No Great Magic | Page 3

ever get really frightened in the costumery. Not exactly,
though your goosehairs get wonderfully realistically tingled and your
tummy chilled from time to time--because you know it's all
make-believe, a lifesize doll world, a children's dress-up world. It gets
you thinking of far-off times and scenes as pleasant places and not as
black hungry mouths that might gobble you up and keep you forever.
It's always safe, always just in the theatre, just on the stage, no matter
how far it seems to plunge and roam ... and the best sort of therapy for a
pot-holed mind like mine, with as many gray ruts and curves and gaps
as its cerebrum, that can't remember one single thing before this last
year in the dressing room and that can't ever push its shaking body out
of that same motherly fatherly room, except to stand in the wings for a

scene or two and watch the play until the fear gets too great and the
urge to take just one peek at the audience gets too strong ... and I
remember what happened the two times I did peek, and I have to come
scuttling back.
The costumery's good occupational therapy for me, too, as my pricked
and calloused fingertips testify. I think I must have stitched up or
darned half the costumes in it this last twelvemonth, though there are so
many of them that I swear the drawers have accordion pleats and the
racks extend into the fourth dimension--not to mention the boxes of
props and the shelves of scripts and prompt-copies and other books,
including a couple of encyclopedias and the many thick volumes of
Furness's Variorum Shakespeare, which as Sid had guessed I'd been
boning up on. Oh, and I've sponged and pressed enough costumes, too,
and even refitted them to newcomers like Martin, ripping up and
resewing seams, which can be a punishing job with heavy materials.
In a less sloppily organized company I'd be called wardrobe mistress, I
guess. Except that to anyone in show business that suggests a crotchety
old dame with lots of authority and scissors hanging around her neck
on a string. Although I got my crochets, all right, I'm not that old. Kind
of childish, in fact. As for authority, everybody outranks me, even
Martin.
Of course to somebody outside show business, wardrobe mistress
might suggest a yummy gal who spends her time dressing up as Nell
Gwyn or Anitra or Mrs. Pinchwife or Cleopatra or even Eve (we got a
legal costume for it) and inspiring the boys. I've tried that once or twice.
But Siddy frowns on it, and if Miss Nefer ever caught me at it I think
she'd whang me.
And in a normaller company it would be the wardrobe room, too, but
costumery is my infantile name for it and the actors go along with my
little whims.
I don't mean to suggest our company is completely crackers. To get as
close to Broadway even as Central Park you got to have something. But
in spite of Sid's whip-cracking there is a comforting looseness about its

efficiency--people trade around the parts they play without fuss, the bill
may be changed a half hour before curtain without anybody getting
hysterics, nobody gets fired for eating garlic and breathing it in the
leading lady's face. In short, we're a team. Which is funny when you
come to think of it, as Sid and Miss Nefer and Bruce and Maudie are
British (Miss Nefer with a touch of Eurasian blood, I romance); Martin
and Beau and me are American (at least I think I am) while the rest
come from just everywhere.
* * * * *
Besides my costumery work, I fetch things and run inside errands and
help the actresses dress and the actors too. The dressing room's very
coeducational in a halfway respectable way. And every once in a while
Martin and I police up the whole place, me skittering about with
dustcloth and wastebasket, he wielding the scrub-brush and mop with
such silent grim efficiency that it always makes me nervous to get
through and duck back into the costumery to collect myself.
Yes, the costumery's a great place to quiet your nerves or improve your
mind or even dream your life away. But this time I couldn't have been
there eight minutes when Miss Nefer's Elizabeth-angry voice came
skirling, "Girl! Girl! Greta, where is my ruff with silver trim?" I laid
my hands on it in a flash and loped it to her, because Old Queen Liz
was known to slap even her Maids of Honor around a bit now and then
and Miss Nefer is a bear on getting into character--a real Paul Muni.
She was all made up now, I was happy to note, at