Bill Oberst Jr, Los Angeles SAG/AFTRA

My one-man performance of "A Christmas Carol" owes much to Patrick Stewart and more to Dickens, whose original language I use while slipping in and out of the characters that people Scrooge's world. When the mood is just right (and I say the words correctly), that gas-lit world almost seems real.    

It seemed TOO real on a cold December evening in 2002. I had just completed an outdoor performance under the ancient oaks of Brookgreen Gardens on the South Carolina coast. I was whipped after two back-to-back performances. As I was leaving, a local couple asked if they could take a picture, so I turned to them and smiled. A week later I received the picture below in my e-mail. It was taken with a digital camera, and the rather elderly gentleman who snapped it swears that it was exactly as you see it when he downloaded it. "It 's all I can manage to get the pictures out of the camera" he told me "and that's the way it looked."    

What IS that image floating in front of me? It isn't smoke, becaus ethere was none. Either (a) an elderly couple played an elaborate joke on me, which they emphatically deny, or (b) Marley's Ghost paid us a visit that night. The image has never appeared again in any photo. The shot has made the rounds on several internet sites which investigate "ghostly" photographs, so I thought you'd like to see the full-sized original image for yourself. 

Of course, we all know what Scrooge would say about it...