Marcia Talley - This Enemy Town

Gadget extended a hand, helping me to my feet. “Bravo zulu,” he said. Navy speak for well done.

“Thanks.” I brushed sawdust off my sweat pants. “That’s almost as exciting as the Volcano Pool at the Polynesian Village Resort.”

“Disney World?” he asked.

I nodded. “We took the grandkids down last summer. You climb to the top of this fiberglass mountain, then shoot down a long slide built inside it-whoosh!-into the pool.”

Gadget and I headed for the tech room at stage right, down a short flight of steps and into a weirdly shaped cubbyhole of a room furnished with an odd assortment of castoff furniture, its walls densely painted with the names of cast members who had appeared in Academy productions going well back to the 1930s. A computer, a television, a VCR, piles of cheap paperback novels and videotapes-I saw Mulan, Rambo, Shakespeare in Love , and Animal House -a gooseneck lamp and loose wires and extension cords leading God knows where. All the comforts of home.

“We spent a fortune on Magic Kingdom tickets,” I said as Gadget held open the door and waited for me to go through ahead of him. “But forget about Mickey! I think the kids would have been happy to spend the whole four days at the pool, sluicing down that lava tube.”

I helped myself to an oatmeal cookie from a package sitting open on the table. “I did it a couple of times,” I added, taking a bite. “Damn thing was over thirty feet long, twisting and turning.” I gestured upward with the cookie in the general direction of the stage. “Much more dangerous than that, anyway.”

Gadget rapped three times on the battered tabletop. “Knock on wood.”

“You think that’s necessary?”

Gadget shrugged. “You never know. We put it together pretty fast.”

I finished off the cookie and licked the crumbs off my fingers. “I’m not worried. This is an engineering school, isn’t it? You’re engineers. You’re supposed to be able to build things.” I grinned back at him, then, thinking about the rickety handrail, rapped three times on the tabletop, too.

As my mother always said, “Better safe than sorry.”

Victorian London: it surrounded me. Gentlemenin top hats. Ladies in bustles and bonnets and bows. Butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. Beggars, grave diggers, Gypsies, the odd escapee from Bedlam, and a stick-twirling bobby or two. I’d been teleported-T-shirt, paint-smeared blue jeans, Nikes, and all-directly into a set for Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol . When I closed my eyes, I could even smell the nineteenth century-but when I opened them again, it was only a half-eaten steak sub with onions that an actor had abandoned on a nearby chair.

The theater was filled with sound, too, a glorious cacophony as the orchestra members wandered into the pit, unpacked their instruments, and began tuning up. They were accompanied by saws, drills, and hammers, musical themselves in their whines, drones, and rat-a-tat-tats as, working frantically together, we neared the firm deadline imposed by opening night.

I’d finished painting the steps leading up to Sweeney’s parlor, cleaned my brushes in turpentine, and took a well-deserved time-out to watch with some amusement as Gadget helped the sound engineers fit the leads with body mikes. He’d lined the mikes up along the edge of the stage, marked each one with an actor’s name using masking tape, and was checking their batteries-the square, nine-volt kind-for juice. Gadget being Gadget, he’d chosen the high-tech way, by pressing his tongue against both terminals.

My cell phone vibrated against my ribs. It was Dorothy, leaving a message that she wanted to consult with me about something. Not seeing anything productive in watching Gadget systematically destroy his taste buds, I returned her call. She didn’t pick up, so I went looking for her.

Dorothy wasn’t taking a break in the tech room as her message had indicated, so I hustled off in the opposite direction, through a narrow, almost invisible doorway and down an even narrower flight of stairs. I paused on the half landing that opened into the other hidey-hole where actors and amorous, in-the-know couples seeking privacy often hung out: the Jabberwocky room. Painted flat black, the walls of the Jabberwocky room were decorated with large-scale, surprisingly faithful copies of Tenniel’s illustrations from Alice in Wonderland. Alice had been swimming up the stairway wall with the Dormouse ever since the 1940s, and on the far wall, behind a rickety bookshelf, she had spent decades sipping endless cups of tea with the Mad Hatter et al. Alas, there was no sign of the Jabberwocky, who at some time beyond recent memory had been painted over with an enormous map of Tolkien’s Middle Earth by someone with little skill and even less taste. Because of her recent chemotherapy treatment, I had suspected that Dorothy might be resting on the large white sofa that dominated the room, but she wasn’t there.

I toddled down the remaining steps that took me to the lower dressing room level and stuck my head through the door. “Hello? Anybody home?”

I was talking to myself. Everyone appeared to be somewhere else, except for a chorus line of Styrofoam heads that stared at me eyelessly from a shelf. The heads were wig stands, but at that moment they simply sat there on their necks, eerily; wigless and bald, reminding me, sadly, of Dorothy. The last time I’d seen her, she was still wearing that moth-eaten wig. Maybe she hated the hats I brought her? Plan B was to lure Dorothy and that wig of hers down to Karen James’s beauty salon on Maryland Avenue. If anyone could coax it into a more updated hair-style, Karen James could.

Wondering if Karen’s place had an emergency entrance, I turned my back on the wig stands and wandered into the dressing room proper. Mirrors covered the walls on both sides, and makeup, book bags, and assorted articles of clothing were strewn about everywhere. Mounted on the wall next to a pair of gigantic pipes at the far end of the room was a strange, dark gray box, which on closer examination appeared to be a radio. I flipped the switch on and nearly jumped out of my Nikes.

“Tobias! Don’t talk to me, talk to the audience!”

I spun around, but Professor Black wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity. When I could breathe again, I realized that the box had to be an intercom piping sound in directly from the stage some twenty feet overhead. “Plot, plot, plot!” the director shouted above the strident scrape of student violins not yet ready for prime time and the relentless pounding of the electric piano. “If they can’t understand the words, they won’t know what’s going on! Talk to the people in the back row!”

Grinning to myself, and feeling a bit sorry for the actor playing Tobias, I continued into the hallway, past the rooms that housed the Academy’s telephone switchboard-always locked up like Fort Knox, for some reason known only to AT &T and the head of building and grounds-and out the back door onto the lawn. I was heading toward the set shop in Alumni Hall. Unless Dorothy had gone home sick, I couldn’t imagine where else she could be.

The enormous cargo door in the back of Alumni Hall yawned open, thank goodness, so I didn’t have to walk all the way around the building and let myself in the front. I passed through its jaws into the belly of Alumni Hall, where the staff seemed to be getting ready for a basketball game.

Completed in 1991 with hefty contributions from the United States Congress and individual contributions from well-heeled alumni and friends, the massive arena could seat the entire brigade of midshipmen, plus staff and faculty, too, for a total of 5,700 souls. Got half a million bucks? You, too, could have part of the building named after you, like the USO, which bankrolled the colossal stage that descended from the rafters five or six times a year, transforming the east end of the building into the Bob Hope Performing Arts Center.