A group of people was unhappy with me. In fact, they were angry at me. We were planning to produce a play (only for ourselves and not for an audience), a version of William Shakespeare's Macbeth, and I had been chosen to play Lady Macbeth. However, when we met for the first day of rehearsal, I still had not memorized my lines. Some of the other people had learned their lines, but I had not even been given my lines until now; I had not realized that knowing my lines for this first rehearsal would be necessary. So now, as I sat down and began trying to memorize, I contemplated backing out of the entire enterprise. Since the actual show did not start for a few more days, however, I decided I should still have time to learn my lines and play my role.

As I worked on my part, I noticed some stairs near me. A board had been laid over the stairs, stretching from the top of the stairs to the bottom. As part of the action of the play, water was flowing down the stairs and over the board. At some point in the play, someone was supposed to slide down the board through the water.

Since I did not have any lines in the first couple scenes, the others began rehearsing those scenes without me. As they practiced, I continued reading the text on my own. I noticed that before I would enter the stage for the first time, something "sublime" was supposed to happen and that after I had entered, the sublime thing would become "sublimer."

I also gradually realized something that I had not known before: Lady Macbeth was actually a goddess, and during the course of the play, she descended to earth. My copy of the play had some pictures interspersed through it. On the page where Lady Macbeth's part began was a picture of fleecy clouds with light shining through them. The picture also showed Lady Macbeth, wearing a long white robe, seated and writing a letter.

I saw that in the first scene, Lady Macbeth would be writing a letter to someone. It was necessary for me to memorize the text of the letter. Two words of the letter's first line were "starbits fly." Since the second line of the letter made no sense to me, I thought I was going to have to ask someone the meaning of the words.

Obviously I was not going to have my lines memorized today for the first rehearsal; I would simply have to read my lines from the page. Most of the other actors were also reading their parts. One man, however, apparently had already memorized his part. I thought if I could simply memorize the first few lines, at least I would know something.