Casting Call
By E. Wallace
1999
"And then my uniform fell off, and they shot me dead."
Beverly shook her head. Jean-Luc sounded totally unconvincing, and she suspected he was doing it on purpose just to get out of it.
"And then my uniform fell off, and they shot me dead."
Well, Riker was better but she had used him quite a bit in the last few months.
Perhaps it was time to go in a different direction. Gender wasn't critical anyway. She moved on.
"And then my uniform fell off, and they shot me dead."
Beverly choked back a laugh. What was the point? The male portion of the audience, in the grip of an instantaneous fantasy, would never even hear the second half of the line if she let Deanna say it.
"And then my uniform fell off, and they shot me dead."
Worf hadn't made much of an effort to get the line itself out. He'd never make it through the whole speech. He was as bad as the captain about not wanting to participate in such 'frivolity' as he called it. Only a Klingon could make having fun sound like torture.
"And then my uniform fell off, and they shot me dead."
Hmmm. Geordi was a definite maybe. He seemed a bit too chipper about the 'shot me dead' part, but she could work with him on that. No character was ever supposed to laugh at his own lines.
"And then my uniform fell off, and they shot me dead."
Same deadpan delivery as usual. Data did every first reading that way. Then again, that made him even more malleable than Geordi.
Beverly rubbed the back of her neck to soothe the tired muscles. She had thought the writing would be the tough part. The challenge from her writers' network to build a play of any genre around a single bit of dialogue had been intriguing except that she had simply forgotten to take into consideration the infinite number of ways the damn line could be read.
Wait... what about...?
A new idea curled her mouth into a wicked grin. Of course! He was so perfect for the role that she could 'hear' him read the line without the benefit of an audition.
//"And then... my, my uniform... fell... off, and they... shot me... (gulp) dead."//
It would take just a bit of tweaking in a couple of places, but Reg Barclay looked like someone who could be shot for losing his uniform!
The end