Sally and Debbie Star in "Grand Night Out," and Other Entertainments

So my friend Debbie got us tickets for the Community Players' production of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, up the road in Panacea Falls. Panacea Falls is a happening place, far more so than this town, where the fish camp got so tired of closing at 8 every night that they filed for bankruptcy. The restaurant in Panacea Falls has only one television, and it wasn't in the room where we were sitting, sharing our Mediterranean Pizza (very good, with spinach and sundried tomatoes and feta cheese) and our Kaluha Cake (even better, with chocolate), drinking our glass of wine apiece (even better than the cake, if such a thing is possible, with alcohol), and generally doing our best impression of ladies about town.

The town also has this community theater, currently housed in the former elementary school, but soon to be housed in the former post office. As we were being seated, in fact, the rest of the audience was watching a documentary video on the history of the old post office, which dates from the mid-1930s and is a symbol, apparently, of the end of the Great Depression in Panacea Falls. Now it will be a symbol of the Importance of The Arts in All Our Lives. Etc.

The Mousetrap is of course the longest-running stage play in history, or so they say. It ran for decades in both New York and London, but I had never seen it until last night in Panacea Falls, and had always been under the impression that it was not a comedy. All the local audience, however, knew all the local people on the stage, so that any time a character made an entrance or spoke a line, the action was greeted with a roar of  approving hilarity, even when the action was that of one person strangling another in the dark. By intermission I'd worked out whodunnit, though I won't give the story away:   the play runs through Sunday, and I'm fairly sure they have tickets left. Let's just say that I didn't spend my high-school years reading Agatha Christie novels and dreaming of living someplace with vicars and drawing rooms and French windows and newlyweds with mysterious pasts for nothing. For years and years that was the kind of thing I did instead of homework, so let us just say that at the end of the play, when it turned out that I'd guessed right, I felt vindicated all out of proportion to the immediate and obvious circumstances.

After the play, we sat in Debbie's car discussing topics dear to the hearts of ladies who have fled their families for an evening of civilized entertainment. As I recall, rodents falling into toilets  dominated the conversation. We of course, in our old house, had flying squirrels who once or twice met a watery death that way, while Debbie and her husband, who live in the country, once found a skunk stuck in an outdoor pipe at two in the morning. The skunk was still very much alive;  as Debbie tells it, there was a paw sticking out of a gap at a join in the pipe and feeling around, like a nearsighted man groping on the table for his glasses, but they had no idea to what species the paw was attached until her husband took the pipe apart. A black head popped out, her husband let out a sort of warning trumpet, and they sprinted for the back door. From their children's bedroom window they watched the skunk clamber out of the pipe and waddle away across the road, while the children slept on, oblivious to all the drama.

These stories pale beside the experience of another friend of ours who once, in a rental house, had a live rat swim up through the sewer and into her toilet. Her children had flushed a pear down the toilet in one of the bathrooms, and they'd had the plumber out, and then shortly after that, the other toilet began to back up. What? our friend thought. They flushed pears down all the commodes? As she stood contemplating this new mystery, the fixture in question began to emit a strange gurgling noise, and out struggled a rat. In a state of mental paralysis, our friend reached for a jug of bleach, poured the contents into the toilet bowl, and slammed the lid down. When she forced herself, hours later, to lift it a fraction and peek inside, the rat was dead and also hairless. Her husband came home late that night to discover a sign taped to the bathroom door: DO NOT USE THIS TOILET. Which one of them ultimately disposed of the rat is a bone of contention to this day.

Debbie has more snake stories than rodent ones, which makes sense. If you've got the one, you're not so likely to have the other, which is a consolation. When they moved into their house, she said, they should have taken it as an omen that the one thing the former owners left behind was a snake-catching device:  a broom handle with a retractable loop at one end. Not long after they'd moved in, she was doing laundry and heard a clinking among the canning jars on a shelf above the washing machine. She called her husband, who shone a flashlight on the jars. The light struck a pair of eyes, which stared fixedly back at him in a manner neither human nor rodentine. He managed, after some tries, to lasso the snake with the snake-catcher and began to pull from the shelf what turned out to be yards and yards of snake, a black racer or bull snake measuring some seven feet from nose to tail. As he backed towards the door with the snake's head at the end of the pole, the far end of the snake caught and wrapped itself around an aluminum ladder which happened to be standing in its path;  in the end  he had to drag both snake and ladder out into the back yard.

Other things happen to Debbie, too, particularly at Wal-Mart. None of us likes Wal-Mart, but we came along too late in the history of our respective small towns to shop on Main Street and save the local businesses from destruction, and so when we need things, like hot pink little-girls' boots for example, we hold our noses.

Last week Debbie was in her local Wal-Mart with a selection of her daughters, buying fabric to make Christmas presents. Her youngest child, who is eight, had some money with her and wanted to buy a gift for her father, preferably a movie of some sort. On the five-dollar rack they found an old Clint Eastwood western -- High Plains Drifter, I think it was -- and because he likes that kind of thing, they got it. That is, the eight-year-old took it from the shelf and put it on top of the rolls of fabric in the arms of the thirteen-year-old. At the checkout, the thirteen-year-old put fabric and movie down on the conveyor belt for the checker to scan through.  

Bzzzzz went a buzzer. Movie in hand, the checker nodded at the thirteen-year-old and asked, "How old is she?"

"Thirteen," said Debbie.

"Well, she can't have this," said the checker.

"Oh, it's okay," Debbie said, fishing in her wallet, "I'll get it."

"No," the checker said, "she can't have it."

"But I'm her mother," said Debbie. "She's not getting it. It's not for her."

"She put it on the belt."

"But I'm paying for it."

"There are cameras on me," the checker said. "I'll lose my job."

And so on, back and forth, for some time. No, Debbie couldn't go to the end of the line and buy it. No, technically, nobody could stop her from going to the back of the store to find another one and then buying it in another checkout line, but the rules --

"It's not that I disagree with the rules, " Debbie told her. As she told me later, she was beginning to feel like the kind of mother who would buy beer and Debbie Does Dallas for her children's consumption, or like the kind of Debbie who would do Dallas and encourage her children to do likewise.

"But it's a gift for their father," she said. "They won't even be allowed to watch it."

"I'm sorry," said the checker.

"This is SOCIALISM," said Debbie to the world at large. Quite a lot of people in the line behind her -- there were quite a lot of people in the line behind her by this time -- nodded sympathetically.

In the end she parked all the girls on a bench by the door, ran back to find another copy of the movie, and stood in another line to buy it. In this line she ran into another friend of ours, who said that the exact same thing had happened to her the week before, only that time the comestible at issue had been a package of air-soft bb pellets, which her fourteen-year-old son had had the misfortune of setting on the belt.

"He can't have those," the checker had said.

"Oh, it's all right," our friend had responded. "I'm buying them for him."

"I'm sorry . . . "

If she had set them on the belt, apparently, all would have been well. But the cameras were watching, and --

So, if you find that you have to go to Nanny-Mart, be advised . . .

In the meantime, I am going to work off my indulgences of last night with fear and trembling and leaf-raking.

While I was theater-going, Betty was having a party of her own.