I lean on the bar and peel the label from my King of Beers, nursing it, my last two bucks. Sally is bright, cheerful, “You look a bit thin”, she says, “wanna burger?” We slip into the kitchen, an airless alcove behind the bar. I perch on a broken barstool, and Sally ignites the gas grill.

“What’s on your mind Deborah?”

“Seduction”.

The jukebox had pumped its closing beats and we were walking back to the barroom long bar where gins sat cup by cup.

Red Mole had been in New York for three months; our opening gambit Goin To Djibouti, seen at the Westbeth Theatre, had won us enough kudos to secure a booking in the basement of the off-off-Broadway house, The Theatre for the New City. With our visions of mutant nuclear holocaust survivors and deformed victims of dissident herbicide warfare, we descended the gloomy basement steps.

We had a problem. Chelsea and Bristol have made it clear that although they will pay the rent from their cheap champagne skin trade associations, they will in no way dish out souvlaki and hero money. Spinner had long since shot the remains of his Arts Council grant, generous boy, and There Was No Food.

No matter what, no matter how many insults and putdowns and shabby shows that only tire you out, no matter how many hours of singing in the street for pizza and mechanical repairs, no matter how many offers of script or choreography got waved aside, (those patches truly answered for), out here on the edge of theatre, in the heart of the drama- life onstage, we seem at this moment to need each other.

“Cut!!”

This from the Rooster.

Cut Cut Cut!!!

What the hell is he doing? The act was still only half way through…