Toward the end of his life, the legendary actor John Barrymore insisted on using blackboards as reusable cue cards, even though he usually remembered his lines. "The blackboard is to me what a net is to a circus trapeze artist," he once explained. "He can do his quadruple somersaults with confidence as long as he knows that the net is there to catch him just in case." One day he was asked how he planned to play Macbeth in the Hollywood Bowl without his beloved blackboards. Replied Barrymore: "I'll have them use skywriting."
Sources
James Kotsilibas-Davis, The Barrymores, p. 181
