gs like that.

Right now I was jumping my eyes over that stuff, asking it to keep me
located and make me safe, as I lay on my cot in my clothes with my
knees drawn up and my fingers over my ears so the louder lines from
the play wouldn't be able to come nosing back around the trunks and
tables and bright-lit mirrors and find me. Generally I like to listen
to them, even if they're sort of sepulchral and drained of overtones
by their crooked trip. But they're always tense-making. And tonight (I
mean this afternoon)--no!

It's funny I should find security in mementos of a city I daren't go
out into--no, not even for a stroll through Central Park, though I
know it from the Pond to Harlem Meer--the Met Museum, the Menagerie,
the Ramble, the Great Lawn, Cleopatra's Needle and all the rest. But
that's the way it is. Maybe I'm like Jonah in the whale, reluctant to
go outside because the whale's a terrible monster that's awful scary
to look in the face and might really damage you gulping you a second
time, yet reassured to know you're living in the stomach of that
particular monster and not a seventeen tentacled one from the fifth
planet of Aldebaran.

It's really true, you see, about me actually living in the dressing
room. The boys bring me meals: coffee in cardboard cylinders and
doughnuts in little brown grease-spotted paper sacks and malts and
hamburgers and apples and little pizzas, and Maud brings me raw
vegetables--carrots and parsnips and little onions and such, and
watches to make sure I exercise my molars grinding them and get my
vitamins. I take spit-baths in the little john. Architects don't seem
to think actors ever take baths, even when they've browned themselves
all over playing Pindarus the Parthian in _Julius Caesar_. And all my
shut-eye is caught on this little cot in the twilight of my NYC
screen.

* * * * *

You'd think I'd be terrified being alone in the dressing room during
the wee and morning hours, let alone trying to sleep then, but that
isn't the way it works out. For one thing, there's apt to be someone
sleeping in too. Maudie especially. And it's my favorite time too for
costume-mending and reading the _Variorum_ and other books, and for
just plain way-out dreaming. You see, the dressing room is the one
place I really do feel safe. Whatever is out there in New York that
terrorizes me, I'm pretty confident that it can never get in here.

Besides that, there's a g