I strolled back to the tent to the strains of “The Pennsylvania Polka.” The lemonade had restored my energy a bit. I still wasn’t up to walking in time to the music, but I could at least appreciate that if you were a polka lover you were probably having a great time out here in the square.
When I got back to the tent, I found it swarming with half-dressed people. I blinked, and then realized they were Michael’s drama students from the college, getting ready to perform their play. I took a deep breath and put on what I called my Mrs. Professor Waterston face. I’d learned from one of the students that I had a reputation as one of the nicer faculty wives, and I didn’t want to blow that.
Standing just inside the doorway holding a clipboard was Kathy Borgstrom, who served as the drama department’s administrative assistant—which meant that it was her job to keep dozens of creative, temperamental, impractical, and often dangerously absentminded people from becoming completely disorganized. Today she looked even more than usual like a border collie who’d been saddled with a herd of half-grown kittens.
“Good God, they haven’t added another scene at the last minute, have they?” she asked, glancing back and forth between me and her clipboard a couple of times. “Just what are you supposed to be?”
I took in the crowd. A pair of British redcoats were eating ice cream cones and talking with a World War I doughboy. A woman wearing a Caerphilly College T-shirt and a Civil War–era hoopskirt was trying to squeeze through the crowd and getting nowhere. Another woman wearing a fringed and beaded leather American Indian dress was lounging on a blanket in one corner, reading a graphic novel. A union private and a Confederate colonel were feeding cheese crackers to Mr. Throckmorton’s pigeons. A woman dressed in black pedal pushers and a black sleeveless shirt was powdering an entire row of Colonial–era wigs on wire stands. Half a dozen actors in various stages of undress from several centuries were pacing back and forth in every part of the tent, loudly doing vocal exercises.
“I’m actually here to get out of costume,” I said. “What’s all this?”
“The play,” Kathy said. “Actually more like a series of historic scenes illustrating the high points of American history. John Smith and Pocahontas. Patrick Henry’s ‘Liberty or Death’ speech. The Boston Tea Party. The Battle of Bull Run.” She glanced around and then continued in an undertone. “It’s a bit heavy on the noisy bits of history—anything with a lot of shouting or cannon fire made the cut.”
I nodded. I noted, with approval, that Rose Noire had retreated to the other end of the tent, taking both dogs with her to guard the entrance to the tunnel. Eric and the twins were pressed against the fence, watching the costume parade with wide eyes.
I went to the bins where I kept useful stuff and pulled out a change of clothes—I usually kept several in the tent in case I wanted to look presentable after a bout of blacksmithing in the heat. I stepped behind a clothes rack, shed the bulky choir robe, pulled on the jeans and T-shirt, and breathed a sigh of relief. I wanted to grab some cold water from my minirefrigerator—not to drink, after all that lemonade, but to pour over myself. Alas, unlike Kathy, most of the students weren’t in on the secret of the tunnel, so I refrained.
I settled for giving the boys a quick hug.
“You think the play’s going to be something the boys would like?” Eric asked. “I was thinking of taking them out front to watch.”
“Check with Michael,” I said. “There might be a lot of battle scenes.”
“They seem pretty good with loud noises,” Eric said. “Even—ow!”
A deafening screech of feedback had interrupted him.
“Good grief,” Eric said. “Do those guys know anything about how to run a sound system?”
“They’re doing just fine,” I said.
“Fine?” He was staring at me with that look teenagers get when they think adults are being particularly dense. “Fine? You mean you can’t hear that feedback?”
“The feedback’s part of their job,” I reminded him. “If someone opens the trapdoor during the concert, the noise it makes will just sound like more feedback.”
“But— but—” Clearly Eric was having a harder time than most of us accepting this now-standard feature of life during Caerphilly Days. “It’s awful,” he said finally. “Like fingernails on a chalkboard. Worse than fingernails on a chalkboard, in fact.”
“That’s an interesting comment,” Rose Noire remarked. “Did you know, there’s been some research done on why humans find that sound so universally unpleasant?”