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play. I’m going to spoil it for everybody! I thought I was ready for something like this but I’m not!”
    â€œOh, don’t say that! Somebody must have thought you were ready or you wouldn’t have gotten the role in the first place, right?”
    â€œThat’s the strange part. It was Abby who picked me for this role. She saw a TV movie I did and thought I’d be right for the role of Sheila and here I am! I’ve been trying to get away from those glamour-girl roles I’ve been stuck in for so long that I practically slobbered on the woman the first time she spoke to me about it. But now …”
    â€œWell, then, that should count for a lot—she’s never picked a TV star before, has she?”
    â€œNo, and she never will again after The Apostrophe Thief .”
    Marian smiled. “Sorry, I just don’t believe you’re that awful. What you’ve got is nothing more than good old-fashioned stage fright. What I hear, lots of actors suffer from that all their lives.”
    â€œOh, thanks a lot!”
    â€œWhat I mean is, there’s nothing wrong with you . It’s just one of the hazards of the profession, isn’t it?”
    Kelly made a noise that might have been assent. “You’d think Abby’d be willing to help me out, since she picked me. But she’s barely spoken to me since rehearsals began.”
    â€œWell, maybe that’s just her manner.”
    Kelly sighed. “I suppose. She and Ian Cavanaugh are both like that—kind of stand-offish.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, she should have been willing to help you out?” Marian asked. “What were you arguing with her about?”
    â€œI wanted her to rewrite a line—it’s too hard to say without twisting it up. One line. But no, nobody meddles with Abigail James’s peerless prose! Even the director has asked her to cut it, but she won’t. She just keeps telling me to get it right.”
    â€œWhat’s the line?”
    Kelly thrust a script at her. “This speech here.” She pointed. “I absolutely, positively, cannot say it.”
    Marian looked at the line. “‘People mean no more to you than a watch battery,’” she read. “‘Useful for about a year, then it’s time for a replacement.’” She frowned. “What’s so hard about that?”
    Kelly’s face had fallen. “You too? Everybody in the whole world can say that line except me! I can say ‘Better buy better rubber baby buggy bumpers’ and ‘He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts’—but I cannot say ‘People mean no more to you than a batch watery.’ There, you see? I always do that— batch watery . Read it again.”
    Marian read the line again. “Try building up to the word ‘watch’,” she said. “Don’t think about ‘battery.’” And immediately felt foolish for giving acting advice to a professional.
    But it did the trick. After a couple of tries Kelly got the line out the way it was supposed to be said and did a little dance of triumph to celebrate. She tried it again; and while her delivery wasn’t smooth, at least she was no longer spoonerizing. “Ah, thank you, Marian! You’ve saved my life!”
    â€œDidn’t your director tell you to do it that way?”
    Her friend looked sheepish. “He probably did. John’s a good director, but I’ve been so rattled I don’t always remember what he’s told me. I don’t see how these people do it—remember everything, I mean. In television, you finish a day’s work and go home and forget those lines because they’re over , done, finished, goodbye! But here you’ve got to remember a whole play’s worth of lines and you have to remember them all the time. Plus about a zillion stage directions. And do you know I’m responsible