No Great Magic | Page 2

witchcraft and directed at King James."
He growled a little at me and demanded, "Prithee, how comes it your
peewit-brain bears such a ballast of fusty book-knowledge, chit?"
I said softly, "Siddy, you don't camp in a Shakespearean dressing room
for a year, tete-a-teting with some of the wisest actors ever, without
learning a little. Sure I'm a mental case, a poor little A & A existing on
your sweet charity, and don't think I don't appreciate it, but--"
"A-and-A, thou sayest?" he frowned. "Methinks the gladsome new
forswearers of sack and ale call themselves AA."
"Agoraphobe and Amnesiac," I told him. "But look, Siddy, I was going
to sayest that I do know the plays. Having Queen Elizabeth speak a
prologue to Macbeth is as much an anachronism as if you put her on
the gantry of the British moonship, busting a bottle of champagne over
its schnozzle."
"Ha!" he cried as if he'd caught me out. "And saying there's a new
Elizabeth, wouldn't that be the bravest advertisement ever for the
Empire?--perchance rechristening the pilot, copilot and astrogator
Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh? And the ship The Golden Hind? Tilly
fally, lady!"
He went on, "My prologue an anachronism, quotha! The groundlings
will never mark it. Think'st thou wisdom came to mankind with the

stenchful rocket and the sundered atomy? More, the Bard himself was
topfull of anachronism. He put spectacles on King Lear, had clocks
tolling the hour in Caesar's Rome, buried that Roman 'stead o' burning
him and gave Czechoslovakia a seacoast. Go to, doll."
"Czechoslovakia, Siddy?"
"Bohemia, then, what skills it? Leave me now, sweet poppet. Go thy
ways. I have matters of import to ponder. There's more to running a
repertory company than reading the footnotes to Furness."
* * * * *
Martin had just slouched by calling the Half Hour and looking in his
solemnity, sneakers, levis and dirty T-shirt more like an underage
refugee from Skid Row than Sid's newest recruit, assistant stage
manager and hardest-worked juvenile--though for once he'd
remembered to shave. I was about to ask Sid who was going to play
Lady Mack if Miss Nefer wasn't, or, if she were going to double the
roles, shouldn't I help her with the change? She's a slow dresser and the
Elizabeth costumes are pretty realistically stayed. And she would have
trouble getting off that nose, I was sure. But then I saw that Siddy was
already slapping on the alboline to keep the grease paint from getting
into his pores.
Greta, you ask too many questions, I told myself. You get everybody
riled up and you rack your own poor ricketty little mind; and I hied
myself off to the costumery to settle my nerves.
The costumery, which occupies the back end of the dressing room, is
exactly the right place to settle the nerves and warm the fancies of any
child, including an unraveled adult who's saving what's left of her
sanity by pretending to be one. To begin with there are the regular
costumes for Shakespeare's plays, all jeweled and spangled and
brocaded, stage armor, great Roman togas with weights in the borders
to make them drape right, velvets of every color to rest your cheek
against and dream, and the fantastic costumes for the other plays we
favor; Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Shaw's Back to Methuselah and Hilliard's

adaptation of Heinlein's Children of Methuselah, the Capek brothers'
Insect People, O'Neill's The Fountain, Flecker's Hassan, Camino Real,
Children of the Moon, The Beggar's Opera, Mary of Scotland, Berkeley
Square, The Road to Rome.
There are also the costumes for all the special and variety performances
we give of the plays: Hamlet in modern dress, Julius Caesar set in a
dictatorship of the 1920's, The Taming of the Shrew in caveman furs
and leopard skins, where Petruchio comes in riding a dinosaur, The
Tempest set on another planet with a spaceship wreck to start it off
Karrumph!--which means a half dozen spacesuits, featherweight but
looking ever so practical, and the weirdest sort of extraterrestrial-beast
outfits for Ariel and Caliban and the other monsters.
Oh, I tell you the stuff in the costumery ranges over such a sweep of
space and time that you sometimes get frightened you'll be whirled up
and spun off just anywhere, so that you have to clutch at something
very real to you to keep it from happening and to remind you where
you really are--as I did now at the subway token on the thin gold chain
around my neck (Siddy's first gift to me that I can remember) and
chanted very softly to myself, like a charm or a prayer, closing my eyes
and squeezing the holes in the token: "Columbus Circle, Times Square,
Penn Station, Christopher Street...."
* * * * *
But you don't