My latest enchantment lies in the realm of the theater, in performance. On a trip to Sarasota, we encounter a bracing splash of Europe: John Ringling’s marble tomb of a museum full of darkly varnished old masters, more Circumcisions and Salomes than you could, as my father says, “shake a stick at.” Ringling’s villa on the tropic waterside has emerald cut-glass chandeliers. I like best the theater he bought in Italy, in the town of Asolo, and brought to Florida in numbered pieces, packed in crates. Reassembled, it’s a Renaissance music box, a horseshoe of gilt and velvet tiers, a blue ceiling studded with golden stars. We see Twelfth Night there, and laugh at the Clown’s reading a letter to Viola in a wild, distorted voice. Told to speak normally, he explains, “I do but read madness,” and my whole family laughs. I don’t understand the implications of the play’s playfully twisted genders, the comedy of cross-dressing, though I don’t imagine these are entirely lost on me either; I put them away for later, like Proust. What I’m aware of loving is light and costume, the shifting charm of theatrical effect.

Back home I construct a paper proscenium and stage, and begin to make my own designs: watercolored paper cut-outs for trees and pavilions, figures from magazines to represent Clown and Duke, Olivia and Viola. I’m planning to make a sort of puppet version of the play, all in my own design, but I get only as far as the opening. My cardboard Clown, in harlequin diamonds, strums a cardboard lute: “If music be the food of love, play on….”