Blue Sky Boys At the Barter

     My friend, Molly Catron, and I met for lunch yesterday in Abingdon and then went to the Barter Theatre to see and hear "Blue Sky Boys." I didn't know what to expect as I'd never heard of this play and didn't see it during the Abingdon Highlands Festival when it auditioned last summer. I thought maybe it was about the man from Big Stone Gap who wrote the book about his adolescent activities of building rockets years ago.


     I was delighted to discover that it was about the first NASA project of putting a man on the moon before the end of the 1960's. I was a teensy, teensy part of that project in that my ex-husband, when we were still married, worked for a sub-contractor of NASA's and actually had an office on the Houston space center grounds. One of our neighbors was a Flight Controller for the lunar landing and was one of the oft-televised cheering men applauding and passing out cigars. Another connection is that my ex did analysis of the first photos that were sent back from the moon and wrote a paper that he presented at a conference in York, England in 1973 which garnered a trip to Europe for us.


     Now some stories involving a lot of science can be very dull. However, the playwright, Deborah Brevoort, handled that by including ten roles for imaginary characters, i.e. Buck Rogers, Icarus, Apollo, Galileo, the Red Baron, and even Snoopy.
The total number of 14 characters are played by seven actors, all male. The interaction of the real with the imagined leads to a good many laughs, and the play is fast-moving and highly entertaining.


     We here in Southwest Virginia are so lucky to have the Barter, a professional theatre and the State Theatre of Virginia, so handy. One thing I wish for is that ticket prices would not be so high. The matinee ticket I bought yesterday cost $29 which included a $2 discount because I'm a Triple A member. In the past I've bought six or twelve tickets called a "Passbook" for the season which brings the price down to a little less than $20 for a matinee. The opportunity to buy passbooks ends in April and this April I had other things on my mind and the opportunity passed by. So I will be selective about what I see. I passed up "Annie" because I've seen it before and will not go to see anything with Elvis or rock and roll, because I'm just not a fan. 


     But Molly and I plan to see "Violet" next Thursday--it looks really good!

Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Yesterday was my birthday, and I had a special request. I wanted Rocky and I to go to the Barter Theatre in Abingdon to see Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Actually, it was my 2nd time to see it, as I first went with my good friend, Jean, two weeks ago. I enjoyed it so much and wanted Rocky to see it as I knew he'd love the spectacle of it.

And spectacle it was! Clever costumes, lavish scenery, and great music. A smile came over Rocky's face in the first few seconds, and it never left him. How that filled my heart!

Andrew Lloyd Webber is a great favorite of ours, and this was one of his first productions if I'm not mistaken, in the 1960's. An added bonus was that Eugene Wolf, who was a friend of Rocky's  when we were doing the Barter Storytellers around 1998, was playing the part of Jacob. Gene had a big hug for Rocky when he saw him yesterday.

We finished off the day with dinner at the new Troutdale Bistro, a fine restaurant that just opened in downtown Bristol. We were so stuffed and lethargic when we got home I had to take a little snooze in my new stressless anti-gravity chair which was one of our mutual birthday gifts.

 

The Big Read

Last Saturday afternoon, I attended a group that was sponsored by the "Big Read" program in Abingdon, VA. "The Big Read" is a community project, usually sponsored by a local library, to encourage reading and literacy. Each community chooses a book which is read over a certain time period and community events such as movies, plays, book discussions related to it are scheduled.

The book that Abingdon selected was The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, published in 1940 when McCullers was only 23; it was her first novel.

I have to admit that I had never read the book. In fact, the only thing I had ever enjoyed by McCullers was a television production of her play, Member Of The Wedding. I had very much identified with the adolescent girl in that play who idolized her older brother and fiancee. So, I proceeded to read The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter and in popular idiom, was "blown away." Where was this book when I graduated high school in 1952? Or at the very least, I think it should have been assigned reading for American Literature 101 instead of Hemingway; ...Lonely Hunter is far more relevant than the Spanish civil war.

I couldn't believe that I was reading about race relations and the U.S. economic system in a book published a year prior to the start of World War II. I kept returning to the publication date to make sure I had read right because the sentiments were those of the mid-1960's cultural upheaval. Besides, it was difficult believing that a 20-year-old white Southern girl could have had the perception of the characters that she revealed.

In short, I was, and am, impressed!

Admittedly, the book is depressing and I had to put it down for a week at one point. I burst into tears at other points

I wasn't able to attend everything that was scheduled during "The Big Read," not even the kick-off, but I did attend two events during March. The first was a play at the Barter Theatre, Adjoining Trances, which consisted of an intriguing dialogue. The characters are Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams, and the setting is a summer home in Cape Cod where the two of them, platonic friends,

worked side by side on their projects.

The second event was the discussion I attended last Saturday. It was meant to be a meeting for those who had memories of the "Great Depression" of the 1930's.

There were a dozen people present at the Abingdon Seniors Center besides the library director who facilitated, and a young female reporter from The Bristol Herald-Courier, with her toddler on her hip. 

The oldest storyteller there was an 89-year-old M.D. who had been a teenager when the banks failed in 1929. The next oldest was another gentleman from Greeneville, TN who had been born in 1930; then me, born in northern Indiana in 1934; and another gentleman from southern Ohio born in 1935. Several women sat in the circle, but did not participate in the discussion. 

We talked about the hardships of that time and how people conquered their obstacles and survived. There was an overriding tone of pessimism about today's events, and that old-age attitude that the current younger generation doesn't have what it takes and have been spoiled. I wouldn't let the meeting close with those words, so I commented that I was more optimistic, that if our young people today could figure out all the gadgets they have, they'll be able to figure out how to solve their problems. I must have resonated with the young reporter because I was quoted in the newspaper the next day!