She'll tell you what she remembers. She'll decide when.
She was sitting in that chair before the doors opened, and she will still be in it when you leave. Ask an usher who she is and they will tell you she came with the set. Ask her and she will tell you to sit down, they are about to start.
Nobody at the station knows her. Bing has never said her name on the air, Vivian has never handed her a station break, and Chester has never once held up a card for her, which is the only thing in the building he has never done. She is not in the studio. She is somewhere a good deal closer to you than that, and she has a story about some children, one Christmas Eve, and a night not a single one of them ever forgot.
She admits she forgets a great deal these days. Names. Where she has put things. Whole years that have gone soft and run together. She has made her peace with that, mostly. But a few nights have stayed sharp as the day they happened, and she has brought one of them with her.
She has a family who love her and are driven to distraction by her, on account of one habit in particular: she holds back the last piece of any story until the room has waited long enough to deserve it, and she is not sorry about it in the slightest.
From the first of December to the last, there is a bowl of red and white pinwheel candies on the table beside her chair. Where she gets them the other eleven months of the year, she has never said.
Every production of Christmas on the Dial is cast from its own community, so the face changes from town to town. Your program has tonight's cast.
Meet the others: Bing Marlow, Vivian Vale, Chester, Maggie, The Kids, The Hi-Fi Five, WMRG.
