of the tiny black-and-silver spider crawling across the
remembered silver frame, and for some reason it gave me the cold
creeps.

Well, this wasn't doing me any good, just making me feel dismal again,
so I quickly went out. In the door I had to slip around the actors
coming back from the Cauldron Scene and the big bolt nicked my hip.

Outside Maud was peeling off her Third Witch stuff to reveal Lady
Macduff beneath. She twitched me a grin.

"How's it going?" I asked.

"Okay, I guess," she shrugged. "What an audience! Noisy as highschool
kids."

"How come Sid didn't have a boy do your part?" I asked.

"He goofed, I guess. But I've battened down my bosoms and playing Mrs.
Macduff as a boy."

"How does a girl do that in a dress?" I asked.

"She sits stiff and thinks pants," she said, handing me her witch
robe. "'Scuse me now. I got to find my children and go get murdered."

* * * * *

I'd moved a few steps nearer the stage when I felt the gentlest tug at
my hip. I looked down and saw that a taut black thread from the bottom
of my sweater connected me with the dressing room. It must have
snagged on the big bolt and unraveled. I moved my body an inch or so,
tugging it delicately to see what it felt like and I got the answers:
Theseus's clew, a spider's line, an umbilicus.

I reached down close to my side and snapped it with my fingernails.
The black thread leaped away. But the dressing room door didn't
vanish, or the wings change, or the world end, and I didn't fall down.

After that I just stood there for quite a while, feeling my new
freedom and steadiness, letting my body get used to it. I didn't do
any thinking. I hardly bothered to study anything around me, though I
did notice that there were more bushes and trees than set pieces, and
that the flickery lightning was simply torches and that Queen
Elizabeth was in (or back in) the audience. Sometimes letting your
body get used to something is all you should do, or maybe can do.

And I did smell horse dung.

When the Lady Macduff Scene was over and the Chicken Scene well begun,
I went back to the dressing room. Actors call it the Chicken Scene
because Macduff weeps in it about "all my pretty chickens and their
dam," meaning his kids and wife, being murdered "at one fell swoop" on
orders of that chickenyard-raiding "hell-kite" Macbeth.

Inside the dressing room I steered down the boys' side. Doc was
putting on an improbable-