Typecasting by Harry Turtledove Page B

sooner.
    Signs on roadside fence posts and barns shouted for Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The Jefferson primary was coming in a couple of weeks. Reagan already had the GOP nomination pretty much in his back pocket. Bill figured the ex-governor from one state south would have breezed here any which way. Jefferson’s Republicans averaged just to the right of Attila the Hun. Its Democrats, by contrast, were tree-huggers and left-over hippies. That made Kennedy the odds-on favorite.
    From Yreka to Ashland was a little less than forty miles. The Mighty Mo had just passed from Siskiyou County to Jackson County—from what had been California to what used to be Oregon—when Louise said, “I don’t think Nicole’s happy about her part.”
    â€œNo?” Bill said. “She ought to be. She ought to be happy she’s got a part at all. The Ashland Shakespeare Festival gets to be a bigger deal every year. It draws more and more out-of-state tourists. It makes Ashland money. It makes Jefferson money. Sitting where I do, I can’t help liking that.”
    His wife sighed. “I know, I know. She’s not happy anyhow.”
    â€œShe ought to be,” Bill repeated. “The festival gets more professional every year, too. They don’t usually let the Drama Department at Jefferson State put on a show any more. It’s not like it was in 1935—not even close.”
    Jefferson State Ashland had started life as the Southern Oregon Normal School. It became the Ashland Normal School when Ashland and Oregon parted company, and went right on training teachers. One day in the mid-1930s, an instructor there named Angus Bowmer noticed that the roofless old building which had once housed Chautauqua lectures would do very nicely as an Elizabethan-style stage. Bowmer had always wanted to perform and to teach drama; he was training teachers because it was the Depression and you grabbed any job you could find and clung to it like a limpet.
    The first few festivals were sort of like Ren Faires with plays. They included things like archery contests, bowling greens, and dances. Some of the actors were locals, others outsiders who odd-jobbed it while they performed. Nobody got paid, not at first.
    It wasn’t like that any more. The festival had grown and grown. It went on without its founder, who’d retired in 1970 and died a year ago. It had its own campus now, not far from the state university, with three theaters, and ran from spring to fall. Jefferson State drama students still pitched in, but more often behind the scenes now than on stage.
    Louise Williamson clucked, as if disappointed in Bill. “I understand all that,” she said—yes, she was unhappy with him. “It’s more complicated than you’re making it out to be, though.”
    Or else Nicole’s taken arms against a sea of troubles that aren’t there , Bill thought, remembering Hamlet from his own high school and college English classes. Twenty-one-year-olds were good at that. They saw how many things were wrong with the world, and saw them very clearly. They didn’t see that fixing all those many things was usually harder than it looked. Bill hadn’t at twenty-one, either.
    *   *   *
    Ashland was a town of about 15,000: a college town and, this past generation, a Shakespeare town, too. Hotels and restaurants and shops catered to the outsiders who came to watch the plays. The locals who didn’t cater to tourists raised pears and apples and grain on the fertile soil of the Rogue River Valley.
    They had reservations at the Columbia Hotel on Main Street, just a couple of blocks from the Festival campus. The Columbia was right next to the Varsity Theater, but that ran movies, not live drama. At the moment, the marquee plugged Mad Max and Gilda Live , which struck Bill as one of the odder pairings he’d run across lately.
    One of the entrances into the hotel