As the audience drifted into the Norfolk Library on Saturday, April 5, they were directed to the reference room, where a gleaming tray of martinis greeted them. The story on offer that evening, “Here We Are,” was written by the Algonquin Round Table stalwart Dorothy Parker in 1931, a time when it was not unusual for groups of adults gathering at sundown to clutch fistfuls of raw liquor.

And it was not unusual for Parker to write in acidulated tones about the relations between the sexes. It was she who wrote: “Life is a burst of colorful song,/A medley of extemporanea./And love is thing that can never go wrong,/And I am Marie of Roumania.”

The story re-enacts a conversation between two newlyweds settling into a train compartment as they set off on their honeymoon trip to New York. Inevitably, this being a Dorothy Parker story, the unnamed couple enact the first skirmishes in what is clearly to be a bloody war. It may be fought largely in a domestic setting and conducted in conversational tones, but it will have all the cruelty and deviousness of the real thing.

Rosemary Gill read the story in an assured and highly modulated style. Her rendering of the breathless, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth voice of the bride and the bluff, cajoling voice of the groom elicited titters, squirms, and guffaws. The entire performance will be broadcast on CATV 6 and  made available online at robinhoodradiotv. A short segment can be viewed below: