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flustered.
    The middle box opened, and a third puppet emerged, this one fat, bald, and with one large eyebrow. “I don’t see what’s so bad about that,” he said in a thick Cockney accent.
    “There’s nothing bad about that,” said the professor. “Well, nothing
that
bad about that. It’s what he said after that gets my goat. She replied no, she didn’t, and then he said—”
    “I said, in that case I’d have to keep coming back here,” said Denny, and though his face was unmistakably wooden George got the impression that it had smirked at them.
    The drummer in the orchestra rattled off a syncopated beat after the punch line, and the audience laughed as the professor sputtered to respond to his puppet. They were all crude-looking things, like they had each been carved out of a single log, but somehow their crudeness lent them a believable air of expression.
    “You all get more and more out of control every day!” said the professor. “Berry, you even insulted my actor friend!” he told the fat puppet.
    “What? I said he was great in his death scene in the play,” said Berry.
    “Yes, but you said it should have come several acts earlier!”
    Another beat from the drummer (this one a little late, George noted), and the audience roared laughter. Berry mugged for the crowd, even though his face did not seem to move.
    “I guess we did sort of ruin things,” said Denny. “They all got a little down when I told them about my friend Frank.”
    “Frank?” said Berry. “Why, what happened to him?”
    “Well, he passed on.”
    “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that, Denny!” said the professor.
    “Yeah,” said Denny. “He fell through some scaffolding.”
    “How horrible!” said the Professor. “Was he fixing his roof?”
    “No, he was being hung,” said the puppet, and again there was the snarl of a snare drum.
    “Oh, Denny!” said the professor. The crowd clapped and cawed laughter.
    “He’s rigging them up underneath the table,” whispered a woman in the row before George.
    “Hush,” said her friend, but George had thought the same thing. Yet even so, how was the professor manipulating three puppets at once?
    “I didn’t do anything wrong, did I, Doc?” said the Southern belle puppet.
    “No,” said the professor to her kindly. “No, you didn’t, Mary-Ann.”
    “Good,” she said. “Though I did meet the most delightful man at the party.”
    “Did you?” said the professor.
    “Oh, yes. He’s very well respected, a Southern planter.”
    “Ah, very good.”
    “Yes,” she said, “he’s an undertaker from New Orleans, you see.”
    “Oh!” cried the professor, anguished at having been made a fool of again. The bass drum belched down in the orchestra pit, and the audience hooted and clapped. “What can I do to get you all to behave!”
    “Well, why don’t you let us out, Doc?” said Denny.
    “Let you out?” said the professor.
    “Yes! Let us stretch our legs.” He wiggled in his box as though straining to move his limbs. “Let us out of the boxes, Doc, and set us loose!”
    “Oh, Denny,” said the professor, “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”
    “Why not?” said Berry. “We could be real people for you!”
    “Real?”
    “Yes!” said Mary-Ann. “Real people, for you, for everyone! For this one last performance here!” She turned to beam out at the audience.
    “We could own houses, ride trains, and even vote!” said Denny. “Several times, if we wanted to!” Again the puppet seemed to smile coyly.
    “But why would you want that?” said the professor.
    “Everyone wants that, Doc,” said Denny.
    “We’d be no longer wooden,” said Mary-Ann. “No longer so stiff, so hard, so cold.”
    “Yes,” said Berry. “Everyone wants to be real. You’re one or the other. You are or you aren’t. And here we are, stuck in between.”
    The audience members laughed a little, but glanced at one another, unsure. Usually every exchange was a joke, but