The dinner theater led to a school, which eventually inspired a summer day camp in partnership with the Glendale Arts Festival, and Sylvia found herself enduring the amateurish children she had hoped to avoid. The parents were the real problem, as many were uncomfortable with the program’s rigid meritocracy. Shouldn’t the summer program be more inclusive? wheedled the parents of the hammier students, those whose only talent was a profound lack of embarrassment at their ineptness. Isn’t participation more important than professionalism when young children are involved? Sylvia, who had learned to tone down her New York candor after years in the Maryland countryside, pretended to accede to their wishes by creating two casts for each show. The parents were appeased, more or less, although one bossy mother insisted on having the last word. “Don’t call the different casts ‘A’ and ‘B’ or ‘One’ and ‘Two,’ as the children will infer that one is better than the other.”

And so the summer they turned fourteen, it happened that Perri was in the “Creamy” cast of Peter Pan, while Kat and Josie were in “Crunchy.” You could argue all day about the relative merits of creamy versus crunchy peanut butter-and the cast members did, with almost everyone swearing allegiance to crunchy-but the bottom line was that everyone knew that Perri was the standout, which meant Creamy had to be the superior cast. Kat and Josie had attended the camp only because Perri begged them to, intent as ever on the trio’s staying intact. Yet Perri voiced no objections when they were placed in different casts.

Josie’s parents were all for Sylvia’s day camp-it solved the summertime dilemma of making sure that Josie, now allowed to spend her days alone, did not fritter her time away. The fees were steep, but affordable since Josie had dropped out of the Gerstung gymnastics program. It was Mrs. Hartigan who balked, pointing out that Kat was shy and self-conscious, with no aptitude for performing.

“She says I just want to do this because Perri is doing it,” Kat confided at the campfire one weekend afternoon.

“So?” Perri asked. “What’s wrong with that?”

Josie knew but didn’t say anything. Her own parents had said similar things, if less directly. Of course you can go to drama camp-if that’s what you really want. “But you’re allowed to have your own ideas,” her mother added, as if Josie didn’t know that. “You don’t always have to do what Perri says.” The thing was, Perri had the best ideas, and she had so many of them.

So the girls went to drama camp, where the ratio of girls to boys in their age group was roughly six to one. Despite these lopsided numbers, the counselors stuck to their plan to stage Peter Pan, which had only three female parts. (And one of them, Tiger Lily, lost her big number because it was judged irredeemably racist and insensitive, with its peace pipes and pidgin English and chorus of “ugh” s.) But Sylvia decreed that if boys could play girls in Shakespearean times, then girls could play boys’ parts today. Not just Peter Pan but Captain Hook and Mr. Darling, Wendy’s brothers, even Smee. Nonetheless, most of the girls wanted to be Wendy, except for Perri, who sought and was given the “Creamy” Hook.

Josie was a nonspeaking lost boy, until Sylvia realized how agile she was and asked her to take the part of Michael, Wendy’s brother. “You don’t have a dancer’s personality,” Sylvia said, “or even a dancer’s arches. But you move very well. And that’s important for flying.”

Flying! Actual stage flying! It turned out that Sylvia had called on old contacts to obtain the patented wire system, Flying by Foy, used by theatrical companies whose actors needed to take flight. Even Perri was jealous, for Hook did not fly at all, and Josie was exceptionally good at flying, even better than the girls chosen to play Peter in either cast, so good that Sylvia urged the Patels to let Josie audition for a Baltimore production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which needed flying fairies. Josie could tell this bothered Perri a little, and she felt bad because theater wasn’t important to her, except for the flying. It was a relief to soar through the air again, given how her instructors at Gerstung had not encouraged Josie to pursue gymnastics competitively. She had the technical skills, they told her parents, but not the mental ones. She choked at meets, flubbing moves that she executed flawlessly in practice.

As for Kat, she asked to be Nana, the sheepdog nanny. She liked dogs. Moreover, she liked being hidden inside the huge, shaggy costume. “Eight hundred dollars for theater camp,” Mrs. Hartigan said, “and we don’t even get to see your face.”

They performed the play four times, with Creamy taking the night shows and Crunchy the matinees, the stars in one cast appearing as chorus in the other. The Sunday matinee was especially lethargic, and the girl playing Mrs. Darling disappeared mere minutes before curtain. (On a bathroom break, it was discovered after the fact.) The result was a show that opened on an empty stage and remained empty, the pianist in the pit playing the strains of “Tender Shepherd” over and over again. “Do something,” Sylvia muttered to no one in particular. Kat, waiting in the wings for her entrance, took this admonition literally, removing her dog’s head and beginning to sing the lullaby in a pure, true voice that no one had ever suspected of her. The voice soared out like birdsong, serene and effortless. Then Mrs. Darling showed up, and the play went on, although it never quite recovered from its limp, improvised beginning. Perhaps it was because people in the audience kept waiting for that beautiful voice to return.

“Did you know that Kat could sing like that?” Sylvia demanded of the Hartigans afterward. Mrs. Hartigan shrugged, still miffed about her daughter’s costume, but Mr. Hartigan said he believed Kat could achieve any goal she set for herself. Three months later he moved out, proving that Kat could not, in fact, achieve any goal she chose, for she certainly would have rescued her parents’ marriage. But that would happen in the fall, after Labor Day. The rest of the summer was spent in blind devotion to Jesus.

Not Jesus per se, of course, but Jesus as embodied by Peter Lasko, in Sylvia’s centerpiece production, the one performed throughout August in the Glendale community center. The girls, accompanied by Mrs. Kahn, first went to the show because of their newfound devotion to theater. Before the lights went down, Perri was a little superior, telling Josie and Kat that Godspell was second-rate, with a treacly, unmemorable score, not at all in the class of Stephen Sondheim, someone of whom she now spoke incessantly, almost as if they were dating. She also told Kat and Josie that some Jewish parents in Glendale -“Not yours,” Mrs. Kahn interjected-had tried to talk Sylvia out of mounting it, saying it was a flat-out attempt to proselytize. So the play already had a certain forbidden aura before the first notes sounded on the shofar and the cast began moving through the audience in preppy clothes that Sylvia had chosen in an attempt to rethink Godspell’s hippie legacy. Throwing fake money in the air-the stock market was still riding high-they began to exhort the audience to prepare for the way of the Lord.

And then Peter Lasko bounded onto the stage, dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt, instead of the traditional suspenders and Superman T-shirt that Josie knew from the CD’s cover. “Interesting concept,” whispered Perri’s mother. “I guess at the dawn of the new millennium, Jesus is a CEO.”

Josie had no idea what Mrs. Kahn was talking about, nor did she care. She thought Jesus was the best-looking boy she had ever seen. Could such a person really have emerged from Glendale High School just a few weeks ago? Would there be other boys like that at the high school? The show unfolded before her dazzled eyes, and even a more objective critic than Josie would have to admit that Peter Lasko was an extraordinary performer, almost too extraordinary, for his professional sheen revealed the limitations of the rest of the cast. He was like Perri in Peter Pan, with a sweet tenor that was better than anyone in Josie’s current collection of CDs, even Nick Lachey of 98 Degrees or the boy who sang about the angel. (It was okay to like Nick Lachey back then, especially if you were fourteen.) Josie’s nonexistent theatrical ambitions caught fire as she watched, inspired not just by Peter’s obvious talent but by the realization that the stage was a place where a boy really might take one’s hand and sing, You are the light of the world. And where a girl could lasso that boy with her mink stole-“Traditionally it was a feather boa,” Perri’s mother whispered-and bring down the house with the line “Come here, Jesus, I’ve got something to show you.”