Beth Albright - Sleigh Belles

“Come on, Daniel! Let’s get me to the Bama Theatre. I’ve gotta pretend I care about this Christmas play,” she said as Daniel put the camera equipment in the van and backed out.

When they reached the theater, he pulled up out front to let Dallas out. The Bama Theatre was grand, built in 1937, and was now on the National Register of Historic Places. It was a magnificent old place, one of the last old movie palaces in the Deep South. Dallas and her archrival ex-stepsister, Blake, had been in many a beauty pageant there over the years. But today the beautiful old place would be home to the Christmas play Sleigh Bells. The holiday play was a town tradition. Local theater kids would make up the cast, as well as children from the Tuscaloosa Children’s Home, a group home for children who, for various reasons, couldn’t live at home with their families. Dallas certainly felt sympathy for those kids, but she definitely didn’t consider herself qualified to take care of them. She was not looking forward to what she had to do.

She entered the auditorium and stopped in her tracks. The ghosts of Christmas past were all around, hovering over her, haunting her. She stood motionless, looking up at the tiny, lighted stars that filled the painted night sky on the ceiling.

She hadn’t seen the stage since they had decorated it and added the sets.

She swallowed hard at the memories that invaded her. The playhouse was covered in Christmas lights, the entire room looking like a winter-white forest, dressed up in its Victorian finest for the holidays. On the stage, a set made to look like a Christmas village sat to the right, with a Christmas wreath hanging on a pretend toy-store door lit by the cutest old-fashioned streetlight.

Dallas was reminded of her first play at this theater, back when she was only eight years old. Her mother almost hadn’t made it to the show because of a freak snowstorm—it never snowed in Alabama. Well, almost never.

She took the whole scene in, remembering all the times she’d walked that stage throughout her life. The countless beauty pageants she’d been in, though she’d never really placed better than runner-up. She had stood by while Blake captured most of the titles, while Blake’s mother, Kitty, had cheered loudly from the audience. She tried to envision her own mother clapping and calling her name, but since she’d hardly ever shown up to Dallas’s events, the memory didn’t exist. She began to feel a break in the firewall, so she quickly plugged the dike.

The kids were there already, of course, running around the stage, the choir director trying anxiously, but to no avail, to calm them down. Dallas puffed her chest out, lifted her chin and headed down the aisle toward the stage to say hello and get the worst part over with.

“Children, may I have your attention?” the chubby little lady called out. Ms. Betty Ann had been the choir director at the Bama Theatre since Dallas had been a child in the Christmas plays herself. “Children, have a seat and let Miss Dallas talk to y’all just a minute,” Betty Ann said. The children, distracted for a moment by their visitor, obediently sat down on the stage in the middle of the little pretend village. Dallas approached them, coming up from the side stairs. Betty Ann leaned over and whispered to Dallas, “Good luck. They’re wound up tighter’n Dick’s hatband today. I’m worn slap out already.”

“Hey, kids,” she started, her heart beating out of her chest. She didn’t like to do things she didn’t want to do, and she knew she really didn’t wanna do this. “I’m Miss Dubois and I’m gonna be your new director.”

Some of the kids started talking. One little girl even started crying.

“Why? What happened to Miss Fairbanks?” asked one little boy. They were all mumbling now, most of them between the ages of six and ten years old.

“Well, Miss Fairbanks wasn’t feeling too well, and she wants to make sure we keep practicing,” Betty Ann broke in.

“Exactly, and now I will be the director.” Dallas smiled at them, hoping to look enthusiastic.

The kids all looked sad, some more started to cry, and one boy actually folded his arms and went to the corner of the stage, stomping his feet.

Offended, she tried to reason with them. “Look, it’s hard for me, too, but here we are now, and Christmas is just around the corner, so let’s make the best of this, okay?” Dallas tried to warm them up, but she wasn’t very good at it. She was starting to lose her cool façade.

“I don’t want you, I want Miss Fairbanks back,” announced Sara Grace Griffin, who was nine years old.

“Well, look, I’m not so sure I’ll like doing this either, but this is the way it is.” Dallas turned and began to walk away, hearing the sound of crying children get louder with each step. She stormed off into the stage wings, arms folded, head down, when she slammed right into—

Cal.

3

Cal jumped back, obviously surprised to see Dallas right there in front of him in the theater wings.

“Cal! Sorry, what are you doing here?” Dallas asked, shocked at bumping into him here.

“I’m running the sound system for the Christmas play. What are you doing here?”

“Well...guess who’s the new director?” She smiled awkwardly, feeling completely out of her element.

“What happened to Ms. Fairbanks?”

“Flu.”

“So...you? You’re the director?”

“Yep. It’s my lucky day.”

“Yeah. Well, good luck, I guess. See ya.”

Cal walked away, and Dallas turned to watch him leave. It was obvious that he was unfazed by seeing her. She, however, was having another flare-up.

Dallas stepped over to the staircase in the wings and sat down in the dim amber glow of the footlights. Unbelievable, she thought. How was it possible that not only was she stuck directing this ridiculous play, but now she’d also have to do it alongside the one man who never failed at making her lose her cool?

She inhaled a deep breath, trying to get a grip on everything that was happening, but it didn’t ease the tension that was beginning to consume her. She felt the pressure building, but for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t sure how to take control of the situation. She felt trapped. There was nothing she wanted more than that anchor spot. The announcement, they’d been told, would come just after Christmas. Great timing, she thought, for the person who got the job. They’d be able to start the New Year with an exciting new job. If she didn’t get it, she could be one of the two reporters to lose her job to station cutbacks. For now, she knew she just had to stay focused. Worrying about the worst-case scenario wasn’t going to make her performance any better. The only thing she could do was to keep her eye on the prize. She had to direct this play and somehow find a way to work with Cal.

Dallas pulled her purse closer, as if it were her only friend in this place. She wore a long winter-white Calvin Klein cashmere coat that she’d bought in Atlanta at a secondhand shop. She drove the three hours over there to shop all the time. She didn’t come from much, but she had done quite a job of making it look as though she did. Her dad, businessman Sweeney Sugarman, had divorced Kitty, his second wife and Blake’s mother, about ten years ago. Financially, he’d done little more than help pay Dallas’s way through college at the University of Alabama. He’d died several years ago and had never even seen her first report for WTAL.

Dallas’s mother, on the other hand, had sent her to live with her father when Dallas had only been fourteen years old. The day she’d left was the last time she had seen her mother. They had become estranged ever since. No one in town even saw LouAnn Watkins Sugarman anymore. Last anyone heard, she had tried to become a singing star out in Hollywood, and when that didn’t pan out, she’d come back home to some small town in Alabama but had never tried to get in touch. It had been twenty years since Dallas had spoken to her. None of Dallas’s family had even come to her college graduation. She was used to being alone. And in control.