The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [49]
So there was the premiere, with our parents seated in the dingy love-seat that hid an exceptionally squeaky pull-out bed, holding the two-of-a-kind original programs (created in Rose’s perfect penmanship, bien sûr) with “The Weird Sisters”—the witches of Macbeth—written in her hand, and a little cauldron (no more than a black bubble at the bottom) drawn by Cordy, who had thrown a whale of a temper tantrum until we allowed her to help. Rose bit her lip as she watched Cordy’s careful scrawl, sure it had destroyed the program, but she had learned that you must give in to the talent if the show is going to go on at all.
The curtain opened, the gas fireplace crackling coldly behind us, and we began, our own carefully cribbed scripts set in front of us as we stirred the giant pot full of air.
“Speak the speech, I pray you, trippingly on the tongue!” our father cried out before we could speak, and he and our mother applauded wildly. Rose hushed him, breaking character in frustration before turning back to the long wooden spoon we had liberated from the jar above the stove.
Rose had neatly excised all the extraneous characters, which made it an extremely abbreviated production. We had, at one point, dispatched Cordy to our mother to request a brother, as he would have been enormously helpful, but our mother said it was not likely, and in any case it would take an awfully long time even if it were to happen, so we settled for the abridged version.
Rose kept the first witch’s part for herself, being as it was the one with the monologues, and first to speak, besides, and Bean played her part with a great deal of hair-flipping, which she had seen on a television show during a sleepover at a friend’s house, and Cordy got lost repeatedly, until Rose hissed at her in frustration to keep her finger on the lines. Cordy found this no help at all, and it resulted primarily in her shouting out the lines she did know, so it sounded a bit like this: “The weird sisters, HAND IN HAND! / Posters of the sea and LAND! / Thus do go about, about; / Thrice to thine, AND THRICE TO MINE! / And thrice again to make UP NINE! / Peace! The charm’s wound up.” Cordy was big on rhyming.
When we finished, Rose was nearly in tears, frustrated with the way her great dramatic vision had failed to align with reality. “That wasn’t right at all!” she cried, and would have commenced to pointing fingers, had our parents not stepped in to console her. Bean and Cordy couldn’t have cared less, as Bean was still practicing her curtsy from the curtain call, and Cordy was chasing Mustardseed around, attempting to complete his costume with her witch’s hat, which he (not surprisingly) wanted no part of.
“Your play needs no excuse,” our father said. “I found it lovely. It covers all the important parts without any of the major characters. Brilliant adaptation.” He kissed Rose’s slightly hat-haired head.
“I agree,” our mother said. “I always thought the three witches were the best part of the play anyway.”
“Of course,” our father said. “It was convenient of us to have you three so we could have our very own Weird Sisters.” He gave our mother a wink over Rose’s head.
“But Cordy did it wrong!” Rose objected again.
“No, she just did it differently,” our mother soothed. “But it doesn’t matter, because aren’t the best plays the ones that are different?”
Well, no. Not always. We saw one production of Much Ado set in a USO in World War I, and that was quite good. But then there was an infamous naked Midsummer, and the reverse-race Othello, and those were both awful.
But Rose learned an important lesson: people don’t always do what you tell them to do.