If you know the password — try typing N-I-C-K-E-L.
To whomever finds this book —
My wife asked me last spring what I thought I was doing, spending our wedding savings on a projector and three benches and a piano. Tonight one hundred and ninety-one souls came through the door. The Czaplewski twins, who do not have shoes that fit, sat in the front row and could not blink. Their mother told me afterward that they have spoken of nothing else for three days.
Understand: a working family in Millbrook cannot afford the opera house in Lansing. They cannot afford a Pullman ticket to see the ocean. But for one nickel — one nickel — they can watch a man fall down a hundred steps, or a Bedouin caravan cross the Sahara, or a crystal grow faster than God meant it to, or the wings of a bee in clear and certain detail. That is the whole of it.
Miss Marsh's piano makes them braver. The hand-colored reels make them dream. I just keep the lamp lit and the change box square. I have never done better work in my life.
— H. C. R., faithfully