Intense negotiations

   Got us all permission to have Variety Show.  And that allowed us to have a comradery as creatives no matter our roles in the world increasingly black&white AND rainbow.  As a parish it helped us, too.  It helped us communicate things that we could not talk about directly; helped bring the Gospel out from the statue of a priest holding up the How-To-Church-Book to the people; and it helped us have FUN.

  The stage was spotlighted against a backdrop of hideous warring.  And when we started having the shows most of our neighborhoods were shutting down.  People were hiding because of the past sliding into the present and because of terrible worry for the future.

  My father took the phone call.  Mrs. So and So's on the phone.  

  I'm busy!  Called back.  Something about hopeful but feet in misery. 

  Stillbusy!  

  Again, a callback.  Now she's crying, my father yelled while pullung the phone towards the game on the TV.

  Hello this is Sherry.  Of course we could only hear one half of the conversation.  Mom was glad the other mom had called.  Sorry about her sore feet, maybe ice water. Really?!  Twenty-three years? 

  It wasn't the only phone call from parents after the first one.  And our mom was really always busy, but the Variety Show was reawakening talents and uncovering hidden desires in people.  Really reserved people.  At first mom said, "I'll help.  I'll help you." And, "I'll help you get there."  Then people would come with gym bags and grocery brown bags and taped together boxes with used to be's.  

  Used to be new.  Used to be my favorite thing.  Used to be something I never put down.  Used to be what I thought I'd do with my life.  

  Life, appararently, had somehow changed all these people.  Most were surprised how much they wanted to try it again.  Sort of dreamy looks at where the time goes and how it "flies".

  Used to be my wife's, a man said of hats and gloves.  I saw Mom really look in the man's eyes and they both teared up.  Sherry had a grace with people that included letting words fall away, or get quiet, and then she'd know the right Scripture to say, or somehow make people chuckle, or she'd let the conversation fall off and the other person take the lead.  Most people were a mixture of getting ready for the shows with excitement and everything is just more chores to work into a routine of "normal" life--eating, sleeping, shopping, driving.

  People would say, no bother at all or managed to fit this in.  And a lot of parents in the parish were realizing and acknowledging it's important to so-and-so, so

  Some of "the kids", at first, were wanting to put all our attention on creativity!  Although we were in various states of relationship with why and how.

  Getting a beat, heads nodded instruments and bowed faces to the director-leader's reading of what we were making.  People with strong hands started snapping fingers to beat and off-beat.

  Mrs. Lane, Mrs. Lane was building into a chorus too.  As the Variety Shows got closer and closer to Opening Nights it was more and more phone calls and little notes everywhere, Don't Forget.

  What will you all do when they want to dance?  Together?  Click.  Some people dismissed the threat.  We'd all been dealing with threat, threatening, and decimated.

  One person uncrossed really fit legs, rolled a growing stack of sheet and script, put it on top of the piano, whispered what the pianist should play and sang to mama.  Mom was verging on meltdown which came out like a jerking between patient politeness and grabbing something to throw or beat or smash or curse at or scream at or quit, I, could, can, quit.  I CAN QUIT.  NOBODY ACKNOWLEDGED HER because in those days, like these days, the "I" was the turf we were each reclamating.

  Your not hearing the song's words, a kid said to Mama Sherry's butt talking to a folding metal chair.  More singing, peoples' cheeks burning bright, sweats just a'dripping.  Where'd you put it?  She started asking everyone everywhere without taking her eyes off everything in her purse on the seat.

     "Too Tight"

  no punctuation pissoble because backstage had turned into a carefully choreographed blurrrr and whirl of people.

  editor's marks.  Scratch the quotations.

  "I'm mah NOT titling."

  A tight-voiced, stiff upper lipped, just past conversation 

     tension  squealed like train brakes in the subways

  YOU PEOPLE, ALLOFYOU, NEED AIR in here, and I mean it, the church's choirperson circled the place on another folding metal chair seat, tapped (but didn't break the pencil that day), mean it, MEAN IT.  "The CHILDREN WILL BE HERE momentarily."

   A tank-topped person stayed seated.

  A tank-topped person revved fists like cranking a motorcycle.  "NOW tip it up, the revv, like you're, the arms dear, climbing a fire ladder, ARMS UP, REVV, CLIMB

  And don't wiggle.  TAKE FIVE IN THREE," He sat.  People held posture and pose for about twenty seconds.  Sculpted.  "And don't tip the chair backwards, that's the third one we borrowed this week," said a woman in blue jeans, an apron, and construction boots.  Hammer swinging.  Sister Rose shuffle-stalled, shuffle-stalled, arms folded, stopped, an arm not getting caught on the crucifix reached out and gave a backdrop for a scene change a shove.

  She also pushed my shoulder out of entranced and huskily said, "Go.  Out front."

  "To?"

  Arms re-folding no answer.

  "To, Sister?"

  "To hear the songs."

  Way back they made me go ahead yell so people wouldn't have to hear more bitching about out of tea, honey, and just about anything we could cook.  So I did, "Guys!  Guuuuys!" A bunch of school kids were marching between the curtains trying to balance those hats.  One had a black eye.  I motioned, Okay?  He smiled.  Pulled people over near me without touching anyone.  "Okay, so, um, Sister Rose's concern is that we're getting an awful lotta stuff back here!" Right away someone offered to clean it up, but a Dad stepped onto stage from the front of the stage, Stairs is done!  HONEY YOU'RE HOME! A dramatic mom hooked elbows with the dad.  We need ya.  TO: Look at a pedestahl.

  What's that?

  Just then someone hollered BOMBS AWAY!!!!  There were thuds and the middle curtain opened like drapes.  People on both sides gasped.  Scenery had been painted; people were changing out of work and school clothes into costume; a coatrack of feather boas was stuck in the eyehooks someone sewed onto the curtains.  The feathers wiggled and air-danced as the AV boy flipped the spotlight off and on, bored.

  "PUT THAT DOWN!"

  "I SEE DADDY" a toddler with a claw hammer yelled out.

  No one moved.  One guy covered his boxered nuts with a full arm swing "X".  Our Dad slid foot left, foot right in his tube socks and gym shorts.  "Sherry?!"

  "Honey, just come down from there!" She grabbed the hammer.  Daddy sliding slowly towards the center of the stage in just gym shorts and tube socks gingerly.  Mom surrounded by babies and toddlers and coats and purses.  "Sherry?!"

  "Come towards me honey."

  "WHAT JUST HAPPENED?" A homefronter almost crashed into our Dad.  My mother eyed the whole scene.  "Honey!  WHERE ARE YOUR GLASSES?"

  He mumbled something.  The dramatic mom came rushing out from more back stage.  She put both arms and hands out like a crossing guard.  He mumbled again.  She said sounding as loud as a megaphone, "They were on the stool."

  Suddenly all the house lights went out and it was real dark.  The spotlight came on.

  Some kids had squirmed through a door crushing inward.  Eventually nuns and some others, some pulling bigger kids by ears and slapped face collars got the chains off the Hall back door.  Another maybe fifteen purses, gone, someone reported to one of the clipboards.  My Dad started to cry, centerstage.  So my mom started to cry.  Then the whole family started crying.  The dramatic mom put the stool right behind Daddy.  She put his glasses on his face, a little crooked.  She asked him something quietly.  Took a small, folded over notepad and cribbage pencil from her breast and wrote a figure on the piece of paper she'd ripped off.  "Pass this around," she strongly suggested.  The carpenter took it down the un-rickety steps.  "We'll report," a flurry of Noooo's and BOOooooos.  She waved hands all around her trying to settle the new ruckus.

  "Let's LISTEN," Sherry yelled louder than the spiraling down quieting crowd.

  "Thank you Sherry.  I think we should report OUR LOSSES.  Just that."

  Some people were zipping costume bags shut.  Some left.  Some stayed.  Shoulders slumped at another loss.  

They'd also stolen the mannequin.

  As the anonymous reporting piece of paper went around and kids moved all coats and babies on stage, the dramatic mom started talking to our mom.  Next thing we knew as she was shaking her head as if shaking off a dream we heard, "I'll ask him, but I don't know." Sherry tapped her lips with her index finger and thought, then called out, "Honey!  Ed!  Can you volunteer to be the dummy?"

  "I feel like one.". My Dad held his glasses up to the spotlight to see if they were scratched.

  "Honey," the dramatic mom called out.  Several men stepped forward.  "Ed," she said.  "That was NOT YOUR fault."

  "Feels like it," Dad said.

  "Why?" Sherry asked.

  "I think I was the last one in."

  "You think someone was watching?" A man in a backseat not fully lit by the spotlight asked.

  "I didn't say that."

  "But is it possible Sir?"

  "I suppose.  Not me, but this place."

  Someone else said, "They robbed our church 'bout four or five times last month."

  "Who would I talk to about that?"

  "Probably the Monsignor or his secretary," Dad said then quickly asked, "What does the dummy do in the play?"

  "The dummy," the dramatic mom explained, "Has to sit there

  "I can

  "And be brave

  "I can

  "While wardrobe puts items

  A man brought a boxer's robe from the wings.  May I?

  "I guess so.

  "I just sit?

  "Come on kids!  Let's dress up the dummy!" Sherry waved people over.  And our Dad sat there while we piled everything we could find on to him.

  Then he got hot and jumped up, spilling hats, ripping off scarves, walking like Frankenstein in a boxer's robe.

  "He's pretty good," dramatic mom called over her shoulder, "A real natural," with straight pins in her mouth, cloth ruler like a sports towel around her neck.

  Someone got back from his father's hardware store with a fuse and the house lights came back up.  "I could put a dimmer on those," the carpenter said as he almost set his can of soda on top of French fries not eaten, but didn't and gulped it down, slid the fries toward the center of the table.  "Wouldya honey?" Dramatic mom threw a pinned dress onto a pile of First Act costumes.

....

  A sweaty pile of kids wrestling each other's skin red.  OOOOOwwww.  "YOU took them." Silent concentration.  OOOOOWWWWAH.  "I didn't." Jabs, pinching.  "I know you took them."  So locked into can't lose this battle, diving further into the pain.  "I DID NOT."  Clumps of hair in fists, floor dirt sticking, bite marks; nothing, the group response to what's going on?  

  Mom put the grocery bag on the kitchen counter.  Milk and two grapefruits.  Always put whatever you buy in a bag so it looks like you bought a lot.  A wink.  I put the new milk in the fridge.  "Should I throw this out?" She was already onto the next chore.  Plucking slimey, smelly potatoes away from the good ones.  She and I'd been saying conspiracy theory to Dad and a brother pretty sure the milk tastes watery.  I feel like we're sneaking.  It's not sneaking, she emphasized sneaking.  Wrong word.  And grabbed both gallons of milk.  We'll leave one whole, she thought, and the other is for cereal, like 2%, I saw they have milk called that now.  Fighting about something.

  Sherry put both milks in the fridge and went into the family room's heavy, sweaty quiet.  She sat.  Nobody said anything.  "Smells like mildew in here?!" 

  "No," somebody said.

  Mom considered approach.  She'd been building a tool box of group navigation ways.  You could see her mind ticking through the list...humor? lecture? interrogation? draw it out?  Then she uncrossed the leg she'd put over the other and said, "I want the truth." Elbows on knees, both feet on the ground, like one of the guys.

  The middle sister put herself in tude.  Made face like lipsticked barricade, slight snarl, head and shoulders rocking a beat.  Littlest sister started rocking as if in a rocking chair on the sofa.  Mom stared at everyone.  "I know I combed your hair pretty this morning." It was a mangle of tangle.  The middle daughter said nothing but refocused on seeing self in a car, cruising away. 

  "Well, you can all sit here until

  "I WAHnna go outside and play

  "UNTIL I find out."

  My mother had dug her nails into my arm on top of nail dug.  I looked at the blood drops.  I looked into her eyes.  She waved her hand between us to clear the air, the past is the past, this is now.  "This close.  And I want the truth."

  "It's complicated."

  "Use those skills you've been acquiring."

  "Okay.  Lemme think.  And get this school uniform off."

  "Go."

  It was dusking when my father got home.  "Everything okay?"

  "I'm in here, they're in there; what does that tell you?!"

  Mom had a second grocery bag and had taken a dozen or so aluminum loaf pans out of it and had them lined up on the counter.  She was using a paring knife to cut an "X" in the bottoms.  "Guess you're not making meatloaf."

  "Do you smell food cooking?"

  My father looked into the family room.  Except for the eldest son playing throw the ball at the wall with a sofa cushion everybody including me was frozen where you left yourselves.

  "We're pah,pah," the oldest son bounced the sofa pillow against the wall above the credenza threatening to say "P" words.

  "Not in jail," our mother called back reminding to keep lips sealed with a kiss.

  "HUNGRY!" Another kid started listing what we were.

  My father stuck his head around the corner and point-counted us.  Went back and talked low to Mom while asking periodic questions like, "What else are we kids?"

  My mother stabbed a short riding crop object, a 45, and one of the pieces of tinfoil squares cut for the centerpieces with an ice pick.  But threw it down on the floor.  "Angry!" A kid shouted.  My father picked the ice pick up off the floor and put it down a little hard in front of Mom.  "That's too hard.  Put your glasses on.  And sit on my lap big guy."

  "I put this," my father picked it up, "this down here," he put it back down exactly where it was, "too hard?" He asked pulling his glasses out of shirt pocket really slow and stepping over mom's legs to grab her face and look in her eyes.