Excerpt from More Fog,
Please, “Carousel Revisited”:
The theater world is
filled with drama of all kinds. Sometimes we hear “It’s not life and death”' when
a diva ─ a stressed actor or singer ─ protests too much. True enough.
Sometimes, though, life
and death hover over the theater like a sudden black storm cloud on a sunny day.
High school is too early, but life can hand us a difficult lesson at a young age.
This was how I first came to know Carousel. To understand the 2013 production
at East Stroudsburg, I need to explain what happened a long time ago in a small
town far away.
***
In the fall of 1953,
I was a junior in high school in my home town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and we received
the exciting news that we would be performing this show – a real Broadway show!
Not the operettas we’d done in the past. A serious show; a musical drama.
The show was performed
in February of 1954. A close friend, Anita Barker, played the role of Julie Jordan.
She had auditioned only days after burying both her parents, who had been shot to
death by her estranged brother-in-law. Anita’s dedication and professionalism was
a marvel for all of us involved with the production. I believe being cast as Julie
helped her through a horrifically dark time in her life, and her performance was
inspired and inspiring.
***
The [East
Stroudsburg South High School, 2013] show was in March. On May 6, I was having lunch
with Judy Lawler and whining about having the summer ahead of me and not much to
do since Ragtime, two years earlier, had been my last summer show.
“Why don’t you write
a book?”
I think I just stared
at her. Might as well suggest I climb Mt. Everest, and I said pretty much exactly
that. A book! Too daunting, too much, too … everything.
“Don’t think so big.
Think of one event, one incident.”
Immediately I thought
of Anita Barker and that Carousel production from 1954. I had told Judy the
story before, and reminded her of it.
She nodded. “Then use
that,” she said. “And try writing it in the first person.”
I went home and sat
at the computer, and I spent many hours there over the next five months. The story
had been there all along. I realized as I wrote what an impact Carousel ─
that Carousel in 1954 at Oak Ridge High School ─ had on my life. Reliving
the show with these twenty-first century young men and women helped me to remember
a great deal about that long-ago production.
And that’s how I came
to write How I Grew Up in 2013, and followed up with two additional novels
over the next two years. The show is almost a major character in the book because
it was so important to my character “Melanie Stewart” at this traumatic time in
her life. While I was writing about Anita, I also was writing a work of fiction,
and Melanie became a person in her own right.
I gave her a leading
man named Jamie Logan. I really liked my character Jamie Logan, a handsome boy with
a good heart and a superb tenor voice, and I just wrote a book about him entitled
You Are My Song. In between, I wrote a book about Melanie’s friend Krissy
Porter and the young man who becomes her life, a brilliant pianist named Eli Levin
who has a frightening congenital heart defect: hence, Eli’s Heart. All three
have their beginnings in that Carousel production. So without it being my
intent, I guess I wrote a trilogy.
But in writing How
I Grew Up, I was able to talk about the rehearsals for the show and recapture
the feeling of being part of a musical. There’s really nothing quite like it, and
having been with the South kids so recently, I drew on the feelings I knew they
had experienced.
Here’s a very brief
excerpt. It’s a school day; it’s also opening night.
We all kind of went through the day as if we weren’t really there
at all, but were waiting for our lives to start that evening. At lunch, everybody
in the cast tried to sit with each other. We had a connection that nobody else could
really understand. The cast was a group for the weeks that we rehearsed the show,
especially that last week. For that brief time, there really were no other groups
in our high school.
It was pointless for us to talk about anything except the show,
because that was the only thing any of us were thinking about.
And if you’ve ever been in a high
school show … you’ll understand exactly how these young performers felt.
***
How I Grew Up is available on Amazon, paperback $10.00 and Kindle $3.99.
It’s a good story! I’d love to share it with you.
www.susanmoorejordan.com
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