e ran to the only people and
place where she felt she could ever again feel safe. And she showed
them the top of her head with its singed hair and its jagged ring of
skull and they took pity.

My least plausible theory of me, but the one I like the most, is that
I was born in the dressing room, cradled in the top of a flat
theatrical trunk with my ears full of Shakespeare's lines before I
ever said "Mama," let alone lamped a TV; hush-walked when I cried by
whoever was off stage, old props my first toys, trying to eat crepe
hair my first indiscretion, sticks of grease-paint my first crayons.
You know, I really wouldn't be bothered by crazy fears about New York
changing and the dressing room shifting around in space and time, if I
could be sure I'd always be able to stay in it and that the same sweet
guys and gals would always be with me and that the shows would always
go on.

* * * * *

This show was sure going on, it suddenly hit me, for I'd let my
fingers slip off my ears as I sentimentalized and wish-dreamed and I
heard, muted by the length and stuff of the dressing room, the slow
beat of a drum and then a drum note in Maudie's voice taking up that
beat as she warned the other two witches, "A drum, a drum! Macbeth
doth come."

Why, I'd not only missed Sid's history-making-and-breaking Queen
Elizabeth prologue (kicking myself that I had, now it was over), I'd
also missed the short witch scene with its famous "Fair is foul and
foul is fair," the Bloody Sergeant scene where Duncan hears about
Macbeth's victory, and we were well into the second witch scene, the
one on the blasted heath where Macbeth gets it predicted to him he'll
be king after Duncan and is tempted to speculate about hurrying up the
process.

I sat up. I did hesitate a minute then, my fingers going back toward
my ears, because _Macbeth_ is specially tense-making and when I've had
one of my mind-wavery fits I feel weak for a while and things are
blurry and uncertain. Maybe I'd better take a couple of the
barbiturate sleeping pills Maudie manages to get for me and--but _No,
Greta_, I told myself, _you want to watch this show, you want to see
how they do in those crazy costumes. You especially want to see how
Martin makes out. He'd never forgive you if you didn't._

So I walked to the other end of the empty dressing room, moving quite
slowly and touching the edges here and there, the words of the play
getting louder al