When I was a senior in high school in Franklin, Pennsylvania, avant-garde was still only a murky gleam in some foreigner's eye, and Lady Gregory was considered pretty far out as a playwright. What we wanted for our senior class play was a drawing-room comedy, or at least that's what the English teacher who doubled as our drama coach wanted. The fact that none of us on the play-reading committee had ever seen a drawing room, to our knowledge, was no handicap at all. We had the Samuel French catalogue to guide us, and it not only gave clear plot synopses, but even more vital, it told right off how many characters and which sex-- say, 5 m., 9 f. We had more females than males around-- perhaps a chronic imbalance of all amateur theater groups-- so the more f. the better.

I wasn't in the actual cast-- I had a voice which has since been described as having "the timbre of a cuckoo clock"-- but I took a very active part in the production as left-wing prompter. If it hadn't been for me, the heroine, Olivia Dangerfield, would have wrecked one of the most important lines in the play, when she said to her negro mammy, "Old dear, don't forget to feed my doves." This established her character in a flash, showing as it did that although Olivia might behave like a madcap, underneath she was a romantic, well-born Virginia lady, the sort who kept doves to flutter with. Even her saying "Old dear" proved that her ancestors came straight from England.

On opening night the girl playing Olivia read the line as, "Mandy, remember to feed my pigeons," which is not the same thing at all, as I was quick to point out in a carrying tone from the wings. Thanks to my helpful prompting, she had to go back and say, "I mean, old dear, forget the pigeons and feed the doves." For some reason, the audience took this for wit, and laughed harder than they did at some of the real bon mots in the dialogue, such as, "It's the motor car that makes country life possible-- and the Ford that makes it probable."

-- from "A Stage Full of Legs without Bodies"

She didn't look like an advocate of revolution-- black, red, or even white. She looked more like the kind of woman who would clap for Tinkerbell. She was built like a bean pot, but a soft, melted-down bean pot, with short legs and a flattish lid sprouting gray frizzled hair. She was beaming at Chester so nicely, with such a ladylike air, he decided she was merely barmy. One of those barmy old maids of good family that New Englad overproduced. But the last thing he wanted was to get mixed up with any crackpots, however harmless. His new public relations man had warned him on that. He turned away and made a show of listening to Four Elbows' windup: "...six lessons in teen-age POISE-- or conversational RUSSIAN made EASY." She folded her elbows to subside.

The fixed-versus-floating-zone belligerents were still muttering when the chairman called eagerly, "Ah, Miss Washburn, there you are, just in time." He didn't add, "to create a diversion," but the thought hung in the air.

--from Heat Lightning (1969)