"Oh, I hear things," Elwood said, with a shrug. Which is all I'd ever get out of him.

I didn't want to cut it. I'd hired on to play Mercutio, and I meant to play him well. And I'd promised Larry I could double the parts, and I meant to do that, too. But Mercutio exits at the very end of scene one and Juliet appears on the balcony at the very start of scene two. If it was only a matter of more pain I'd do it willingly, but for this appearance of Juliet I had to have the whole change and I just didn't know if it could be done in a minute.

There are air bladders in my body, too. I plugged the hose fitting from the Masque-Aid into a socket (never mind where; you could search me pretty thoroughly and probably not find it), and warm saline began pumping.

Juliet was thirteen. She had to be covered in baby fat. She needed a slim waist. She needed boobs, and a bottom.

Those last two would have to wait, as they'd look passing strange under Mercutio's tights and jerkin.

Dee was knocking on my door.

I got through the dance without mishap, and without the voice of Blanche, praise all the muses. I don't know where the voice I used came from, but it was suitable to a love-struck teenager.

Then off and wrench my face back during the short intermission between acts, then Mercutio's plaintive search for Romeo... then I was tearing backstage, tearing off Mercutio's clothes, slapping my face into the Masque-Aid while Dee plugged in the saline hose... and she was the only witness to what may have been the fastest sex change since Roy Rogers gelded Trigger.

A couple of pints quickly produced a pair of breasts fit for peace to dwell in. Ditto the behind; no sense overdoing it in either place. Suck out a little more juice from the waist, swell the hip, and voila!

Only one small detail to attend to. Well, not that small.

The penis is just skin covering two blood-filled chambers. With the proper operation those chambers can be pulled back into the body, sort of like pulling a sock inside out. Extrude it and you're the leading man. Pull it back in for the ingenue effect. Do it several times quickly and you'll be popular at your next orgy.

My father would have been proud. I came off that stage Mercutio, and appeared sixty seconds later on the balcony, Juliet.

"With love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls," said Romeo, tearing off his shirt. "For stony limits cannot hold love out: And what love can do, that dares love attempt. Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me." He kissed me as I shrugged out of my own shirt.

"If they do see thee, they will murder thee." I was breathing hard now. "Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye than twenty of their swords. Look thou but sweet, and I am proof against their enmity." Dropping the Montague britches as he spoke to reveal not hand, not foot, nor arm nor face, but another part belonging to a man. A fair sun, arising! He came into my arms and we fell back together on the bed.

"I would not for the world they saw thee here." Kissing him again. "I have night's cloak to hide me from their sight; and, but thou love me, let them find me here: my life were better ended by their hate than death prorogued wanting of thy love." And so, into the sex scene.

Yes, I hear you, all you purists out there. What can I say? Given my own druthers, I'd druther do it the traditional way, too. Passionate kisses, doe-eyed looks. But the public demands realism—especially in a backwater like Brementon—and that's what they get.

Or that's what they were supposed to get. A minute into the naked embrace, I began to wonder if Romeo had read the same script I had. His bud of love, which by summer's ripening breath should by then have proved a beauteous flower, had proved too like the lightning, which doth cease to be ere one can say, It lightens. In a word, impotency.

O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo? Inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb, thy love has proved likewise variable.

When I had a chance to reflect on it later, the reason for his trouble was obvious. It's the obvious problems most people overlook. Romeo had an odd sexual quirk. He was a dedicated heterosexual.

I realize they're common enough in the general population, but they are rare in the thespian community. Hell, I'm practically one myself, except on the stage. Perhaps that's why no one really understood that when it came to the sticking point, as it were, his will would fail him. None of us really understood the serpentine logic of his particular perversion.

As a male hetero, he could only get aroused by a female. And though I now gave every evidence of that gender, he had known me as Mercutio, and that's what I stayed, in his mind.

I can laugh at it now. It's become one of those theatrical disaster stories we all love to tell each other, like the prop telephone that rings at the wrong time. (Solution? Pick it up, listen for a moment, then hold it out to your worst enemy and announce, "It's for you.")

There was nothing funny about it at the time.

You wouldn't have known it from the audience reaction, however. They were laughing. It's one of the worst sounds you can hear in my business: laughter when you haven't made a joke.

But if you're getting laughs, it's best to keep getting them until you figure out what else to do. Rising from the bed and stalking naked around the stage, I became Kate, shrew of Padua.

"Nay, then, I will not go today. No, nor tomorrow, nor till I please myself. The door is open, sir; there lies your way. You may be jogging while your boots are green; for me, I'll not be gone till I please myself. 'Tis like you'll prove a jolly surly groom, that take it on you at the first so roundly." Suiting action to the word, a frustrated woman trying to please herself.

Romeo sat disconsolately on the edge of the bed, hunting The Taming of the Shrew for an appropriate comeback. He looked up at me. "Why does the world report that Juliet doth limp?" he said. "O slanderous world!"

We tossed lines back and forth for a while. The laughter gradually faded—not because they were taking us seriously, but because we could stretch this situation only so far. I had no idea how to salvage it.

Suddenly Romeo jumped from the bed. He embraced me with one arm, his free hand rubbing his buttocks. And I felt his interest begin to rise.

Dee had procured a drug banned on most worlds because of extreme hazard to the male recipient: they often hurt themselves attempting sexual congress with electric light sockets and household pets. She had crawled under the bed and jabbed a needle right through the foam rubber.

"Now, Juliet," he said, "I am a husband for your turn. For by this light, whereby I see thy beauty—thy beauty that doth make me like thee well—thou must be married to no man but me. We will have rings, and things, and fine array. And kiss me, Ka—Juliet, we will be married on Sunday."

And so, at long last, to bed. Where he performed like a trouper and, as if in an effort to make up, tried to jump me again while we were singing the second verse of "Tonight."

And at long last, a scene I wasn't in.

While Romeo poured out his heart to Friar Lawrence (and, this performance only, tried to hump the Friar's leg), I staggered back to my dressing room with a full ten minutes to change back to Mercutio. And who should I find there but Dahlia Smithson, by now neither rich jewel, fair sun, nor snowy dove. I'd say she was closer to an envious moon, sick and pale. That which we call a rose would smell of gin. See how she leans her cheek upon her hand! See how her eyes, twinkling in their spheres, bulge from her head as she points to me and says, "What the fuck are you doing in here, in my costume?"