“Why are you wearing those chains?”
A pair of small girls, visitors at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, have just spied actor Tom Westlake, who plays the part of Jacob Marley’s ghost each year at the popular annual Dickens-inspired theater festival. Marley, as should be recalled by anyone who’s caught one of the dozens of movies inspired by Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—or perhaps actually read the book—will recognize Jacob Marley as the deceased partner of Ebenezer Scrooge, doomed to carry a vast chain through eternity, ever since dying, on Christmas Eve, having died a notoriously selfish businessman.Why are you wearing those chains?”
“What’s that chain?” one of the girls asks Westlake.
“It is the chain I forged in life,” he replies, mournfully.
“What do you do with it when you sleep?” the other asks.
Westlake, accustomed to getting unexpected questions, pauses a split-second before speaking the plain truth.
“I don’t sleep,” he says. “I’m dead.”

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