And This Is Laura. Ellen Conford

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СКАЧАТЬ must have inspired us. This time quite a few people waved their hands to be called on, and even I felt the urge to try a pantomime. It looked like fun.

      The next person was a short girl with dark, curly hair.

      “I’m Rita Lovett,” she said, almost in a squeak.

      Mr. Kane had her put on shoes and socks. She wasn’t nearly as good as Jean Freeman had been. In fact, if I didn’t know she was supposed to be putting on shoes and socks, I would have thought she was tromping on ants and spraining her ankles because all she really did was raise and lower her feet a couple of times and kind of hold her hands on them.

      Beth looked at me and shrugged, ever so slightly, as if to say, “Either one of us could do better than that.”

      I nodded to show I agreed.

      “That’s not bad, Rita,” Mr. Kane said. “But remember when you do pantomime there are lots of little details that make it realistic and if you leave them out it’s not as effective. Can anyone suggest something that Rita might have done even before she started to put on her socks?”

      What was she supposed to have done before putting the socks on? I couldn’t imagine. It seemed to me that Rita’s problem was mainly that when she was supposed to look like she was putting on socks she actually looked like she was stomping on bugs, but apparently that wasn’t what bothered Mr. Kane.

      “She should have gotten the socks from the drawer,” said Jean from the back of the room. “And then she should have unfolded them, or unrolled them or something like that.”

      “Right. You remember, Jean didn’t start right off brushing her teeth. She did all the preliminary things you do first, uncapping the toothpaste, turning on the water. It’s those little details that help your audience really see the thing you’re acting out.”

      Beth and I both raised our hands. He called on me.

      I went to the front of the room and looked back at all those faces. Beth smiled encouragingly at me. I tried not to show that I was nervous.

      “I’m Laura Hoffman.”

      “Laura’s sister, Jill,” Mr. Kane said, “was in this club a few years ago. She had exceptional talent. It seems to run in the family.”

      I sighed. I wished Mr. Kane wouldn’t make such snap judgments. After all he hadn’t even seen me act yet and now that he had everyone expecting I’d be as good as my incredibly talented sister, I felt more self-conscious than ever.

      Everyone waited for me to do something terrific.

      “Make a peanut butter sandwich,” Mr. Kane said.

      Peanut butter sandwich. Why, I’d done that hundreds of times. I reached for a jar of peanut butter above my head, like I was getting it from a kitchen cabinet. But I couldn’t really feel it in my hand. How big was the jar? How wide did my fingers spread when I held a real jar of peanut butter?

      I got the bread and put it down next to the peanut butter. I held it in two hands, although I was pretty sure that wasn’t the way I usually carried bread around. Again, with the knife, I couldn’t “feel” how I would ordinarily hold a knife. Did I just clutch it, or did my index finger extend over the handle?

      I stuck the knife into the peanut butter jar and pulled it straight out. I think I did the spreading part pretty well, like I was really smearing on peanut butter. But apart from that, I knew I wasn’t much good.

      It felt so strange. I mean, even though all those people were watching me, what bothered me most was that I couldn’t remember how it felt to hold a jar or a knife, things I did every day. It was mystifying that a peanut butter sandwich was so much more complicated to make in pantomime than it was in real life.

      “Not bad, Laura.” Was it my imagination, or did he actually sound disappointed?

      A little let down, I went back to my seat.

      “Did anyone notice anything Laura forgot to do when she made her sandwich?”

      Rita Lovett waved her hand. Without waiting to be called on she blurted, “She forgot to take the lid off the jar!”

      She smiled triumphantly, as if she’d somehow made up for not unrolling her socks by noticing my jar lid.

      Beth looked disgusted. “She just couldn’t wait,” she whispered, “to pick on someone else’s tiny mistake. I thought you were very good.”

      I was grateful for her sympathy. But I was so annoyed with myself! How could I forget a dumb thing like the jar lid, when I’d been so careful to look out for just those little details Mr. Kane warned us about? I remembered to put stuff back in the cabinet—I even put the knife in the sink, although probably no one knew what I was doing. I guess I’d been so busy looking out for all the little details that I forgot to watch out for the big ones.

      Beth was next. She had to make a telephone call. Without talking aloud, of course.

      She was good. She moved her lips and made faces and reacted like she was really having a conversation with someone. You could even see her leaning against a wall that wasn’t there and fiddling with the curly telephone cord.

      I made little clapping motions as she came back to the seat, and she grinned.

      No one could find anything wrong with her pantomime.

      “That’s all we have time for today,” Mr. Kane said. There were a few groans of disappointment from some of the people who still had their hands up.

      “We’ll do some more next week,” he promised. “And I’ll have some monologues prepared for you to read too. And after that, we’ll begin to talk about our first play of the season.”

      The room buzzed with excitement. A lot of the shyness had apparently been overcome.

      “And maybe,” Mr. Kane went on, “you boys could get some of your friends to come down and join us. We’ll need some male actors for our productions, you know.”

      The boys didn’t say anything. They looked slightly uncomfortable. They hadn’t done any pantomimes or even raised their hands during the whole meeting. I wondered if they’d stumbled into the wrong room by mistake and had been too embarrassed to just get up and walk out. One of them looked really young, like a fifth grader, and the other was tall and skinny with stuck-out ears. Neither of them looked like a potential leading man.

      “You were so good,” I told Beth as we walked out of the building.

      “Oh, it’s just that he gave me such an easy one to do. Yours was much harder than mine. Try it, you’ll see how simple it is.”

      “I will when I get home.” In fact, that’s just what I’d been planning to do. She’d made it look like fun to make an imaginary telephone call and I couldn’t wait to try it in front of a mirror.

      Beth and I certainly seemed to be on the same wavelength. Though I hardly knew her, I did know right away that I liked her and wanted to get to know her better.

      “Where do you live?” she asked. “Do you get the bus?”

      “No, СКАЧАТЬ