Saint Vidicon to the Rescue

by Christopher Stasheff

  Even at that, Arlene was the senior citizen of our onstage set. The rest of them were just out of college and still working on their Equity points. I came in the door to find my charges had commandeered a table, but that Arlene, Britney, and Debbie had already attracted a small group of standees, all for some reason male, who were giving my boys challenging looks. Farther down the table, the stagehands were giving those looks right back.

  Some companies, the actors won’t even sit with the techs and don’t realize the stagehands are snickering at them behind their beers. At least I had them both at the same table, even though it was IATSE at one end and Equity at the other. Sometimes I could even pull them all into the same conversation.

  Tonight, however, looked to be brewing up a different kind of solidarity. One of the locals leaned down for a closer look at Ashley’s neckline, and Jory asked, “Need glasses?”

  “Shut up, kid,” the local said, not even looking at him.

  “He talks,” Jory said in tones of exaggerated wonder. “Gary, did you hear that? It talked!”

  The local looked up with a frown. “You want your teeth fixed?”

  “At least I still have them,” Jory answered.

  The local rumbled anger and came for him.

  Jory stood up, grinning.

  I caught the local’s arm as he passed, shoved it up behind his back, grabbed his shoulder with my left, and said, “We take it outside.”

  His friends shouted and started for me, but two of the stagehands stood up behind Jory. Mike and Al were each well over six feet and bulky with muscle. The locals hesitated.

  “Thanks, guys.” Jory swerved past them and came after me.

  For some reason, the other locals between me and the door didn’t try to interfere—they let us pass, then followed us. That blocked Jory from catching up, unfortunately. Well, maybe not so unfortunately.

  I frog-marched the loudly-protesting local into the parking lot and spun him as I let him go so that he ended up against a wall. Snarling, he stepped away, bringing up his fists, and the crowd muttered appreciatively, forming a semicircle.

  I kept my fists on my hips. “You don’t want to fight with my boys,” I told him. “They’re all black belts except Jory, and he used to spar with a kid who made Golden Gloves.”

  That gave the local pause, but he had to save face. “All you actors are gay,” he snarled. “Everybody knows that.”

  Well, not all—but a substantial percentage of my fellow showmen are indeed homosexual. Theater is one of the few professions where they won’t be hassled for it, where a man’s talent and skill count for more than his sexual orientation. “Not every actor,” I told him, “and even gays have to learn how to fight these days.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he sneered.

  “Aw, hell, Jack,” said one of the stagehands’ voices, “I thought we were going to have some fun.”

  “Just an exercise in practical education, Lyle,” I told him without looking away from the bellicose local, “and I don’t think he’s going to need a tutor.”

  “Yeah, and what do you think you could teach him?” Another local stepped forward toe-to-toe with Lyle.

  My local stared past me, gawking. I swung around beside him with a wary glance out of the corner of my eye, but he was all rapt attention, watching the big man who was no doubt the local champion challenging the invader. That quickly, he had shifted from boxer to spectator.

  The champ was every inch as tall as Lyle with, I could have sworn, the same black hair and beard. They were both muscular and had the kind of thickened belly that looks like fat but is all muscle.

  “I could teach him street fighting,” Lyle said with a lazy grin. “Maybe you, too.”

  “Might be you’d learn a little more than you wanted.” The local leaned in nose to nose.

  “Phew!” Lyle stepped back, waving his hand across his face. “Your buddies really oughta tell you about that breath.”

  The local grinned wider. “You got a problem with my breath?”

  “No,” Lyle said, “you do. Really oughta try cleaning the chitlins before you eat them.”

  An ominous silence fell, and my heart rose to block my throat. Indy is close enough to the Mason-Dixon line that you don’t tell a Good Ol’ Boy he eats chitlins.

  With a snarl, the local charged—but Lyle pivoted out of the way, and it was dark enough that nobody could have said for sure that he kicked as he turned, but the local did trip and fall. He scrambled to his feet just as the siren wailed, and the parking lot lit up with flickering blue-and-red lights.

  The spectators disappeared like butterflies in autumn, but Lyle and the local still stood toe-to-toe, neither willing to give in before the other. Neither of them seemed to be daunted by the thought of a night in jail. I, however, had the reputation of the company to consider, not to mention trying to shift the scenery tomorrow night without Lyle’s help. I stepped up to the two Goliaths and hissed, “Indian wrestle!”

  They both turned to me with blank stares, but the doors of the patrol car slammed, and they spun toward each other, locking hands and setting shoe against shoe. They strained against each other’s pull in perfect, rigid stillness as the patrolman stepped up. “What’s going on here?”

  “Just a friendly test of strength, Officer.” I stood hands on hips, watching.

  The policeman took the sight in with one sweep of his flashlight and grunted. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Somebody has to referee,” I said, “or they’ll start arguing about whose back foot moved first.”

  The local champion yanked hard, but Lyle was ready for him and yanked too. The local lunged forward, trying to throw Lyle off-balance, but he’d played this game often enough to know that the yank would probably be followed by the lunge and shoved hard.

  Stasis.

  The cop was still, watching.

  Lyle yanked to the side, then shifted and pulled back. The local wavered.

  The cop laughed. “Almost had you there, Bull.”

  “Almost,” Bull grunted, and executed a sudden pull-twist-shove maneuver. Lyle whirled his free arm, striving for balance and managing to keep it, but his back foot shifted an inch.

  “Score!” the cop declared. “Moved your back foot, stranger.”

  “Only an inch.” Lyle relaxed. “Only one fumbling . . .”

  The local yanked—but Lyle, readier than he looked, yanked back too, with a laugh. “Round two?”

  “Game’s over,” the cop said firmly. “Settle for winning, Bull.”

  “Awright, then.” Bull straightened with a grin. “You owe me a beer, stranger.”

  “The best the house has got.” Lyle slapped him on the shoulder and turned away. Back inside the bar they went, trading friendly insults having to do with their ancestry. As I remember, Bull was denying any relationship to the orangutan Lyle was hypothesizing as his grandfather and countering by claiming descent from a buffalo.

  “Nice maneuvering,” the cop said.

  “Looks like Bull has played this game before,” I answered.

  “So have you,” the cop said. “I had a call about a barroom brawl that had moved outdoors.”

  “Must have been some other tavern,” I said.

  “Yeah, it must,” the cop agreed. “Make sure it stays that way, okay?”

  I did my best.

  Nobody minded if Lyle seemed a little hungover the next day. Everybody was looking well rested when they showed up for makeup call. The stagehands ran through the preshow light check, sound check, and scene check while Maryann made sure everything was where it should be on the prop table, then reluctantly admitted to me that no one had to pay a fine that night. I went back to the makeup room, telling myself that one of these days I was going to let Lon and Arlene know how much they owed me for picking up after them. As usual, I decided that day would come when we were all safely back in New York and the tour had closed.

  As I came in, Lon stood up, glaring down at Johnny, and demanding, “Wh
o says I did?”

  “It’s your kind of sense of humor.” Johnny glared. “And you haven’t exactly shown respect for other people’s makeup before.”

  “You think I want to get pink-eye from your infected eye shadow?”

  I sidled a little closer to see what the problem was. Johnny’s makeup kit was open, and a lump of nose putty lay in the bottom. My eyebrows shot up when I saw how it had been shaped.

  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?