I write back saying I’d be happy to.
A month later she writes: “I am equally happy to report to you that you are one of the five finalists. Unfortunately, because of continuing payroll cuts, the position had to be reduced to a single year, though with a possible option for a second. One correction I must make is that of the two candidates who I said had died, one wrote me saying she was ‘only kidding,’ though with no enucleation why. And the second said that the person who claimed to be the executor of his estate was in fact his archenemy and longstanding theatrical rival in that part of the country (and coincidentally a final candidate for the position himself) getting even on a number of old scores (some of them musical, I’m sure). I quickly eliminated all three from the competition, which might seem ‘unequityable’ to you, but with so many highly qualified candidates to choose from, I was snatching (you might say) at eliminative straws. Another thing, Mort: because the position is now only for a year and with no possibility of tenure even if you were asked to stay on for a second year, its title of ‘Theater Arts teacher’ will henceforth be known as ‘actor-in-residence,’ with the salary commensurately reduced to that of an assistant professor’s rather than the assoc. professor’s pay as advertised. And with vacant houses going for a premium in this booming college town, there’ll now be no assurance of an on- or off campus abode, which might change the title to ‘actor-out-of residence’ if the person who gets the job can’t find a home. (When the original ‘in-residence’ pun was told to me, it seemed much funnier than the above. I’ve always been remiss with key lines and cues, which is perhaps why I gave up acting to only teach and administrate.) If you’re still interested, after all I’ve just said, please list two possible times you might be able to come here for a minimum stay of two nights and days between August 19th and 24th. I’m sorry to rush you like this, but the position does begin with the new fall quarter on September 3rd.”
I write back giving the dates I can be in northeast South Dakota. Several weeks after I was supposed to have been interviewed, the chairperson phones and says “Do you think you can fly out tomorrow or the next day for the interview? The job is still for one year though begins with the winter quarter now and with no possible option for a second year.”
“I can come tomorrow. Do you make the flight arrangements from where you are or should I do all that here and be reimbursed when I arrive?”
“The school policy is for the interviewee to make his own traveling arrangements and be reimbursed in full if he gets the job. If he doesn’t get it, the college reimburses half of all his expenses, though with both it takes a minimum of one to two months to receive.”
“I’m not a gambling man, Sarah, especially with money I’ll have to borrow to pay for the trip, so what are my chances of getting the job?”
“I’m sure I’m not supposed to reveal this, Mort, but the four other finalists bowed out because they didn’t want to uproot their families for only one year when there was no chance the contract would be renewed. So I’d say your coming here is more to interview us and see how you like our department and countryside rather than our interviewing you.”
“In that case, I’m on my way.”
She tells me of the one plane I can catch in Minneapolis to get to the North Dakota airport, the closest to the college. “There’s no train service to here and the one bus from Fargo leaves an hour before the plane lands, so someone will meet you at the airport and drive you down.”
It takes all day to get there. Long stopover in Minneapolis, longer Fargo wait for the car. I’m put up in a student dorm, “Which would normally cost you a dollar a night,” Sarah says, “but I think my department can absorb. You’ll have to shell out for all the other expenses while you’re here, so for reimbursement purposes keep your receipts and an exact written record of what they’re for.”
That night I’m to meet several Theater Arts Department people and their mates at the one restaurant in town that Sarah says serves halfway decent food. Before we go we have cocktails at her house and she gets high and her husband Ike gets a little drunk and begs off from “Old Ptomaino’s to take care of my hounds who have colds and who I don’t want getting lonely without me and during dinner and dopey talk just toppling over and die.”
Driving to the restaurant at 30 mph over the national speed limit and about 70 mph more than her tipsiness could seem to control, Sarah says” Ike didn’t come mostly because he went out for the job too. They wouldn’t consider him because he had little theatrical experience except for his Ph.D. orals and the defense of his dissertation on Beckett’s effect on the East Berlin years of Brecht, or was it the other way around, with Brecht on Beckett’s German poems? But there’s some execrable state law where it has to be a professional like you and preferably someone outside the school or we don’t get those particular funds. Kind of makes me bitter, for we need the money and it’d be fun working with that shiftless slob for once, but no hard feelings, you hear?” and she turns to me for an answer and we narrowly miss a cow as we plow through the first row of a front-lawn cornfield.
The dinner talk is mostly about rifles, shotguns, the upcoming hunting season when most of the men expect to fly north and bag a couple of moose, turkey shoots, do I shoot? “No? Then trap and fish? Then what do you expect to do around here weekends if you get the job?” And movies. Quality of acting in x-rated classics, which are all they get in the area. The greasy food we’re about to eat. “But great Bloody Marys,” someone says, “with two shots each in them of real commie vodka, and a celery twig instead of lemon slice, so you can get some roughage too.” Crime in New York. Death of the Broadway theater, rebirth of the regional. Where I’m originally from tor there’s an accent that’s not Manhattan, which a few of them say comes from London and almost everyone detects as not from New York. “North Carolina.” I lie. “So you’re down home like all of us, even if you been living in that cesspool for fifteen years.” Joan of Arc, Timon of Athens, and Cyrano de Bergerac, the three major Theater Arts Department productions this year that I’d be expected to help direct. “What are your ideas on Cyrano for instance? Would you portray him as a sympathetic impotent or a detestable sex-starved rogue or both? Do you think Rostand was influenced by Collodi’s Pinocchio, which if you didn’t know was written just fourteen years before Cyrano?” “Seventeen years,” someone says. “Fourteen.” “Seventeen.” “Let’s settle it,” Sarah says, “and call it an even dozen.” “Even two dozen,” the person who said “seventeen” says.
Gradually a couple of the teachers or their husbands or wives get drunk and have to wait in their cars for their spouses to finish dinner and in one case both get drunk together and leave while their desserts are being set aflame. “Put ours in two doggy bags,” the wife says before they go. Finally it’s just Sarah drinking more but getting soberer it seems, and the scenic and costumes design professor and his girlfriend, a Theater Arts Department senior who will be starring, he says, “in one of your three major plays this year including Cyrano or Timon in drag — that is, if you don’t positively mind.”