So, finishing their coffee with a toast to the success of Come Closer, they said their good nights and parted outside the coffeehouse.
“Don’t forget,” Mal called after them, “rehearsal Monday night. See you then!” He walked off with Paula, and Randy escorted Peggy, Amy, and Greta back to the Gramercy Arms.
III
First Reading
Peggy was at stage center, under a bright bank of floodlights. Amy entered from stage right, crossed down center and turned her back to the house to look upstage. She paused a moment before speaking.
Her position, back to the audience, would have been unforgivable if there had been an audience, and her lines, when she spoke them, were scarcely dramatic.
“You have paint on the side of your nose,” she said, “and there’s a rip in the seat of your jeans. Now where I come from, no lady....”
“The same to you,” Peggy grinned, looking around from the flat she was painting. “At least, the same to you as regards the paint on your nose. I can’t see the seat of your jeans from here!”
Amy put down the bucket of paint that she had brought with her and stepped back to the apron of the stage to get a better look at Peggy’s handiwork. It was a small wing flat that was to represent the corner of a frame house. A window frame had already been installed in it, and later the suggestion of a back porch would be added. Peggy was busy with the somewhat tedious work of painting clapboards on the flat canvas. Each was made with two lines of gray paint drawn across the white-painted surface; first a dark line, then a somewhat broader light-gray line. From working distance, it looked like nothing but striped canvas, but from a few feet away, the dimensional effect was surprisingly real. Peggy joined Amy at the edge of the stage to get a look at what she had been doing.
“It looks pretty good, doesn’t it?” she asked.
Amy nodded. “Keep it up, honey child, and you may find a real niche for yourself in the theater!”