On the last day of the run of the play, the actor listens to a song that he was partial to months ago when rehearsals began, and realizes once again just how long his life has been wrapped up in the most recent artistic endeavor, the most recent project participated in to fool his mind into feeling that he’s accomplishing something. He remembers that the first rehearsal was some time in the middle of last August, at the end of a summer in which he had found himself often wondering if his life had ever been more banal and directionless. Then with some hesitation he took the small part in a somewhat ridiculous production of an adaptation of a 1940’s film noir movie to the stage, and within months he was feeling better, something that occurred to him all at once one day in November.

The final performance, the last of about 60 or so, is naturally a bit anticlimactic. In a run that featured so many memorable minor and major disasters nightly, this one goes by without a hitch. The door on stage opens and closes the way it was supposed to, the lights and sound are on cue, no actors miss an entrance leaving their costars on stage stranded and fumbling for things to say to fill the silence, no drinking glasses or ashtrays are dropped in the dark during the many complex scene changes. The actor himself resists the urge to become hideously unprofessional and create practical jokes, as he did in one performance in December before the holiday break by putting Vaseline on the ear pieces of the prop telephones and on the doorknob of the aforementioned notoriously misbehaving stage door. Ah, yes, December. The normal excitement of the holidays was mingled with the comfort of being part of something he looked forward to every week, even if he and his castmates would never admit it. Supposedly serious, self-respecting actors would never admit to actually being gratified by the kind of fluff they had all found themselves forced to reenact four times a week. They could never bring themselves to say that some part of them actually thought it was quite a bit of fun, and that maybe the best part was simply getting to be with each other. Never, that is, until the last performance.

After curtain call, there are costumes for the 19 performers to be folded and sent off to dry cleaning, leaving the dressing room that had been only negotiable by ducking and constantly turning suddenly looking barren. The actor grabs the black shoes he took from his closet before the first dress rehearsal; the only part of his costume that belonged to him. They are thrown on the floor of the passenger side of his car. Champagne is popped and drank, food is laid out and eaten, and everyone involved begins to wonder after a while how long they’re supposed to stay around. What is too early to leave, constituting rudeness? What is too long to stay, suggesting being pathetic? The actor is in the last group to leave, with the members of the cast with whom he frequently went out for drinks on Friday nights after the show, suggesting patheticness, but within good company.

It’s a Sunday night, and the next day is work, just like every Monday. But it will be a Monday beginning a week that will have no ending, at least not one like he’s become used to. “What is an actor without an act?” he thinks. Will there be anything there the next morning to protect him from turning the disdain he feels for the simple, passionless workaday office drones on himself? Because that’s what an actor without an act is. He decides not to think about tomorrow.

When he finds a parking spot near his home, he gathers his belongings from within the car. Somehow he can’t bring himself to take his fancy shoes from the passenger side floor. He doesn’t want them to be back in their place in the closet just yet.