Thank You for Ten: Short Fiction About a Little Theater

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  The joint production of A Christmas Carol, with the Prescott Players opens Friday the 18th at the Little Dionysus Playhouse at 8:00PM. Tickets can be purchased online or over the phone up until an hour before curtain.

  Art, Look, Listen

  Alicia had entered the incorrect code twice already. The third time was not the charm and the lock-box beeped its disapproval again. If she'd write these things down…

  On the fourth try, she remembered the five digits in the proper order, and the box beeped its sweet acceptance of her code. The red flashing light now shone solid green. She pulled open the tiny drawer and removed the key. She grabbed her bag of supplies, and entered the building. To spare heartache later on, she replaced the key into the lock-box right away.

  Once again she made her way past shelves of toy guns, cups, plates, goofy hats, and many other forms of theatrical paraphernalia. The novelty of these items had long since worn off in the month and a half she'd been coming here. On this, probably her last day, she paid it all virtually no mind as she passed into a door leading her into the long, thin hallway that used to give her the creeps.

  This hallway led both to the backstage area of this theater and out into what she called the audience section, though she knew theater types called it "the house". From the house she walked up the slight incline of one of the aisles toward the open door of the lobby, her final destination. It would have been easier to be given a key to enter the lobby right from the street, but management told her there were only two copies of that key. So she'd been given the code to the back entrance.

  Sunlight from a pretty April morning perfectly illuminated the lobby today. She unfolded the stepping stool that she'd left leaning against the wall on her previous visit, and placed it in front of a large rectangle mounted on the wall and draped in red cloth. She climbed the small stool and grabbed a handful of the cloth. She pulled the cloth aside.

  "Good morning, again," she said to an oil painting. "Our last session together. Are you ready?"

  The face responded with the same almost-smile that had greeted her every comment, question and observation over the last seven Sundays. Unchanged, and yet somehow still responding in kind to whatever mood she'd been in when she arrived, the oil painting had intrigued her from the start.

  "You were a bit of a mess when we met, weren't you?" she asked. "Now look at you. Almost as good as new."

  She stepped down and looked at the entire painting from a distance. A well built man in a white robe, with unruly but not messy black hair. Green eyes. He leaned up against a boulder, holding a fancy cup in one hand, and a pair of masks on a string in the other. A mountain in the far background. The Little Dionysus Playhouse, a namesake of the god in this painting, had hired her to touch up this 80 year old artwork.

  The theater's board of directors had called her college's art department and asked if any student would be suited for a basic, (and inexpensive) restoration project on an oil painting. Her professor had referred her to the playhouse right away.

  "Seven weeks," she said, crossing her arms and addressing the image. "Does it seem that long ago to you?" She thought back over her previous sessions as she mixed the final small amount of paint for the job.