Every political group has at least a few people out on the edge, true believers who take the concepts so far that to get into the mainstream they would have to take a plane. So does every religion. But, as Kat is discovering, the line between accommodating their beliefs and turning your own upside down is not easy to draw.

This week, Kat is going to be making fairly good money working stage crew for an very Orthodox Jewish girls� school. The school is putting on the musical �Oliver,� which seems a strange choice for an all-girls school. Because of their rules on modesty, only females may attend the performance. As part of those rules, only girls can work be on the technical and stage crew.

If they were doing this performance at their own school, there would be no issues raised, but they are not. They have rented the auditorium of Kat�s public high school. The stage director, who is male and not Jewish, was clueless about what he was getting into. He knew the cast was all-female but, from a rental perspective, that makes no difference. He knew that only women would attend but, from a rental perspective, that makes no difference. It was this week that they explained that only women could work at the show.

If expensive equipment were not involved, he probably would have told them they were on their own. But the school must protect his equipment. The public school, of course, cannot hire only women to work the show so the religious school must do the hiring. He put on his own stipulation: they had to find girls who already were trained on the equipment and whom he trusted to run things without his being able to be on site. (He also insisted, I believe, that they hire a female from the school to be in charge but he was assuming that she would not really know the equipment.)

There are very few girls at that school who have worked the lights and sound system. While there have been more girls than one might expect on stage crew, many of them build sets and are part of running crew. (The running crew gets props and sets on and off the stage and requires little in the way of special skills. The girls� school will be supplying their own running crew.) Kat is one of a small group with additional technical theater skills. She�s worked spotlights for the school before. He knows her and trusts her. So Kat is going to be making more money an hour than she has ever made before this week.

But is agreeing to do this a good deed? Mr. Philately thinks that it is. She�s helping her school and she�s helping expand the horizons of the girls on stage by letting them act and sing and dance within the constraints of their beliefs. Others are not so sure. In their view, she is abetting a view of women remarkable similar to that held by people like the Taliban. She is giving tactic approval by helping them restrict their world of song to women only to such an extent.

Good deed, abetting, or simply taking advantage of an opportunity? This one seems a struggle between the good of promoting freedom of thought and the good of promoting liberty? Isn�t life easier in a struggle between good and evil?

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