Free Who's Kitten Who? by Cynthia Baxter Page B

“All day I kept muttering it under my breath as I drove from one house call to another.”
    “At least you’ll get your scene out of the way early on,” Betty said. “Anita Snook gives Amelia her first flying lesson in scene four, I believe. You see, the play starts with George Putnam—he’s Amelia’s husband—narrating. He announces that Amelia Earhart is about to embark on a historic flight that will make her the first woman to fly around the world. Onstage behind him, the ensemble is bustling around, reading newspapers and talking about her groundbreaking flight. You and I are both in that scene.
    “But then the play goes back in time, to Amelia’s childhood. She was only ten when she saw her first plane at the Iowa State Fair. A darling little girl named Wendy plays Amelia as a child. Then we see Amelia at twenty—that’s Elena’s first scene. She’s at a stunt-flying exhibition, and the pilot of a small plane deliberately heads toward her to give her a scare. But she stands her ground, not even flinching. There’s a famous quote about the experience, something like, ‘I didn’t understand at the time, but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by.’”
    “So that’s where her passion for flying began,” I commented.
    “Exactly. Then the play follows her through all the events in her early adult life: becoming a nurse’s aide in Toronto during World War Two, going up in a plane for the first time in Long Beach, California, with a pilot named Frank Hawks, and then her first flying lesson with Anita Snook—that’s you.
    “The rest of the play takes the audience through her achievements, as well as her relationship with George Putnam. He was a publisher who started out doing public-relations work for her. But before long, they fell in love and married.”
    “She died on that flight around the world, didn’t she? The one the play begins with?”
    “That’s right. It was in 1937. She’d gone more than twenty-two thousand miles with her navigator, Fred Noonan, and she only had about seven thousand miles to go. But something went wrong and she never made it. She was never found either, which resulted in all kinds of speculation. One theory is that she and Noonan were captured by the Japanese and killed. Another is that they both came back to the United States but used assumed names.”
    Betty shrugged. “As tragic as her untimely disappearance was, it adds to her mystery. She was truly larger than life.”
    At least I didn’t get roped into playing Amelia Earhart, I thought as I pulled into a parking space in front of Theater One. Compared to playing Amelia, spitting out a few lines as Anita Snook should be a snap.
    As soon as I walked inside, I sensed that the atmosphere was markedly different from the first time I’d been there, right after everyone got the tragic news about Simon Wainwright. That time I’d felt like I was attending a memorial service. Today there was a buzz in the air that practically screamed,
It’s showtime!
    As I trailed down the aisle after Betty, swerving out of the way of the sewing machine someone had set up near the stage, I realized that the butterflies in my stomach weren’t the only ones doing warm-ups. The other members of the company were scattered around the first ten or fifteen rows stretching, doing breathing exercises, or earnestly studying their scripts.
    “How come everyone’s sitting out front, instead of backstage?” I asked.
    “Derek likes the cast members to sit in the audience as much as possible during rehearsals,” Betty replied. “Watching the rest of the cast rehearse helps familiarize everyone with the entire production. This way, everyone can also hear all his comments, so he doesn’t end up saying the same things over and over.”
    Nearly all the cast members were dressed casually in T-shirts and jeans or sweatpants. In fact, Betty was one of the few who looked the way I’d expect performers to look