CHAPTER 45

 

This is my latest brainstorm!

If Schuyler is in the show, with a ton of stuff to memorize—like lines and blocking (that’s what they call figuring out where you move during a scene)—he’ll be too busy to roam around Seaside Heights on a crime spree.

“Schuyler’s really good,” I tell Ms. O’Mara. “In fact, he and I just improvised a whole scene at my booth on the boardwalk. Plus, he’s good at insults, too. Shakespearean ones. Not, you know, the usual ‘yo’ mama’ jokes.”

Ms. O’Mara gives me a look because, yes, much like a brook, I am babbling.

“Schuyler in the show?” she says, very thoughtfully.

“Tom Snout could be a teenager,” says Oliver.

“And if he’s funny…” says Quinn.

“Oh, he is,” I blurt out. “Hysterical. They should call him Schuyler Ha-Ha, except that’s what they call me because my last name is Hart and I used to stutter even worse than I did at my first audition.”

Now all three adult actors are staring at me.

“We’ll give him a tryout,” says Ms. O’Mara.

And they do.

Tom Snout is one of the “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They’re the comic relief—the clowns. A group of blue-collar workers in ancient Athens who put on a play to entertain the duke at his wedding. Yep, there’s a play in the play. Tom Snout plays a wall dividing two young lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe.

“I play a wall?” says Schuyler when the director explains the part.

“Right. It’s a joke. The two lovers have to talk through your fingers like it’s a hole in the bricks.”

“Cool.”

“And,” says Ms. O’Mara, “you’d get to wear an extremely comical rubber nose because Tom Snout should have a big snout.”