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thinking too much. How many times do I have to tell you? Don't think, just say the very first thing that comes into your head.'
    'Could they have done more with the ring idea?' another student suggests. 'The exercise seemed to kind of fizzle out at that point.'
    'I agree,' Paul says. 'Claire, turn it around now. You ask Keith the questions.'
    The acting class takes place in a large, pale rehearsal room near the university. There are just a dozen or so students, and Paul.
    She remembers her audition with him four months ago. The NYU/Tisch courses were the best of the best, and many times oversubscribed. Even if she could pay the exorbitant fees, she'd known that getting into the class would be tough.
    She'd prepared a monologue — Brecht, or Tennessee Williams: something worthy and literary — and sat nervously outside the audition room off Lafayette, waiting her turn with all the glamorous New York beauties, confident, willowy creatures who'd dismissed her with a glance. When at last it was her turn, she'd gone into the rehearsal room to find it empty, apart from a tiny, pixielike man in a plain black T-shirt. He was sitting on the only furniture in the room, a white table, playing with a plastic coffee spoon.
    She told him her name, and he pretended to write it down on a clipboard with the spoon. Then he looked at the spoon, puzzled, as if surprised it wouldn't write. Dipping it in an imaginary pot of ink, he flicked it at her.
    Immediately she put her fingers up to her eye and wiped the imaginary ink away. He nodded.
    'OK,' he said, 'you've passed.' He pulled out a real pen and wrote something down.
    'Just like that?'
    This seemed to amuse him. 'Why? Do you want to go on and see if I can find a reason to fail you?'
    She'd shrugged, and he'd said, 'Good. Classes begin when full semester starts. I'll see you then.'
    She took a deep breath. 'There's something I should tell you. I'm not actually a resident here. I mean, I don't have a green card or anything. I'm not even a student at the university.'
    'You can act, can't you?' Paul had said.
    She shrugged. 'I hope so.'
    'Then act like a student. If I'm right about you, it's the least you're capable of.'
    ===OO=OOO=OO===
    On their first day, Paul had got them to perform a scene from
Hamlet.
Claire had thought her fellow students were pretty good. Then he made them do it again while balancing broom handles on their fingertips. In the effort to keep the handles upright the scene fell apart, the actors tripping and stumbling over the unfamiliar language.
    Afterwards, Paul had gathered them around him. 'Let me tell you something. What you were doing just now, the first time, wasn't acting. It was
pretending.
You were copying what you've seen other actors do, but it wasn't real to you. That's why you couldn't do it the second time, when you had to concentrate on something else.
    'I am going to tell you only one thing today, but it's the most important thing I'll ever say to you: Don't think. Acting isn't faking or impersonating. Acting is
doing.'
    'Is this a Method class?' one of the students asked.
    An expression of mild annoyance crossed Paul's face. 'Don't ever let me hear you use that word. It implies that there's a set of rules or a formula of some kind. The phrase Stanislavski himself used was "inhabiting the moment". That's our goal.'
    ===OO=OOO=OO===
    Today they end up improvising a story in which two washroom attendants have been mistaken for brain surgeons and are operating on the president's mistress. Claire, lying on the floor, plays the mistress. The surgeons have just decided they will replace her brain, which they have accidentally mutilated, with one of their own, when someone walks forward into the circle.
    She sees a man in a long brown raincoat, snow all over his Hush Puppies. He stops and says, 'Claire Rodenburg?' to no-one in particular, and somehow he says it in a way that instantly, brilliantly, wearily, conveys that he's a cop.
    'You can't take her!' one of