How Not to Make a Wish (As You Wish, 1) - Softcover

At least that's what I told myself as I suffered my third sneezing fit in an hour.

Standing in the costume shop at the Fox Hill Dinner Theater, I extracted a linty tissue from my pocket and blew my nose, trying not to pay attention to the clouds of dust swirling in the overhead fluorescent lights. If I let myself think about how much debris filled the air around me, my lungs would seize up and I'd collapse in front of a dozen feather-covered costumes from Gypsy.

"Gotta have a gimmick, Kira Franklin," I muttered to myself.

A gimmick—that was the name of the game in the cutthroat world of Midwestern dinner theater. And without one, Fox Hill would be out of business in less than a month. Anna Harper, the dinner theater's artistic director and my boss for the past seven years, was fully aware of our company's dire straits. She'd been hinting for months that I should get my rÉsumÉ out, that I should try to nail down my dream job at Landmark Stage, the Twin Cities' newest theatrical darling. In fact, she'd pretty much told me that my next paycheck would be my last—the theater loved me, couldn't work without me, but just couldn't afford to keep me, blah, blah, blah.

Alas, my Fox Hill credentials weren't likely to spark interest from the Landmark. Like it or not, I'd limited my marketability by staying with Anna for as long as I had. Every time I applied for a position with the prestigious Landmark Stage—even just working in the ticket office—I received a polite, anonymous, form-letter rejection.

Nevertheless, barring a miracle, Anna was going to have to cut me loose. But we wouldn't go down without a fight. Prior to hiring some starry-eyed kid right out of high school, Anna had decided on one last money-making scheme: selling our old costumes to the public. We were trying to be as festive as possible as we launched our last-ditch bid for survival—we had taken out full-page ads in both the Minneapolis StarTribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press announcing our grand sale: Evening gowns! Dance wear! Halloween costumes for young and old alike!

We played up the glamour, providing a long list of our hit shows from the past decade. We kinda, sorta, maybe hoped that no one would focus on the fact that most of the costumes were designed for a handful of quick outings on stage. We absolutely refused to make any guarantee that seams would hold, that sequins would stay attached, that feathers and ribbons and bows would last through a single wearing at a glamorous society ball.

That's why we kept a costumer on hand during all performances.

A costumer, someone to run lights, someone to run the sound board, people to change sets and hand out props—it could take more than a dozen backstage folks to mount one of our productions. And I was the person in charge of all of them, at least until I was laid off. Kira Franklin, stage manager extraordinaire.

Okay. That wasn't really the way that I thought of myself. I always stopped after the "manager" part.

But my father added the "extraordinaire" when he dutifully attended each of our productions. And so did my high school debate coach. And the handful of friends that I managed to rope into seeing individual shows, most often by handing out coupons for free dessert at our luscious gourmet buffet table (two entrÉes nightly!).

Come to think of it, most of my friends had dropped the "extraordinaire" a few years back, too. Maybe it was our Christmas production of Miracle on 34 Street, with a well-developed seventeen-year-old playing the little girl role, because we just couldn't find a kid who could stick to our rehearsal schedule.

Truth was, the Fox Hill Dinner Theater was not a leading light in the Twin Cities' theater community.

Let me explain a little more about who and what and where we were. You've probably heard of the Mall of America, right? The largest shopping mall in North America, with more than four hundred stores? Employs 12,000 people? Built around an amusement park, with a flight simulator, aquarium, and real live (okay, dead) dinosaur walk? Visited by forty million people each and every year?

Fox Hill was about a mile south of there.

We were located in an old strip mall, space we took over from a Woolworth's that was driven out of business by the big box stores even farther down the road. We had a decent-size "house" with seating for five hundred. There were two steam tables to serve dinner, and a thrust stage that reached into the audience, bringing musicals so close that patrons could practically touch them. But in a metropolitan area with a thriving artistic community and more than one hundred theaters, large and small, Fox Hill had its work cut out for it.

And things weren't exactly helped by the fact that our next-door neighbor was a porno-movie theater—the Fox Hill Cinema. You might have thought that dirty movies were a losing business proposition in the wake of the Internet and perfect-for-home-viewing DVDs. The fading grande dame, though, had cleverly diversified to stay in business with its three-screen emporium. Two showed the latest skin flicks, and one showed art films.

It could be really interesting to watch the line at their ticket window. It was pretty easy to tell who was in line for the Truffaut retrospective, and who was waiting for Goldilust and the Three Bares. At the dinner theater, we tried to promote ourselves to the first group, and we hoped that the second crowd didn't wander through our doors by mistake. You had to take your customers where you found them, though. Isn't that one of the primary rules of business? Well, it should have been.

"Kira? Are you in here?"

As if to answer, I sneezed again. "Yeah. In the back room."

Maddy Rubens pushed aside a sliding rack of thirty-six identical dresses—the irresistible Paris Originals from last year's overly optimistic production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Maddy was a lighting designer who had worked at Fox Hill on occasional gigs between the handful of dream jobs that she'd landed in New York, the more usual local productions, and the rare-but-lusted-after West Coast projects. More important, Maddy was my housemate and best friend.

"Jules and I finished going through the jewelry," she announced. "There's enough crap out there for a dozen high school proms. Tiaras up the wazoo, and enough pearls to strangle a decent-size horse."

"Gives all new meaning to the phrase ‘costume'jewelry," I said.

"We're calling it a day and going to get burritos. Are you coming with?"

My stomach rumbled. Even though I'd had an Egg McMuffin with double hash browns for breakfast, I'd worked through our supposed lunch break. In fact, I'd had nothing but coffee since coming in that morning—four of my jumbo java mugs' worth. I'd brewed it first thing, taking elaborate care to put out the sign that read "Kira's Stash." I liked my coffee twice as strong as anyone else did, and I'd finally conceded the necessity of labeling my own carafe after poor Anna had been kept awake for thirty-six straight hours following one particularly long dress rehearsal with nothing but my java for sustenance.

"Burritos sound great," I said, "but I want to finish up Kismet."'

"The costumes will still be here tomorrow," Maddy said, reasonably enough. "You work too hard."

I sighed. "I don't work hard enough. I told Anna I would have all of this stuff ready by last Friday."

"The same Anna who's signing your walking papers next week?" Trust Maddy to tell it like it was.

"Come on," I said. "Could you just walk out? Leave all this behind?" Maddy snorted, but I knew that she was every bit as tied to the theatrical world as I was. We weren't in it for the money—both of us, along with Jules, could barely afford to pay my father rent on the second-floor apartment he provided us at well below market rate. We were in the theater because we loved it. It made our hearts sing, as corny as that sounded. We loved the creativity, the feeling that we were making something from nothing.

Either that, or we were bug-eyed crazy.

"Yeah, you're right," Maddy agreed reluctantly, as I'd known she would. "But you still have to eat. Let's go! Jules is treating. We're going to get chips. With extra salsa. And guac-a-mo-le..." She turned the last word into a seductive song.

I shook my head reluctantly. "Nope. I wouldn't enjoy it, with this stuff hanging over my head. But tell Jules that buying tonight doesn't get her off the hook for the Scrabble victory dinner she owes me."

Jules—Julia Kathleen McElroy—was the third occupant of our apartment. She was an actress. After spending years trying to top the charts in the Twin Cities theater scene, Jules had settled into a comfortable career doing industrials, training films for companies. Her most successful role had been "Stubborn Defendant" in You're Being Deposed? Expect the Worst.

"Fine," Maddy said with a resigned sigh. But then she took a step closer to me, resting her blunt-fingered hand on my arm. "Just tell me with a straight face that this doesn't have anything to do with today's date."

"Today's date?" I asked, and I almost managed to sound puzzled. What could I say? Acting wasn't my strong suit. I knew it would be overkill to say, "I don't have a date today. Do you?" Besides, I could never be quite that blasÉ about the greatest disaster in my entire life.

"Kira," Maddy remonstrated.

I shook my head. "It doesn't have anything to do with today's date." I said the words with the rote certainty of a small child reciting multiplication tables.

"I don't believe you."

I raised my chin and looked straight into her pierc...