
"Darling, let's stop this pretending...
what more is there to say...
here's to your eyes and my final demise...
oh, Simone, it's you..."

from the song "Simone", sung by Boz Scaggs circa 1980


E.G. Marshall asks in his own inimitable way "What is reality"? Adequate enough question for this episode, which takes place as he calls it "in a third rate circus" in Europe 100 years ago.

Peter is an architect who (along with his mother) was deserted by his circus performer father years ago...as a young boy he trained for a performer's job there. He's arriving just as graveside services for his father are concluding. The younger man seems ill at ease with the circus and seems to want to collect some money his father promised him. The ringmaster/manager of the circus (well played by an accented Robert Dryden) says the money's there in a few days. (Is it?) But he needs an ending act in the father's place to keep the show going. So Peter the architect becomes (for an intended limited time) "Peter the mechanical man"...the first "two" in this title.

He finds himself falling in love with a ballerina named "Francesca" who is warm and kind to him, and assists him in his act. At times, though, he'll see her and attempting to be cordial, is coldly rebuffed. He learns the "cold one" is "Simone", Francesca's twin sister who's also one of the circus ballerinas. (Hey, Pete, you should have gotten a clue when you never saw the two of them together, but, then, we wouldn't have had as much of a story.) Then again, E.G. talks in one of his interludes of how Francesca and Simone's mother used to get different answers from them while playing as little girls, so what is reality, anyway? The sisters are the second "two" in the equation.

Again, interesting episode...I'm just not much into carnivals and circuses and the like... :? 