Beneath her seemingly imperturbable exterior, Mrs. Estous Lee Davidson admits to having experienced many a nail-biting moment during her tenure as General Manager of the Bermuda Festival.

Yet she has loved every minute of the job she will soon relinquish.

"It is with considerable mixed feelings that I leave it, but it takes a lot of energy,'' she explained.

The 20-year-old Festival has long since become an efficient and well-oiled machine, but as with any artistic endeavour of this magnitude and complexity, anything can go wrong, and something usually does.

When the venue is a small island in the middle of the Atlantic, the hazards are compounded, and not always easily corrected.

What do you do, for example, when an artist arrives ill, or worse, cancels altogether? Baggage and equipment go astray? Flights are delayed and connections missed? Duplicate tickets distributed? The power fails? While some would throw temper tantrums, that is simply not Mrs. Davidson's style, and in any case she says "tempers never solve a problem''.

What, then, is her secret of coping? "I either approach things quietly and calmly or I walk away,'' she smiled.

"In the end, I just do the best I can.'' And indeed, that is exactly what the soft-spoken General Manager has done throughout her 13-year stint in what is perhaps the tiniest office on Front Street.

Wonderful views of the sparkling harbour she might have, but space, like the hottest Festival tickets, is extremely limited -- and shared with a volunteer assistant, two desks, chairs, filing cabinets and boxes of stacked paperwork.

At any given moment, someone -- perhaps an aspiring agent or performer -- is likely to pop through her door, while the phone rings constantly and the fax spits out more work.

Like everything else, Mrs. Davidson takes these peripheral distractions in her stride, keeping her mind firmly focussed on the task at hand.

An experienced businesswoman who once co-owned The Bookmart, she arrived at the Bermuda Festival office 13 years ago in response to a newspaper advertisement for a General Manager. Although she had no previous experience in running an arts festival, she felt equal to the challenge.

"This is a business job no matter what you think,'' she explained. "The Festival is extremely well organised, and I assume that is because it was started by business people and not by arts people.'' She mentions names like Sir Edwin Leather and Mr. Richard (Dick) Butterfield among the many from whose advice she profited while learning the ropes.

In time, the established pattern of relying on Mr. Bill Lockwood, artistic director of New York's Lincoln Centre, to book the various Festival acts was dropped in favour of the local office booking its own shows.

It was a milestone of which Mrs. Davidson remains justifiably proud, although she is quick to note that all acts are chosen, not by herself but by a special Festival committee.

In reaching its decisions the committee relies, not just on its own pool of advisors, but expertise within the local community where it feels that "solid advice'' would be of benefit -- as in the areas of jazz and dance.

In addition to completing its own artistic arrangements, the Festival office has assumed responsibility for all accounting except box office receipts during Mrs. Davidson's term of office -- another proud milestone.

She mentions that each Festival is given an annual budget, which it chooses to operate within, and pays tribute to "our fund-raiser extraordinaire'', Mr.

Simon Templeman, and the sponsors and patrons who regularly support his efforts.

"We deeply appreciate their generosity because, like all arts, the Festival could not survive without the support of outside patronage,'' she explained.

Accepting that "it would be a very unusual person who actually loved everything in every Festival'', Mrs. Davidson said of Festival programmes: "That is not what we aim for. We aim to have one thing that everyone would like to see, and hopefully many people will also like to see many of the other things.'' Acts are chosen based on information from a variety of sources, most of them tried and true. In addition, Mrs. Davidson keeps abreast of happenings in the arts world through reading and television.

Volunteer assistant Mrs. Anne Gunn -- who originally came to the office for two hours a week, and now helps out on all five days -- says her colleague is a walking encyclopaedia of Festival-related information.

"You work a week with Lee and it is mind-boggling how much she knows and has to know in order to run the Festival,'' she said.

Indeed, there is so much detail in running a Festival that a cool head and calm spirit are essential.

Apart from booking acts and signing and writing contracts, there are umpteen other arrangements to be made -- travel, hotel and location bookings; local transportation; hosts and hostesses for each act or artist; mailings; printing and distribution of tickets, brochures, posters and programmes; shipping of sets, props and costumes; lighting; rehearsal times and master classes -- the list is endless.

Festivals are booked two years in advance, and always with an eye to getting the best value for money -- for example, capitalising on touring artists or groups to keep costs down.

"We could never have afforded to bring Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens all the way from South Africa, for example, but since they were already touring the US we were able to get them at the end of their tour,'' Mrs.

Davidson explained. "The English Chamber Orchestra and the Haworth Shakespeare Festival were secured under similar circumstances.'' Expense is also the reason why the Festival does not bring in the most popular acts young people would like to see.

"Most of those artists have a 30-60 day cancellation clause in their contracts, which means they can cancel a booking within that time if something more lucrative comes up,'' Mrs. Davidson explained.

"And of course, most of them require venues far larger what we can provide, and come with enough sound equipment to fill five containers. Another clause of their contract says that, if the event is rained out, they must still be paid.

"So we try to do the best we can for the young people within our budget and capabilities.'' Naturally, after so many years of mounting successful Festivals, Mrs. Davidson has a kaleidoscope of memories on which to draw, particularly where artists and occupational hazards are concerned.

Careful to maintain discretion, she speaks of a renowned popular trio who arrived half drunk, consumed a bottle of rum during each performance, and remained more or less drunk the whole time they were here. There was a world-renowned artist who, after each performance, got so drunk that he literally had to be carried up to bed like a sack of potatoes; a group musician who sat through each performance with a small blanket across his knees, which turned out to be his pacifier, and whose edges he rubbed throughout the show; the little man who suddenly produced a live bird from his trouser pocket on departure at the Airport. It was his pet and he had successfully smuggled it all the way from China! There was a theatrical group which partied all night, every night, and played tennis each morning at 8; the ballet troupe whose luggage left Bermuda but never arrived at its destination; an artist who kept changing hotel rooms; and a pianist who was such a nervous wreck before each concert that no-one could speak to him while he chainsmoked foul-smelling French cigarettes to calm his nerves.

And there were the "kids'' from Juilliard whom she discovered, with some alarm, had nipped off to the Registrar's office and gotten married.

At first horror-struck, Mrs. Davidson was relieved to know their solution to the dilemma of an Irish Catholic/Jewish union met with their parents' approval! Mrs. Davidson also remembers some last minute, major cancellations, including the (communist) Chinese Magic Circus who, for political reasons, failed to get the necessary visas and sent an inferior troupe from Taiwan in their stead; the celebrated French mimist Marcel Marceau, who suddenly fell ill; and a singer from Nashville who exercised his 60-day clause to opt out.

More than one performer has arrived unwell and gotten worse -- most recently a member of the cast of Macbeth, whose part had to be read off stage by the show's director for two nights; and the tenor whose lead role in The Marriage of Figaro was sung off stage by two other singers on the closing night.

In terms of operating hazards, the General Manager recalls hustling a local Fire Service officer past a group of Buddhist performers unexpectedly burning incense and lighting candles backstage during his inspection of City Hall's safety arrangements for a show which involved fire eating.

Electricity supplies have caused many a moment's anxiety, the most recent being last week during the opening performance of the opera, when the stage lights dimmed with alarming regularity.

During last year's Island-wide outage, Mrs. Davidson sat on Belco's doorstep for hours literally begging for an answer to whether that night's performance could go ahead.

Tickets have produced some of her worst nightmares.

Lee Davidson steps down Printed abroad, the Festival office unwittingly dispatched hundreds for a sell-out show before it was noticed that two rows of seats had been duplicated. Recently, she discovered an architectural drawing of a major hotel room did not conform to its true measurements, as result of which the estimated number of chairs did not fit into the space.

On such occasions, diplomacy, patience, and hours of improvisation saved the day -- as have the heroic efforts of what Mrs. Davidson calls the unsung volunteer heroes of every Bermuda Festival: backstage crews and lighting technicians; box office staff and ushers among them.

"I am absolutely indebted to all of them,'' she said.

She also had high praise for Festival Chairman Mr. Peter Lloyd, who was "everything a chairman should be''.

Now the time has come to move on.

First, Mrs. Davidson will take a well-earned holiday with her husband Roger to visit their married daughter, Jennifer, in Nairobi, Kenya.

And then? "I'm hoping someone will give me a job!'' she exclaimed.

Mrs. Lee Davidson