When she was a youngster, Linda lived with her Mom in Oregon, and her Uncle and I lived in Illinois. Now and then, she would come for a visit. I am insecure around very young people, believing that I will earn their disapproval by being dull. So I was always eager to find something really, really cool to do when Linda came to town.

I knew she loved scary books and movies, the bloodier the better. This desire to scare yourself stupid is apparently a recessive trait passed from aunt to niece, not mother to daughter. In fact, she had some trouble seeing horror movies because her mother abhorred them. This might be my fault due to our own misspent youth together:

When we were kids, Sis took me to the Saturday matinees. That was back when small town theatres had “matrons” who patrolled the aisles keeping order among the wildlife. If my sister was in luck, the show involved cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, or maybe Snowflake, the wild white stallion. If I was in luck, it involved a brain attached to one floating eyeball kept alive in a tank of goo, or flying tadpoles that sucked precious bodily fluids from your spine, or body snatchers from which I am still not completely recovered.

Sis judged movies on a five star system. I judged them on a five nightmare system. I can still wake up screaming if I think about The Exorcist just before bedtime. Anyway, after Psycho sent her mother over the edge, Linda was rarely allowed to revel in the late night Creature Features ever again. At least until she married.

So now, back to Chicago. I looked through the Tribune to find something Uncle, Linda and I could all do together. And there it was: a tiny ad for a Clive Barker play, appearing in one of Chicago’s numerous neighborhood theatres. I don’t remember the name of the play, and since you can’t yet google your own past, it’s lost forever. But this is Clive Barker we’re talking about. A play sure to be full of ghosties and ghoulies and at least a Hellraiser or two.

The neighborhood theatre turned out to be in a bad neighborhood. It was tiny … a basement full of folding chairs if memory serves. Because nobody else was there who wasn’t family of the cast, we three were treated like royalty. We were moved down front to the first row. We could rest our elbows on the stage.

It turns out the play did not have lots of projectile vomiting or flying wraiths. But it involved many men, prison clothes, robes and one dude in serious need of anti-psychotic meds.

As we reached the play’s, er, climax, one cast member was suddenly nude, and so was his member. Having spotted the pretty young thing in the front row, he played to his audience. He got to his knees, wiggling his package about a yard from Linda’s wide open eyes. The footlights must have given him fairly serious burns. This was not the innocent nudity of Hair, surrounded by sweet song. This was Chippendale-gone-raunchy, motivated by nothing any of us can quite remember. Her Uncle looked down to contemplate his cuticles and didn’t look up again for several days. I seem to have babbled at length about the weather on the drive home.

I’m pretty sure Linda has a memory or two she hoped I didn’t share with her Mom. That evening, I created one I hoped she didn’t share with her Mom: the night I exposed her daughter to the arts.