The second stop on the tour, the theater, was always the trickiest one because Summerlost Festival employees were around early, getting ready for the day, and the box office opened for a couple of hours in the morning.
In addition to regular-priced tickets, the festival sold discounted day-of tickets to residents of Iron Creek, and those tickets were first-come, first-served on the day of the performance. The seats were only ten dollars but you had to sit on the very back row of the lower gallery, on a bench, not a theater seat. Leo told me all about it because he usually went to a bunch of the plays with the ten-dollar tickets, but this summer he was saving every bit of his money.
The idea behind the cheap day-of tickets was that they wanted to make the theater experience accessible to everyone, like the way people in Shakespeare’s time could go to see the show for a penny if they were willing to stand.
It would be awful to stand for that long.
Anyway, Leo and I didn’t want to run into a neighbor coming to stand in line or an employee working or, especially, Gary.
If we ran into Gary, it would be a one-way ticket out of England.
Because of all that, we didn’t take the tour clients to the actual theater. We took them to the forest nearby.
It had rained the night before, a high-desert rain that left everything smelling good and the sky clear and enormous. Our feet crunched on the pine needles under the trees and our group murmured quietly to one another. It was a nice group of six older people, three sisters and their spouses, who had been coming to Summerlost for thirty years. Even though it was early, all three sisters were wearing sunglasses that looked so powerful it seemed like you could wear them into space.
“You can learn about the theater and the way it works on one of the official tours,” I said, when we’d all gathered in one spot under the trees. “But we like to bring you here to see the whole festival below you as we talk about Lisette’s career.”
“All these years coming here and we’ve never been over to this forest,” said Amy, one of the women. I knew her name because Leo and I had started giving the people on the tour name tags, and wearing them ourselves. It was easier that way for questions.
“Silly of us,” said her husband, Bill. “It’s nice here.”
“They’re talking about building an amphitheater over here,” I said, “for festival lectures and things. But it would mean cutting down some of the trees.”
“Oh, I don’t like that idea,” said another sister, Florence.
There wasn’t a lot of undergrowth under the pine trees, so you could see between the tree trunks to the theater. In the cool morning light, the banner on top waved at us.
“Lisette began, of course, in the Greenshow,” I said, and everyone’s gaze shifted to the Greenshow stage, with its half-timbered platform. “She was eleven. She’d been watching the show for years because it was free and her family didn’t have much money. They came every night. Lisette was later quoted in many interviews as saying the Greenshow was better than a movie.”
Leo grinned at me. We’d been doing the tour for a few weeks now and I sounded like a pro.
I gave the same information Leo did but I said things in different ways.
“When she was eleven, the Summerlost Festival decided they wanted to do a Greenshow act with children in it,” I said. This was my favorite part. “Lisette didn’t audition. She didn’t hear about it in time. But she watched the performances all summer long. And one day, when one of the children stayed home sick, she jumped up on the stage. In her shorts and her T-shirt and sneakers. And she did the whole dance, and then said all the missing girl’s lines.”
Florence clasped her hands and smiled, even though she must have already known this. I smiled back. I understood.
I loved the story because Lisette went ahead and took her chance. She decided to go for what she wanted.
And I loved the story because it reminded me of my dad and that day he’d been pulled out of the audience. Even though he and Lisette were totally different onstage. Even though she’d wanted to go up and he’d been embarrassed the whole time.
“After that,” I said, “the Greenshow director wrote Lisette into the production for the rest of the summer. And that was the beginning.”
Leo took over the next part because they loved it when he rattled off the dates and names of every single Lisette Chamberlain performance in less than two minutes. He dared them to time him and they always did.
“Young man!” said Ida, the third of the sisters. “That was amazing!”
Leo smiled. “What was your favorite performance of Lisette’s?”
I stood, half listening, and I noticed someone walking across the courtyard stop and look over in our direction. Whoever it was raised a hand to shield their eyes.
Uh-oh. Had we been sighted? Could they see us through the trees?
Leo and I had a code in case something like that happened.
I raised my hand, which I never did otherwise.