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Webster, Henry Kitchell, 1875-1932

"The Real Adventure"

Even if she hadn't
been in the company she'd have found something like two days' work in
every twenty-four hours, just in the wardrobe room. Because the costumes
were cheap and the frank blaze of borders, footlights and spots,
pitilessly betrayed the fact. One set for the ponies was so hopelessly
bad that the owners refused to accept them, and Rose, on the spur of the
moment, made up a costume--they were uniform, fortunately--to replace
them. The wardrobe mistress, with two assistants, and under Rose's
intermittent supervision, managed somehow to get them made. And there
wasn't a single costume, outside Rose's own twelve, that hadn't to be
remodeled more or less.
On top of all that, the really terrible grind of rehearsals began;
property rehearsals, curiously disconcerting at first, where instead of
indicating the business with empty hands, you actually lighted the
cigarette, picked up the paper knife, pulled the locket out from under
your dress and opened it--and, in the process of doing these things,
forgot everything else you knew; scenery rehearsals that caused the
stage to seem small and cluttered up and actually made some of the
evolutions you'd been routined in, impossible.


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