The Golden Globe

God, it had been a long time. What had happened to my sex life? Miranda didn't count, of course. That was business. Before that, the brief run as Juliet, and I'd been catching, not pitching. Oh, yes, of course. The governor's daughter. Sweet as she'd been, I realized I hadn't really stopped ru

"Your father isn't a member of Congress, is he?" I murmured.

"My father was two cc's of white fluid in a test tube."

"The best kind." I twisted, took her in my arms, pressed her against the bed. She wrapped her legs around me and looked up with flashing eyes.

"Lord, you feel wonderful," I said. There's nothing like a woman's body. She must have been reading my mind.

"Why are our bodies soft and weak, and smooth, unapt to toil and trouble in the world, but that our soft conditions and our hearts should well agree with our external parts?"

Good question. It had always seemed to me to strike at the heart of the eternal mystery of sex. And she was no shrew.

I could have bid her kiss me, Kate, but I'd used that line in more comical circumstances, and besides, another was at hand.

"The wren goes to it, and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight," I told her. "Let copulation thrive."

And it did prosper mightily there on that short and musty straw.

Eventually we repaired to the facilities down the hall to see if anything could be done about the damages. I examined myself in the mirror while she got busy at the bidet. There were a few bite marks, nothing a little maxfac couldn't cover up. Lips a bit swollen. Hair... well, perhaps a good beautician could give me a cost estimate.

"Once again, my father was right," I said.

"How's that?"

"When he urged me to brush up my Shakespeare. Claimed it was the quickest way to get girls in the sack. 'Just declaim a few lines from Othella, and they'll think you're a helluva fella.' "

"Well, it's the first time Shakespeare got me in the sack." She looked up, suspiciously. "Are you sure that was your father's line?"

"Dad stole all his best lines," I admitted. "But he only stole from the best. In this case, Cole Porter."

She shook her head; never heard of him. And to think, I was considering asking her hand in marriage.

By the time we got dressed and I was packed, "day" was dawning on the street outside, and there was still no reply from Polly.

Cordelia followed me as I trundled the Pantechnicon to the lobby and out onto the street. We embraced there, kissed, and I told her I'd drop in again as soon as the cruise run was over. And I would have, too....

That's when the bellboy shambled up, pillbox hat askew, shirttail out, and pressed an envelope into my hand. He turned on his heel and left us standing there, apparently never dreaming I might actually tip him.

I tried not to let my hands tremble as I opened the envelope and unfolded the yellow paper within.

If thou wert my fool, Nuncle, I'd have thee beaten for being old before thy time. Thou shouldst not have been old till thou had been wise. Sparky, if you can make it, Phileas Fogg was a piker. But, as the Bard says:

The sweet and bitter fool will presently appear;

The one in motley here, the other found out there.

If he says you can do it, maybe you can. Lear is yours.

I modestly took my place as the one and only bass. I would have been tickled pink to oompah my little heart out except I had somehow neglected to take sousaphone lessons in preparing for a life on the stage. Though I knew it was rumored that if one pressed the middle valve down the music would go 'round and 'round and come out way up there somewhere, I had no personal experience of this. Hell, for the first two hours of rehearsal I'd worn the thing on the wrong shoulder. It still looked more like some plumber's catastrophic mistake than a musical instrument, but at least now, after a dozen performances, I knew where to blow.

Or pretend to blow. The sound system backstage took care of the actual music. My job was simply to be in the right place when the sousaphone was dropped from the fly loft, like a human horseshoe peg.

The "Seventy-six Trombones" number was the climax of the twenty-minute "Sounds of Old Broadway" piece we did twice a day, at six and eleven. At seven and midnight, it was "Caribbean Rhythms," where I got to fake it at a set of steel drums, dressed up like Carmen Miranda.

So when's the last time you demanded Oedipus Rex on a cruise ship? It was legitimate stage work, and I was glad to have it.

So I continued my high-kicking march step, in place, waving my Panama straw hat and gri

Close enough. There were actually three 'bone pickers, four cornets, and five woodwinds. As Busby Berkeley is rumored to have said when informed he could only have twenty chorus girls for a dance he was staging, "That's all right. I know how to make twenty look like a thousand."

The way he did it was through artistry and film editing. The director of this particular turkey had used a holographic echo generator. The images of my dozen chorus kids was picked up by this gizmo, and a computer introduced variations in height, skin color, facial shape, and so forth, then endlessly replicated the first row—the only row I had—into twelve infinitely long files, vanishing into the distance of a stage that was actually no deeper than a starlet's intellect.

Don't bother notifying the union about this, you dirty snitch. The contract plainly states that holo-echoes can be used for crowd scenes in medium-to-small houses. Nobody ever called Sparky Valentine a scab. Not under my real name, anyway.

I waited in the wings while the boys and girls took their bows, then bounded out as the spotlight picked me up. People were standing, but not, I was forced to admit, in an ovation. They had drinks in their hands waiting for the aisles to clear. I bowed as the music swelled, gestured to the maestro, who turned and smiled as one hand continued to conduct his three-piece augmented orchestra. I knew the applause would not extend for long, and besides, I'm not one of those pathetic hams who milk it beyond that Zen moment of one hand clapping. I bowed once more, and the curtain came down.

This was not, in point of fact, the Titanic, as I had told Roy, but her sister ship, the Brita