The Magic Show

Lots of boys go through a magic stage.  They get a kid’s magic set of simple tricks, they pick up a card trick or two, or they figure out how to make a coin disappear into thin air.  Then there’s another kind of kid who takes it a step further and starts haunting the magic shops.  For me they were on K Street in Sacramento, Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, Cannery Row in Monterey and in the back of Thinker Toys in Carmel.  Trick by trick I evolved into what is known as an apparatus magician.  An apparatus magician is a magician who uses rigged items to present illusions: empty boxes that produce live animals, scarves that change colors or disappear into your hand, the Chinese wands, the linking rings, a magic table with secret compartments, the flying cane.  As the boy amasses his collection of illusions he reads all the books in the library about the Great Blackstone and Harry Houdini, or tricks one can do with ordinary household items.  He never misses a David Copperfield TV special and is in the audience when the magician plays Lake Tahoe.

When I was in elementary school my Grandparents hired a local teenaged magician to entertain the family on Christmas eve.  He had a lovely assistant in costume and he was properly decked out in a tuxedo.  He had doves and a black velvet magic table and plenty of colorful balls, scarves, ropes, boxes and wonderful toys.  I wanted them all.  I wanted to be him.  I might have camped out in front of his house and bugged him to death if I had any idea where he lived.  That magic show on Christmas eve showed me that magic wasn’t just for TV variety shows, but it was for anyone and I might some day put together my own magic act and perform at parties.

My brother Mark had a lovebird named Sam because we were told it was a boy.  Then one day Sam laid an egg and he was Samantha.  That bird was unruly and chased people around the living room.  He liked to land on shoulders and in my case bite a mole I had on my neck.  When I was in junior high school I had collected enough good tricks to put on a decent magic show and managed to land my first birthday party gig with Mark as my assistant and Sam stuffed into the box that seemed to be empty.  We always had to prearrange for a place to sneak in the bird so the party guests wouldn’t see it and clear the place of dogs and cats.  The trick was so much more amazing when you didn’t know a bird had arrived to the party.  Sam was usually pretty good about just hopping out of the box and waiting for Mark to scoop him up and rush him off stage and back to his cage.  However, on a couple of occasions Sam embarrassed us by flying off into the room and landing in an unreachable spot.  We would have to stop the show while Mark climbed around the room trying to capture Sam.

We always did the bird trick first so that Sam wouldn’t be tucked into the box for too long and then the show could continue without any worry about mishaps.  I can’t even remember the entire program now, but it included the linking rings, the Chinese wands, several amazing things done with an egg coming and going, three or four magic scarf tricks, a set of boxes that covered cutouts of rabbits that magically hopped from one container to the other, pouring the pitcher of milk into the newspaper cone and disappearing into thin air.  Mark stood by to hand me things and I worked off a magic table that I built myself from directions I found in a magic book.  By the time I was 16 the show had grown to its final version, which probably lasted a half hour.  We didn’t advertise, but word got around and we were asked to perform at various parties––both for adults and kids.

I had seen David Copperfield do an amazing trick with a floating cane.  You knew there was a string or a wire, but you just couldn’t figure out the physics of how it was attached based on what seemed to be incredible movements of the cane.  One of my shops had the trick and I snatched it up, but the problem with it is that you’ve got to have theatrical lighting to help out the illusion.  The close quarters of a living room performance make the illusion impossible to achieve.  My last magic show was also my first chance to perform the trick because it was going to be in a large school classroom and I could control the light.  I brought along a portable clip light with a blue bulb in it and had my friend Anna help out by turning off the regular lights and aiming the blue light at me as I danced the cane through the air all around me.  This was my finale at that particular performance and the last time I performed that same magic act that I had been doing all through high school with little variation.  It was performed around the last week of high school after Mark and I had driven all over the hills of El Dorado County with Sam swinging on his perch in cage on the back seat––his little bell that he liked to hit with his head ringing away (sometimes he stuck his head under the bell and wore it like a hat)––bringing our little magic show into living rooms for several years.  Then all at once I went off to college to study theatre and left magic behind.

I still think it would have been fun to pursue life as a magician, but I never researched the path one takes and couldn’t imagine how to advance my interest.  Magic was not a subject I ever came across in the college catalogs in my high school’s career center.  It has to be more than moving to Las Vegas, but that would probably have been part of it.  Had it been possible to be a magic major I might have done it.  Looking back on it now I realize that I was trapped in a certain limited routine and since the path towards a career in theatre was apparent, it was natural that I would take that path.  I was happy with my tight and simple thirty minute show and never branched out into sawing girls in half or trying to make the Statue of Liberty disappear.  I liked the performance aspect of it the most and studying theatre in college fulfilled that aspect as well as simply being more practical.  There is nothing practical about becoming a magician, but a few people make a fat living at doing just that.  My grandfather loved magic shows and perhaps harbored secret dreams of making elephants disappear.  I think he would have liked to see me become a professional magician.

My magic shops are all gone now.  The one on K Street in Sacramento went when that street was turned into a pedestrian mall.  I don’t think the changes to K Street had anything to do with it, but it was just that magic and gag shops no longer fascinated boys the way they used to.  The other magic shops I regularly visited were in heavy tourist spots and hung on a bit longer, but none of them are around now.  Video games had come along, which was the first step towards an era of electronics that have made many things of science fiction become science fact, but along the way the card tricks and the magic wands lost their allure.  The casino circuit still supports a handful of magicians, so there is an audience that wants some of that good old hokum on occasion, but did you notice that somewhere around the time of the Apple computer that David Copperfield stopped showing up on TV?

Presenting the Chinese wands during the last magic show in 1986.

The Overcoat

The black overcoat I am wearing in the photo that introduces this blog is vintage.  That photo of me is from December 2011, but the coat was purchased by my father when he was 16 years old in 1959.  My father was raised with his older sister, Claudia, by a single mother in Concord, CA.  Concord is on the edge of the greater San Francisco bay area, connected to Walnut Creek and an hour drive to Oakland and San Francisco where wool overcoats are perfectly useful.  As far as I can research without a visit to the Oakland Public Library, there was a men’s shop called Smiths of California on Broadway in Oakland that emerged in the 1920s and lasted through the 1960s at least––it’s not there now.  Another thing that’s not around is the Clifton Dale overcoat, sold exclusively at Smiths, so the label stitched into the inside of my coat states.

Actually, the Clifton Dale line of overcoats were sold in other men’s stores as well, but it seems the labels were individual to the men’s store that happened to carry Clifton Dale menswear.  I have no idea who Clifton Dale was, or if he wasn’t a real person at all, but he made an overcoat that lasts.  Too bad he isn’t still making them.  This one is not quite black, but charcoal, with a subtle check print in it.  The sleeves have the detail of a cuff around half of the circumference and a useless button for show, as if the cuff needed buttoning down for safe keeping.  The coat fits nicely in my shoulders and hangs straight down with plenty of room to comfortably wear a suit jacket underneath.  The style is typical of what you see on Mad Men.  It is basic and yet it has a kind of subtle elegance and detail to it not seen in a similar garment on the rack of Macy’s today.

During my childhood this coat was hanging in our hall closet going nowhere and doing nothing.  I never remember my dad wearing it.  The coat had traveled up the hill from Concord to Placerville when we moved in 1969 and because it was warmer more of the year, not conducive to the snow conditions in the winter and my father only traveled a short distance by car to his office, there wasn’t any need for the coat.  My dad also felt it was a bit too dressy for most country activities.  But it was a good coat, and as I mentioned before, it sure looked beautiful over a suit.  There was nothing wrong with hanging on to it, but I’m amazed that it never ended up in the periodic pile of goods being donated to Good Will.  

When I became a teenager, my parents were introduced to a game at a Christmas party.  The idea was that if you rolled doubles on a pair of dice, you could start trying to open a package waiting in the center of the circle of players.  However, before you could rip open that paper, you had to put on an overcoat, mittens, hat and scarf.  Once you were all bundled up you could start opening that package if the mittens would allow it.  Meanwhile, the rest of the crowd is taking turns rolling the dice.  Low and behold, someone rolls a double and starts tearing the clothing off the last winner, who must drop the package and give up his turn to the new winner.  This can go on for quite a while.  One trick of the game is that the package is actually a series of packages wrapped inside each other.  When you finally get to the final package it is pretty small and there is some sort of novelty gift that is never as exciting as it was to play the game.  

I thought this was such a great idea that I tried it at a small dinner party I gave when I was 15 years old.  The guests were neighbor friend Paul Hunt, Jossette Childress and Laura Batho.  This was the year when the four of us went to all the school dances together and shared in birthday parties and such.  My little brother, who was still actually little at the time, played along and we had a good round of the dice game, laughing and screaming until our sides might split.  We played the game in a big hat, scarf, mittens and that Clifton Dale overcoat from the hall closet.  The coat came out of the closet a few more times while I was in high school just for that game at various parties.

I left for college and the coat hung quietly in the closet, somehow unharmed, for a few more years.  In my junior year at California State University, Sacramento, I picked up a used midnight blue tails tuxedo with my first paycheck from a new job with the Sacramento Light Opera Association’s Music Circus (now known as California Musical Theatre).  What did I need with a tails tuxedo?  Nothing, except I thought it was cool and I was a tap dancer and, you know, Fred Astair wore tails, so....  You aren’t supposed to analyze it, nor are you supposed to find a practical purpose, but you are just supposed to accept that at age 20, in Sacramento, I needed a midnight blue tails tuxedo.  I wore it to the CSUS Drama Banquet and to the Sacramento Area Regional Theatre Alliance Elly Awards.  I was able to use it on Halloween once and in a few performances.  On one of these occasions, the weather was a bit chilly and I was going to need an overcoat to wear with the tuxedo.  My thoughts went to that lonely Clifton Dale in the hall closet in Placerville.  I drove up the hill to get it and wear it to my event.  I never brought it back and I have made good use of it ever since.

At this very moment, everyone thinks I am so cool when I wear it because of the general Mad Men craze that is affecting fashion everywhere.  But, even before Mad Men, the coat was admired by others often.  When I first kidnapped it I was very slim and wore a 39 long suit jacked.  Now I wear a 46 long suit jacket and the overcoat still fits beautifully, so I suppose it was oversized on me when I first began to wear it, but it hung off my shoulders well and didn’t look like I was swimming in it.  In my early 20s I only wore it when I needed something to wear over the tuxedo or the rare occasion when I wore a sport coat on a chilly evening.  Now I wear suits and blazers quite often and the overcoat has become essential to my wardrobe.  I’ve kept my eye out for a replacement as the day will come when I’ll just have to buy a new coat, but I haven’t seen one made as well or as good looking that wasn’t priced entirely beyond reason.  Whatever coat I buy, it won’t be a Clifton Dale, for they are sadly a thing of the past.  Even now, I am sewing up a small tear caused by either time or a moth, but as long as no one can tell the difference, I’ll keep patching it up and wearing this prefect garment.

From One Small Town to Another

Getting out of Placerville has got to be every graduating high school senior’s goal.  Very few, any more, stick around for more than a possible two years of junior college.  I started out going to junior college myself, but not in Placerville.  However, I traded one small town for another and one family household for another.  I applied for several four year programs, but the scholarship offer to attend Hartnell College in Salinas was too ideal.  This was a theatre conservatory program called Western Stage and it had a more ambitious and grander program than your average state college was offering in those days of the late 1980s.  In a year and a half I worked on more productions than the rest of my five year total undergraduate life.  My tuition, books, lunch money, gas and a few dollars for other little things that an eighteen year old college freshman might need were all paid for.  My grandparents and an aunt and uncle lived in Salinas, a kind of second home to me as we spent every Christmas there (still do) as well as many summer visits, so I stayed with Aunt Carol and Uncle Walter.  That first college program expanded my sense of the world in many ways, but living in Salinas itself did not.  I had done little more than trade one small town Main Street for another and with relatives watching over me too.

Where Placerville trades on its Gold Rush history, Salinas trades on its John Steinbeck history.  This is the land of Cannery Row and East of Eden.  Steinbeck’s victorian house still stands and has been museumized, serving a reservation based lunch service certain days a week.  My aunt volunteered at the Steinbeck House for many years and even held a big anniversary party there for my uncle and herself.  Today there is a grand Steinbeck museum at the end of Main Street, but in the late 1980s, there was just the house and Main Street was only just starting to come out of its dilapidated period that many a Main Street went through in the 1970s.

The Salinas Main Street was split into two areas: an old town built in the 1920s and a newer post war section from the 1950s that still had many useful shops doing well.  For some reason the old town section was struggling in 1986, but slowly but surely through the following decade, this section of so much character was rejuvenated.  A record shop and a music store that I depended on have disappeared and I don’t recognize the current businesses, but the good news is that there is indeed business.  One thing that always rejuvenates a dead Main Street is some night life.  It is nice to have the museum during the day, but now at night there are more restaurants and one of the old movie theaters, the Crystal, has been expanded into a multi-screen cineplex called the Maya Cinemas.  Also, the grand old Fox California Theater has been restored as a multi-event space where anything from a concert to a wedding can be found, so activity on old Main Street is hopping again.

When I was attending Hartnell College, this lower section of Main Street had a lot of empty stores, a dead hotel, and three of the four theaters were boarded up.  However, the Cinema 1, formerly the El Ray, was still open and showing second run movies for a dollar and you got a double feature.  The theater was warm and inviting and retained its 1940’s detail and charm.  At the moment the interior is stripped and molding, though the building stands and is for lease.  There is movement on a restoration, so hopefully the place will be back in business, adding one more marquee to be turned back on along old Main Street.  Of course, the thing that caused Main Street to diminish was the usual reason: a mall was built on the edge of town that included a multi-screen cineplex.  Now, that cineplex is the absolutely worst movie going option in the region and Main Street is back as the go to destination.

At the other end of Main Street, still operating in all its mid-century modern glory, is the Star Market.  It just makes me smile to see it, for it is such a thing of a bygone era and it hasn’t been touched and it hasn’t died, but just keeps serving the public.  Directly behind it is the neighborhood of my grandparents and so the Star Market was their grocery store.  Across the street is the lettuce fields––the hallmark of the Salinas Valley.  If you keep driving out Main Street towards the south west, you are on your way to Monterey and Carmel.  My time in Salinas includes those towns as well. They served as a kind of expanded home town, for I was in those places often to shop, see theatre, enjoy the ocean and just get away from the confines of the limited Salinas Main Street and Hartnell College, where I spent the majority of my waking hours for a year and a half.

Even though Salinas feels very small town, the truth is that the general Monterey bay area has an awful lot to offer.  For shopping, Placerville never had a mall, but Salinas does and a more upscale mall in Monterey included a Macy’s and a nicer movie theater.  Carmel’s Ocean Avenue is the cutest kind of Main Street you could imagine.  Looking like a European Pinocchio village, the adorable main thoroughfare of the land of Doris Day and Clint Eastwood (who happened to be the mayor while I lived there) is mostly filled with shops to attract tourists.  There are plenty of good restaurants, boutique clothing stores, gift shops and an expansive array of art galleries.  There is a lot of old wealth in Carmel––this is one of the places where Hollywood goes to retire and the home of the old Bing Crosby celebrity golf tournament (now the AT&T), so of course there was a mini Saks 5th Avenue for a long time, though it has gone by the way now.

One of my favorite spots in Carmel is the Cypress Inn owned by Doris Day.  My family usually has lunch in Carmel the day after Christmas and I always like to pop in to see Doris Day’s Christmas tree in the beautiful front lobby living room with its big fireplace, comfortable chairs, grand piano and proper afternoon tea service.  The Inn is Spanish Californian in design and has many odd corners and interesting spaces.  A courtyard includes self filling watering bowls for the many dogs that are welcomed to the Inn.  Some years it seems like the dogs might out number the humans in the busy lobby.  There is a comfortable little bar and lounge nook decorated with old Doris Day movie posters and it connects to a very nice expanded bar area in the rear.  Carmel has numerous motels, hotels and inns that range from basic to adorable, but the Cypress Inn is the best of them all.

There is very little in the form of nightclubs in the area.  Entertainment options besides the movies (and there isn’t a movie theater in Carmel) include quite a lot of theatre choices.  Western Stage in Salinas keeps up a healthy year round schedule of plays and musicals and Monterey Peninsula College serves Monterey and Carmel as do a dozen other little theatre groups scattered through the county.  There is the Monterey Bay Symphony, summer Shakespeare at the Forest Theatre, and touring performing arts groups at Sherwood Hall in Salinas.  There is the really big deal: The California Rodeo!  This event is accompanied by a Main Street parade, in which my mother and later my cousins participated.  Every junky motel in the area has a no vacancy sign turned on during the rodeo days.  Otherwise, there is a kind of calm over the area and unless you have tickets to a performing arts event, people stay in.  There used to be one gay bar in Monterey during the ‘80s and ‘90s, but the joint has since disappeared.  I do know one gay couple in Carmel and I asked them about the gay scene in the area and they said, “We met everyone at the town Christmas tree lighting ceremony.”

This area combines small town atmosphere with world class offerings.  To walk along the Monterey Bay or to sit out on the Carmel beach and look out over the Pacific Ocean is to observe one of the most beautiful places of natural beauty on the planet.  I feel lucky that my family still gathers in the area for Christmas each year.  I grew up taking it for granted, but now I savor it each December.  Although, as a kid I did treasure a few simple joys.  One was Monterey’s wonderful Dennis the Menace Park.  This park had unusually good park toys to climb on and a swinging rope bridge.  The next door lake had paddle boats.  In Carmel, Thinker Toys (still there), had a wonderful array of puppets, including marionettes.  I still have a beautiful wood carved skeleton marionette from that shop.  In the back of Thinker Toys was a magic section.  There was usually a magician on hand to demonstrate tricks and for a few years I thrilled in picking up a new trick or two for my collection that lead to my high school era career as a birthday party magician.  Today the magic counter is no more and the puppet selection is greatly reduced, but Thinker Toys is still a marvelous little shop of wonders.

My grandfather moved his family from Michigan to Salinas when my mother was ten to leave the cold winters and be closer to his brother Paul, who was the publisher of the Salinas Californian.  Uncle Paul was a kind of magical person, living with Aunt Charm on a hill looking over the Salinas Valley.  He gave me rides on his little green tractor around his little farm.  He had funny little painted cutout characters poking out of his vegetable patches. The walls of his garage were filled from top to bottom with his painted canvases of odd portraits and landscapes.  Just for fun he built a miniature carousel the way some people build model airplanes.  He was expert at bird calls and although I delighted in watching him give his bird calls out over the valley, I never saw the particular birds stop by to say hi.  He had ancient home movies that included an old fashioned tent circus setting up.  I wasn’t very close to him and I was even further removed from Aunt Charm, but I think of him a lot as a magical and curious elf who brought some enchantment into my childhood.

My grandparents moved into a very small house on the edge of the lettuce fields with the idea that it would be only temporary, but they stayed there the rest of their lives.  They added an extra room jutting out into the back yard called the “patio room” because it was built over the existing patio.  This was a wonderful room with floor to ceiling glass windows and a large brick fireplace.  This room housed the Christmas tree and a big table was set up for large family dinners.  The double doors that opened into this room served as the proscenium arch under which my brother and I gave a Christmas show of some kind every Christmas Eve from the age of five through high school.  Next to the fireplace was a dog door that I could fit through when I was small.  In one of our shows, my brother Mark kept our audience’s attention dressed as a deer and singing “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” while I sneaked around the house and through the dog door dressed in a Santa hat and beard and chortled “Ho Ho Ho!” at the end of the number.  Our surprised family audience thought this was pretty nifty.  Uncle Walter exclaimed, “That’s ingenuity for you––you couldn’t come down the chimney because of the fire, so you did the next best thing and came in beside the fireplace!”  Uncle Walter wanted to try on my hat and beard and so I dressed him up and we have a photo of this moment hidden away in some album somewhere.

This reminds me of two items regarding “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.”  When little brother was two, he stood up in his crib until the wee hours on Christmas Eve singing that song non stop.  It may have been the first song he ever learned.  My mother always gave us a Christmas book to read on the long trip from Placerville to Salinas each year and one year Mark received a storybook version of “Rudolph.”  My grandfather sat little Mark on his lap to read him the book and read it comically with all the words mixed up: Randolph the Rein Nosed Red Dear.  Mark would correct him and make Grandpa read it again, but out came Grandpa’s mixed up version, sending Mark into a frustrated fit.

My grandparents liked to ride bicycles and my grandfather could sit on the handlebars and ride backwards––it was one of his many little tricks.  He always had some little trick or puzzle to show me and we communed over magic shows on TV.  He’d video tape magic specials and save them for my visits and then we’d go over our theories of how the tricks were done.  In the summers my brother and I would take over the bikes and ride around the greater part of Salinas to visit all the many neighborhood parks.  Salinas had what we didn’t have in Placerville––miles of sidewalks on flat ground, so we bicycled away the greater part of a Salinas day on summer visits.  Grandpa was a veterinarian and ran a popular pet cemetery on the edge of town.  He also wrote a column called “Pet Talk” for the news paper.  Later he self published a book of his articles called About Pets that I illustrated.  Even in retirement, Grandpa rode his bicycle down to the animal shelter to give shots and keep connected to the animals.  He was a little like a jolly Fred Mertz from I Love Lucy and he and my grandmother were brilliant at cocktail parties where they could enter into a conversation with absolutely anyone and thoroughly enjoy themselves.  I have to work a lot harder at that kind of thing and in a business where I have to shmooze and network a lot, I sure wish I had inherited the ease with which my grandparents could work a room.

My grandmother always seemed a little daffy, a bit off balance, both physically and mentally, though she actually was a sharp lady.  She wasn’t a great cook and really latched on to the convenience foods that emerged in the 1950s and never let go.  My brother and I joked that the Cheese Whiz she always had in her pantry might be the cause for her daffy personality.  Mark and I could always get her laughing with our stories or impressions and theatrics.  She enjoyed seeing us in all of our shows and was particularly delighted with having me around during my college time in Salinas.  We often played group games after dinner on Christmas and Grandma was usually particularly useless as a teammate, for she never really understood the rules, but she was immensely entertaining as she gave it the good old college try every time it was her turn to play.  She out lived my grandfather and was playing golf a month before she died at age 91.  The last time I saw her she was on a cruise ship docked in New York’s harbor and I had dinner with her on board the ship––she was 90 and still traveling.

I got to know Salinas intimately during college and also my Aunt Carol and Uncle Walter.  Uncle Walter had an attitude that it was his duty to parent me––I did not share this attitude.  For the most part we stayed out of each other’s way, though I always sat down to family dinner with them most nights.  A few times a week we had Uncle Walter's mother for dinner––known to me as Grandma Sharp.  During this time she was in bad shape after a stroke.  She was wheelchair bound and a little shriveled up.  She smiled at me across the table during dinner a little too long, which made me kind of uncomfortable, but when she talked she only had negative and bitter things to say.  My mother approached her at Christmas to say hello and Merry Christmas and Grandma Sharp retorted, “It won’t be a Merry Christmas with me around!”  My brother and I observed this moment together and it struck us as rather hilarious.  We still pull it out from time to time to get another laugh out of it––it was the timing of the exchange that was so funny and it could have been used in some holiday comedy film (imagine Lionel Barrymore giving the line).  Grandma Sharpe wouldn’t say much, but then all of a sudden she’d shoot off with some bitter comment like that and it just struck us as funny.  Of course her situation wasn’t funny at all, but she was quite a character and my brother and I always get a kick out of observing characters.  One night at dinner after I had moved away from Salinas, Grandma Sharp asked out of the blue, “Whatever happened to that nice young man who used to sit across the table from me?”

An old high school friend was in Salinas the summer of 1987 for an internship at Western Stage, but although we were both busy with the same theatre company, our schedules didn’t coincide and so we planned to meet late at night after rehearsals were over at a Denny’s.  We had so much to talk about that we sat there over cokes and french fries until nearly four in the morning.  I knew I didn’t have to be anywhere until 2 PM the next day, so I wasn’t worried about the late hour.  When I got out of bed around 12:30 PM the next day, Uncle Walter was ready with a rather loud scolding about my late return.  He didn’t want to hear what I had to say about it, but just cut me off and said, “If you intend on keeping those kind of hours you can find another place to live.”  Much later I found out that he had called my father to discuss the issue of my late hour return and my dad had shrugged it off with, “That’s how those theatre people are––rehearse and socialize until late and sleep in until noon.”  My aunt said, “If I had been awake I would have been worried.”  I had an internal laugh over that comment, because I hadn’t worried her at all except in retrospect.

I imagine that Uncle Walter never told me he called my dad because he didn’t get the answer he wanted to hear.  For my part, I just kept to myself and kept more normal hours for a while.  Later when I stayed out late for a cast party, Uncle Walter never really said anything.  On another issue, my Aunt and Uncle were going on a trip and Uncle Walter laid down the law that no friends were allowed in the house.  This made me mad, though the joke was that it was a rare occurrence that I ever had anyone over anyway and it hardly mattered.  But, since he made such a point of specifying this rule, I ventured to challenge him by saying, “Are you actually afraid I’m going to throw some wild party?”  My intention was to point out that he had observed my daily behavior long enough to know I wouldn’t be causing trouble while he was away on a trip, but his reply was, “It’s no different for you than when the girls lived here.”  He meant my four cousins.  Cousin Debbie once asked, “So how is it living here?”  I returned that things were pretty good and she shot back in an astonished tone, “With Dad?!”  I understood in those two words that my cousins felt they had been ruled by a real disciplinarian of the military variety and guessed that I was experiencing only a portion of what Uncle Walter could dish out.

On the other hand, I admired my uncle as a successful white collar farmer, who cultivated a well-rounded knowledge of many things.  He was another good cocktail party personality who could mix with any crowd and was very involved in the community. He was quite proper and well mannered, he and my Aunt were active together in tennis and going dancing at the Salinas country club.  He always opened a car door for the lady, gave a firm hand shake and looked you in the eye when he talked to you.  Regardless of whatever tensions he and I had as he tried to be a substitute father and I rejected his treating me like I was 14 when I was 19, he always had a cheery smile and greeting for me in the years after that time and had an overriding charm about him that was welcoming to anyone who met him.

My Aunt Carol is an elegant woman who has been amazingly strong as a caregiver dealing with the aging process and sickness of Grandma Sharp, Uncle Walter, her father, a second husband Lester and her daughter Cindy.  One reason is that Aunt Carol was there on the scene when these relatives became ill and being the strong lady she is, went to work doing what she needed to do.  Through all of that, Aunt Carol still managed to host a house full of family for Christmas, cooking dinners and baking an array of Christmas cookies for her neighbors and to send home with us all.  Aunt Carol is the hub of my mother’s side of the family and for me, the center of Salinas.

In my final semester living in Salinas I got a little job at a wine shop making gift baskets.  I just sat at a work bench in the back of the shop like Bob Cratchit, with my craft and packaging supplies and put together baskets of wine, chocolate, fancy pots of jam and other goodies, all shrink wrapped for the taking.  This was my first real job where I took home a paycheck and I really saved up the money because I was too busy with classes in the morning, rehearsals at night and homework squeezed in and around all that to spend it.  I kind of wonder how I managed everything now.  I guess when you’re 19 you don’t know what your limits ought to be.  I left Hartnell College a semester early because I was only taking general education classes at that point and was going to transfer to a four hear college the following fall semester, so I swapped Salinas for Placerville again––just for one spring semester and a summer––then I really left the small town life.

Population growth has taken over some of the farmland, but agriculture is still a major part of Salinas and the small town feel of the town, especially along Main Street, seems to stay more or less the same year after year.  Ocean Avenue in Carmel is unlikely to change much as the town is very mindful of keeping it as picturesque as always and Monterey just doesn’t have any room for expansion, so it is likely to stay the same too.  The grandparents are gone now and their little house on San Juan Drive sold off.  I still drive by it on the way to Aunt Carol’s house where we still gather for Christmas.  Uncle Walter is gone and so is Grandma Sharp and when the day comes that we no longer have Aunt Carol with us (I hate to think of that) I imagine that Christmas in Salinas will come to an end.  Maybe I’ll think, oh well, I’ve had my fill, but I’ll probably continue to go back for visits, checking in on Doris Day’s Cypress Inn, walking the trail along Monterey Bay and poking around Main Street Salinas.  It’s a second home and a lovely corner of the world.

Uncle Walter tries on my beard after our show.  Brother Mark is Rudolph.

Visiting Grover's Corners

If someone were to ask me what is my favorite play (not musical), I will always pick Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning Our Town no matter how many plays I see.  Even when I stop to really consider the options, I end up with Our Town.  Every time I see it, whether professional or amateur, it never fails to move me deeply.  Wilder’s play about small town life in the early 20th Century is not only a perfect piece of theatre, but it captures the American spirit and as the narrator of the play, “The Stage Manager,” says, “So––people a thousand years from now––this is the way we were:  in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”  This statement, made after the main characters are introduced, points out the purpose of the play and it has held true all these years––proving the play to be timeless.  Clearly it was Wilder’s plan that his play should capture the American experience, which has something to do with the simple things in life as they are found in the microcosm of America that is the small town and the goings on along its Main Street.  The simple things can also be the biggest things in the course of a life.

Although the play might seem like it is now a big nosalgia trip, it was written as a bit of nostalgia in the first place––it is set in that time right before everything started going very fast, before the Great War, before cars and radio and movies.  Walt Disney loved to explore this time in many projects, for it was that very time when we was a boy.  Lady and the Tramp might be about the love affair of two dogs from two different social classes, but the world in which that story is told is a time when horse drawn buggies and automobiles were trying to figure out how to share the road.  This is an interesting period, for it represents one of the big themes of Our Town: the old giving way to the new––one foot in the past and one foot in the future.  The play celebrates the period as well as mourns its loss and the period seems a perfect metaphore for the American experience.  In 1938 when the play ran on Broadway at the Henry Miller Theater  (rebuilt and renamed “The Sondheim” today), the time depicted in Our Town’s Grover’s Corners was in the memory of most of the adults going to see the show––they were looking at their own childhoods.  A ten year old being taken to see Our Town in 1938 wouldn’t have any personal point of reference to 1901, for they had radio, comic books, cars, phones in their homes, Mickey Mouse and Snow White in color at the movies.  Today we are also like those ten year olds of 1938, for we have no personal connection to that time before the world became very turbulant, but whether or not you grew up in a small town, the basics of humanity depicted in that play are universal forever and we can relate to those things that are eternal.

From a physical production standpoint, Our Town really knows it is a creature of the theatre.  In this period of American Theatre, kitchen sink realism was all the rage, but Wilder asks the audience to use their imagination.  On a basically bare stage he has his “Stage Manager” explain to the audience that they won’t need scenery and just a few chairs, tables and a pair of ladders will serve.  The cast is usually costumed in the period, but past a useful lighting design and a bit of music, this is all there is or needs to be for production value––the actors do all the work.  Most of the activities are pantomimed, from sipping an ice cream soda, to making breakfast on the stove.  The real meat of the play is in the conversations between the characters of the town––how they say hello in the street, talk about the latest news or gossip and share schoolwork, sentiments and dreams.  

One of the aspects of this play that always moves me (differently from production to production), is hearing about the characters’ dreams, many of which are not fullfilled.  Mrs. Gibbs wants more than ever to go to Paris one day, but her husband won’t hear of it.  She mentions that a man has called on her to buy her antique piece of furnature for $350 (that’s 1901 dollars folks), which would pay for a trip to see Paris.  Mrs. Webb encourages her to sell the furniture piece and to just keep dropping hints to Mr. Gibbs so that sooner or later he’ll break down and they’ll take the trip.  High schooler George Gibbs wants to go to college and study agriculture.  High schooler Emily Webb plans to get married to George Gibbs and have a family.  These dreams are all curtailed or compromised.  They are filled in with other turns of fate that lead the characters down different paths.  Mrs. Gibbs never sees Paris, but we find out that she leaves the money to her daughter and son-in-law and they use it to help modernize their farm.  George, worried that going away to college will end his romance with Emily, stays in Grover’s Corners to take over his uncle’s farm and marry Emily.  Emily does get married, but dies giving birth to her second child, leaving George alone to raise their four year old son, so her dream was short lived.

Little Joe Crowell, Jr. the paperboy, has the cute line in reaction to the news that his teacher is getting married and leaving her profession, “I think if a person starts out to be a teacher, she ought to stay one.”  The Stage Manager fills us in on a lot of Joe’s history and although we don’t see anymore of him after his one scene we learn of his dreams too.  I am always moved by his story and it is the first of the dashed dreams in the play.  Little Joe had graduated top of his class and went to college to become an engineer, “But the war broke out and he died in France.  All that education for nothing.”  That line kills me.  The Stage Manager finishes, “Of course, what business he had picking a quarel with the Germans we can’t make out to this day.  But, it did seem perfectly clear at the time.”  

Joe’s story is so simply told, but you see this little boy delivering papers, he has a few lines with the town doctor about his teacher getting married, and then we’re told he was one of the most promising kids from Gover’s Corners.  Just as he’s about to start his adult life he is killed in the war.  Over.  This idea, potent anytime, has seemed all the more potent to me in the last two New York productions taking place during a time when we hear in the news all the time about our current soldiers parishing as they fight for their country.  And that last bit really resonates: “...it did seem perfectly clear at the time.”  Take one soldier out of the crowd and really look at who he is as an individual and you can’t begin to understand why his death is justified.

Another war related piece of history is told to us in the third act as the Stage Manager wanders around the cemetary and stops in the Civil War area.  He says they were, “New Hampshire boys...had a notion the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves.  All they knew was the name, friends––the United States of America.  The United States of America.  And they went and died about it.”

Reading the text that repeats “The United States of America” a second time doesn’t alone register as particularly moving, but in the hands of Paul Newman on Broadway in 2002, with his aged voice speaking so soothingly throughout the production, he suddenly became very strong and sure of voice, underlining with his tone that second “United” of the sentence.  He half said it to himself and half threw it out to the audience by punching the air in a gesture of perseverance.  Then he sorrowfully turned to the audience to state, “And they went and died about it.”  

Partially it was Paul Newman standing before me (I was in the first row).  Partially it was his excellent line reading, which came from a man who had known the wars of the 20th Century, but it was also Wilder’s observation about the boys who fought in the Civil War––fighting for a huge country of which they couldn’t have seen more than fifty miles.  That’s astounding when you ponder it and it’s not unlike our soldiers shipping out to the south seas or Europe or the Middle East.

The 2002 Broadway production was particularly moving during the wedding scene––and here we get that wonderful way that the audience can really be brought into the play:  Emily actually came down the theater aisle from the back of the house as the organ played the march from Lohengrin.  We all turned to look at her, just as we all do at actual weddings, and that notion of the event suddenly becoming so real as life––that we were right in the play along with the characters––was more moving to me than an actual wedding.  I suppose, too, this was one of the strongest of many moments in Our Town where you realize how much is the same from generation to generation regardless of progress and all the changes you can name.

In a 2009 Off Broadway production directed by David Cromer (who also played the Stage Manager), the choice was to costume the actors in modern dress and read the lines with as contemporary a delivery as could be managed without rewriting.  The disconnect to the 1901 period becomes too jarring with this choice.  To see the teens acting so reserved, polite and bashful while dressed in modern clothes and plugged in to ipods just doesn’t read as believeable.  Also, it is the beauty of the play that we see ourselves in characters living a century ago.  We don’t need modern dress to drive the point home.  Our Town has a big cast and in a small Off Broadway house it must have been pretty tough to get top acting talent to agree to what has to be a horrible contract.  That production was critically acclaimed and ran a long time, but the quality of the acting wasn’t there in all cases.  The George and Emily were particularly weak, which is a big problem as they carry the greatest emotional weight of the play.

So, if the acting was poor, what was it that delighted the critics?  This production had a big directorial trick dropped on the final sequence, which paid off the modern dress choice beautifully, but at the expense of a stellar performance from Emily and confusion caused by the clash of periods.  The director had Emily going back for her one last day on earth, usually fullfilled by Emily’s words and the audience’s imagination, to find a realistic turn of the century kitchen with Mrs. Webb cooking actual bacon in period dress.  Now the period was realized, but in every possible detail and it was something to actually smell that bacon frying and coffee brewing.  This scene was such a surprise after having no scenery and no costumes and did drive home Emily’s line, “Oh earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you.”  The concept was perfectly suited to the ideas of the play, but the rest of the play up to that point was compromised––somehow that elaborate final scene was so overpowering that you could forgive or forget how second rate the rest had been.  However, with a good Emily, as was Maggie Lacey in the 2002 Broadway production, you didn’t need anything more than the actress and Wilder’s words to evoke the emotions from the “Good-bye World” speach in that final scene.

The other thing that worked in that Off Broadway production, in the end, was that the play is strong enough to survive less than wonderful key players and you realize rather quickly that you are watching an American treasure and the poetry of the piece emerges regardless of a bland line reading.  Some of the lines I find most endearing include:

“The morning star always gets wonderful bright the minute before it has to go...doesn’t it?"

“I’d rather have my children healthy than bright.”

“Both of those ladies cooked three meals a day––one of ‘em for twenty eyars, the other for forty––and no summer vacation.  They brought up two children apiece, washed, cleaned the house––and never had a nervous breakdown.”

“A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George.  All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder making sure that the knot’s tied in a mighty public way.”

“Everybody locks their doors now at night.  Ain’t been any burglars in town yet, but everybody’s heard about ‘em.”

"Wherever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense....”

“Do human beings ever realize life while they live it?” asks Emily.  The Stage Manager answers, “No.  The saints and poets, maybe––they do some.”  That is Wilder’s reminder to stop and smell the roses and for a few more minutes, before we exit the theater and go back to our turbulant world, we think that we really should stop to appreciate the little things that make up a life.  There is a sadness in the swift realization that we will take much for granted just as before we saw the play, for it is in our nature.  However, when we stop for a few hours to see a play––any play––we are stopping to pay attention to humanity.  Our Town in particular, illuminates the beauty of humanity.

You can see the original Stage Manager, Frank Craven, in a 1940 film version with a young William Holden as George.  Hal Holbrook can be seen as the Stage Manager in a 1977 TV production.  The 2002 Broadway production was filmed for television and is available on DVD, though it wasn’t recorded before a live audience, which diminishes the energy to a degree.  It’s still worth a look.  A documentary called, OT: Our Town, shows an English teacher working in a Compton, CA school struggling to put on a production of Our Town––the first production of a play in twenty years.  The final result is magical, not only because the kids connect to the play, but their parents seem to be genuinely moved by the theatrical experience and the act of putting on the play brings a sense of community to a community that is very splintered.

Of the original production, Brooks Atkinson said in the New York Times that, “Our Town is one of the finest achievements of the current stage.”  If someone were to ask me, what did I think was the greatest American play, I would find it difficult to pick one, but if I have to pick only one I pick Our Town.  

John Craven and Martha Scott in Our Town. (1938)

Credit: The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts / Billy Rose Theatre Division