He switched.

Goldings told Silverstein that "my chair is hard enough."

But Beer was still not satisfied. He wanted to sit at a desk. And so they moved. Silverstein explained the camera angles were not as good, but he was willing to give it a try.

Then he asked Beer if it would be all right to have Kennedy sitting on the corner of the desk, since it was necessary to get him into the discussion as well. Beer agreed. "It's completely bogus, but it's all right."

Non-Submissive Undergrad

After a dry run through, Silverstein was satisfied. Beer, however, started telling Golding to be more forceful in his rebuttals during the tutorial session. "I want them to see the Harvard undergrad as non-submissive," he explained.

The subject changed to what Goldings should wear. Beer suggested chinos and a sports coat instead of a suit. Goldings objected. "Chinos are so conventional."

But Beer persisted. "This whole thing is bogus, but we've got to make it as little bogus as possible. Wear the chinos."

With that, the first session of the Eliot tutorial scene was over. On the way back to Weld, Silverstein started worrying about WNAC-TV's remote unit. The station had promised to have it all ready to go by 3 p.m. on Saturday. Yet, it did not plan to start setting it up until 11 a.m. that same day. As he told Bennie, "Do you realize, they want to do in four hours what our men from New York plan to do in two days with the other units? How can they possibly hope to be finished on time?"

She Was Joking

In Weld, Silverstein showed Lewis the way he planned to do the tutorial scene. Lewis said he liked it. A few minutes later, just after 5 p.m., one girl said, "No more problems. We're shut for the night." Naturally, she was joking. Numerous script revisions still had to be made, and then the corrected versions had to be mimeographed. Also, the directors and producers still had to watch the Pudding show rehearsal at 5:30 and the Glee Club at 6:50. But both of these were relatively relaxing for all concerned. Their only purpose was to give the Omnibus staff some idea of what type of material each group had available for the air. The actual choice was to be made later.

At 8:15 p.m., people started talking about food. They asked for Mary Ahearn's advice on where to go since she lives in Cambridge. It was the "same, old place," however: Chez Dreyfus. While the others went ahead, Mary stayed behind to make a few general comments about the show.

"On paper, we're in wonderful shape now as far as time is concerned," she said. "But by Sunday we might be ten minutes over. There's no way of telling about the timing. Alistair (Alistair Cooke, the show's regular emcee who arrived in town Thursday night to speak to the Nieman Fellows) has done the show long enough so that he knows exactly what a minute is. But the other people on the show won't. That's why we need to rehearse so much."

They'll Use Own Words

Mary explained the role of writer Lewis. "He wrote the whole thing through, but only to give the individuals who are going to be on the show some idea of what to say. Each person who speaks will use his own words. Alistair usually writes all of his own material, too, but on a show like this he'll only re-write what Andy has already prepared for him."

Mary took her job philosophically. She has probably spent more time on this show than any other single person, having started it the day after another one of her shows--the last in the series on the Constitution--appeared on Omnibus. She knew something would come out on Sunday, even though normally the professionals in New York "take a week of rehearsals to put on a show." The panic would all be over by Sunday, she felt sure. But, as she puts it, "To make the program look spontaneous, we have to get all the bugs out now."

She left to join the others at Chez Dreyfus