“They’re practicing for their show, remember?” she had said, impatient with me. “You and I had this discussion last night. I said they’d be there at three whether you were there or not.”

My heart deflated as I remembered. “Oh. Right. Damn it. I was hoping to just grab my laptop and go.”

“Well, sucks to suck, doesn’t it, Mr. Elwood?”

And she was gone.

So I regain my composure, I go out there and I start leading the kids in some exercises. (Unique New York, Red Leather, Yellow Leather, you know the ones.) And then once we finished with the exercises, I asked them all to get out their scripts and turn to the page on which they left off.

“Do you know which play we’re doing, dude?” one of them had asked me.

“Mr. Elwood,” I correct him, not looking away from my phone as I waited for everyone to get situated. “And no, DUDE, I don’t know which play you’re doing. I don’t even know where you kids came from, I just got kind of stuck here.”

“I know it’s Shack-spare,” he said, and to this day I don’t know if he was being serious or not in his mispronunciation. “But I don’t think it’s Macb-”

I scream to drown him out, stop him in his tracks, cut him off. Everyone looks at me, but my eyes are trained on this kid in baggy clothes with bewilderment dominating his features. I stomp over to him, and I can feel the fire in my eyes as I snarl, “Don’t. Ever. Say. That. Name. In. My. Theatre.”

He looked at me incredulously. “Dude. It’s just a name.”

“Call me ‘dude’ one more time-” I stop and sigh. “Is THIS how Alex felt when G-Wash kept calling him ‘son’?!”

Everyone blinked at me, not knowing what I meant. I was infuriated yet again, but I managed to take a few deep breaths to calm myself. I go back to where I was with the kid. “It may be just a name to you, but to this theatre, it means imminent disaster. You don’t say the name of The Scottish Play unless you are rehearsing it or acting it out on stage.”

“You mean [The Scottish Play]?” (I took it out here, as I am sitting in my office at the theatre presently and I feel as if typing it would have the same impact on the theatre as voicing it.)

I whirled around to glare at the girl who had said it, who looked like she KNEW what she was doing and didn’t have a single care to give about it. I look around. “Do you know what you’ve done to my theatre, you idiot?!”

“Did you just call me, a sixteen-year-old girl, an IDIOT?!” (Like her age and gender matter to me. I would’ve called her an idiot even if she were a seventy-thousand-year-old genderqueer named Cactus Populi.)

I sneered, going to the lovely W. Shakespeare himself for an insult, “Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood.”

She didn’t very much like that one, either.

Anyway, after a moment, I look around cautiously. Nothing dented, nothing broken, nothing destroyed. I stand up a bit straighter. “Well. I’ll be damned. It seems it IS only a superstition.”

The practices were okay, until the last week before opening night. Three girls broke various bones, a curtain was ripped, another was set on fire, a light fell and almost killed me and my husband as we were watching them rehearse two nights before the show, and then, the night of, we had to cancel because the lead came down with some kind of sickness, I don’t know. Caeli somehow had reversed the curse though, one night. She didn’t tell me what she had done, she only told me to go into my office and wait for her to get me. And when the next night, we ran through the show with no hiccups, I praised the ground she walked on.

TL;DR: NEVER speak the name of The Scottish Play and always have a wizard- *cough* I mean, stage manager, handy.

However, we did an adaptation of “The Dunwich Horror” by HP Lovecraft and every single night of the show, one way or another, someone injured themselves. We always look back on that show and joke that it was cursed.