he's still not back, lady agatha. there's not sign of him from the upstairs windows either. ~ it's not my place to stop sir henry if he wants to go out. ~ indeed i do, ma'am. only yesterday another pony went under the mud at grimpen mire. ~ anyhow, barrymore's gone to fetch him back. ~ i will, ma'am. will you be wanting tea? ~ yes, sir. ~ yes, miss. ~ it's been seen again, doctor. ~ the hound. ~ it's only that dr. watson asked me to report anything i heard in the village. ~ it's not what i heard, sir henry, it's what mr. blake saw and heard. ~ he was on his bicycle and he heard a long low moan sweep over the moor. ~ yes, sir henry. ~ here's you're weekly journal, sir henry. ~ sir henry, there's no need to jump at me. ~ i thought you might like some warm milk, so i've brought a pitcher and a mug. ~ the mist rolled in too fast for me. i never cross the moor on nights like this. i sleep in a small room at the far end of the west wing. ~ sir? ~ once. ~ crying? i don't think so. i am a sound sleeper, and of course at that end of the house one might as well be in a tomb, the walls are that thick. ~ would you like me to light the fire? ~ very good, sir henry. ~ i hope you carried a torch, doctor. ~ can't abide carrots, dr. watson. i don't like the sound of the crunch. ~ mrs. barrymore said you were looking for me, sir. ~ aren't these the shoes you gave me yesterday for polish? ~ i can't imagine where the other one is, sir. ~ i'll turn the place upside down. ~ i will, sir henry. i can't imagine what's become of it. will you be staying for tea, miss? ~ that will be nice, sir. especially if the barrymores leave. i wouldn't like being the only woman here. i scare easily. ~ i found this under the door, sir. in the kitchen. i heard someone outside but when i looked i couldn't see anyone. ~ mr. holmes, have you seen sir henry about? ~ he's not in his room. ~ what is it? what's wrong? ~ barrymore? ~ yes, ma'am.

So back in December, a couple of days before my birthday, on an otherwise unremarkable Monday evening, I was getting ready to leave work and I checked my comcast e-mail, the one I use for business and my parents and things like that, and I found an audition notice from a theatre group in McLean. It was "The H0und of the B@skervilles," the Sherlock Holmes story, which needed five men and five women, no headshots, no resumes, no prepared monologues, just show up and you can read for it, British accents preferred. Auditions start at 7:00 pm.

As it was 6:30 and I had nothing to do that night, instead of going home, I went. On the way there I read every street sign I passed out loud with a British accent. I auditioned three times, each time reading the part of Perkins, the maid.

The next night I got a phone call to please come back on Wednesday night for callbacks. I went back. I read again for Kathy, a more major character, and Perkins. I liked Perkins better.

On Thursday evening, I was shopping at Macy's and, I admit it, obsessively checking my home voicemail. Finally, around 8:15, there was a message from the producer, asking me to call her back. I went out to my car in the parking lot of Pentagon City. I called, and she offered me the role. I officially became Perkins the maid.

And so it began.

Starting the first week of January, I left work at 6:15 and drove seventy million miles (okay more like 20, but it was far, outside the beltway for those of you who know what that means, and I had to pay a toll, for crying out loud) to a grade school in the town of Great Falls, Virginia, and rehearsed from 7:00 to 9:30 or 10:00, three nights a week.

Slowly but surely, the actors got to know each other. The guys playing Sherlock and Watson were actually British, as well as the woman playing Lady Agatha, and they were all just lovely people and funny as hell. The two younger guys in the cast, Sir Henry and Jack, were a bit quiet at first, but eventually they loosened up, and we had a pretty good time together, even though they are six and eight years younger than I am. (The three of us went out drinking after our matinee performance and for like five minutes I felt like I was cool.) After about the third rehearsal, Kathy asked me about my Dean bumper sticker, and we immediately bonded in our Democraticness.

Perkins was not a big role - those are all of her lines in the sidebar - but she was active. She popped in and out of scenes, moving things along, stirring things up. The other characters kept saying she wasn't the brightest bulb, but I thought she was just lazy, not necessarily dumb. Our director wanted us to think about what the character was doing just before we came onstage, and it was obvious to me that Perkins was always in the attic watching "Passions" on her little black and white television (or the 1920's South of England equivalent).

As she was never on stage very long and had no long conversations to memorize, it was the perfect role for someone who hadn't acted in fifteen years.

After a month, we moved into a rehearsal hall in the same building as the theater. We wouldn't be in the actual theater until the week before the show opened, but we did our best with the space we had.

By this time, the cast had jelled together pretty well. We had the one oddball, the one guy who didn't quite fit in. He brought a mat and pillow to rehearsal and always laid down when he wasn't on stage, and it was weird and truthfully kind of creepy. (At some point someone asked him if he had a bad back, and he said no. Apparently it was some kind of wacky method acting from his coach. If I may be so honest, it didn't do him any good, as he was by far and away the worst actor in the cast. By FAR and AWAY.)

We bonded over our crazy rehearsal schedule, we bonded over our frustration with the horribly stiff and uninspired directing, we bonded over our loathing for our stage manager who spoke to us as though we were kindergartners. (At our brush-up rehearsal Thursday night before our last weekend of performances, we were all just sitting on the stage running lines, and Sir Henry was goofing around with one of the prop guns, pointing it at people as he said his lines, that kind of thing. Halfway through, the SM stops us and says "You know, I'd feel more comfortable if we weren't playing with the gun." Sir Henry, snarkily: "Wait, you mean it's... REAL? I can shoot you?" Another time he was screaming at us about something and Sherlock actually stood up and said to him, "Chill the fuck out, okay?" and Lady Agatha out-and-out screamed at him one night, and she's the most proper woman you'd ever hope to meet. He was NUTS, our stage manager.)

So finally, after two months, two months of rehearsals that happened to coincide with the busiest time at work, so two months of hardly ever being home and awake at the same time, on Friday night, March 5, we opened.

I don't really remember that performance in particular. I don't remember any of them in particular now, except the last one. I know I didn't knock over any furniture, which I had done in one of the dress rehearsals. I know I didn't drop a vase full of water I had to carry onstage and place on the mantle, the only thing I was ever really terrified of doing.

I do remember one thing from opening night, when I was putting on my makeup and one of the producers showed up with the programs. Of course, the first thing I did was turn to my own bio, which I had submitted about a month before. The final line was the same one I used in the bio on this site: "In her spare time, Elizabeth enjoys working on her novel, cyberstalking Eddie Izzard, and writing about herself in the third person."

And I read it, and then I hyperventilated.

See, there was a typo. Not a big deal, the program was actually riddled with typos to an embarrassing degree, but this was one typo that was particularly embarrassing to me.

They misspelled Eddie Izzard. Forget one of the z's, maybe? Oh no. They forgot one of the d's.

That's right. According to my bio, I cyberstalk EDIE Izzard.

Sigh. I suppose the one percent of the audience who knew who he was understood there was a typo. The other 99% of people who saw the play think I stalk a very very oddly named woman.

We all had our own individual ways of getting in character. There were four of us -- me, Sherlock, Watson, and Sir Henry -- who come onstage in quick succession during the first scene, so we'd warm up together. Personally, I recited a silly little rhyme I learned during my time in an extra-curricular acting troupe in high school. (It begins "What a to do to die today at a minute or two to two.") It was the only thing I could think of, and it actually worked pretty well because enunciating all the "t"s helped me warm up the British accent, and the repetition helped me calm down before going onstage. Watson had a tongue twister thing of his own, Sherlock would do a lot of "buh buh buh" and "puh puh puh", and Sir Henry, who was a bit of a card, would do Monty Python routines.

So each night, after the five-minute call, we'd all start pacing the back hallway, doing our little things and trying not to bump into each other. (If anyone had had a microphone back there, it would have been funnier than any moment of the play.) It became part of our routine, part of our bonding experience, and the one night I didn't get to do it because of a last-minute wardrobe malfunction (ha), I felt absolutely lost.

I tried to keep what I was doing under my hat at work, but I eventually had to tell people because it was becoming obvious that I was always leaving when other people were staying, and I had to explain why.

Then I was surprised at the number of people who actually wanted to see it, despite my protests that the show might suck, or that I might. Not only people from work, but all people.

Opening night, Friday, one of the associates at work and her fiance came. The first Saturday night was Corina and Wes, who drove down from Philadelphia and, god bless them, stayed in a hotel, as I had no time during tech week to prepare the guest room. The second weekend, Melissa came down and saw the Saturday night performance with my friend Sally. At the Sunday matinee were three more people from work and two of their spouses. On the final Friday night, Kate drove down from Philly just in time for the performance, then turned around and drove home because she is crazy.

And on the final Saturday, closing night, there were ten people in the audience there because of me. My parents (who had flown in from South Carolina) my aunt and uncle (who had driven up from North Carolina), my uncle's fraternity brother and his wife (who I had never met before but they live here and my aunt and uncle were staying with them so they just came along), Michelle (who had sent me flowers at work for opening night), Lori, a friend of theirs who has become a friend of mine, and a girl I worked with last fall.

And I was glad, because our final performance was our absolute best. (It was so funny, because Friday night we all felt like we did terrible. Everyone walked into the green room after their scenes going "Okay, I suck.")

But Saturday night was special. There were almost 200 people in the audience, almost three times as big as any of our audiences had been before, and what they say is true, you absolutely feed off of your audience. We went out and did our last show, and did it better than we ever had. Instead of coming offstage feeling totally lost, we came back with fists pumping and high-fives. We had a uniquely theatrical buzz, and it is exhilarating. And addictive.

I had needed this for a long time, I think. (Quoting Melissa quoting Peanuts Christmas Lucy, I needed involvement.) I needed to be a part of something, to belong to something, to contribute to something.

There is no doubt in my mind that my involvement in this play staved off a depression similar to the one I had during the first three months of last year. It's just a bad time of year for me, and this one definitely had the makings, and because I had no time to listen to it, no time to sit around inside my head, I think I held it off. (Knock on wood.)

I also met some incredibly nice and funny people, of all ages and backgrounds. Almost all the friends I've made since I moved here are lawyers or otherwise work in that profession, and among the actors, I was definitely the odd one out. I love my lawyerly friends, obviously, but it felt good to branch out a little.

I did something a little bit scary. I'm sort of used to rejection, but it doesn't mean it doesn't hurt when it happens, and going to the audition was scary. I tried to tell myself that it was just a whim, that it didn't matter if I got something or not, but by the night of the callbacks, I was handicapping my odds against the other women in the room and could not deny that I really, really wanted it.

(I have since auditioned for their next production and did not get it, though there is only one woman in the play -- Dial M for Murder -- and it wasn't much of a surprise as I don't exactly remind people of Grace Kelly. Besides which, the rehearsals started immediately, four nights a week, and I'm not sure I would have survived it.)

And although I beat back a greater depression, I am feeling some definite post-show blues. Despite the glitches, the insane SM and the weirdo in the cast and Edie Izzard and the times I'd have to go from rehearsal back to work until 2 in the morning, I loved it, every minute of it. I loved having somewhere to go and something to do. I loved being on stage, and I loved the cast bow during the curtain call. I loved that people came to see it, to see me. I loved being a part of something. And it's hard to let go.

But I have to. To make room for the next one, yes?