It's a January morning in a small Kansas town, and school has been called off for snow. Gretchen, who is sixteen, wants to go back to bed and wait for a phone call she swears she isn't waiting for. Shelley, who is twelve, wants to make snow ice cream the way their grandmother always did on snow days. Their mother has driven into town for the closing on Grandma's house, which is being sold today, and she has left them one instruction, underlined three times: do not open Grandma's box.

They open the box.

Running time is about fifteen minutes. It's funny, I hope, and sad, I know, and there's a lot of snow.

Constance is a freshman and this is her first show. She's tiny, she's fearless, and she can play twelve without even trying, which she says is not a compliment.
Janelle is a junior and was Emily in Our Town last spring. She cries on cue. It's a little scary.
Elena is a senior and our best voice. You never see her, but you'll hear her. She recorded the answering machine message in one take.
Joshua is our sound guy, and he's also the radio, because he has the most "radio" voice of anyone in the school and we needed someone to read the school closings with a straight face.

I've done drama club since ninth grade. I've built sets, hung lights, run the fly rail, been a tree, been a townsperson, been Townsperson #4 with one line, and last year I finally got a real part (the mother in The Diary of Anne Frank), which I loved but which made me realize I like writing the words more than saying them.

So last spring in Creative Writing we had to write a scene, and I wrote ten pages about two sisters on a snow day, and my teacher said it was a play and I should finish it. I finished it over three nights in April and gave it to Mr. Griffis without telling anybody, and then I didn't sleep for a week. In May he called me into the drama room and said, "We're taking this to district." I said "What?" about six times. Then I cried in the costume closet. (Janelle, that is not where you learned it.)

Everybody asks if it's about my family. Some of it. I have a little sister, and she did eat snow a dog had been on, and she will deny it. My grandma is completely alive and fine, and she's the one who taught me to make snow ice cream, and she has already told me she'll be in the front row at district with a thermos of coffee. But she does write letters. Every single time. And when I asked her once why she kept all of ours, she said "Because you'll want them someday." That's where the play came from.

Thank you to Mr. Griffis for picking it, to my cast for making it better than I wrote it, and to my parents for driving me to rehearsal at 6:45 in the morning.

Robin

Thursday, August 26, 1999
Auditions. Fourteen people came, which for a one-act with two speaking parts you can see is a lot. I sat next to Mr. Griffis and took notes and tried to look like a professional and not like a person who was going to throw up. Constance read Shelley and did the "that is slander" line and the whole room laughed, and I knew. Janelle read Gretchen and did the letter speech and I had to leave the room for a minute. It was the first time I'd heard somebody else say my words out loud. Cast list goes up tomorrow.

Monday, August 30, 1999
First read-through, at the table in the drama room. It ran 13 minutes. Mr. Griffis says it'll get longer once we put the pauses in, and that the pauses are where the play lives. I wrote that down. Then I spent the whole night rewriting the phone call in the middle because it sounded phony out loud. (It sounded fine in my head. Everything sounds fine in your head.)

Thursday, September 9, 1999
Blocking. The chase around the table is a disaster, in a good way. Janelle tripped on the comforter twice and we're keeping it. Ginger found the perfect yellow mixing bowl at a garage sale for a quarter, and a tin recipe box at another one for fifty cents, and she is now in charge of everything forever. Neil and Cody built the window flat. It has real panes. Cody says the trick is going to be the snow.

Wednesday, September 15, 1999
The snow problem. We can't drop snow from above at district because we don't know what their stage is like and we only get a few minutes to set up. So the snow is going to be outside the window only: Chad has a slow-turning wheel with holes in it in front of a light, so it looks like flakes going by, and Neil cut little paper flakes to tape on the outside of the glass. It is honestly beautiful. I stood in the back of the auditorium and watched it snow for ten minutes while everyone else was on dinner break.

Thursday, September 23, 1999
Everyone was off book by Tuesday, and today we ran it twice after school: 17 minutes, then 16:40. Mr. Griffis says the extra time is all in the box scene and that it's earned. I cut four lines from the beginning anyway, because the beginning is where I always say too much. Then props. Ginger made forty envelopes for the letter bundle, some out of construction paper, and aged them by dipping them in tea and drying them in her mom's oven, so now the whole prop table smells like Lipton. She made the grease spot on the recipe card with a pat of butter and a hair dryer, and it really does look like Oklahoma. (Janelle still says Nebraska. That's the joke. It works better when it's true.) Ginger wrote little letters inside the envelopes too, even though nobody will ever see them, and Constance has started reading them during breaks and laughing out loud. We have seven weeks. I'm not nervous. (I'm very nervous.)

We're also doing a free performance for families on Thursday, November 11, at 7:00 in our auditorium, before we take it on the road. If you're from around here, come. There will be cookies, and you're allowed to cry.