Why would a mermaid have a gun?
I’ll get to that in a bit. Remember in the last ButtonDown I wrote about all the letters I’ve received and hung on to? Well, I briefly thought then about what great tinyletter material might be in them, so…instead of the boxes of them being taken to the dumpster, they are stacked up in my kitchen.
Last night, I cleared the salt shakers and other stuff from the kitchen table, and started to sort one of the boxes, which had about four years’ worth of letters - basically 1984-1987. There are 13 stacks of family letters (Dad, Mom, Susie, Bridget, Chris, Charlie, Mike, Marty, Janie, Betsy, Greg, me, Katie - the names we called each other before we all grew up ((except me…the ‘y’ is always part of Lucy))). And yes, I got a stack for myself, because some of the letters got round-robined back to me.
Letters from aunts and uncles are in one stack; from nieces and nephews another, and good friends have another stack. Then there’s a stack of miscellaneous - people whose names I don’t recognize but with whom I apparently had some kind of relationship of note, famous people I helped out at the National Theatre, old love letters from Marv, and one from Kurt Vonnegut in reply to my letter to him in which I opined how the last sentence in his book Palm Sunday (“Thank you for your politely faked attention.” felt like a slap in the face. He apologized and explained what he meant. BTW, his signature includes a comic illustration of an asshole. I will treasure this letter forever.)
When that first letters box was emptied today, I took the empty out to the recycle bin, and decided to rest on my laurels for the remains of the day, old-letters-wise. I went to the Farmers’ Market to have a couple of knives sharpened and buy scones and flowery plants, checked my bulletin board downtown (from which someone stole the big laminated signs about the county commissioners’ plan to burden all us taxpayers by removing our county library from the regional library system), and planned to plant my flower seedlings so that in a month or two, the pollinators will have food and my neighbor’s vegetable plots will get pollinated as well. (I plan to have a plexiglas cover with a hinge on one side and a lock on the other side to protect “my” bulletin board henceforth!)
Most of you know I am hooked on MidSomer Murders and (less so) Hoarders. There are a couple of houses in Burnsville that probably would benefit from a Hoarders episode, but the show may no longer be in production. Normally, the television (what a great old-fashioned word!) doesn’t go on here until 9 or 10pm, but today Yancey County’s skies are very smokey - there are wildfires in our western neighboring county (Madison) and just down off the mountains eastward (McDowell County). So I cranked up the tv before dark. The house is airtight and cool, despite not having air conditioning, so I stayed inside once I’d gotten my provisions.
If in the near future (meaning some time this year) you receive a fat manila envelope from me, it’s probably letters you wrote to me over the years. Or letters to me from someone we both knew well). What I’m doing is something my mother did a few years before she died - she sent or gave to each of us packets of letters we had written to her over the years.
Don’t be alarmed; I don’t think I’m croaking any time soon, although I got a “portal” message about my last ob/gyn appointment and there are alarming icons with no explanations. She had said she was going to call me next week, apparently, with lab results. So maybe I AM going to croak soon, but I’m not too worried, except who’ll take care of Sadie and Fang.
I’m not afraid of death, only pain. A dear friend died a few years ago, on enough morphine that she was just floating and happy and as zoned out as I’ve ever seen a person. A couple of you were with me at her bedside just before the end, and know how peaceful she felt. I hope for the same when the time comes.
Okay - back to the mermaid thing: I had a couple of girlfriends over for a pajama party last week. That seems like a really weird thing for a 72 year old to be saying, but basically that’s what happened. We watched Robin Williams on Broadway, then zonked.
Before the zonking, one of them had commented on a couple of theatre-related pictures on my wall - the National Theatre in DC where I worked for about 6 years, and the Athens Theatre in DeLand, FL, which I helped raise money to renovate a few years later.
I got all gas-baggy, and told them about how my big brother Mike would direct plays that all we siblings were in when we were kids. There was a long storage bench along one wall below the bookcases in our living room in Big Bend which made for a great stage. I remember being Dorothy and him being the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. It seems because of my age and long hair, I got to play a couple of “leads” - which set the stage (ha!) for community theatre involvement many years and miles away. But - the first play I remember being in was something about pirates and mermaids. I - and maybe a couple of my sisters (?) were mermaids, and a couple of our brothers were pirates.
Somebody - probably Mike - had made and fastened to my legs a fishtail such as a mermaid would have, except probably made from tinfoil. And set me up on the “stage”. I could not move. All I can remember is that I was supposed to shoot my brother Marty (a pirate) with a handgun. Simple, right? HA.
We’re talking about the 1950s. We’re talking about The Rifleman, Gunsmoke, The Virginian, Wagon Train. I knew how to handle a gun - As Seen on TV. So, I couldn’t just point the gun at Marty and pull the trigger - even at the tender age of whatever-I-was, I instinctively knew about dramatic effect - so I automatically attempted to “fan” the trigger.
Having never actually tried it before, what I did did not actually work, which did not keep me from trying for authenticity. Both Mike (director) and Marty (the intended victim) begged me to JUST PULL THE TRIGGER but the inner actress in me could not do it. I don’t remember how the scene ended. Perhaps Marty simply gave up and fell over dead anyway.
After my career as a mermaid, I went on to roles in high school and then with The Milwaukee Players (a division of the Milwaukee Public Schools’ adult education program, I think) where I met so many wonderful people and as “a fine little actress” (the director’s words!) got to play in lots of excellent shows. I remember playing the hapless maid in Emlyn Williams’ Night Must Fall who finds a human head in the trash. My scream made the little old ladies in the front row shake. Same thing when we did another show (the name escapes me) when my father (a hairy guy named Harvey) beats me with a log because I flirted with a horseman (who was a king, maybe?). As you can guess, I was known for my blood-curdling screams.
One year, the big musical was to be Paint Your Wagon, which our director had been in on Broadway (a chorus part). The music director said I had the perfect voice for Jenny (the female lead), but the director said I was too short (the male lead was 6’3”). So he cast a woman who wasn’t much of an actress, and frankly maybe an inch or two taller than me - and they had her bleached-blonde hair teased up probably a good 6” in hopes she wouldn’t seem so short next to him. Ah, well - “the willing suspension of disbelief” is what makes these things work, right. HA. Again.
Although all of us were amateur actors, the Milwaukee Players employed a professional director, choreographer, costumer, lighting director, musical director, and stage manager. They made us look GREAT!
Bedtime, and another box of letters to sort through tomorrow.
If you’re the praying sort, please pray for rain for us to knock this smoke down!
xox
Lucy