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attempts to explain that the director had said that I didn’t need a microphone, he managed to pin it to me and stuff the transmitter into my pocket. The stage manager had no sooner disappeared than the curtains opened. As I soberly stood and stepped forward, my chair followed me, tied to me by the microphone cable the stage manager had inadvertently wrapped through it. As I flowed side to side across the stage, making my great speech, the audience roared with laughter, and the director again looked on in horror as the chair followed me like an obedient pup. I floundered with my upstage hand, trying to free myself from its loyalty. Still, even then, as well as when the director gave cast notes and glared at me as he remarked how some people made a comedy out of a serious drama, I refrained from pronouncing the fatalistic phrase. Finally, humiliated, I headed home, taking my daughter with me. We got right out in the middle of the section of highway where there were no houses for about five miles in either direction, when a thumping sound told me the tire had gone flat. I had no sooner slipped out to change it and was laying prone on the ground to get the jack under the pickup, when a deluge started. That was 15