quabbling Actors John and Marie

ome time ago Baron Von Lodge was the head of a small country near Switzerland known as Lilliland.

Lilliland had a fine arts culture that attracted artists and writers and actors. Among the residents were two famous actors who were married to each other, John and Marie Sanford.

The couple was well known for their acting, especially in a romantic comedy about a couple who go through life as lovers, facing the joys and sorrows of their lives together. That was the way it appeared onstage.

But, when Lady Angela, of Alpine Castle, and the Baron had a reception, and the couple was invited, the fur started to fly. In real life, they just could not seem to get along. Everyone at the reception stopped and watched them go at each other. They didn’t touch each other, but traded caustic words and sentences. They would argue that in one scene that was supposed to be John’s, Marie would do something to attempt to steal the scene away from him.

“Every time I am delivering my lines in the play, Marie would start playing with her hair in a peculiar way and the audience would not pay attention to my lines, but instead, focused on what Marie was doing with her long hair. That’s definitely upstaging me,” he claimed.

Then they tried being in separate plays but they missed each other so much that their performances suffered and the critics picked up on the poor performances.

The Baron and Lady Angela often spoke about the problem that John and Marie were having but they could not figure out how it might be solved.

Perhaps they might never leave the stage since they behaved better toward each other onstage than offstage. Shakespeare said that “all the worlds a stage” so perhaps they should use that phrase literally every day.

John and Marie eventually moved to London to appear in a theater in the West End. They must have worked things out together.

The Professor thought that the problem might come from a misguided sense of competition. That was a very good example of the importance of teamwork.