Master Thespians

We were on the way to the mall yesterday and Ellie and I were in the back seat and Nana and Greg were in the front seat and Ellie had brought her purse with her. She showed everyone that in her purse she has a wallet and a real cell phone that doesn't work and keys that don't go to anything and a tiny notebook with a pen. So she decided to pull out her cell phone and "call" Auntie Anne. She asked for Auntie Anne's phone number and she carefully dialed it into her nonworking phone. When she hit the wrong number, she wasn't sure what to do, so I told her to push the red button to clear the number so she could start over. She had to type it in a few times, but she got it finally and waited for it to ring.

After a few seconds she said, "Hello?"
She paused and someone was clearly talking on the other end.
"Um, where are you?" Ellie asked. Then she whispered to us all, "She doesn't know where she is."
"How could she not know?" Nana asked.

I asked to talk to her, so Ellie handed me the phone and I said hello and listened to the silence that was Auntie Anne.

"Where are you?" I asked the phone. "Oh, okay." I told everyone that she was pulling into the parking lot. "Do you want to talk to Ellie again? Okay, here she is."

Ellie talked for a couple more seconds and then said goodbye and hung up the phone and wrote Auntie Anne's phone number into her notebook so she wouldn't have to ask for it anymore.

When we got to our meeting place in the mall, Anne and Heidi weren't there yet.

"Where are they?" Nana asked me.
"Not here yet, I guess," I answered.
"But didn't you just talk to them and they told you they were here?" Nana asked.
"That was just pretend. The phone didn't work," I told her. I thought it was obvious that we were pretending. We both laughed that she had been fooled.

A few minutes later, Greg joined us. "Where's Anne? I thought she told you she was here already," he said.

A HA! We fooled both of them!

We are great and powerful actresses.

I am, of course, reminded of the many hours Gen and I spent as children talking to imaginary people on telephones. How we would go into my dad's office in the basement and tape down the buttons under the receiver so we could pick up the handset without activating the phone and then have in-depth conversations with nobody. It was such a fun and engrossing game. And I can see that Ellie is already very good at this game. I am so proud of her.