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I was an angel in a school play. Let me back up. It was my recollection that initially I was to be the Baby Jesus since I was the precher's child. Instead, I got up from of the manger like Lazarus from the dead and said, "No", walking out into the congregation something like maybe the Lord had walked on water. We lived out in the country and the best I remember, our car broke down on the way to the pageant and we had to hail a ride in a logging truck, robe, wings, halo and all. My life must have been mapped out before me even then. For Christmas I got a nurse's suit and wore it with pride, posing and smiling for pictures before I could spell the word. Moving to a new town not far away but up near stores, I was elected and became Halloween princess or Queen, representing my elementary school room class. My escort, Dale, was the only one who would not extend his arm to me and in those photos I am smiling, looking my most glamourous and he stood there looking like a scarecrow. I was too proud even then to suggest, "Give me your arm, you fool." There I am in the Tiger yearbook all but alone.
Years went by and my father put me at a Baptist college when it was time. It was not my choice but in those days I did little to rip the carpet so to speak. It changed. I had a boyfriend from back home but he had gone to a university. On down the road I would happen upon a photo of a cheerleader sitting up in my, to have been our, bed wearing a football jersey. "She was sick", he said smiling and he had to take care of her. Good thing I left that scoundrel standing at the altar. That was in the days I discovered theatre at my alma mater (sp) and was cast in Mark Twain's "The Diary of Adam & Eve", appropriately as Eve. Adam was a tad younger than I. He had a girlfriend out of town. I fell in love. He worked as a music director part time to help make ends meet and coming back early from Thanksgiving holidays, I climbed in through the window of the boys' dorm leaving boot track prints all over the rug and floor. He dated a doctor and later married a judge's daughter having, I believe, twin boys. He was a fun, wonderful fling.
And I became a teacher. I was young. I taught senior boys. Many of them never missed a day. We read Holden Cauldfield's (J.D. Salinger) "...Catcher in the Rye". We talked and wrote about the Transcendentalists period of the American Classic Era in literature; we sponsored coffeehouses. We just about did it all. One works for the post office and the other one is dead. I miss them. I have their writing in notebooks, boxes and paper bags. It speaks to me, from the grave, as the saying goes. Life continues to turn.
I worked professional theatre for a while. Before I did that, I cleaned up and swept floors in hope of attracting the director's attention. It worked. One day I summoned up my nerve and said, "I want to be an actor." And that I was. Amidst it all, I took tickets, helped in the box office, showed folks to their seat and poured wine. Sal and I became friends. He was younger than I am.
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Evolution of an Older Woman