Life in the Third Act

Scott Fitzgerald said, “There are no second acts in American life.” I am not the first to observe how wrong he was.

In his own life, as he saw it, probably, Act One began when he was in his mid-20’s and had sold This Side of Paradise, his first novel.

He never wrote or spoke of his childhood, and, although he was, in fact, a child at some point; his life began at Princeton with his relationship with Genevra King and then the fabulous, fraught Zelda. His reason for pessimism after his great early success may have been that, like so many celebrities before and after him, he reached for fame and got it too soon. He didn’t have the equipment to handle it. (There is also the matter of his alcohol addiction and his wife’s schizophrenia. I cannot know for certain, but suspect that at the heart of his life’s tragedy was the 20th Century’s confusion of values – an individual’s pursuit of material possessions and fame at the expense of his nobler motivation to produce art.)

But let’s think of life, any life, as broken into three acts. Take me, for instance, since this is my blog and I can do what I want with it.

My Act One was decidedly Childhood. Growing up in Fairhope, Alabama, a utopian colony with one of the world's first Progressive schools, was unforgettable--growth-producing, and a pathway to a good second act. I was made alert to its potential through the advantage of an education in the  aforementioned school,  the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education, where kids made things happen and things happened to kids. We were not talked at or talked down to, we were questioned, we were allowed (yea, encouraged) to ask questions, and at the end of the 12 years in school we knew who we were. We just couldn’t wait for more stuff to happen. (For more on this, read The Fair Hope of Heaven, available online through amazon.com and Page & Palette, a local bookstore in Fairhope.)

Act One ended poignantly with a romance; a promise of things to come. I would no longer be a child. I had the tools to grow into a productive adult. I just didn’t know it.

Act Two was Romance and Travel, with a smattering of comedy, melodrama, and adventures in the arts, particularly the theatre. Act Two abounds with stories – short stories, novels, character sketches, changes of locale, marriage(s), the raising of a child, divorces, deaths -- an infinity of challenge and growth. This would have been Scott Fitzgerald’s Act One, but, because I had such a rich childhood, all this stuff was Act Two for me. There are indeed second acts in American life.

Act Three is just at the beginning now; a chance to assess and apply what I’ve learned while at the same time learning more. A chance to work at perfecting the instrument. An awareness that it is now or never, so it’s gonna be now. Well, knowing the instrument doesn’t mean the same circumstances won’t recur, or necessarily that I’ll handle them differently. It just means I know they’re coming.

There, I’ve done it again, glossed over things as if life were just a somewhat bumpy ride down an unpaved road. In Act Three I’m learning to write it well, clarifying and not letting myself off the hook so easily. Perhaps I’ll get involved in theatre again, and I’ll work at it. Perhaps there is another book or two in me, yet to be written. Maybe even another house. The two little boys who are my grandsons are young men, ready to take on the world, and if they’re lucky their lives will have three acts as well. Even if they become cynics, they still will not say that there are no second acts in American life. I hope that, like me, they will attempt to deal with the whole show with some humor, intelligence, and good will.

An earlier version of this blog post appeared when I was still living in Fairhope, on my "Finding Fair Hope" blog, and a reader corrected me about my interpretation of Scott Fitzgerald's statement. She said he didn't mean Americans didn't reinvent themselves, but that their lives were filled instead with "first" acts. I didn't mean to reinvent myself either, but I'm not sure I agree that was what Fitzgerald meant. "How's your second act?" was a common taunt among writers of the 1920s and 30s, as the second act was the most difficult to craft--the place in a play where conflict came into focus, setting up a need for the inevitable resolution in Act Three.

All my acts have been a bit helter-skelter, compared to the well-made plays of years past, and now that I'm in the last act, I have a sense that it's all working out.

Lovelier The Second Time Around

Sometimes a play just hits its audience right where it should, no matter how young or old it is, no matter how dated the theme, and no matter many times we've heard the jokes before. This is the case with the Coach House Players' production of The Second Time Around, a comedy by Henry Denker that first ran on Broadway in 1977.

The story concerns an older couple who fall in love and decide to live together without benefit of marriage over their families' objections. A problem long ago solved, right? I went into the theater on the second night of the show wondering if it would be possible to sustain dramatic tension over the situation for anything like two hours.

Wronkoski

Surowitz

Thanks to a motley assortment of neurotic and endearing characters, it worked. The audience smiled, laughed, guffawed and practically howled and some of the one-liners, and the story wound up nicely in the hands of the two leads, who had held our interest the whole time. Rich Wronkoski as Samuel and Barbara Surowitz as Laura won us over early and kept us wondering how they had spawned such a brood of misfits. With perfect timing and ease onstage, they both carried off the difficulties of making such an unlikely story plausible today, even if the play is set in the distant past. The chemistry and warmth between them made us care and hope the two would pull off the old-fashioned happily-ever-after bit. They seemed like a couple--and one you'd want to know.

Their offspring, the dyspeptic Mike (or Mickey, as his mother keeps calling him), and Cynthia, played by Rob Rowe and Bernadette Pikul, provide tension and comedy at the same time. Mike's nervous stomach is a source of laughs and Cynthia's controlling insistence that her mother's memory is somehow being desecrated provide the crux of conflict in what should be a natural turn of events. Clever dialogue and solid performances make the audience accept the crisis and care about the reactions of these cartoonish people. Complicating the scene are their spouses, Mike's wife Eleanor (played with likable detestibility by Rachel Davis) and Cynthia's psychiatrist husband Arthur, played by Adam Alberts as a man in serious need of therapy as he tries to heal everybody he meets. Samuel's grandson and his girlfriend--Tom Roberts and Jocelyn Witkowski--provide comic points and Roberts has the best line in the play, summing up the conflict neatly toward the evening's end.

The play is well directed by John Thayer, with the performances evenly paced and balanced. A minor carp--I could have done with more outlandish 1970s costumes and hairdos in order to reinforce the time period. The Jimmy Carter joke didn't go over, and with the ocean of time between this play's first production and this one, it's understandable why. If Ms. Davis' character had been aping Carter's toothy grin all along it might have worked--otherwise I think the line could have been cut. 

Without resorting to a spoiler, I will say that the last moments of the play are warm and wonderful (Note: anytime a little Frank Sinatra comes on, this critic turns to butter), and at the performance I attended an audible "Aww..." emanated from the audience.

The Second Time Around will be performed for its final time at the theater at 12 Augusta Street, Kingston, this afternoon at 2.

Movie Critics

I took them to the movies last night. The Rosendale capped off its four-day festival of films about music with a third presentation of A Hard Day's Night, and a goodly crowd was there. There were children, the elderly, and then there were my grandsons, age 16 and 19.

I would say almost all of us had seen the film before, but not for fifty years. This was their first viewing of the Beatles as young bundles of energy and happy rebellion, running hither and yon to escape the throngs of screaming females. They know of Ringo and Paul, of course, but I don't think they knew about John and George. And the two they knew, they knew as old guys.

The first time I saw the film was at the height of Beatlemania--girls in the audience didn't merely swoon, as girls had done 20 years before for Frank Sinatra. These girls were younger--10 to 16, I'd say, and the hysteria that swept over them at the sight of their fantasy men in Teddy Boy suits was extreme--they screamed, they wept copious, uncontrollable tears, they intoned the names of their imagined beloved over and over, as if to envelope the object of their pubescent lust in an orgiastic embrace. I was just over the age to be so passionate about an iconic creation, but I enjoyed observing the phenomenon. And I loved the music.

A Hard Day's Night was a romp, basically an infomercial about the new musical group. By the end of the movie we'd heard every one of the songs that would be the first of their world-wide hits. There is an unbridled joy in the movie, a surreal wackiness that warms the heart and makes us want to know what will happen next.

Unfortunately what did happen next to the lads from Liverpool wasn't all that good. The world watched as they matured from antic post-adolescents to blissed-out stoners--I'll never forget that debut of the song "Hey Jude" on Ed Sullivan, with the Beatles now swaying, dazedly, chanting the anthem that was to usher in yet another phase of their development right before our eyes. Seeing A Hard Day's Night again with all the faces fresh, the hair tousled and shampooed, the exuberance of young men on top of the world, at the top of their game--touched our hearts. We had all been through so very much together.

I went hoping that the sheer power of that mood would infuse my own offspring, that they would say, "Wow--I wish we had guys like that now!" but that didn't happen. They love music, and they did enjoy the film as a time capsule from a distant era. But they actually said they got tired of the sameness of the music before the film ended. I  had relished every minute of the movie and found myself reliving bygone days, as is my wont lately. I came to realize how that music had become the sound track of my life for a number of years even though it isn't so much now.

I was a fan of the Beatles early on and had followed their careers, more distantly as time went by. I was less a fan of John after Yoko, and of Paul after Heather. What meant the most to me was captured in 1964 by this one flicker in time. Sometimes when we see something through the eyes of others we can tell whether we had it right the first time. I'll stick with my first impression here. Whatever the younger generations feel about the movie, the music, and The Beatles, I'm pleased I saw A Hard Day's Night for the first time when it came out...and I was 24.

A Hard Day's Dawn

The Beatles in A Hard Day's Night, 1964

I

I was living in Atlanta when they first began to make the news, the moptop lads from Liverpool who were mopping it up as the vanguard of that exotic genre (in those days) known as British rock and roll. I was about their age, but they seemed much younger in their schoolboy garb and floppy hairdos. I was a married woman with a two-year-old and they looked like exuberant high schoolers.

Boys were wearing crewcuts still--or closely cropped and neatly combed coifs--when I first spotted a youngster in his early teens who was wearing his hair below the ears and obviously very much intendedly so. The Beatles had been on the cover of LIFE Magazine already. Yet I was astonished that the hairdo had already made it to Atlanta. I smiled. The Beatles. Yes.

They appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and we all watched. They sang at Yankee Stadium and created an unprecedented sensation--screaming, fainting, uncontrollable girls pulled hysterically at their dates and trembled with uncheckable passion. They made a movie which we couldn't wait to see. And it did not disappoint.

The Beatles capered into the 20th century with joy, wackiness, talent, and a sound tailored for its moment in time. I'm told the opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night" is unique and instantly recognizable, setting the stage (or screen, that is) for the particular chaos that calls for applause, laughter, and possible dancing in the aisles. After the troubling upheaval of the assassination of a youthful and appealing president, a baffling and painful war, and the reality of an uncertain future, the four young men exemplified fun, youth, vigor, testosterone--and, indirectly, hope. What was not to love?

The 50 intervening years saw The Beatles evolve as the rest of us did, sometimes leading the way, sometimes facing their own tragedies and tribulations. But in the days of A Hard Day's Night it was still all about joy and optimism.

My grandsons, aged 19 and 16, haven't seen the movie before. I'll alert them that the accent Liverpudlian is undecipherable at times; that the music was the kind Grandma used to like, and that they'll like the movie. I hope I'm right. We're going tomorrow night.

Tonight at the Rosendale!

I love the Rosendale Theatre Collective, a not-for-profit organization in the little burg that lies midway between New Paltz, where I now live, and Kingston, where I will move at the end of the month. Luckily Rosendale will still be close enough that I can continue to participate in the Programming Committee.

It was in this capacity that I suggested the classic 1935 film of the Hollywood Bowl production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by the renown German director Max Reinhardt. Because it's pretty much midsummer, and to honor Mickey Rooney who died this year, we decided to give it a try.

I love this movie, and I especially like Rooney's antic and unique portrayal of Puck. He was 14 years old but looked about six, and had more energy than a barrel of monkeys. He squeals, squeaks, shouts and bounces in a way I've never seen any actor do, in the role of Puck or any other. One of the critics of the day thought he was trying too hard to be cute--but that's nonsense. Mickey Rooney was the personification of cute, especially as a kid, and I have no doubt that the source of those squeals and squeaks was Reinhardt himself, a seasoned director who had a raw natural talent on his hands and took full advantage of it. Rooney's Puck is not cuddly or sentimental--he's a imp of the first magnitude, daring and pesky, totally detestable one minute and charming the next. Quicksilver, lightning escaped from the bottle.

The production is astonishing partly because it was in black and white. It appears to have been shot through chiffon sheets sprinkled with sequins, and lit by fireflies. James Cagney does a creditable turn as Bottom, and the film introduces a young beauty named Olivia De Havilland.

A Midsummer Night's Dream was nominated for a few Oscars and won two--one notable because it's the only time in the history of the institution that an Oscar was won by write-in vote. Hal Mohr, the cinematographer, took home a statuette even though he had not been nominated.

I call that magic. In fact, everything about this movie is magic. Hop in to Rosendale at 7:15 tonight and I'll be happy to show you!

A Complicated Move

By the end of the month I'll be entirely ready to move into a new home, the house I'm in the process of purchasing in Kingston, NY. This will be a big change for me in many ways, which I'll go into in a minute.

I'm still awaiting a date for closing on the property, at which time I have to have homeowner's insurance, proof of sale for a line of credit to do renovations, and I hope to have made selections on the finishes for the necessary improvements to the beautiful old modified Queen Anne I shall call home. There's some conflict between the two owners (a divorcing couple) but no question that I shall get the house.

I've been packing for weeks, and still am doing so. I probably need about ten more cartons from the liquor store for books, CDs, files, office supplies and documents. Really just a few more hours once I get the cartons and buckle down to work.

I didn't anticipate the sudden death of Nancy Cain, a lifetime friend who would have enjoyed hearing me go on about all the glitches, hitches, decisions, and changes of mind I've gone through as the day to move nears. I'll take a few days to fly to Alabama and speak at her memorial celebration Monday. Everybody involved is stressed not only by our loss of a delightful, loving friend, but also by the planning of a suitable event to observe and work through our emotions. I'll leave Albany at about noon tomorrow, so my packing includes deciding what I'm going to wear and what I'll take to wear at the service. I'll leave to return before dawn on Tuesday after what will certainly be a wrenching, painful day among old friends and family, all of whom loved and most of whom depended upon Nancy on some level. Our hearts will be bare as we share memories and try to hold ourselves and each other together.

Life goes on, and I hope not too be too emotional to function when I return. Tuesday night is the first time I've produced the presentation of a film at the Rosendale. I thought, a few months ago, not anticipating the events to come, that it was a good idea to present a fitting tribute to Mickey Rooney by showing what I think is probably his best film performance, the role of Puck in the 1935 movie of A Midsummer Night's Dream. There is a lot of interest in this showing, and I hope this results in at least 50 people in attendance, otherwise I miscalculated and may be responsible for a bit of a flop my first time out. I don't even know if I can be at the production, but I hope I can and I hope it is a success.

The next item on my life's agenda is engaging a mover, organizing my stuff and myself, and physically getting to the closing and the move to Kingston. It should be an exciting, happy day, sometime around the 27th of June, but at this point it's a cliffhanger. I have too much to think about. I'll have Nancy with me all the way, pulling for it all to come out all right, and that gives me the encouragement I need to keep trying.

Nancy Calhoun Cain

August 17, 1940 - May 29, 2014

She was as pretty as a picture every day of her life, and when we were both 16, she was a knockout. But Nancy Calhoun had so much more about her than her looks—she was fun, honest, kind, and interested in everything.

There was never anything ordinary about Nancy. One of those people who is universally beloved, she attracted friends with her personality, her kindness and her sincere concern for others. We could rely on her to listen and hear us, to laugh with us, to care and empathize with what we cared about. She was always ready with a piece of good advice or a personal affirmation. Being her friend you never hesitated to ask and she was never less than generous in her praise and her pride in your success.

Nancy married Ken Cain, the local dreamboat, in her early 20s. They were married for 53 years. As he rose in his business dealings to great success he showered her with everything she could wish for. They own magnificent houses in Santa Fe and Fairhope with a view of Mobile Bay. She loved decorating and her homes were always designed in the highest level of good taste.

She had many enthusiasms—from animals to books, travel, the arts, and fine food. I think she valued her friendships above them all. In her teenage years she had a horse she had raised from a colt and a fine black lab named Knight. She and Ken always had little dogs and elegant cats, and she treasured them like children. Not having children of her own she loved her nieces and nephews as if they were her own offspring and opened her home to them and all her relatives at every opportunity.

She had a lovably quirky mind, which prompted her to explore everything in life she found interesting. It was a way of educating herself, on her own terms. Her curiosity took her to the pyramids of Egypt and on photo safaris in Africa, to English villages, to London, Paris and all of Europe, for all I know. She and Ken traveled to many unknown spots in the U.S. as well, in the big RV they bought when he officially retired. It was their plan to drive to every arts festival in the country, and they did try that for as long as the interest lasted. She enjoyed the local events in Fairhope and musical presentations everywhere. She read omnivorously, and was in more than one book club while reading whatever struck her fancy on her own. Many a weekend she and I drove the two hours to Montgomery to catch a play (or two) at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, chatting, giggling and gossiping on the drive up and discussing the intricacies of Chekhov and Shakespeare on the way home.

She was great at conversation because she was so interested in other people and what made them tick. Many came to her with their troubles; she was never less than sympathetic and understanding with any of us, no matter how great or trivial the crisis. She enjoyed nothing more than a good laugh and a good talk with a new person. She could be exasperatingly silly in conversation about politics or movies, or she could engage in heated contrarian debates about literature, history or the existence of god.

Perhaps the neatest trick in her arsenal was her ability to make her own life look as if she didn’t have a care in the world. She could joke and enjoy herself in spite of a congenital heart condition that had taken her father in his early 60s and a niece at age 20. At least 17 major heart procedures were sprinkled throughout her life, plus a mastectomy and probably other medical situations nobody knew about but Ken and her beloved brother Chuck. She never discussed the trips to the Cleveland Clinic, M.D. Anderson, and other prestigious hospitals where her surgeries took place. She simply bounced back and planned another party or trip to study the gardens of England or the hills of Africa.

She was determined to live as good a life as humanly possible. And, until the final hospitalization was ended by a trip home because nothing more could be done, she did as good a job of living that life as any human being could. She exemplified the phrase joie de vivre, always ignoring the pain that lay beneath for her. She was brave in the best way; she made it look easy.

She showed us by example how to choose the happiest option in front of us, how to slay the dragons by simply shoving them aside and moving on to something more fun. Yes, the world is a darker place for us now that she’s gone, but those of us who remember seeing her deal with grief have a better way to handle it. We have her transcendent joy to remember.