From time to time an adult would hurry by, usually far too busy to notice the boy sitting in the farthest corner of the lobby. Then someone would pause, look back at him uncertainly. Dodger would give him or her his most winning smile. If that wasn't enough, he would say, "It's all right. My father is meeting with Mr. Sensational." Jack Sensational was the head of the studio. Nobody asked any questions after that.
He ate half his sandwich and all the banana. He visited the facilities his father had pointed out, and decided he was bored to death. What would it hurt, he wondered, if he did a little exploring?
The sign TO SOUNDSTAGES A-B-C-D had lured him farther afield than he intended to go. Now the huge door he was passing read SOUNDSTAGE H-2, and he knew he was lost.
He also knew he was going to be in big trouble. But there is a defense mechanism in dogs and young children that prevents them from worrying too much about future consequences once it is clear that it is too late to avoid them. What the hell? Dodger thought. If I'm going to catch it, I might as well make the crime worthy of the punishment.
So he wandered along the wide corridors, dodging heavy equipment hauling props and scenery, and groups of actors and extras in outlandish costumes chattering among themselves.
He knew just enough to avoid any door with a red light over it, since the light meant actual shooting was going on. But when he opened another door and stuck his head in enough to get a glimpse of a huge ballroom set swarming with carpenters and electricians he was shouted at, and beat a hasty retreat.
But he viewed an open door as an invitation to come in.
The first one he entered was a soundstage populated entirely by six-foot-tall blonde women wearing pink high-heeled shoes and pink ostrich-feather headdresses that towered another four feet over them. There must have been a hundred of them. They were just standing around, doing nothing. Before them were a hundred champagne glasses filled with bubbling liquid, big enough for the women to take a bath in, and behind that was a towering blue backdrop. One of the women glanced at him, then went back to contemplating her long, pink fingernails. For five minutes nothing at all happened. Nobody noticed him and nobody asked him to leave, and it was all incredibly boring.
And that seemed to be what moviemaking was about. He visited three more stages, and in all of them people were standing around doing nothing. Nobody was shooting at anybody, there were no sword fights, no action of any kind. Dodger tentatively decided against a career on the silver screen.
He was getting tired by the time he wandered into Soundstage F-5, and wishing he could find his way back to his half a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. But when he entered F-5 he forgot his hunger.
The other stages had been large, but difficult to see because of false walls standing here and there at random, and lights hanging from the ceilings. This one was empty and the overhead lights were turned off. Dodger didn't need them, because most of the floor of the stage was a vast blue pool of water, lit from below. It was smooth as glass. Tied up not far from him was a full-scale pirate ship, sails furled, whose masts towered a hundred feet high.
This was more like it. Maybe there was magic in the movies after all.
His footsteps echoed in the big barn as he went to the ship. He reached out and touched it, and the ship bobbed slightly, sending out concentric waves that turned the even play of light across the distant ceiling into a magical pattern of diamonds. He pushed harder against the ship, heard an anchor rope creak against a piling, and the pretty pattern of lights was shattered even further. He wondered how he could tell Father about this. There must be words for it. There were so many words.
"Hey, what are you doing?"
He jerked guiltily and looked up. There was another boy standing in the open door of the soundstage, but it was not he who had shouted. An angry-looking woman in the red-and-yellow uniform of Sentry Security was holding the boy by the arm. She was about to pull him out into the corridor when she looked up and saw Dodger.
"You, too," she called out, beckoning. "Get over here. You kids were told not to go wandering. I ought to kick you off the lot."
Dodger thought of running, but didn't immediately see any other exit doors from the place. There was absolutely nothing to hide behind. So he hurried to the guard and she grabbed him, too.
Without another word she hustled them across a busy corridor and through a door marked STUDIO 88. Someone had taped a notice to it: Auditioners and Parents ONLY!
Inside was chaos. It was not an entirely unfamiliar scene to the Dodger. He had witnessed casting calls for the legitimate stage, and knew what happened when you got a hundred precocious youngsters and their indulgent parents together at one time. Some of these kids had yet to hear the word "no" issue from their parents' mouths. They were the ones running in every direction at breakneck speed while Mom and Dad looked on with simpering approval and told everyone in sight that little junior was just so damn talented they didn't have the heart to repress his creative impulses. Sometimes these creative impulses took the form of hitting another talented child with a handy blunt object, and in these cases the police frequently had to be called to prevent murder among the battling parents.
The rest were of another sort entirely. Dodger knew them well. They had spent most of their short lives learning to actually do something—singing, ballet, accordion playing—and had achieved some success at it. They were as spoiled as the first group, but quieter about it. Most of them sat serenely with stage mothers and stage fathers, and the only noise they made was the hideous sounds that issued from their kazoos, harmonicas, and Jew's harps.
"Damn all aspiring Shirley Temples," John Valentine had once said, at just such an audition. "Children on the stage are a necessary evil, I suppose, if you're reviving Annie. God forbid. But they should be locked in a trunk and stored in the wings between shows. Take them out, feed and water them, let them do their turn, and lock them up again."
But he reserved the worst of his scorn for the parents.
"Gypsy Roses, every one of them!" he sneered. "Frustrated, talentless, hams by proxy. They mouth lines along with their brats, and dream of their names on the marquee. They eat their young. If the first one doesn't work out, you'll see the same faces five years later, with a new brat in tow."
Dodger, who had witnessed this routine of his father's several times, would say nothing, remembering the first time he had heard it, when he had innocently asked if he himself wasn't something like that, what with memorizing all the plays by Shakespeare.
And his father would put his hands on Dodger's small shoulders and look intently into his wide blue eyes.
"That's not for you, Dodger. No tap-dancing dog-and-pony shows for my boy. You're learning your craft, and it's the noblest craft of them all. It's the only thing in the world worth doing."
"Where's your release form?"
"Huh?" Dodger looked up into the face of a pretty young woman with a clipboard and a harried expression.
"Here," she said, and thrust a printed form at him. "Have your father or mother fill this out and then wait until your name is called. And please, don't lose this one." She was gone as quickly as she had appeared.
Dodger found his way to a table that was heaped with food. He'd seen nothing like this at theater auditions. Once again his opinion of the movie business moved up a notch.