"So we're here to tell you that we're both very happy with the work all of you have done over the years. Nobody's about to lose their job." The laughter was less hearty this time; these people were still dubious.
"Some few of you remember me from the early days, from back before Thimble Theater was incorporated." He picked out a few familiar faces as he said this, waved to one man, rested an affectionate hand on the shoulder of Curly, Sparky's longtime assistant; she returned Valentine's fond smile. "Others... well, you've probably become used to Kenneth's sometimes unusual management style. I'm here to reveal to you today, to admit to you, if you please, that I'm partly responsible for that. Kenneth and I are, have been, and always will be a team. A team in the best sense of the word, meaning that for the majority of the time, when he's right, well, he's right. What can I say? And for the other small percent of the time when I'm right, Kenneth is big enough to admit that, too. Even my genius son can't be right all the time."
There was a short pause, and Sparky laughed. So did everybody else.
Valentine let his smile fade into a troubled look. Sparky knew the look: the Hamlet soliloquy. Whether... to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune...
"We wrestled with this one, I can tell you that. Sometimes we go along in the same old comfortable rut, and we lose sight of the lessons of history, the lessons of evolution. Change is of the essence. Nothing is so good, or has been good for so long, that it doesn't bear reappraisal. That's what Kenneth and I have been doing this past week. Looking into old policies and new directions."
The crowd was very quiet now. Once more it was sounding like head-rolling time, in spite of everything John Valentine had said. The scuttlebutt among those who didn't know him was simple: he was a perfectionist, he was impossible to please, he was impatient with those not possessed of his own degree of dedication and talent. When John Valentine showed up, the conventional wisdom went, the best idea was to keep your head down.
Those who did know him knew it was much worse than that.
"So we want you to bear this in mind in the future. Take nothing for granted. Question everything. Only in this way is truly great art created. Only through ruthless self-examination and endless reexamination can we avoid the pitfalls of the comfortable, the easy, the fake, in life, as well as in our art. Never be ruled by sentimentality. Just because something was here yesterday, because it was here twenty years ago, because it worked so well then and we've all come to know and love it, to be comfortable with it... these are not reasons to continue on as we have before. If you find you can do a thing easily, with no effort... why, it's time to move on to another thing. Move on quickly, before you are devoured by the demon of complacency. The world is full of artists who discovered their 'style' seventy years ago, and have been frozen in time since then. Endless repetition is not art. Art is endlessly inventive.
"I have performed Hamlet well over eight hundred times in my life. Endless repetition? No. Someone not an actor—and I include, shamefully, hordes of poseurs who tread the boards to great acclaim—could never understand how one avoids a deadly boredom saying the same words and making the same gestures night after night after night. The secret is simple. They are not the same words. They are not the same gestures."
Only now was the full, manic energy and persuasiveness of John Valentine revealed. They had liked him, uneasily, before. Now they were spellbound as sparrows in a herpetarium.
"I have never played Hamlet the same way twice. I have never walked out on those cold battlements in Denmark to confront my father's ghost without feeling the churned bowels of fear. I have never gone through a single night but that some word, some line, some unexpected response from another artist has not sparked a new realization in my heart about this horribly conflicted, self-doubting, morose, and melancholy man who never lived... and yet who is more alive than you or I.
"This is the attitude you must bring to your work, to your art. And they must be the same thing, my friends, or we might as well be laying brightly colored carpet on a million glass screens." He crouched and slowly swept the room with an extended hand, peering with horror at the million televisions somewhere out there in the dark.
He slowly relaxed in the intense silence. In a moment there were a few nervous coughs, the shuffling of a few feet. He straightened, and smiled fondly down at Sparky once more.
"Would you like to make the announcement, son?" he asked, quietly enough that his rapt audience had to strain to hear.
"You do it, Father," Sparky said. "We're all enjoying this too much to send in the second team now."
There was more of a laugh than the remark deserved. Up to then many in the room had been resisting John Valentine out of a sense of loyalty to Sparky. The thing that caused the laughter, and made it slightly uneasy, was the realization that what Sparky had said was true. Sparky was a great talent. John Barrymore Valentine was awesome.
"Very well, son." He dropped his eyes, let the moment hang there just the right interval, then looked back up at his audience.
"One month from now, after completion of three more episodes, we will ring down the curtain on Sparky and His Gang."
Though a few had begun to suspect it, even they could not credit it. To close production on Sparky, to the people at Thimble Theater, was a little like IBM deciding to get out of the computer business.
In the silence, only Sparky and his father seemed to share the light. Which was as it should be, since John Valentine had instructed the lighting director up in the shadows how to handle this moment. As the silence threatened to stretch, Sparky climbed up from his seat onto the huge table. His face wreathed in a golden glow, eyes flashing, he threw his head back and gave it all he had.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Kenneth Valentine." A pause, as he looked over the room. "Let's hear it for Sparky!" He began to clap his hands. In a moment his father joined in, then Curly stood, weeping and applauding, and in moments the whole room was swept with a thunderous ovation.
It continued long past the moment many of them began to wonder just what it was they were clapping about.
Toward the end of that day, Sparky broke another tradition by summoning Curly, the chief of the studio legal staff, and the chief accountant to his office. They found themselves in a comfortable and cluttered environment, a bit shabby since nothing had been replaced in many years, but clean, since Sparky didn't care if the cleaning staff entered so long as he wasn't present. They had strict instructions never to move anything. Dust, sweep, and get out was the rule. John Valentine had vanished after his presentation, off on mysterious projects of his own. He wouldn't have bothered with a meeting like this one, anyway, since it was strictly about money. Valentine let others handle such matters.
"So how much is the new theater going to cost us?" Sparky said.
The accountant, a handsome Latin-lover type who Sparky thought looked like a lawyer, and who was proud of his Indian and Arab heritage, was named Yasser Dhatsma-Bhebey. He shuffled through a stack of papers and drawings, shaking his head slowly.
"Spa... Kenneth, it's hard to say. One man in costing-out reckons there are five different projects here." He shuffled more papers. "Another figures it's at least six, maybe seven. Each of them has several variations."