dly. _Keep
it up!_

Just then I looked toward the audience. Once again I almost squeaked
out loud. For out there, close to the stage, in the very middle of the
reserve section, was a carpet spread out. And sitting in the middle of
it on some sort of little chair, with what looked like two charcoal
braziers smoking to either side of her, was Miss Nefer with a string
of extras in Elizabethan hats with cloaks pulled around them.

For a second it really threw me because it reminded me of the things
I'd seen or thought I'd seen the couple of times I'd sneaked a peek
through the curtain-hole at the audience in the indoor auditorium.

It hardly threw me for more than a second, though, because I
remembered that the characters who speak Shakespeare's prologues often
stay on stage and sometimes kind of join the audience and even
comment on the play from time to time--Christopher Sly and attendant
lords in _The Shrew_, for one. Sid had just copied and in his usual
style laid it on thick.

_Well, bully for you, Siddy_, I thought, _I'm sure the witless New
York groundlings will be thrilled to their cold little toes knowing
they're sitting in the same audience as Good Queen Liz and attendant
courtiers. And as for you, Miss Nefer_, I added a shade invidiously,
_you just keep on sitting cold in Central Park, warmed by dry-ice
smoke from braziers, and keep your mouth shut and everything'll be
fine. I'm sincerely glad you'll be able to be Queen Elizabeth all
night long. Just so long as you don't try to steal the scene from
Martin and the rest of the cast, and the real play._

_I suppose that camp chair will get a little uncomfortable by the time
the Fifth Act comes tramping along to that drumbeat, but I'm sure
you're so much in character you'll never feel it._

_One thing though: just don't scare me again pretending to work
witchcraft--with a virginals or any other way._

_Okay?_

_Swell._

_Me, now, I'm going to watch the play._

IV

... to dream of new dimensions,
Cheating checkmate
by painting the king's robe
So that he slides like a queen;
--Graves

I swung back to the play just at the moment Lady Mack soliloquizes,
"Come to my woman's breasts. And take my milk for gall, you murdering
ministers." Although I knew it was just folded towel Martin was
touching with his fingertips as he lifted them to the top half of his
green bodice, I got carried away, he made