A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I thought since my sister just blogged her favorite TP story, that I would blog mine. She copies me a lot, because I am her big sister and she worships me. Don't worry, readers. I’m used to it, y’all. It ain’t no thing. Anyways, sometimes I like to copy her so she feels better about being in my shadow all the time.

Ahem.

So I’m playing a witch in a production of Macbeth, and the director has this concept of the play that is making my life miserable, i.e., that the witches are these seductive sirens (so original!) that are basically controlling Macbeth through paranormal means. Of course the dude playing Macbeth hates the concept, because if his character doesn’t have free will, it kinda makes it not a tragedy, but anyway, in those days I ran with a crowd who thought dramaturgs were cool and we cared about shit like Sophoclean theory. So there I am, hanging in a giant spider web above the stage with the other two witches, waiting for Macbeth to come out for his “To be thus is nothing; but to be safely thus” soliloquy, and because the three of us had to be on stage so much without any dialogue, we had developed a language of grunting and belching noises that were meant to sound like natural scary witch talk to the audience, but to us each sound had a specific meaning. Those meanings had nothing to do with any witchy-type interests. They were geared more toward wringing some amusement out of that 3 hour marathon of watching from above as dudes in burlap leggings and fake fur raised swords and shouted “Huzzah!” So basically, if one of us saw a spear carrier scratching his ass when he thought no one was looking, and managed to alert the other two in time for them to also witness said ass scratching, this was sufficient amusement to us for at least 5 or 6 scenes.

So we’re hanging in the web, and Macbeth enters, and the 1^st Witch made the sound that meant “look at this crazy shit happening over here!”, and sure enough, there was Macbeth, talkin’ all serious to the audience about vengeance and the futility of ambition with a nice long trail of toilet paper attached to his shoe. He’s walking back and forth, getting himself worked up into a good actorly froth, and completely oblivious to this tremendous kite tail following him, and I don’t know how many audience members noticed the toilet paper, but I think they couldn’t help but notice that that spider web was shaking like a poorly designed suspension bridge in a windstorm.

Eventually, the toilet paper fell off, and we witches watched from above for a whole act as it got kicked around the stage, and then when it came time to do the famous cauldron scene, we descended from the web, and as we walked downstage toward the cauldron, the 1^st witch bent down, picked up the piece of toilet paper, held it aloft, and with a great screeching howl of victory, she tossed it with some ceremony into our noxious, eye-of-newt-and-toe-of-frog-laden brew.

Mmmm. That one got us through the rest of the run. As I recall, it was a good two and a half weeks, at least.