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with a new mania. Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore spread like a contagion from the Fifth Avenue Theater in New York to the Adelphi in San Francisco, infecting thousands of community stages in between. There were children’s productions, Catholic versions, Yiddish translations, all-male and all-black and minstrel performances. Suddenly everyone was whistling “We sail the ocean blue,” or humming “Poor little Buttercup.” Just say the word “never,” and you’d be drawn into the patter. “What, never?” “No, never!” “What, never ?” “Well . . . hardly ever!”
    When the Pauline Markham Pinafore Troupe arrived in San Francisco, it didn’t take much persuasion to get Mrs. Hirsch to accompany Dora, Agnes, and Sadie to a children’s half-price matinée. Once was enough for Evelyn Hirsch, but the girls were enthralled and begged to see the operetta again and again. All of them were stagestruck, but when Agnes revealed that Tommy Tucker the Cabin Boy was played by a girl, Sadie was lost.
    â€œYou mean she’s wearing trousers? Like Bernhardt ? Agnes, are you sure?”
    â€œI most certainly am.”
    â€œIn grand opera,” Dora informed them, “it’s called a Hosenrolle —a young man played by a contralto in breeches.”
    Dora could be a know-it-all.
    The next time they went to the theater, Sadie watched for a telltale jiggle beneath the cabin boy’s blue jacket that might give a girl away during the sailor’s hornpipe. The dancer seemed a bit heavier than when the operetta opened two weeks earlier, but Sadie still couldn’t believe it.
    â€œAgnes, you’re wrong,” she whispered. “That’s a boy.”
    â€œYou’ll see soon enough. Tommy Tucker is . . .” Agnes dropped her voice and leaned over to say, “ . . . en famille.” A lady one row back hissed at them, so Agnes waited a moment before murmuring, “Pauline told me so.”
    â€œPauline? You mean—?”
    â€œMiss Markham, yes. I met her at a party.” Ignoring the insistent “Shhh!” behind them, Agnes bestowed her most momentous news in a dramatic whisper. “They’re casting for a new cabin boy at the end of the San Francisco run.”
    SNEAKING MONEY FROM THE BAKERY TILL and skipping school, Sadie returned to the theater twice more that week to check the choreography. Locked in the bakery storeroom, she practiced the hornpipe madly. When she wasn’t hopping on one foot or hauling on imaginary ropes or giving charming nautical salutes, she was upstairs in her room, gazing into a hand mirror and working on her “Mysterious and Tragic but Courageous” expression, while making up a story about being an orphan whose lifelong dream was to join the Pauline Markham troupe and travel the world to earn the applause of audiences everywhere—nonsense that rattled right out of her head the moment she stepped through the stage door at the Adelphi.
    Surrounded by a chaos of packing crates, costumes, props, and rolled-up canvas scenery, she waited to be noticed, which she was, butmostly by stagehands who shouted at her to get the hell out of the way.
    â€œHebe?” a refined baritone asked curiously.
    She turned, offended. “I beg your pardon!”
    â€œWhat part are you auditioning for? Cousin Hebe? The Captain’s Daughter? Surely not Dick Deadeye.”
    She needed a moment to recognize him. The First Lord of the Admiralty was a pompous old man, and she’d paid little attention to that character. Without the ruddy makeup, the admiral’s costume, and talc-whitened hair, the actor was much younger than she would have imagined. He had a gallant bearing and tawny leonine hair sweeping back from the kind of forehead she’d learned to call “lofty” from reading novels.
    â€œCome, child! We sail upon the tide! No time to