The Women in Our Lives

The last time I saw my Maggie on the circuit was at about the age of ten or eleven. I was having a smoke outside the stage door between shows. An act would go on for about seven to ten minutes, and, if your nanny’s tutoring was done for the day, you would kill time till the next show, and there were six or seven shows a day, depending upon the venue. This must have been the old Broadway theatre in Springfield Mass, because in my memories I see the Bridgeway Hotel across the street where we would stay when playing the Broadway. It was a beautiful theatre, a 3000 seater, with a grand arch across the stage that was common to those old palaces. It was ripped down in the fifties to make way for a parking lot and then the interstate some years latter. I called in sick the day it came down and made the trip to watch. I don’t feel that nostalgia any more, but back then I was still close enough to when it was all real and alive.

Maggie and I, off and on, played the same venues since we were four or five years of age, and would see each other a few times a year. She peaked out the stage door and came out to sit with me. She told me how her mother said that young men who smoke would never amount to anything. I must have been in a mood, because I answered her by saying how her mother doesn’t smoke and my father thinks she amounted to an old bitch.

I assumed that was going to upset her, but it didn’t. I remember her quietly thinking it over and replying that her mother just wanted things to be right, to which I told her the rest of the world couldn’t always be wrong. Then she told me that her father had told her that if it wasn’t for her mother he would have ended up in the gutter. I thought to myself that was quite believable; he was the most guileless man I had ever met, a wonderful, sweet man in a business that ate wonderful, sweet men for breakfast. He was a funny man too, in a way that he made appear accidental so that it wouldn’t upset the old bitch. Not that she allowed any humor in the Cochran family act, far from it. But unlike her he lived to a grand old age, so the way I look at it, he got the last laugh.

I bring this up because the boy stopped over the other night with a girl friend in tow. She struck me as a tough little girl, hard around the edges, but in a common sense sort of way. And it always kind of amazes me that some people will have the good fortune to meet or insight to seek out what they need, and some people will not. This young girl seemed to me a fine counterbalance to the boy’s strengths and weaknesses. Like old man Cochran, that beautiful man who was my father-in-law, the boy is beginning to wander guileless down a path that eats such people for breakfast: a musician (and a fine one). This scenario was also true of my parents, though not as stark a contrast. My father was the one who guided me in the ways of Vaudeville and what I thought at the time was life in general.  As a boy I either didn’t think about it at all or assumed that my mother was just tagging along and playing her part in the act.

My father had that gift of seeing the humor in the most mundane trivia of life. Skits about every day life were our bread and butter. But whether in life or on the stage, my father had no sense of self censorship. He talked a great line about craft and getting things done, but in the end it was all talk, like everything else with him. He had the gift of gab and it is no small thing, but it can be mistaken for everything if you are not paying attention. It had been my mother all along who took my father’s scattered insights and shaped them into an act. It was my mother who would accompany my father into old man Albee’s office and hammer out the business details. My mother was right to think my father would not have survived the death of Vaudeville, and his early death was a blessing in disguise. He was one of those souls peculiarly suited to what he did, and would be lost outside of it.

I never cared at all for TV shows, but I did like that “I Love Lucy.” To me it was some incarnation of our act on the tube. And for all her feigned scatter brained behavior, it didn’t take much imagination to understand who made all that happen.

So the boy was telling me how he had met someone who could help him with a band he wanted to play with, and this girl calls the fellah a con and itemizes all the signs. And the boy doesn’t want to believe it, but in the end his loyalties are with the girl. If I sometimes wonder how life works itself out for the next gang to come along, I think of that old expression of what goes around comes around.

Now for a little change of pace (I can't help myself here) take a look at this one:

http://edstrong.blog-city.com/maureen_dowd_poor_barack
_hillary_gives_him_a_good_spanking.htm

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