It was autumn, close to November, and I was up at my parents' house in Winnetka. I had about one hour to deliver the artwork for a Reader ad to Joe Shannahan announcing my upcoming New Years Eve show at The Metro. There i was, driving breakneck into Evanston, parking illegally at the McDonalds, running into the Kinko's next door, still doing the math to try and figure out how to shrink my 8" x 11" page into the requisite 2" x 3" layout allotment. Right. So I muscle past the hordes of Northwestern students politely waiting in line till I nab some politely attending salesperson, and I swear under my breath until he does the math for me, and we crop and paste our way into a tidy little box which does nicely, and I whip out the door, pull the parking ticket off my windshield wiper and head for Lake Shore Drive.

Now, having lived for 16 years on the North Shore, I have driven this route so many times that it feels like my driveway. You bet I'm speeding, you bet I'm swearing. Who the fuck are these idiots in my driveway? I'm holding donw the papers in the passenger seat with one hand, applying lipstick to my mouth with the other, and steering with my knee. Right. So I pop off at Irving and zoom towards Clark street. Left on Clark. Straight through the intersections, the lights are turning orange. It may be too late, it's five past the hour. I picture Bill Wyman looking down at his wristwatch and shaking his head. "All right, boys. Start the presses."

Of course, The Metro dock is full of cars and for a split second I contemplate looking for a space on the street... Right. Fuck it. I squeeze my auto onto the sidewalk and forget about it. "HELLO! HELLO THERE!" I'm pounding on the main doors till somebody lets me in (I don't know enough to walk through the record store). We hustle down the hall to the "secret elevator" and ride up to the Executive Offices. My escort sneaks a glance at my sweaty, rabid face and kindly looks away. I picture the elevator stalling and the Reader presses rolling while a bunch of heavy mechanics work to pry us out.

Ah! The cool white calm of Joe's office! The groovy artwork! The heaping pile of CD's! Even a few bottles of Dom Perignon! And the view... It must be nice for him to retreat from the melee of a Saturday Night All Ages show to this Adult Contemporary loft of an office. I'd live there. So we sit and talk, and everything's fine, of course. He sends the ad over by messenger and blessedly cuts me out of the loop. Business. I swear, sometimes I wonder how I ever happen to involve myself in assignments to which I am clearly unsuited. But, it's water under the bridge and pretty soon we are talking about tropical vacations, Chicago winters, Costa Rican hospitality. Joe and I share Seasonal Affective Disorders and we are like squirrels burying nuts.

The patter winds down and I get up to go when Joe has a spark of inspiration. "Have you ever seen The Little Theater?" No, in fact I don't know what he's talking about. Apparently, there is a little auditorium up here on the fourth floor, rarely used, which dates back to the first part of the century when The Metro was a Swedish Citizens club, or something like that. He leads me down an unfinished hall. We make a couple of right turns, past crates and equipment, beyond the reach of electrical light. It is so dark that I'm getting nervous and I chirp, "Joe? Joe?" every once in a while to make sure he's still up there. We come to these double doors and Joe pushes them open. I am suddenly standing at the entrance to a very large space of which I can see nothing, but can feel the depth and height and hear our voices reverberate against the far walls. Joe is fumbling around behind the door, looking for the light switch. It isn't working. "Hang on," he says, "Lemme go make sure the circuit is on." So Joe leaves me standing there at the mouth of an inky abyss, alone with time to think about it. In a weird way, the room is cool and attractive, a bit musty, but almost charged with its own emptiness. I squint and try to see into the darkness. All that my rods and cones can register is this super fast, frentic movement of nothingness, like the flitting of gnats in a night sky. Then all of a sudden, what I had taken to be the product of a straining optical nerve slows down, and damn near stops to the left of me. My hair stood on end.

I felt the presence of somebody watching, somebody checking me out. The very first image to flash through my mind was that of an eight or nine-year-old girl, agitated by the interruption and simply coming to roost nearby to appraise me. I felt the abrupt need to ask her permission to be there.

Okay -- this is freaky, right? But my imagination is so active that I am frequently visited by cinematic notions and I don't take them too seriously, I just go with the event at hand. So I silently asked to be welcome, explaining myself as a musician and a girl, who had come to take a look at the room, and would it be okay if I played here sometime? I pictured her kind of hesitant, suspicious but curious, much the same way a real girl would be around a woman of my age, wanting to make a friend, but feeling out of the bogacity of my intent. I played it cool and waited. It reminded me of this Sally Jesse Raphael show I saw once in Florida, where a camera crew and a psychic were invited down to the restricted areas of the QEII to assess the validity of reported hauntings. They were walking around in this big, dark, echoey chamber (the old swimming pool) talking to the spirit of a young girl who could not find her mother. She cried out pitifully (and was duly recorded on tape) as she raced around the farthest walls, her voice tiny and pathetic, moving from one place to the next with terrifying, supernatural speed. The psychic was trying to calm her down, telling her that she didn't have to stay there, that her mommy was waiting for her on the other side of the light and that she shouldn't be afraid to go to her. The little voice was almost hysterical and the ship's crewman who was hosting the expedition was clearly horrified by the implications. I was as powerfully affected by the loneliness I heard as by the psychokinetic manifestation, true or not. It is horrible to find a child abandoned.

Well, my little spectre gave me the once over and a go ahead just in time for Joe to return and flip the lights on. I didn't say anything, of course, because I never say anything when strange feelings grip me, except to my girlfriends, who are understanding and excited by a good spooky tale. The stage was crowded with amplifiers which belonged to The Smashing Pumpkins and were being stored here while they toured overseas. Cool. The seats were red velvet and the back wall had electric candles that flickered in that kitschy, electric way. I would love to play here, I said. We returned to Joe's office and said goodbye.

A month later, I was in Los Angeles, playing a few shows. I heard Urge was there so I scammed my way into their afterhours gig at the Viper Room. I'm plowing through the hipsters clogging the bar, when I run into my friend, Tom, who was the manager of the record store at Metro. Wow! Hey! Cool to see you. It was hard to chat and Urge was about to go on, but we got in a bit of gab and I told him that I'd been up to see The Little Theater and I was looking forward to playing there sometime.

He leaned in all conspiratorially at the mention of that theater and said, "Do you know about The Little Theater?" I looked at him and got the goosebumps.

It's haunted, I thought to myself. "It's haunted!" he said.

It's a little girl, I thought to myself. "It's a little girl," said Tom.