My reasoning was this: Ashland is a small town. Ashland has many actors. After watching said actors in various plays and piercing the raiments, face-daubings, and hairpieces that concealed their forms, you would think that I should have no trouble recognizing them swanning about town. I spy them not. But, Felicity, you will say, they are actors. They are not running around town looking for somewhere to spend their ample funds like the average Ashland visitor. They are probably snugly leading normal lives in their Festival-owned apartments. But still, I told my husband, you’d think I’d see one or two occasionally. Whilst I cannot recall with absolute certainty the events of trips to Ashland over my entire life, I am quite certain the last three trips have produced no sightings. The cooking store? The Safeway? The Laundromat? Don’t they buy books, or go out to dinner? Where are they hidden? Thus did I reason as we strolled down Main Street.

Matthew smirked, “Are you saying that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival employs automata?”

Of course I wasn’t, but neither am I constitutionally able to pass up such an opening, so together we sketched a wee phantasmagoria of clockwork actors and the implications should Actors’ Equity become aware. We laughed and continued on our way, passing with (me) covetous looks and (Matt) averted eyes a display of shoes and hats, and just as we were about to pass the Varsity Movie Theatre (“The management does not endorse the views and opinions expressed in Fahrenheit 9/11. The Varsity is pleased to present a wide variety of films presenting many diverse viewpoints over the course of the year.”), a compact, muscular man with an energetic stride and a mane of tousled cornrows bustled by. We did not need to see his austere face, or hear his hearty projection when a hippy importuned him for directions, to recognize Kevin Kenerly, a truly excellent actor we were lucky enough to see as Romeo last year (and Caesar. And Oswald in Lear, this year). I stared at Matthew as the actor dwindled down Siskiyou, and he was convulsed in giggles. “Had nothing to do with it!” he chortled. On the way to King Lear that evening, we saw two other actors strolling down Main arm in arm. I turned accusingly to Matt.

“Those…” I hissed, “were actors!”

“Oh, were they?” he said innocently, with a smirk jigging behind his eyes.

So tell me. If the Shakespeare Festival does in fact employ ingenious automata to transmit the Bard’s word to the masses, if they keep their imagos secretly in storehouses until they deck themselves mechanically with finery for the matinee or evening performance, if they have hidden among the arcane workshops that produce thrones, crowns, stairways, riven trees and twining flowers some laboratory capable of shaping a variety of perfect human likenesses capable of every expression of joy and pain… how in heaven’s name did my husband get a remote control for them?