I’ve been married to DH for almost seven wonderful years. We’ve had many great adventures, many small triumphs and a few tragedies. He’s everything I ever wanted. But this Valentine’s Day, I’m spending the evening with an old love.
I didn’t plan the timing of our reunion - that was purely chance. But it’s exactly right.
We met in kindergarten and remained close even through high school, my love and I. In college, I took our relationship to the next level. After graduation, we kept our connection alive - until we didn’t. Too many heartbreaks, phone calls not returned, missed connections did the initial damage. In Los Angeles, I met a woman - a casting agent, as it happened - who showed me the darker side to my love.
And when I found myself in tears at a washing machine commercial, watching a smiling mother put her child’s muddy sneakers directly into the machine, conveniently located next to the open back door revealing a lovely garden, and thinking to myself, “I will never have that, if I keep going like this,” I severed all ties.
Twenty years passed. I launched a career, traveled, married, launched another career, with rarely a thought for my old love. I became part of a city until I couldn’t do it anymore, and moved to the country.
And found my old love, around a corner, a block off Main Street.
There’s an Opera House here in our town, an old frontier theatre that offered traveling Gilbert & Sullivan operettas to rural audiences 150 years ago. When Camp Swift opened, it became a movie hall for the soldiers seeking diversion, far from home. In the 1960’s, it served as the “Teen Tower,” a place for dances and flirting and the occasional amorous rendezvous. And, just before I graduated from college, some enterprising young people reclaimed it for live performances. Since then, it’s hosted melodramas and Christmas pageants, vaudeville reviews and Broadway musicals, hits and misses. I hope tonight is a hit.
Because it’s my re-debut onstage, after twenty years away, my reconnecting with the theatre - my oldest love (aside from cinnamon toast and Schoolhouse Rock). DH has been enormously supportive as I rekindled the old romance, rusty and full of self-doubt. Am I still any good? What if it’s not like riding a bike?
I fumbled through rehearsals, finding old rhythms covered in veils of dust. I flashed back to voice lessons, movement lessons, diction classes. I began to remember how to use my breath, how to hold a teacup, and lead with my sternum. I remembered which way to cross my legs for comic moments and which way for dramatic ones. I reached deep into my memory banks for my Y-buzz.
Tonight, we open in “Love Letters,” and I’m in a delicious role that I’m finally old enough to play. Rather than being nervous, I find myself warmed and grateful for this chance to reconnect with an old love. It feels safe and homey, as if the proscenium is a pair of open arms, pulling me to the bosom of the stage, and saying, “Welcome back, honey. We’ve missed you.”
I’m older now, and I’ve had my share of candy and flowers. I’ll take a hug like that over a box of chocolates any day.
Cross-posted at The New Charm School.
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