Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

In the appendices of Alzina Stone Dale's 1984 edition of Dorothy L. Sayers and Muriel St. Clare Byrne's Busman's Honeymoon (1936), reproduced for the first time from a handwritten sheet by Sayers with an additional scribble from Byrne, I have found perhaps the greatest production note I have read in a playscript in my life:

Warning

The murder contrivance in Act III Scene 2 will not work properly unless it is sufficiently weighted. It is therefore GENUINELY DEADLY.

Producers are earnestly requested to see that the beam, chain & attachments & the clearance above the head of the actor playing CRUTCHLEY are thoroughly tested at every performance immediately before the beginning of the Scene, in order to avoid a POSSIBLY FATAL ACCIDENT.

How is it that in this our era of infinite meta when See How They Run (2022) was a real film that came out in theaters and not someone's especially clever Yuletide treat no Sayers fan has ever worked this note into a fictional production of Busman's Honeymoon where the blasphemed aspidistra exacted a worse revenge than corroded soot? I don't want to write it, I'm just amazed no one's taken advantage of it. I wouldn't mind knowing either if the 1988 revival with Edward Petherbridge and Emily Richards found a way of reproducing the effect without risking their Crutchley, since Byrne's "Note to Producers" describes the stage trick in technical detail down to the supplier of the globes for the lamp and she still agreed with Sayers—she wanted the warning inserted before the relevant scene in the acting edition—that it could wreck an actor if not set up with belt-and-braces care. Otherwise I am most entertained so far that according to Dale, while the collaboration between the two women was much more mutual than an author and her beta-reader, Byrne characteristically put in the stage business and directions which it seems Sayers was less inclined to write than dialogue. This same edition includes Sayers' solo-penned and previously unpublished Love All (1941) and testifies to the further treasury of the Malden Public Library, whose poetry section when we were directed to it turned out to be a miscellany of anthologies, plays, and biographies shading into what used to be shelved as world literature. I have three more Christies for my mother, another unfamiliar Elizabeth Goudge, another unfamiliar Elleston Trevor, some nonfiction on an angle of women's war work and the Battle of the Atlantic that I actually know nothing about, and the summer play of Christopher Fry's seasonal quartet. I am running on about a fifth of a neuron at this point, but rushthatspeaks bought me ice cream.

From an apparent radiant in Arcturus, which made it either a straggler of the Boötids or just passing through, just as spatch and I were getting up from our summer-hazed star-watching under the three-quarter moon, we saw a slow fireball of a meteor streak south and westward. All we had seen until then were the familiar blinks of planes and what we less happily took for satellites crawling steadily across the body of Ursa Major. We lay on the granite blocks that were installed six or seven years ago in commemoration of the eighteenth-century farm that became first a field of victory gardens and then the public park where I would spend my childhood sledding in winter and setting off model rockets in summer. The jeweled string of the Boston skyline has built itself considerably up since then. I used to dream of finding a meteorite in a field. It seemed statistically not impossible.