The two sat at the very end of the first row bathed in the faint wash of the ghost light.

Mary wore a flow­ing robe and a feather boa. Her face was still but­tered with the thick stage make up, her lips painted in larger and a dark, har­lot red. She was a pretty woman, but just beyond lead­ing lady age. She had the appear­ance of being tired, but if asked, you’d have a hard time explain­ing exactly why.

Her com­pan­ion, Fritz, was a short, thin man with curly hair not quite cov­ered by his base­ball cap. He was wear­ing shorts, a Grate­ful Dead t-shirt and had a wrench attached to his belt. The story was that he’d fallen when he was hang­ing a light one night just a cou­ple of months, or exactly one year to the day, after a pro­duc­tion of the Scot­tish play had closed. He might have been okay… but every­one else had gone home for the night so no one had found him until ten o’clock the next morn­ing. And by then, well, every the­ater needs a ghost or two.

Mary was the one who’d appar­ently jumped from the roof of the the­ater in the early 1900’s after find­ing out her hus­band was hav­ing an affair with a stagehand.

Nei­ther of these sto­ries was exactly true, but as sto­ries do when in the hands of sto­ry­tellers, they had grown and the facts had changed. Fritz had died while hang­ing a light, but Mac­beth had actu­ally closed three years and five months before the acci­dent. As for Mary, her name was actu­ally Eliza and although her hus­band had had an affair with a stage­hand she hadn’t thrown her­self from the roof. Instead she divorced him and sev­eral years later she choked on a piece of hard candy after a performance.

Nei­ther of them minded the more dra­matic ver­sions of their demises. (To be continued…)