Waiting in the Winter

A Story by Emily Hayes

In fifty years I walk out of a Broadway theater after managing some cool show and this girl whose your current age comes up to you and starts asking you all these questions. Here's the conversation.

11:30 pm, 1/4/2026

The New York City air is brisk, biting me as soon as I walk out of the now empty theater; it smells like New York City, a smell too beautifully rotten to describe. I look around for a moment, taking in the scene outside the side door, which is often times mobbed by fans dying to catch a glimpse of actors and actresses as they leave for the night, now abandoned except for me. I start walking up 48^th street towards Times Square when I hear a voice behind me, not threatening in nature but all the same jarring �"

“Why’d you do it?” the voice asks. It comes from a young girl, no older than a high school senior, with mousy brown hair flying in the wind and eyes brighter than a spotlight on a soloist. Her cheeks are bright red from the winter wind, her lips equally red from her lipstick.

I turn around, shift my bag higher up on my shoulder, and shove my hands into the pockets of my coat. “Um, what do you mean?” I ask, watching the cloud produced by my breath fall out of my mouth.

“I read the interview in the playbill from Beauty and the Beast and you mentioned that you didn’t originally want to stage manage, but teach. So, why’d you do it?” she timidly walks towards me, the playbill is still clutched in her hands.

“Well, this is what I really love,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know what to do with my life,” she said, shifting uncomfortably from side to side and rubbing her chapped hands together, “and I think I want to do stuff related to theater. But I don’t want to act…I want to create something. Maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, I was looking through my playbills the other night, I keep them all, and you have stage managed a good number of the shows that I’ve seen recently.”

She has fire in her eyes, fire that needs to be harnessed and channeled before it burns down everything else. Her uncertainty is intriguing �" she’s uncertain for more reasons than just the fact that she’s being forced to choose what she wants to do with her life while at the same time she has to ask adults if she can use the restroom.

“Well, I’m flattered that you waited around for me, even though it’s absolutely freezing. Walk with me,” I said as I continued towards Times Square. She quickly caught up with me and kept pace nicely, both of us noticeably shivering. “Tell me about yourself. What’s your name, where are you from, what kind of stuff you want to do, all that jazz.”

“Oh. Um. My name is Eve and I’m from Brooklyn…Williamsburg, to be exact. I’m a senior in high school and I really don’t do much. I write scripts sometimes, film and theatrical, and I read a lot, and I do theater stuff with my high school drama department, but that’s about it.” She’s hiding behind her hair, but I can tell that she wants something big to happen to her.

I find a Starbucks �" rare in New York, I know �" and open the door. Eve looks relieved and walks through the door, accidently tripping over the minor threshold and brushing it off as if it never happened. We both order tea and sit down at a small table far from the door.

“Can I ask you a few more questions?” she asks me after a few minutes of silent absorption of heat.

“Shoot, kid” I tell her.

“What has been the hardest part so far?”

Well, she wastes no time asking the hard questions. But then again, she started off by asking why I do what I do, so really I shouldn’t be surprised. I think about that one for a moment, sipping my tea as I do so.

“Probably the weird hours �" we work when people are taking their time off. It makes friendships and relationships outside of the theater world difficult, but the good ones tend to stick around. Either that or working with actors 24/7.”

She smirks at that, almost choking on her tea. She looks satisfied with the answer, taking it in and turning it over until she relates to it.

“What’s your favorite part of the process?” She’s becoming more comfortable now, as described by her body language. She’s not rigidly straight, but relaxed in her seat. She pushed her hair away from her face and behind her ears and finally removed her coat that has noticeable seen many years of wear and tear.

“That would have to be watching the actors figure out exactly who their character is. Being a stage manager, you’re at every rehearsal watching everything go down. When actors originally walk into rehearsal, they know who they’re supposed to be playing, yet they don’t necessarily know how that character acts, why they do the things they do. Sometimes it takes a few days, sometimes a few months, but eventually the actors will reach a moment where they truly become the character and watching that happen for them might be my favorite part.”

We continue like this for about an hour �" her throwing questions at me, me answering them and all the while getting to know this random girl more and more.

“Why did you wait for me? There are hundreds of other stage managers in this city who would be more helpful than I am,” I said, holding my empty cup of tea simply to have something to hold in my hands.

“Because,” she says, searching for the right words, “you’re kind of awesome. We’re very similar people from what I could tell from the interview in the playbill and just from this conversation we’ve been having. My parents don’t really understand the whole theater thing, I just wanted to get some answers to questions about what it’s like being in the theater world all the time, not just for a few hours after school.” She looks as if she has more to say, but we’re both exhausted and I can tell she wants to go home, as do the people working at Starbucks.

“Well, like I said, I’m flattered that you waited around for me. Nobody waits around for the stage manager. But it’s getting late, so I’m going to get going now. But first, here’s my phone number. Call me when you want an internship,” I gave her a napkin with my number written sloppily on it, which was met with an excited hug.

“Thank you so much, you have no idea what this means to me,” she said, almost crying tears of joy. With that, we put our coats back on and prepared ourselves for the briskness that awaited us outside. We walked to the subway station together, making brief conversation while we made our way there and then said our goodbyes, her heading to her family’s brownstone in Williamsburg as I went uptown to my apartment near the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I walked into my tiny apartment, filled with things from my life; the place is pretty much a collage of my personality. It’s the top floor of a gorgeous building owned by a producer for a show I stage-managed years ago. The walls are covered in photos, maps, posters, and playbills. The living room has a couch, a char, and a coffee table �" they don’t match, seeing as I found them all in different thrift stores throughout the lower east side. Everywhere you look, there are piles of books. All kinds of book: classical literature, young adult fiction, nonfiction, and anthologies of the greats like Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, and Hemingway. I sat down in my chair facing the window and thought about what just happened.

She waited around in the freezing cold just to talk to me. She wanted to know about why I did the things I did, why I loved what I loved. And I’m pretty sure I solidified for her that a career in theater is possible. She saw me as a hero, an icon, and that was something new to me. People idolize the actors on stage, not the girl in the booth with a headset telling everyone when to do everything.

I closed the light and went to bed, excited for a phone call from Eve from Williamsburg.