Tom Lake (Reese’s Book Club Pick)
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the familys orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the pas...
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Yes, it was true that Uncle Wallace was a drunk, and his understudy hid in the farthest corner of the theater where not even the light could find him, but plenty of other things were true as well, such as the fact that Albert Long embodied the Stage Manager as completely as he had embodied that long--ago bachelor uncle.
Duke might have made fun of him—-dinner theaters, bombastic speeches, lecherous asides—-but when he was onstage there was nothing to complain about.
Uncle Wallace never had to reach for a line because the lines were written inside him, just the way Emily’s were written into me, the difference being he’d found a part he wouldn’t age out of.
When, in the third act, Uncle Wallace took me back to my mother’s kitchen, he looked at me with so much compassion it stung my eyes.
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