3 min read

An old house over the years becomes many things, does it not? After new paint, new rooms and draperies, new laughter and tears, life and death and countless summers, autumns and winters, the house, once new, now grown old, takes a breath and fits itself to the new, excited faces.

Families come and go in it, babies are born, grow up and move on as characters in endless scripts. So it was for the Family Devine. One daughter went to Sarah Lawrence, one to Colby.

Sometimes inhabitants, like us, finish a life in the theater, and move in to the house, which after time becomes for them the last “theater,” where warm, happy, sad and joyous events happen, and it must be treated as such. Then, inevitably, the last of the cast stands on the worn stage boards, standing by what tradition calls the “ghost light,” a bare bulb in a metal stand, center stage, always left on for the next cast, the next comedy, drama, heartbreaker.

I stand here this day on this stage, alone. And so here is that final play with all the scenes and a few of the many characters. This script says it’s raining. It’s dark and it’s almost the Fourth of July and I remember that She and I spent 20 years of moonlight and rainy nights treading the boards in countless summer stock productions playing old lovers, young lovers, enemies, spies, French lovers with bad accents, Russians in “Anastasia.” It was life in the old theater, and now it’s raining, and the curtain once again is being drawn.

From the beginning, we always prayed for rain because when it rained in the summer everybody fled the beaches and went to the theater. Guess what? They still do. Just book a comedy or musical and stand back. It’s beginning to happen this very moment all over New England. It was like that in all the little summer towns all over the East Coast, and the audiences are happy with every laugh, every grimace, even today. Sets are being built now. They’re rehearsing as we speak from Ogunquit Playhouse to Lakewood to the Maine State Music Theatre in Brunswick.

In the rainy past, She and I started getting cast in all those young lover parts in musical comedies and dramas. Those were the good old days. Well, they were good until they were “ungood.” Then there was that last summer when, as most actors do, we got worried.

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It rained that summer from Pismo Beach to Quebec, and it took us six months to dry out.

One day we sat in a Horn and Hardart Automat, where I bought her a nickel donut (that’s how they spelled it) and we went to see the 1933 movie musical “42nd Street.”

You, if you’re old like me, sat through the part of the script when a young Dick Powell (remember him?) bellows to Ruby Keeler outside the closing theater, “Let’s go to Hollywood!”

“Hollywood?” Ruby asks, with curled lips and narrowed eyes. “Why?”

I added, “Because it never rains in Hollywood.”

Well this script ends this way. She, the better actor, now in lovely spirit fog, is standing behind me adding lines, as I tell her “I’m preparing for us to make a fall return to Hollywood.”

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“Hollywood?” She mutters behind me with curled lips and narrowed eyes. “Why?”

I set the laptop aside and, with a smile, point to the sky. “Because,” I whisper, “it never rains in Hollywood.”

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer. 

 

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