Magic To Do

I got the theater itch in high school. My gateway drug was fifth-grade choir. The choreography we added to the spring show in middle school took it up a notch, leading me to the a capella jazz ensemble in high school. This quickly escalated to the junior and senior class plays. I knew I was a hopeless addict when I found myself at an audition for a community theater production of “The Haunting of Hill House.” I got the lead and plunged into several post-high-school years of incessant thespian activity. Over the course of one very hectic year, I appeared in no less than five productions at as many different playhouses.

This habit began to fade when I got married. My husband was not the kind of person who seeks any kind of spotlight, and community theater makes daunting demands on the free time of its participants. I was happy to get clean of this often sordid occupation. The drama was almost always more intriguing off-stage than on. Besides, as I got older, I developed a crippling stage fright that kept me in willing abstinence.

One hangover from this youthful habit of mine is a keen love of attending live theater. Pro or amateur, I get a thrill out of settling into my seat in the darkening theater—be it actual theater, converted church, community hall, or ad hoc space—hearing the hushed scuffling behind the curtain, then watching people in too much make-up conjure magic in the glare of the footlights. Even if their talent is not as great as their enthusiasm, I always appreciate the effort.

Still too self-conscious to brave the boards myself, I have found a new way to participate and support local theater. I have started volunteering as an usher for Rubber City Theater. An old friend of mine who lives out of state turned me on to this idea. He lives in a much bigger city with a thriving theater scene where he ushers several professional productions most weekends of the year. The volunteer usher racket is so robust there, he often misses out on really big-name shows if he doesn’t get his name on the list early enough.

For RCT, all I had to do was email through their website and express an interest. Within an hour, I was in. My instructions were minimal: show up an hour early. I could do that.

The show was a musical, one of my very favorites, but one I hadn’t seen or heard in over 30 years. Pippin. The songs from that show are the soundtrack of my junior and senior years in high school. I only ever saw a 1981 version of the show that featured Ben Vereen, William Katt, Martha Raye and Chita Rivera—never a live production—but boy did it stick with me. We did some of the songs in show choir my senior year, and they formed the backbone of a speech class that was pretty liberal about group work.

I was more than delighted at the opportunity to revisit this play as an adult—for free—by volunteering. Two aspects of the experience made it memorable.

First, it is absolutely true that you never know who you will run into when you go out in public. Akron being the small city it is, the odds of encountering someone you know are fairly high—and the odds of that someone being unexpected are commensurate with how often you go out in public. Evidence:

RCT occupies a former church on the near east side. As the usher, I stood at the opened double doors that led from the foyer-cum-box-office into the nave-cum-theater proper. My job was to hand out programs and assist attendees in locating their seats. The configuration of seating was incredibly simple; no one required assistance finding their seats. Besides, the house was not more than half full either night I was there, so people migrated to the front rows before intermission.

Standing at my post Thursday evening shortly after seven pm, I noticed someone enter the door not four feet from me: a guy in a red ball cap, wire-rim glasses, and a South Park necktie. He looked familiar. After he finished retrieving his pre-paid ticket, we made eye contact.

“I met you at a ballroom dance class at the Grant Street…” I said to him, never one to mince words or avoid an awkward confrontation.

“The Quirk Cultural Center!” He corrected me in acknowledged response. We smiled.

“Yes. You were a pretty good dancer,” I said. “And not creepy at all.”

He laughed. I think he blushed slightly. “I can’t wait to tell people that a woman told me tonight that I’m not creepy!”

It’s true. The low-priced dance classes at Quirk are inherently awkward. The tiny, very talented instructor did her level best to keep the instruction simple and repetitive, but the group of “dancers” was a freak show: mostly women over 50 or 60, a few couples, and two or three single men with various unfortunate physical attributes. One wore a really obvious toupee and audibly counted while we made our way stiffly through a series of samba steps. Another had a hair lip, a strong odor of sweat masked by even stronger cologne, and slick palms that gripped just a bit too tightly. He also enjoyed making unsubtle references about the sexual qualities of the samba.

By comparison, Bill, my theater-going friend, merely had sloped shoulders and a doughy paunch. This was mitigated by his demonstrable dancing skills, his easy smile, and his ability to refrain from groping or trying to dance too closely. I remembered the two of us laughing and actually having a nice time when we were paired up. Plus he had a penchant for these fun, garish neckties; I recalled a Star Wars theme at the dance class, which coincided with the day Carrie Fisher died. Surely those ties indicated a sense of humor.

We chatted easily while he waited for his friend to show up. This is when the weirdness set in. He revealed that he was newly single, like me, because his girlfriend of some 25 years had died last year, of leukemia, so he was doing everything he could to live more fully—taking those dance classes, playing guitar in a band, singing karaoke, going to plays.

How does one respond to this information from a more-or-less stranger?

The second aspect of the experience that lingers is merely a product of the passage of time. At 17, Pippin exhorted me to explore the world, to try anything and everything, to “find my corner of the sky.” I absorbed it as a young person would, as the codification of my inner longing to separate from my family and create my adult self in a burning flash of excitement and perfection.

Thirty years later, I still love the music, but the story seems to have changed. Now, all I can hear is the underlying underpinnings of the status quo. The final scene makes it very clear that the only worthwhile endeavor in life is to get married, settle down, and have children. This is shocking to me, as I never—and especially at 17 had no desire—to get married, settle down, or bear children.

But that’s more or less what I did, isn’t it? Of course, I never had kids—thank god—but I met the man who would be husband at 24, married at 26, and promptly quit seeking all those adventures I was sure awaited me at 17 or 18.

Well, to paraphrase Stephen Schwartz: Think about the sun, Sharon; think about her golden glance. How she lights the world up; well, now it’s your chance.