Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle. H. Mel Malton

Glass Flute, Scene vii

      Rico Amato makes a great woman. When he’s in drag, he looks like a twenty-ish university student—an ultra-hip babe studying environmental science, with a minor in theatre arts. His look is purely classy. No flashy jewellery, no blue eyeshadow or platform heels. He has better taste in clothes than I do.

      When he’s decked out, he likes to call himself Ricki, and because he’s a friend of mine, I play along with it. That’s how I ended up with a broken nose at the tail end of Steamboat Theatre’s “meet the cast” masquerade party.

      My name is Pauline Deacon, and I’m a puppet-maker by trade. You may think that’s a ridiculous thing to be doing for a living these days, but actually, the puppet market is booming. Perhaps it’s because the current political and economic climate has made us all search desperately for something we can control. There’s nothing like pulling a few strings to make you feel powerful. Lately, there’s been a run on police marionettes and Prime Minister hand puppets.

      I have a fair amount of experience building big, theatrical pieces, and that’s what got me involved with Steamboat Theatre. They’re a small children’s touring company based in Sikwan, a town in the Ontario cottage-country District of Kuskawa. Just north of Sikwan is Cedar Falls, the village I call home.

      Steamboat was remounting a guaranteed moneymaker called The Glass Flute, a black-light production in which puppeteers, dressed from head to toe in black (so they can’t be seen) manipulate large, glow-in-the-dark puppets under ultra-violet light. Kids really love black-light theatre. Watching it is like watching a live cartoon, except that it’s bigger than a TV screen, and when you throw stuff at the actors, they throw it back.

      The theatre was reeling with the shock of a ninety percent cut in government funding, and needed a sure-fire hit. The Glass Flute was it—the kind of show that schools and library associations book faster than a Sharon, Lois and Bram concert.

      It was an old show, written in 1980 by Juliet Keating, the company’s founder and artistic director. It had been revamped and remounted so many times that the theatre’s staff groaned at the mention of it. They called it “The Glass Fluke” or “The Fluke”, for short, but the truth was that it had saved Steamboat’s ass more than once, and Juliet had decided to trot it out again. That’s where I came in.