Seen: last night (December 3)
So there I was, back at my old school, the place where I first set foot on stage as an actor, and where I did nearly all of my theater work.
Except it wasn't really. The old building, the one I went to, was closed in the 1990s and is now part of the CSU campus. The new one was built on the edge of town to replace it. Back in the day, we used to pride ourselves on our cool building---towers and pillars and all that. We thought it made us better than the other schools with their inferior postwar boxlike buildings.
I got tipped off to the production by a friend on Facebook and decided to go. It was my first time in the new building. I drove through the cold and ice and navigated the maze of the parking lot to get to the entrance.
I can't say that I was impressed by the building itself. It was completely the kind of cheap blah structure one might have feared they would build. I felt no connection to it all. The only jolt of feeling like I was in anything like my old school was seeing a girl in a purple and gold letter jacket in the lobby. That took me back.
But the auditorium is nice and expansive. It's named after the beloved orchestra director back from my day.
Driving there, I couldn't help but muse at the irony of the production I was about to see. During my three years at FCHS, I had three large dramatic roles, one per year, and was also the stage manager of the fall musical comedy during my senior year. One of the dramas was about the life of a small New England town at the turn of the century. One was about a soldier going off to die in Vietnam. In both of those. The third was one based on the Old Testament and was about the trials of believing and trusting in divine Providence. The musical comedy that I stage managed was about the excitement of the outside world coming to a small Midwestern town.
It occurred to me that if you rolled all of those productions up together into one, you would probably come up with, well, Fiddler on the Roof.
In fact, in my last role, I played a Jewish father of a large family. But in that case, my children didn't have as nice a fate as Tevye's daughters. Not at all.
What can I say about the production? It was a high school musical. It made me wish I could see our production from the fall of 1982, to compare it. The auditorium was beautiful. We would have given our eye teeth to have that kind of facility. Or maybe not. There was something charming and rustic about having to make due in the old auditorium. There were so many weird secret nooks and crannies. It felt like a real "theater" somehow. So I didn't envy the kids in the new building at all.
Among the changes in the new facility is that the seats have numbers and the tickets actually were reserved. Our seats didn't have numbers at all. But we did have a balcony. I asked for a seat in the very back. During the intermission, I stood against the railing by the light booth and looked out over the parents and students and everyone else in the audience, standing and moving in the aisles.
At that moment I had a flashback to how I used to feel way back when, about my place in the world, about the town I lived in, and about the world as a whole. I was so idealistic back then, and I knew it. I wanted to be connected to everyone, and feel and experience love in a universal way with humanity. I knew it was a grandiose notion, but somehow I had the notion that I should capitalize on my youthful idealism to soak in as much of that as possible.
That kind of attitude made me feel so alive. Back then I wanted to talk to as many people as possible, and experience as much of life as possible in the outside world, like an ambassador of hope and love. It's an attitude that carried me forth all around the globe and late me make friends everywhere I went. All of that kind of feeling of connection kept getting reflected back to me.
As I looked down the rows at the people in the auditorium, it occurred to me that I have not felt that way in a long time. Instead I have been going through the world with such isolation. I have not wanted to connect to people. I have not trusted that. I have been able to see only the blindness and desolation of the people in my town, and in the world. I have felt on a solitary mission.
I miss feeling that connection. Perhaps it is the way the world has been spinning so rapidly lately, but for a moment, I had a glimmer of a window back to my old self, that one who wanted to connect and project love, and experience it back from others.
After the production I walked back out through the lobby and saw the same girl with the purple and gold letter jacket. I thought of a girl I knew from long ago, my date for the junior prom. She hated this place and the people here. She left behind Fort Collins right after high school and never looked back. She went off and married a naval officer, and had a couple kids. The world have to end for her to show up on Facebook. Maybe she had it right after all.
I am so sick and tired of this war. When do we get America back?
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