious, mind you—but the first one, the doorbell, was right on time, the telephone ringing was maybe half a second late, the car backfiring in the street was a full second. No big deal, you may think, but the actors were building unbelievable energy with the most perfect timing they’d ever had, and the late cues were throwing them off. At the act break, I stayed on the headset long enough to tell Rally to confirm my warning for every cue. He grunted, which I assumed was affirmative, so I took off my headset and went to check on the actors.

They were in high spirits indeed; you would have thought the ginger ale they were sharing was champagne. “Did you ever see such an audience?” Dulcie asked, as I came into the greenroom. “The old dears really love us!”

“It helps that Sinjun gave us such good dialogue,” Andy said, “but we’ve never had this many laughs from it before!”

“We’re brilliant!” Dulcie bubbled. “They’ve got me convinced that we’re absolutely brilliant!”

And on it went. I grinned and went back upstairs to give the five-minute call. No need to worry about anybody being late for Act II—with an audience like that, those actors would be so eager to get back onstage that I might have to physically restrain them from jumping their entrances.

They were lined up in the wings a full two minutes early—not just the pair who were supposed to be in place when the curtain went up, but all of them, hovering within earshot of the audience and panting for a sip of applause. Andy’s first line, “Who was it, then?” wasn’t at all funny, but the audience wanted it to be, so they chuckled anyway—- and Dulcie’s answer, “The tack-counter,” gave us a roar you could have heard a mile away.

But the knocking was late.

I know—how can knocking be late? Actors do it live, on the back of the set—but this knocking had to come from the sound booth, because it was supposed to start onstage, then travel out into the house and all the way around before it came back to the stage, when Andy was supposed to say, “Does he have to tap them as he counts them?” Only this time, the tapping didn’t start.

“Go Cue Thirty-three!” I snapped into my mouthpiece.

Silence.

“Rally! Go!”

Finally, the tapping started.

I swung the mouthpiece away from my lips while I cursed in my softest tone. I was going to have to have Rally’s hearing checked.

Right on cue (though the cue had been horribly late), Andy demanded, “Does he have to tap as he counts them?”

“She,” Dulcie said. “The tack-counter is a woman.”

“Well, go knock on the door where she’s working and ask her to ease up on the tapping, would you?”

“It’s not bothering me that much,” Dulcie said. “You go knock her up, then.”

The laugh was surprized, a little shocked, and totally delighted—much more than the line deserved. What can I say? You had to have been there—and this audience would be glad they had been.

At least we were back on track. We would have stayed that way, too, if Rally hadn’t kept missing cues. Well, not missing them, really, but late every time and getting later. I could tell it was bothering the actors, but the audience gave them a huge laugh after every late cue, and they relaxed again.

Then came the ending.

Mr. Cassandro went out the door, the roommates talked about the car being booby-trapped, and Dulcie said, “Oh, Alice’s car is older than that.”

“Go Cue Sixty-four,” I said into my mouthpiece.

Silence.

There was supposed to be an explosion. There was silence.

“Go Cue Sixty-four!” I hissed—even now, I had to make sure the audience didn’t hear me. “Rally! Go Cue Sixty-four!”

Nothing.

I groaned. I sweated. I finally broke down and prayed. Not a very long prayer, mind you—only a simple, “St. Vidicon, protect us from Finagle!” Then once again, “Rally, go Cue Sixty-four!”

Dulcie went to the window to look out. The others took the cue and crowded around her. They waited.

And waited. And waited.

Now, time stretches when you’re onstage and things go wrong—a second seems like five minutes—but even so, it was an unholy wait, with me hissing into my headset, “Go Cue Sixty-four! Rally! Snap out of it! Go Cue Sixty-four!”

But the explosion still didn’t happen.

Tony’s disembodied presence hovered over Rally, where he lay with his head on his forearm, eyes closed, headset askew—which was why Tony could hear Jack calling, “Go Cue Sixty-four!” No denying it—Rally was firmly and irrevocably asleep. But why? He’d had a good eight hours the night before—his first in three days; he’d been surviving on catnaps since they closed Cincinnati, but even so, he should have been able to stay awake. So Tony dropped down into the dregs at the bottom of the glass beside him and filtered through the molecules there. Admittedly, he didn’t know what champagne molecules were supposed to look like, not even ginger ale molecules, but he did recognize the smell of a well-known sleeping tonic—the kind that was only supposed to be given at night and had a very light taste. Add that to a glass of champagne on top of a full meal with three nights of little sleep, and you had . . .

Sound cues coming later and later.

In fact, the amazing thing was that Rally had been able to come out of his stupor long enough to hit any sound cues at all.

Tony had a choice—he could slip into Rally’s mind and try to wake him up, or he could drop into the computer and try to close a connection without tapping the space bar.

The mind wasn’t really Tony’s area, so he dived into the keyboard.

Without a body, he couldn’t tap the spacebar, but he could shunt an electron across a gap—he had enough strength for that. He found the connection and the electrons piled up against the contact—if they’d been human, they would have been straining for release when the circuit closed. Tony jumped on the contact. He didn’t have any mass, but he did have energy, and he only needed to move it a thirty-second of an inch.

It gave a little under the energy of his spirit, but not enough.