Memories in a Box

About a year ago I came across this old photo, clipped from the pages of the Ridgefield Press, my old hometown newspaper.  I find interesting little things every time I pack and move.  Mostly I find memories.

I grew up in Ridgefield, a small CT town on the NY state line.  I remember most of us kids complaining that there wasn't anything to DO in town.  At least that was our excuse when we got into trouble.  But for me there was always theatre.  When I was a pre-teen I was a member of a group called Spotlight and we met in a little building behind Ballard Park.  Once I hit high school I was able to "graduate" to the teen/adult group in town - Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts.

RWPA, for years, had been performing their summer shows on the stage at one of the local schools, and storing sets and props in an old barn on a dead-end street.  My first summer as a member was 1982, right after my freshman year of high school.  That year the folks running the program decided that Blithe Spirit would be the summer show, and they decided to clean up that barn and use it as a theatre.

I auditioned for the show, dragging my friend Linda along with me because I didn't know anyone.  Much to my surprise I landed the title role.  I got the part of Elvira, the ghost.  Linda was also granted a role, she played the maid who had a line or two of dialogue towards the end.  Still, she was nervous and excited.  I was in heaven.  I wasn't old enough to drive yet but most of the cast was a little older and had their own cars, so I was always able to get rides home from the rehearsals which typically went a little late.  All through the hot summer we worked in that barn with no air conditioning.  We broke down old sets from former productions, including the "grand staircase" from the Ridgefield High School production of Hello, Dolly which I'd been in just months earlier.  I remember taking that staircase apart with a bit of sadness.  One of the Dolly cast members who'd helped build it was a recent graduate named Marty, and I'd had a little crush on him. I married him 30 years later, but that's another story for another time.  I can still smell the Barn.  Isn't that weird?  It's like how you just know how the attic in your childhood home smelled, or the Library in town or the bookstore down the street... Anyway, we cleaned that barn out, we painted the stage and made makeshift dressing rooms down in the "stalls" of the old place.

I was 15 years old when the picture above was taken.  A bundle of raging teenage hormones, to be sure.  I was shy by nature and socially awkward at best but on the stage... it was a whole different story.  On the stage I could be anyone other than myself.  The audience wasn't looking at ME, they were looking at the character I was playing and that was a safe escape for me.  I love the stage.

The young man in the foreground of the picture was a college student named Mark and I thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread.  He was funny and smart and OLD (to me at 15) and he drove a baby blue Dodge Dart.  I got lots of rides in that Dodge Dart that summer.  He and I became very close and I fell head over heels in love.  I did that a LOT back then.  At the end of the summer he took off and headed back for college in Syracuse and I think I must have written him a hundred and seventy letters that year.  I can't even begin to imagine how utterly annoying it must have been to get a letter a day from some idiot kid.  What did I even SAY on those three pages a day for a whole school year? Ugh, so embarrassing.

Still, he came home the following summer and by then I was 16 and had my own car - yes, it was a 1974 Pinto but it was still a car! - and much to my surprise he actually came to see me at the RWPA summer production and we started a new chapter.  We dated for the next couple of years.

Good times and good memories.  I might just go back to that old box of pictures and see what else is in there.