Free Copp In The Dark, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) by Don Pendleton

unreal, especially if they're all aimed toward Broadway. I try to tell the kids who come through here to relax and enjoy it—hey, people are paying to watch them perform. If you'd perform without pay— and you're no performer if you wouldn't—then hey, you've made it, you've arrived, enjoy it."
    I guessed, "Craig couldn't do that."
           "Well that's just it, that's what so sad, Craig did do that, but to a fault. Craig seemed to live for that moment, that moment on the stage when the dream was working. Craig's problem, you see, was that he often could not or would not turn it off when the curtain came down."
    "Give me an example."
    "He was into American Indian mysticism—barely into it, I'd guess, Craig was no scholar. But he'd picked up this shamanistic idea that the dream time is the real life and the real life is the dream. He—"
    "Sort of fits the La Mancha theme, doesn't it?"
    "Pretty close, yes, pretty close. But the Indians still went out and hunted the buffalo and killed it and ate it because they knew that real or not they still had to feed themselves to keep the dreams alive. But you're right—I've often thought that Craig was so right for La Mancha because he was really playing himself up there on that stage."
    I said, " La Mancha is a story within a story."
    "It's a story within a story within a story," she corrected me. "And it's also a dream within a dream within a dream. The prisoner Cervantes is a defeated and dying old man who invents the fictional Alonso Quijana as an inept, ineffectual and perhaps demented old country gentleman who transforms himself into Quixote, an inept, ineffectual and certainly demented knight who sees the world exacdy as he chooses to see it, all other evidence to the contrary— but then that illusion is seen as a transforming vision of human life as it ought to be, not so much by Quixote or Quijana as by those who are moved and transformed by his insanity. The play ends with the other prisoners singing "The Impossible Dream" to Cervantes as he is being led away for judgment before the Inquisition. It's powerful stuff, and that is why the play has captured the hearts of so many people all over the world."
    "But Craig was no Cervantes."
    "No. Craig, I'm afraid, was too lightweight for that. Craig, I would say, was the demented knight."
    "Acting out what?"
    "His dementia."
    "And that took the form of...?"
    "One of the boys who was in the play is very shy. He's a bit overweight and has a so-so talent but hell make it in community theater if he sticks it out. Well, this boy fell
    crazy in love with one of the girls in the chorus. Talked about her all the time, I gather, among the other guys, but he was too shy to even ask the girl for a date. So Craig- Quixote intervened.   He didn't play John Alden, he played God.
    Told the boy that he'd overheard the girl talking about him, that she was crazy about him and that she couldn't understand why the boy wasn't showing any interest in her. Well, I'm sure he was kindly motivated and thought it would give the boy the courage to make a move. Instead, the boy asked Craig to make the move for him. Craig did, apparently, but the girl said the same thing that Priscilla said, speak for yourself.
    "So Craig made a date with her, then went back and told the boy that it was all set up. So the boy goes and blows a hundred and fifty dollars for a limousine and shows up at the girl's door at the appointed hour bearing flowers and candy. Predictably, she is very disappointed by this turn of events and slams the door in the boy's face. We heard about this from the girl herself. Never saw the boy again. He was too humiliated to come back, even quit the show by telephone."
    I said, "A good deed gone astray."
    "Worse than that," Judith assured me. "I called Craig on that. He just smiled at me and said, 'He had it all for awhile, didn't he?' That's what I mean about confusing dreams with reality. That boy didn't have anything except a false hope