“Exactly what I had in mind,” Peggy answered. “It shouldn’t be too hard to select, now that I know what I’m looking for.”
But it wasn’t easy, either. Peggy spent the whole morning carefully looking over her collection of play scripts. Every time she thought she had the right role, she found there was no single scene that seemed to be right for a short reading. There was no trouble over Viola, because Shakespeare always wrote good scenes and speeches, and because there was no need to sketch in what had led up to the scene in the play, since everyone was sure to be perfectly familiar with it. But everything else seemed to be a problem. It was not until her parents were all packed and there was only half an hour before leaving, that she finally made up her mind.
For the comedy reading, she determined to do Sabina in the first scene of Skin of our Teeth, which had much more to it than simple comedy. The business of Sabina’s stepping out of character to talk directly to the audience as a disgusted actress criticizing the play and its author gave added dimension to the reading. For her dramatic role, Peggy chose the part of Miriamne in the last scene of Winterset, a hauntingly beautiful tragedy. She selected this, she explained to her parents as they drove to the airport, because it was one of the few dramatic, poetic parts written for a girl of her own age, and she felt that she could identify with the character. Then, book in hand, she started to study.
They waited for the passenger call
Peggy continued to read all through the arrival at the airport, the business of checking in and loading baggage. They waited for the passenger call, then walked up the steps into the plane. When she was settled in her seat by the window, she lowered her book and turned, wide-eyed, to her mother.
“Do you know,” she said in slow, awed tones, “that this is my first time on an airplane, and I’m just sitting here reading?” She closed the book on her lap. “That’s just going to wait for a while, until I see what’s going on!”
Looking out the oval window, she saw the steep steps being wheeled away from the plane. A red fuel truck drove under the wing and sped across the wide concrete runway. Then the plane’s engines whirled, coughed once and started, and the plane lumbered down the runway slowly. Reaching the end, it deliberately turned, stopped for a moment, then suddenly gathered up strength, leaped forward and sped into the wind. Peggy watched, fascinated, as the ground dropped away and the shadow of wings below grew smaller and smaller as the plane rose. She watched until the tiny farms, winding ribbons of highway, and gleaming rivers disappeared beneath a puffy layer of cloud. Then she looked back to her mother.
“Well,” she said, “it looks as if my new career is off to a flying start! Now I’d better study these plays, or I’m in for an unhappy landing.”
Reluctantly tearing her eyes from the fantastic cloud formations that floated past, Peggy once more opened her book and was soon deep into the even more fantastic world of Thornton Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth.