Finding home again

Last night, I found home again.

It’s not like I was lost, really. I’m a pretty happy person, comfortable and content in my home with my family. I’ve always been somewhat on edge away from home, though. Moving every three years like clockwork, as we have because of work and home concerns, I’ve developed a shell and have always been on my guard when out in the public, not surrounded by my close family circle. Friendly: yes. Relaxed: no.

I took the blog-daughter to rehearsal for Pocahontas last night at the Ashtabula Arts Center. The scene was chaotic - there must have been at least 200 people milling around through various rehearsals for Annie, Pocahontas, performance choirs and dance classes. Normally, such noise and confusion would cause me to try to find a quiet place to sit on the outskirts and count the minutes until I can leave.

This was different, though.

In front of me in the pit area of the building was rehearsal for Annie. That consisted of 35-40 people of various ages going through blocking of the upcoming play and tuning their harmonies while happily walking through the fledgling production. I remembered the pit area as the place where I’d spent countless hours as an adolescent, rehearsing plays, singing in the youth repertory choir and waiting for my sister, who was nearly always in dance class at the center. I remembered it as the place where I met my wife and kissed her for the first time, when we auditioned for a mutual friend’s production of “Catch-22” in May 1985.

To the left, in the previously hallowed ground of the original dance space (genuflect, all ye who enter here, and REMOVE YOUR DAMN STREET SHOES) 30-40 youngsters chatted and made/renewed friendships during their first Pocahontas rehearsal. Parents watched as the music and theatrical directors tried to impose some order on the proceedings with less than complete success. This was also the place where my sister, on a near-daily basis through her youth and adolescence, had obeyed the mysterious stentorian French commands of “glissade, assemble, changement, changement!” delivered by the dance teacher. Then, it was the home turf of the legion of the leotard-and-tights, hair-pulled-back, pointe-shoes-wearing, short-tempered dancebots…now it’s just used as an extra rehearsal space. The dancers now have and entire new wing of the center in which to pursue their obsession, safe from the distraction of prying eyes.

At the service/information/center hub counter behind, me was a woman I had known during my stint at the local community college. She answered phones, accepted money, wrote receipts, reserved tickets and answered questions with a smile…not rushed, but happy in the moment. I remembered another woman who had manned the counter for a time during my teen years, enjoying the tide of bright and interesting people ebbing and flowing from the center: my mother.

I recognized new friends and old friends, heard sour notes and the promise of beautiful music to come and saw a small band of dancers venture from their wing into the main part of the center (no doubt to get a Diet Coke), staying tightly packed together lest some of the whirling chaos infiltrate their world of control and precision. I had several people come up to me to congratulate me/ask for information about “Cuckoo’s Nest.”

And I realized…I was happy, very uncharacteristically relaxed in this swirling crowd of chatting, laughing and singing people. I was just me, without need for the shell presented to all but close family and select friends. As my daughter trundled off to her rehearsal, memories from the past and present merged into something I hadn’t realized I was missing. It was that “swift spiritual kick to the head that alters your reality forever (courtesy of Grosse Pointe Blank.)”

It felt like I was home.