Musical Notes

I pull the red scrap book from the shelf in the garage. The silver fish that have made it their home scatter. I open the yellowed pages. There, tucked into programs, flyers, rehearsal schedules, dried flowers, and telegrams are the little cards that come in floral bouquets scrawled with pre-show messages in familiar handwriting.

I turn the pages. There - written in large, bold handwriting, are instructions from my father turned drama coach: Amy! Discipline!!! (underlined three times) and the schedule of our practices for The Unsinkable Molly Brown, thirty-five years ago.

Amy Darling We love you reads one in my mother's hand.
With you on every word and note tonight reads another.

But the one I seek is deeper into the pages.

To Amy who will make them forget Bernhardt, Duse, and Modjeska - Love, Bob. I was eleven.

Clever.

Yesterday would have been my brother's 70th birthday. I was prompted to dig in my garage to find some remembrance of him from my early days on the stage because I was imagining the card he would have written this month to his eldest granddaughter, Hannah who stars in her first musical as Anna in The King & I. I remembered that card and hoped it could somehow be re-cycled. It is, however, glued tight onto the page.
But it won't stop me from re-cycling the message.

My brother was always in my audience. And he will be in Hannah's. I will look up to the stage and see her through his eyes just as he watched me when I was her age.

As I turned the pages of my tattered scrapbook, memories of my family came flooding back to me. My brother's wit and keen insight. My father's direction. My mother's support. We may not have been the Barrymores but the theatre pulsed through our veins.

I need only open my scrap books for evidence of why I became a drama teacher.

Greater, still, to find evidence of a happy life.