|
|||
Mom's
Everybody's favorite sign in England. You see it in the Underground, reminding you to watch the space between the platform and the cars. But it's just such a lovely phrase. You can buy it on magnets, on t-shirts, on posters. We, being the stereotypical tourists, succumbed and bought a magnet.
Contemplating my navel Where better to do it? And for really
boring... Opinionated? That's it for today!
|
THE VETS 6 January 2001 I feel completely empty and drained tonight and I’m trying to put into words why that is. Partly it was the show. It actually started before we even got inside the theatre. We were in the lobby and on the wall was a big picture of Paul in his role of the Stage Manger in the 1987 production of Our Town. Beneath it was a wonderful, very long tribute to him (8-1/2 x 11 sheet of paper, filled, single-spaced type) and next to that was the plaque announcing the "Paul Sykes Memorial Acme Theatre Scholarship." So I was in tears before we even entered the theatre. I told Walt I had to get out of the lobby, but the house wasn’t opened yet, so we walked out into the courtyard. The courtyard where Paul and Audra were married 8 months before he died. I walked out the gate, out of the courtyard and stood by the tree that was planted in David’s memory. I can’t get away from dead kids in this town. Eventually they opened the house and we went in to wait for the start of Our Town. It helped that this year’s Stage Manager was African American. And he was quite good. I actually didn’t so much think of him as playing Paul’s role...he made it his own, and that was very good. But at intermission, Walt went out into the lobby and looked through the old Acme scrapbooks--pictures of Jeri, Marta and Paul in all the shows they did during their time with Acme (Ned never performed with Acme, nor did Tom or David). While he was out in the lobby feeling all nostalgic, I was sitting in the theatre itself. This theatre is called the Veterans Memorial Theatre, but we’ve never called it anything but "The Vets." It is walking distance from our house and is actually a whole complex--meeting rooms, the aforementioned courtyard, and the theatre. The building didn’t exist when we moved here, so we’ve watched it being built and our life in this town is inexorably tied to the history of The Vets. I sat there and just let all the memories come flooding in. My god....what we’ve gone through at The Vets. All the Sunshine Children’s Theatre shows. All the Davis Comic Opera shows, where first I was the publicist and on the board, and then Walt took on the job of technical director and did his own stint on the board. He still builds sets for DCOC. There were all the high school shows, the jazz choir shows, the Davis Children’s Nutcracker. All the ballet recitals. And the abortive "talent show" that I helped to write an direct (the less said about that the better). There was Paul’s first band, The Heffalumps. I remember The Concert of your Life, when the Heffalumps met the Buttonflies. The Heffalumps was a not very good rock band and the Buttonflies were an a capella vocal group doing oldie from the 50s, and well loved by the old timers in town. Whatever possessed them to do a joint concert I don’t recall, but the name of the Buttonflies pulled out all the old white haired ladies and the Heffalumps pulled out all the kids. The theatre was full. I was sitting next to this little old lady who loved the Buttonflies and one song into the Heffalumps set, she stood up, turned to me and said "I’m sorry--I just can’t take this" and walked out. I remember the end of that concert, when Ned, who had gotten a group of little kids dancing at the stage brought them all up on stage and they danced around across the stage while he band played. I think the seed of "Lawsuit" was planted that night. And then Lawsuit. It was their rehearsal hall, their performance space, their playground. Most of the kids in the band also worked for the city and so had keys to The Vets and were the crew in charge of keeping it clean and running, so they felt no guilt in having midnight rehearsal sessions, tearing the place apart, and then getting it all back together again in time for business in the morning. Lawsuit wouldn’t have existed if The Vets hadn’t been around. And who could ever forget Walt’s 50th birthday, a surprise roast, held on the stage of The Vets. Or all the "home movies" that were filmed at The Vets. I remember Chad & Vicki’s wedding, the first wedding in the theatre part of The Vets, with Chad’s brother Dave (the Down Syndrome kid), with his license as justice of the peace for a day, performing the ceremony, with Paul at his elbow helping get him through the ceremony. Those are the good memories. But then the other memories come too. Standing in the lobby watching people pour in for David’s memorial service. We were probably the only funeral in town ever to have the newspaper send a reviewer. (We got 4 stars...or the equivalent). The pain of watching all the kids try to get through that awful...awful...memorial service. And then a year later Paul and Audra’s wedding in the courtyard of The Vets, with dancing on the stage in the theatre, its floor painted with huge pictures of Paul and Audra. A happy memory to soften the memory of Dave’s memorial service. We couldn’t have Paul’s memorial at The Vets because it was being rennovated, so we had it at the Senior Center, where he also had worked for a time. But it might as well have been at The Vets. Just sitting there I realized how your perception of "places" and "things" is colored not only by your happy times with them, but your sad times as well. The Vets has brought us incredible pleasure over the years. We’ve had so many highs there, so many wonderful memories in the scrapbooks of my mind. But then I feel the pain of losing two children, and the pain that the memories of the happy times now bring. I can’t look at the stage and not see Paul singing to an audience of squealing fans and have it bring pleasure any more. Because it hurts so much to know that he’ll never do it again. And I can’t sit there in that empty theatre and not remember the hush that came over the audience (yes ‘audience’ is the right word here) for David’s memorial, the packages of Kleenex that Marta and the other kids tossed out into the audience after she announced that this would definitely not be your typical memorial service. I want to sit in The Vets again and feel the happiness that it has always brought me. But I can’t. I sit here typing with tears streaming down my face and I know that if I could get on a plane tomorrow and fly to the ends of the earth and never return to The Vets, it would really be OK. Gilbert always said that when he moved to a different phase in his life, he shut a door and never looked back. There is a part of me that wants so desperately to shut the door of The Vets and never go back in again. Aside: Let me start by assuring everyone that everything is OK. But it was an interesting evening. I heard the front door open and the sound of Walt coming in. I called out, asking him how he was (which I usually do), and he said that he'd hit something on his bike. He walked into my office with blood streaming down his face. It was coming from a cut over his eye (and head cuts bleed so much...). He also has a scrape under his mouth and he was white as a sheet. He had hit the curb and it flipped his bike. He was understandably very shaken by the incident. We got him cleaned up and he's now settled into a chair with a glass of wine and I am sure he will be ok very soon. It makes me realize yet again, the danger he's in riding his bike all these years (he has been riding his bike to work for nearly 30 years now) without a helmet. I think an order to go buy a helmet now is going to be on the agenda for this weekend. |
||
Some pictures from this
journal |
<- previous | Journal home | bio | cast | archive | next -> |
||
Created 1/6/00 by Bev Sykes |
|||
