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 (