From "The Memoirs, Chapter Four":

            We did a wonderfully ridiculous “living tableau” called Meet Me at the Soda Fountain, in which a cute girl and a cute soda-jerk in a fifties soda fountain set flirt silently with each other all day, the girl sipping her chocolate malt and the trick was that each time she took a sip, she let a little bit of the chocolate drip down her chin until slowly, throughout the day, she and the stool and the set and the floor are covered in a brown mess.  Neither she nor the soda jerk would ever notice the chocolate mess.  Got it?

            It took place in a new, swanky art gallery downtown owned by a friend of Billy’s, the Polly Friedlander, where she, Polly, didn’t quite know what to think of our chocolate mess, but we were a big hit with the gallery visitors and so she liked us.

            We would spell each other for the long hours in the tableau.  Billy King and his wife, Olga, took a turn.

            We even reprised the silly thing later in the front window of the Encore Theater in downtown San Francisco, now with Joy Phipps, in one of her first "tableaux."  She loved it.

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   ...NEXT:  WOLVES BY ALFRED BRUST