Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/390

 "I'm hungry too, I think I'll go with him," Lois said. She had returned a few days earlier, as unexpectedly as she had disappeared but minus the lieutenant.

"You'll stay right here, Cleo will get what anyone wants," Vida said angrily.

"Now, girls, don't be nervous, you're all going to be just fine," Lucy soothed.

"No smoking on stage," Pop ordered the feller who was a Negro, Hindu, Chinese, or something.

Ranna regarded Pop coldly and returned to his dressing room which fortunately had a couch on which he could rest. Ridiculous, he thought, for everyone to become so wrought up. Reclining on the couch he heard Ilona, in the next room, retching as he fell asleep.

"Let Ilona set her lights first because the poor thing is awfully nervous," Lucy told Vida.

"How about you first?"

"Oh, I'm used to this."

The stagehands had shifted slowly from low to second gear. Placing and removing harps and other props on the stage between scenes would require two extra men, the property man declared flatly.

"And," added the electrician, "if you expect to use these bunch standards in the legs, I must have two more men to change colors."

"You mean you can't walk two steps from the switchboard or across the stage and slip a color in and out between the scenes?" Vida expostulated. "This isn't a big Broadway production, it's a kind of tryout. You'll make more out of it than she will, or anyone in her cast. In fact she won't make anything. After all, she's a worker like you. And if it weren't for her you wouldn't be making double-time pay today."

"You can't expect us to make exceptions," the electrician said sulkily. "First thing every show tryout'll want a skeleton crew until after an opening."

Vida saw Lucy signaling and said frigidly, "Excuse me please."

"Listen," Lucy instructed, "don't argue because you won't get anywhere."

To Lucy, at this moment, the stage crew were the only ones with whom she felt at home. It was easy to cope with hard-boiled men. In a way she sympathized with them because of the nuisance Ilona was being in explaining what lights she wanted.

"I want a night light shaft here when I do this movement, and I want it to change to dawn and catch me when I am here," Ilona 378