Character Motivation

A few times when I was a tyke of, oh, about 8 years old, I stayed at my aunt’s house. My cousins were 10-plus years older than me, but my aunt had kept some of their childhood treasures, and on my first visit, she put out an array of old toys on the living room floor.

Still bobbing up and down in my memory is a pink plastic showboat adrift on a dull, tan shag-carpet sea, in the midst of a now-blurry flotilla of other old toys.

The showboat, with its ridiculously oversized paddle wheel and an unwieldy theater smack dab in the middle of the deck, came with plastic people. These characters stood on tabs, which fit in slots on the theater floor, so they could be moved