Nightmare   The curtain rises and the house goes dark — suddenly everything goes wrong. We’re all naked, our masks hide nothing. When we call out line! we get silence. We miss our marks, forget our parts, plead with God. Someone coughs. The director flails his arms, useless, impotent to restore the illusion. Scrims descend at random, the actors go off script, a stagehand coughs and whispers, I smell smoke. The players improvise a fan dance to hide our humiliation. Someone yells and is shushed, the director starts to rant about the music, it’s all wrong because singing is forbidden — it always was.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont August 2020