Then I heard a crash, and looked over to see my dad had dropped his end of the couch, leaving Frank struggling to hold one side of the couch aloft. “Andrea!” my dad yelled, as Frank lowered his end slowly, his face red. I had the feeling he was regretting that he hadn’t just gone home when he had the chance. “Fred here had a great idea!”

“Frank,” I corrected through gritted teeth. I couldn’t help but wish for the parents I normally had—the ones who never would have forgotten about Living Room Theater, the ones who weren’t bent on embarrassing me in every way they could.

“What’s that?” my mother asked, emerging from the kitchen.

“Bug Juice!” my dad said. “Emily, stop looking for plays. We’ll just put ours up. We have enough copies of the script.”

“Wonderful,” my mother said, her face relaxing. “I’ll figure out some food and you can cast it.”

My dad looked around, then pointed at Frank. “You can play Duncan,” he said, and Frank shot me a look.

“Dad,” I said, setting the pile of plays down and taking a step forward. Duncan was the second lead, after Cecily, and that was a lot to throw at someone who’d only come into the house in a futile attempt to get hydrated. “I’m not sure that—”

“And we need a Cecily,” he went on, talking over me. “Andrea,” he yelled in the general direction of the kitchen, “who can play Cecily?”

“Oh, god,” my mother said, coming back into the room and trying to run her hand through her hair, apparently forgetting there were curlers in it. “I have no idea. Maybe Pamela’s daughter?”

“If we don’t have a good Cecily, the whole play falls apart,” my dad said, shaking his head. “You remember what happened during that performance in Chicago.”

“I know,” my mother said. “Let’s see. . . .”

“I’ll do it.”  The words were out of my mouth before I realized I’d even thought them. My parents turned to me, both looking shocked. Frank, though, was giving me a smile from across the room.

“Seriously?” Beckett asked, sounding deeply skeptical.

“I think that seems very appropriate,” my mother said, crossing past me to go back into the kitchen, giving my arm a squeeze as she went. “Thank you, Em.”

“Yes,” my dad said, after a small pause, still looking at me like he wasn’t quite sure who I was. “That’s . . . wonderful. Now let’s move this couch.”

This was how, an hour later, scripts in hand, Frank and I ended up standing behind the doors of the dining room, looking out as the audience assembled. If I hadn’t been so nervous about what was to come, I probably would have been much more embarrassed that Frank had been pulled so far into my parents’ world and then forced to act against his will. I was beginning to feel dizzy, and it was becoming clear to me that it was much easier to volunteer to do the brave thing, and much harder to actually have to follow through with it.

I could see Dawn sitting in the back, and when she caught my eye, she gave me a wave and a thumbs-up. When it turned out we had almost no food in the house that we could serve, I’d proposed just getting pizza, and my mother had instantly agreed, putting me in charge of it while she tried to get the house in order. I’d called Dawn’s cell, and told her we needed ten pies and assorted salads and breadsticks. Dawn then told me that she had just finished her shift, but if I called the actual restaurant and paid with a card, she could bring the order to me and then go home. When she’d arrived, she’d helped me set up the food, and when she’d found out what was about to happen, had asked if she could stay, and had ended up helping my mother do the last-minute cleaning.

The crowd suddenly seemed much bigger than it had in previous years. And why had I never considered how disconcerting it was to have a room full of people staring at you? I rolled my script in my hands. I was hanging on to it for dear life, even though I really didn’t need it. Bug Juice had been such a part of our lives for so long that I had committed most of it to memory years ago, after seeing it performed over and over again.

“Two minutes,” Beckett said, sticking his head into the dining room and then skating away again. He was in charge of reading the stage directions and holding the book. Even though all of us would have scripts in our hands, I’d been to a number of Living Room Theaters where people lost their place and then fumbled through their script for what felt like hours, trying to find their line.

“We should probably go stand with the rest of the cast,” I said. The other main players were clustered in the kitchen, waiting for the play to start. The cast was big enough that people with one or two lines were just sitting in the audience and sharing scripts, and would make their way to the “stage” when it was time for their scenes. But the main actors—who included my mom’s department secretary, the Elizabethan scholar in the English department, the assistant costume designer, three of the set guys, and a few of my father’s grad students—had a green room for the night. Frank nodded but still looked nervous, and I suddenly realized that Frank Porter—who’d gotten up in front of the whole school, who was always making speeches, who seemed more together than anyone I knew—was nervous about performing a makeshift play in my TV room. It looked like he was much more nervous than I was—which for some reason made me feel brave.

“You’re going to do great,” I assured him.

Frank looked over at me, and gave me a half smile. “Thanks,” he said quietly. I smiled back just as Beckett stuck his head into the kitchen again.

“Places!” he yelled.

An hour and a half later, the play was starting to wind down, and no major disasters had occurred. My first few lines had been rushed, the script shaking in my hand and my voice high and trembly.  And it was a good thing I had the lines memorized—it didn’t hurt that eleven-year-old me had pretty much written them—because in my first scene, my vision was too blurred and my script was vibrating too much for me to have read anything on the page anyway. But as the play continued, I could start to remember what it felt like to breathe normally again. And it wasn’t like I was acting with Broadway’s best, either—the Elizabethan scholar playing Camp Director Arnold said most of her lines with her back to the audience, and the grad student who played Tucker had lost his place four times in his first scene, which was impressive considering he’d only had three lines.