Some of you may have heard this story, but I am old and I forget to whom I have told it.

Get over it.

Anyhow. I spent a couple days with my niece in Oregon last week. While she is in her forties, I still think of her as 13, when she came to Chicago to visit me. I was eager to find something really cool to do (I know things are now “awesome” but then they were “cool”).

She loved scary books and movies, the bloodier the better. This desire to scare yourself stupid is apparently a trait passed from aunt to niece vs mother to daughter. Her mother wouldn’t take her to scary flicks having never recovered from “Psycho” in her own youth; but I always loved them.

As a child at the Saturday matinees, I enjoyed a brain attached to one floating eyeball kept alive in a tank of goo. Or the Tingler sucking precious bodily fluids from your spine. While the rest of my family judged movies on a five star system, I judged them on a five nightmare system.

Bottom line, scary stuff was a safe bet for my niece and me to share. And definitely cool, man.

I looked through the Chicago Tribune to find something she, her Uncle Roger 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 theaters. I don’t remember the name of the play, but this was Clive Barker. Guaranteed to be full of ghouls. Eureka!

The theatre was tiny, in a basement with folding chairs. Nobody else was there who wasn’t family of the cast, so we three were treated like visiting royalty. We were ushered down to the first row. We could rest our elbows on the stage.

It turned out the play did not have aliens ripping out of chest walls or zombies returning from the grave. It involved many men in prison dressed in priest-like robes, with one dude in serious need of anti-psychotic meds. A play about men in prison is likely to have themes you’d rather not share with your niece. I began to worry.

Suddenly, one cast member threw off his robe and was totally nude. I repeat: totally nude.

And he played to his audience. The footlights must have given him fairly serious burns.

I looked at Roger. He was looking down to contemplate his cuticles and didn’t look up again for several days. I babbled at length about the weather on the drive home.

I’m pretty sure that my niece has a memory or two she hopes I never shared with her Mom. In fact, I only shared this one a couple years ago. Now it’s family legend, about the night I exposed her daughter to the arts.

Linda B. Myers is a founding member of Olympic Peninsula Authors and author of the PI Bear Jacobs mystery series. Her novels are available in print or ebook at amazon.com. Contact her at myerslindab@gmail.com or Facebook.com/lindabmyers.author.