An Embarassing Story or How to Create an Actress, Part 2 - by Nan Brooks

 

I hope this story encourages you to applaud and encourage the ones you love, and even the ones you don’t love so much. In these times, we all need all the help we can get, eh?

Here is the embarassing story: When I was about six years old and recovering from measles and pneumonia, I was given ballet lessons as a consolation when I couldn’t return to first grade.  It was too late in the ballet school class sessions for me to learn a full dance, so at a holiday performance, I was given a special assignment. It was much like last week’s blog described, except that this time I was expected to speak.

I had been reciting nursery rhymes at 18 months, which both of my parents mentioned now and then with great pride. Their reactions to my recital performance, however, were different. I would learn more about my mother’s true feelings later when she was in her early 90’s and dementia had claimed much of her memory.

It was winter in 1948 and I wore a plaid dress that Aunt Alice had made for me. The room felt majestic with its huge round white marble columns and thick blue carpet. The small temporary platform was just high enough so that I could see the entire audience, all the way to back row, perched on folding metal chairs. When I took my place, they looked unhappy, bored perhaps, and I was shy and afraid. But I was also dutiful, so I said my poem as instructed. Family lore says that I was pretty dramatic about it, which surprised my parents and the dance teacher no end. But I had heard my father read stories all my short life and he was good at it. I must have decided that since he was entertaining, I should be too. So shy little me went for it. Or so the story goes. 

Whether I did well or not, I do not know. But I do know that the audience began to smile. They leaned forward a little and looked interested, rapt even. When I was done, they applauded and smiled and I felt like I was bathed in their warmth; it was sweet as warm honey. I wanted to thank them for their affection, for their smiles, for liking me. I wanted to give them something in return, but I had only one thing I knew they would enjoy. So I recited the poem again, from the top. This time they laughed and applauded again.  I don’t remember leaving the stage and I wonder if someone had to come take me by the hand. It wouldn’t surprise me, enraptured as I was by the magical energy I would come to understand as crucial to performers and audiences.

My father told the snowman poem story many times, always saying, “That’s my girl!”  A few years ago, I found online a mention of my father at age eight. He was described as “very entertaining” in thanking the local Rotary Club for the projector and Mickey Mouse movies they had given the orphanage where he lived. He later snagged a scholarship for a year of college when he won a speaking contest.  And he claimed to have once been in a vaudeville act with Bob Hope. So, yes, I am his daughter.

My mother, on the other hand, described my impromptu extended performance as the most  embarrassing moment of her life.  I’ve always thought she got off easy as a mother, if that was the case. She had other reasons to be embarrassed by me. And her claim wasn’t the whole story.  When she was  in her 90’s, after dinner every night, she and the other residents in memory care would sit in the parlor and watch television. I would sit beside her most evenings and she would talk about all sorts of things, some of which made sense to me, many of which did not. Now and then she would tell the story of my speech to anyone who would listen – nurses and their assistants, visitors, the cleaning crew.  She would brag about how I had become an actress, and then recite that little poem from beginning to end. Dementia had left her that memory, at least. After she died, I found a slip of paper in her handwriting among the family pictures she cherished. Turns out it is a song often taught to young children.

Here it is, in case you need to entertain a crowd:

 

Once there was a showman

stood outside the door

Thought he’d like to come inside

and run around the floor,

Thought he’d like to warm himself

by the firelight red,

Thought he’d like to climb up on

on that big white bed.

So he called the North wind

“Help me now I pray

I’m completely frozen

standing here all day.”

So the North wind came along

and blew him in the door

And now there’s nothing left of him

but a puddle on the floor.