Taffy? Or radio?

I am never again making two dozen bottles of coffee syrup by myself. Technically it was a six-kilo batch, meaning two dozen bottles of five ounces each and enough left over for the fourth half-liter swing-top we didn't fill on Wednesday; it took four hours and it gave me another migraine. My back is also wrecked. The combination seems to have disconcerted my neck. Let's face it: everything above the waist is kaput.

(Do not blame rushthatspeaks. They got sick. People who are sick should not leave the house, or make products intended for public consumption. Feel free to blame UPS, which delivered the bottles today at noon instead of any time on Thursday, or Tuesday as originally claimed. The early afternoon would have been a lot less frenetic if I hadn't had to worry about how to get a twenty-eight-pound box of glass bottles from vanguardcdk's front porch to my parents' kitchen.)

People bought coffee syrup at the show tonight. Both in milk and in bottles. Last night they bought coffee milk and asked if the syrup was available to take home. The Beverly Beverage Company of Beverly, Mass. (est. 1896, exp. 1960) lives. I have done my job.

And the cast of The Big Broadcast of 1962: A Byfar Christmas Carol are doing the hell out of theirs. I keep hearing people coming up to Rob and saying it's the best Big Broadcast yet, but they're right. Traditionally, the shows have come in two parts: an episode of The Frank Cyrano Byfar Hour plus a second feature, respectively The War of the Worlds: The Fall of Boston ('38), Tomes of Terror ('46), and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ('54). The conceit of the first of these, of course, was that the Martian invasion of Boston interrupted the regular broadcast of the Byfar Hour; the Jack Benny-like comedy breaks down as the gasping bandleader's jumbled reports of an emergency in New Jersey are substantiated by the disturbing crackle of the airwaves and the last we see of Frank Cyrano and the Byfar cast, they're huddled round the radio with the rest of apprehensive America, Frank Readick's eyewitness account fading into the local equivalent on WPM. (It's a chilling first-act closer and it could only have worked on the stage: a haunting image of entertainers themselves struck silent, reduced to audience; upstaged by something no wisecracking can wave away. Nothing in the series until A Byfar Christmas Carol reached that level of poignancy, and I'd argue never again that level of unease.) In succeeding Big Broadcasts, the two acts were plainly separate programs on the same fictitious radio station. Entering the Somerville Theatre or the Regent, the audience was taking their place in the studio for the Byfar Hour, then whatever Halloween chiller or thriller was airing next. There was always a show-within-a-show, but the genres changed gears at the intermission. A Byfar Christmas Carol is the first episode to run both kinds of story simultaneously and the results are the most integrated and the most intimate show the series has produced.

An adaptation of Dickens is both the excuse for the Byfar plot and its not-so-secret spine, as Amelia Adams' refusal to take a small part in an experimental TV production of A Christmas Carol sends her Scrooge-ghosting through the history of radio as an art form, with vaudeville its past and television its future, which is also her own history. And pace alien conquest averted, it's the one with the most at stake. Too many contemporary stories seem to behave as though their protagonists are failures if they don't save the world, really actually like the planet. What's wrong with just knowing that your life in art's service wasn't wasted and it's not over yet? A Christmas Carol (1843) resonates not just because it invented Christmas as we know it and everybody likes ghosts, but because with greater subtlety, but just as firmly as its direct descendant It's a Wonderful Life (1946), it reminds its audience that a life can make a difference, for good or for ill. Ebenezer Scrooge isn't a terribly important person, let's face it. As a squeezing, wrenching etc. etc. old sinner, he doesn't make or break London; he's merely one of its small, self-centered engines of misery and inequality, part of the general fog of human carelessness. As a friend, philanthropist, and generous model of humanity, he's not going to save the city from itself, either, but that doesn't stop him from making a very practical improvement in the lives of the Cratchits and who knows how many others who in that other, colder future he might have casually ruined or simply not cared to help? Amelia's quite right when she says with all her self-defensive skepticism that no one will miss the Byfar crew if they don't reunite for their holiday special—but something will still be going out of the world that could have been remembered, rekindled. (All solstice stories are about bringing back out of the dark, remember, whether that's death or despair or the plane of the ecliptic.) And so even if Amelia's three Ghosts of Byfar are nothing more than a dream with more of eggnog than ectoplasm about them, it's still a psychomachia worth seeing played out, because we need that reminder: yes, it matters to love a thing; yes, it matters to trust yourself to it; yes, it changes things, whether it is the spirit of Christmas or the magic of radio. Even if all it changes is yourself. You never know who else that means.

Oh, God. This is my traditional night-before-a-show-closes recommendation, isn't it? Past three in the morning and two performances left. I haven't even had the chance to talk about the other quality of intimacy that I love so much about A Byfar Christmas Carol, the way that through the shifting layers of metafiction it's possible to glimpse, for once, something of the real lives of the actors we've heretofore seen only as their roles. "Amelia Adams of the Adams Adamses" comes from the kind of old money that bequeathed her a mansion on Beacon Hill and a butler so old and creaky, I have increasing difficulty seeing him as grey-haired as opposed to just nobody remembers to dust him, but Amelia Adams started on the vaudeville stage in Revere Beach, straight out of talent shows with a voice that's not yet all whiskey and cigarettes, an eager, wide-eyed partner in a kid who probably loved the Lightning coaster, and a routine that needed some serious revision. (It takes thirty seconds, but watching Frank and Amelia do vaudeville badly is one of the great pleasures of the show: as Amelia herself identifies, it's not just that the jokes are bad, it's that their roles are all wrong; once they swap so that his straight face can never quite keep up with her withering hauteur, they're solid.) A former Foley artist is given a fond salute, the next generation at the Chowderhouse reads Theodore Sturgeon and Mad magazine. It's as close as we're ever going to get to the true history of the Byfar Hour and we're told up front it's a story within a story: trying to pin down the facts among the lampshading is a futile endeavor, which doesn't make it any less warming when Amelia smiles, hearing one more time the old patter she left behind with the Palace Theater.

And it is funny. And it is quotable. And the line about the flashback band was all right on the page, but I snicker every time Lex Concord actually says it. And it's not being recorded, so you've got two performances left before this show is Byfar Past. I'm going to bed so I don't sleep through both of them. Happy longest night, all. Tomorrow there's the sun.