Curtain Calls

On a sultry afternoon in the summer of 1936 a woman accidentally interrupts an attempted murder in a London hotel room. Nina Land, a West End actress, faces a dilemma: she's not supposed to be at the hotel in the first place, and certainly not with a married man. But once it becomes apparent that she may have seen the face of the man the newspapers have dubbed 'the Tie-Pin Killer' she realises that another woman's life could be at stake. Jimmy Erskine is the raffish doyen of theatre critics who fears that his star is fading: age and drink are catching up with him, and in his late-night escapades with young men he walks a tightrope that may snap at any moment. He has depended for years on his loyal and longsuffering secretary Tom, who has a secret of his own to protect. Tom's chance encounter with Madeleine Farewell, a lost young woman haunted by premonitions of catastrophe, closes the circle: it was Madeleine who narrowly escaped the killer's stranglehold that afternoon, and now walks the streets in terror of his finding her again. Curtain Call is a comedy of manners, and a tragedy of mistaken intentions. From the glittering murk of Soho's demi-monde to the grease paint and ghost-lights of theatreland, the story plunges on through smoky clubrooms, tawdry hotels and drag balls towards a denouement in which two women are stalked by the same killer. As bracing as a cold Martini and as bright as a new tie-pin, it is a poignant and gripping story about love and death and a society dancing towards the abyss.

Watch out, Broadway! Babymouse tries out for the school play in the next book in the Babymousetastic, highly illustrated Babymouse: Tales from the Locker series. All of middle school's a play--at least, it seems that way to Babymouse. So when she hears about auditions for the school play, she jumps at the chance. She knows she's destined to be the lead! Or the lead's best friend. Or...Clown #2? Babymouse scrambles to memorize her one line, work on set design, and try to wrap her head around stage directions. But when the big show has a major glitch, it will take all of Babymouse's newfound skills to save the play. Le exhausted sigh.

The twelve stories in Curtain Calls are about love, loss, aloneness and self-discovery told from the view of the very young to the elderly. No matter how heart-tugging the stories may be, there is always the redeeming element of humor. A widow meets her lover during a bank robbery; a nine-year-old confesses to the parish priest her fear she is going to murder someone; a man in his 80's learns that his buddy in assisted living is planning his wife's mercy killing; after hitting a deer, a woman's car catapults into a dark parkway where no one can hear her cries for help; a bored, stay-at-home young mother plots to attract her neighbor, a soldier recently back from the battlefield; a middle-aged bride's obsessions come vicariously close to spoiling her honeymoon in Portugal. In the last story, "Curtain Calls" a once-glamourous Pop singer faces her nineties without her lover, a man who had lived life to the fullest.

In the performing arts, curtain calls transpire when performers return to the stage to be recognized by the audience for their performance. It may seem somewhat strange to speak of “nature’s curtain call,” but I am thinking of those amazing moments when with the passing of seasons Mother Nature presents a stunning performance, so to speak, for which we, the observers, are amazed: the appearance of spring’s flowers, the budding trees of spring, snow-white winter snow, huge flocks of Canadian geese flying south, the filling of dry waterbeds with late spring’s melting snow, the stunning colors of autumn’s leaves, the glorious colors of desert flowers, newborn animals of diverse species, and changing climates across the earth. There are cycles of nature that enable these wonders. The poems in this book address some of the wonders of nature: the seasons, weather, flowers, creatures, and beautiful scenes of nature. In the final section, however, the question is raised as to whether these wonders will survive the devastating effects of climate change, global warming, and other threats to nature. Will humankind awaken to the need of caring for nature?

When we sit back and reflect on significant events, evoke memories of people in our past, assess important aspects of our current lives, and how one man could have played such a transformative role in the journey of so many through life, it is not surprising, in this moment of calm reflection, that we find ourselves inspired to memorialize his remarkable achievements born of a compelling yearning, an insatiable appetite, an incurable drive to live his dreams. Such was a man named Franklyn Vincent Ellison Seales, the natural born son of Francis Seales, a merchant seaman and government employee of Portuguese, English, Scottish and African ancestry and Olive Seales, nee Allen, a homemaker of Portuguese and native Carib Indian stock. He was the youngest of that family of five: three girls and two boys born on 15 July 1952 in the small village of Calliaqua, St Vincent and the Grenadines. We celebrate that he was the first native of the island to graduate from the prestigious Juilliard School in New York City that led him to appear on the Silver screen in Hollywood.

"Why do we go on doing it?" asks Bernard Miles in the opening sentence of this glorious book on the theatre. "What keeps us going through the crises, the anxieties, the grinding circuit of agents and auditions and one night stands?" In this book, he and John Trewin have brought together the strolling players, the actors and actresses, the singers, the playwrights, the audiences, the managers, the stage-hands, who share the world of the theatre. They are set before us in all their exuberance, their jealousies, their ill-temper, their stubborn devotion to a profession that is 'love in action'. Linked by Bernard Miles's reminiscences of his own experiences as actor, manager, director and author, and by John Trewin's scholarship (fruit of a long career as critic and historian), Curtain Calls is alive with laughter, affection and surprise. It illuminates from first to last the belief that "the whole human story is a kind of play, a tragi-comedy in many episodes with script still being written in the wings, the mammoth cast under-rehearsed, imperfectly made up, unsure of their cues and dressed in the wrong clothes; the stage-management either very inexperienced, inebriated or blatantly incompetent; and the Great Director tearing his hair in the stalls."