witness to a group of elderly ladies running roughshod over her), she calmed herself as she caught up to them.
“I told you they have to be back here,” Juanita said. “It’s always in the back area—”
“Well, I remember coming around to see Melvin Millhouse when he was playing Hamlet, and they were definitely to the lef—”
“I’ll show you exactly where it is,” said Vivien firmly, relieved that she was now within grabbing distance of either of them. “Now, perhaps we should wait for Iva and Orbra so they can see your dressing room too?”
“Room? Only one?” Maxine said, pursing her lips. “I don’t remember there being a sharing-the-dressing-room clause in the contract, Miss Vivien Leigh.”
Vivien didn’t bother to respond. She didn’t think she could without her voice coiling up into a high, tight spiral and her eyes bulging. And she’d thought handling a rising Instagram influencer had been a challenge…but dealing with Betsy Baker’s Better Self (a self-betterment guru that made Goop look like a redneck) had toughened her up.
And seriously, Maxine Took and Juanita Acerita were even worse than the Broadway diva Louise London, who was Vivien’s biggest client. High-maintenance didn’t begin to cover it.
“All right, now that we’re all here,” she said smoothly and a little loudly so as to drown out Maxine’s bitter demands for her own dressing room, “I’ll show you where all the magic is going to happen.” She managed to infuse a rush of enthusiasm and warmth into her tone and began to carefully lead the way into the depths of the backstage area.
The wings spread out on either side of the stage, and then gave way into short corridors that led to the dressing rooms, prop room, tech room, and the huge, high-ceilinged workshop that was accessed by the massive roll-up door—all of which sprawled behind the back wall of the stage.
A team of volunteers had been assigned to come through and replace as many light bulbs as possible, so there was a decent amount of illumination in the corridor and the rooms. But in the wings it was still a dim, shadowy warren of space right now, littered with crates, scaffolding, chairs, tables, and other items that had just been left around after the last show closed quickly and unexpectedly.
“It was The Nutcracker,” Iva said. “Now I remember! They just closed the place right down. People showed up with tickets for the Christmas Eve Eve performance—”
“Christmas Eve Eve?” Maxine said, thumping her cane in emphasis. “You got a stutter now, Iva?”
“I certainly do not. You know what I meant—it was the twenty-third of December, and—”
“That’s right,” Orbra cut in. “I remember. They were doing a one-week performance—a local woman was playing the pretty ballerina with the traveling group—and then bam! No one really knew why it shut down just like that. Something about a member of the cast getting sick at the last minute. I don’t remember much about it. Christmas is a very busy time at the Tea House. Everyone wants to have high tea with their grandma, aunts, cousins, whatever.”
“I heard the Sugarplum Fairy ran off with the Nutcracker,” said Juanita, giggling a little. “And that’s why they had to cancel the show.”
“And the dish ran away with the spoon?” Maxine demanded as if she were cross-examining someone on a witness stand.
Vivien suddenly realized she had a raging headache.
Iva rolled her eyes. “Well, I don’t know about that, Maxine, but the holidays were here and everyone was too busy to pay very close attention to what was happening. I don’t even remember who was running the theater at the time…someone local, I’m sure.” She frowned, as if trying to remember.
“And then it was January,” Orbra said, “and no one really thought about the whole thing, since there were never any shows in the winter back then—we didn’t have any tourists until the end of June back in the eighties and nineties, you know, when all of the Big Three Autos—back then they were the Big Three, anyway—shut down for two weeks in July. Everyone would come over here from the east side of the state.”
“So the theater never opened again the following summer—I don’t know why—and after that, everyone must’ve given up on the place,” said Juanita, looking around with bright eyes. “So very sad.”
“I wonder what happened,” said Iva as she trotted along.
Vivien hardly listened to their chatter, as she was more interested in keeping all of them upright and unscathed as they navigated through. Whoever thought it was