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In my post about the Des Plaines Senior Center, I finished with the comment that Jennifer Gervase had asked if we would be selling tickets. I thought she was being facetious.

Today I discovered that in all likelihood, we WILL be selling tickets. When Teresa (Park Ridge Senior Center director) told me that, I was floored. I asked, “Why in heaven’s name would you sell tickets?”

She replied, “So we know how many people to expect. We could just do reservations. We’ll have to wait and see.”

“Why do you need to know how many people are coming?” I asked, sounding more naive by the moment.

“So that we’re sure we’ll have room for everybody.”

I asked how many people she thought would attend, thinking to myself that if anyone other than the cast showed up I would be amazed.

“Every time we have an event we have at least 150 in attendance.”

Now that, my friends, is something that I had never considered. When we had the Mystery-Writing Contest, the promise to adapt the winners into plays was just a whim. Once the winners were selected, of course, the whim became reality. Renata Galissini and I spent weeks converting the three short stories. Neither she nor I had any experience writing plays! The original plan had been to present them this fall, but with the Variety Show and Steak Fry, things just got too hectic.

When I learned that the performance had been postponed until January, I figured, “there goes whatever chance we had to capitalize on the little momentum we had generated.” Hence my thought that no one but the cast would be there. I also couldn’t imagine most people having any interest in seeing amateurs perform amateurishly adapted plays by amateur authors. Wrong!

I have mixed feelings now, and I’m thinking that 150 people is a large number. When I thought that there might only be 30 people there, it seemed as if it wouldn’t matter whether we had someone designated to move props, etc. A small audience would be more forgiving. But 150 people sounds like we will need to put on a “real” production. Will our plays stand up to the demand?