WARNING CONTAINS: a lot about a person you probably don't know, angels, a stage, Shaxpeare, ageism, gross generalization about the dead, some tears, and a bit of magic.
Note - I'm going to mention and wax lonesome about a mentor of mine named Pat. For this to make sense you need to know the following about her. She was a firecracker, great goddess of a human being. She was A Teacher in all things, everywhere. And she's dead (for awhile now). Which is no small loss to the world.
On my birthday every year I like to try to do something I've never done before. It might be as simple as a new food or as wild as doing barrel rolls down a hill at midnight. This year, hitting the big but not SO big four-oh, I took a tour of The Globe Theatre in London. It's not really the Globe, because the original burned down and got buried under new things. I learned on the tour that the reason why the current Globe exists today is largely due to the obsession, passion, and pursuit of one man, an actor, who thought that London should have a place where Shakespeare as well as the great British tradition of theater and acting could be honored.
During the tour you go into the recreated and currently, actually used theater. The guide brings you to various spots in the space to see it from different perspectives. Other tour groups are there too, doing the same in other points at the same time. If you're lucky enough to be a student on a tour, you get to go up on stage and there were a lot of school groups there that day. While my group was standing at the foot of the stage, the cheap "seats", a large group of pre-teen girls came out onto the stage with their teacher and guide. She brought them into a huddle and whispered to them. They fanned out all over the stage, taking the whole thing up and, at her signal, all shouted the same line. Some shouted, some delivered, and some kind of mumbled. The teacher walked, or rather bounced her energy was so palpable, over to a girl standing at the front, "Why did you choose to stand here?"
And time stopped. There in front of me was Pat. This British English teacher melted away and there she was, going from student to student, seeing them and asking them and not taking bull-shit answers but demanding truth and thought and reason. It probably didn't hurt that there was some resemblance in body type, in turn of phrase (yes, even between the British and The Southern). But it was as though Pat had just flown down from the sky and appear on that stage to greet me. To say, "Remember this?"
I do. I remember. Thank you.
