Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for August 15, 2019

Good morning™, preview audience!

Sally seems a bit distracted. She’d probably rather be following that bag, wherever it went with the stagehand.

It’s actually a wonderful play, deliberately understated yet very affecting and powerful. As I recall (and it’s been a long while), the Stage Manager is a narrator and scene-setter and facilitator, but does not himself do much emoting or heavy drama. Past Stage Managers have included Spalding Gray, Paul Newman, Hal Holbrook, Frank Sinatra, and Wilder himself.

Obviously it’s where Grover’s Walls end….

Down in the country next to the river over the hill!!!

As Margo Channing would put it, Welcome to the Theater.

Mike has been filling the last few days with facts about, and dialog from, the “Our Town” play. Is he (yet again) just indulging himself with a side trip about a special interest of his, or will this actually go somewhere within the context of our story?

for an interview neither woman seems to be paying attention to the other.

Sally is thinking get the thermos and get out of there!

Kandikane’s attention is focused on Vitamin. She has not noticed Sally’s really not listening.

1- KID: Hey pops – are you Sugar Daddy? Somebody wanted me to tell you that your obituary is in today’s paper. SUGAR DADDY: First the tombstone with my name on it and now this. Somebody’s trying to tell me something. But what?!?! 2- BARBER: HA! Look at him go. Exit stage right!. LOLA: Where? I don’t see him?

Over the river and through the woods.

Thanks, Kandi but I said all of the same things yesterday.

Next up in this exciting adventure; Mark Antony’s funeral speech delivered by “Doc” while swatting flies..ooh the thrills never……start

Actually, Sally’s doing a pretty good job of being in character. I doubt many journalists her age are familiar with “Our Town”. She’d probably think Thornton Wilder is a free-range rosebush.

The Stage Manager in the play goes on to tell us that Joe Crowell later got a scholarship to Massachusetts Tech [MIT] where he also graduated at the head of his engineering class, but then he went to fight in World War I and was killed in France, so all his education went to waste, and his potential was never realized. I expect that Doc is also wasting his potential by dealing drugs instead of attending classes (probably in law) at a college that his grandmother says is “lucky to have [him] as a student.” At least in his grandmother’s estimation, he is a very bright student.

HHHhhmmmmm… I think we can read Sally like a book. One of those diary things, with nothing on any of the pages… 8^)

up the road from Mayberry

Sally is bored, antsy, uninterested, worried, and seeking an Easy Way Out of an increasingly bad situation.

So, what will be the deus ex machina? Will Little Doc show up to inflame the playhouse status quo?