Ten black binders, neatly chronological. First show seen: The Glass Menagerie, Broadway,
1946. Just sixteen, high school senior (skipped a grade, smart boy). Special
trip with your parents? Only child, as you sat in the dark did you see yourself
as Tom, aspiring poet who dreams of escape? Or fear
you’d be the gentleman caller, former popular high school athlete
now a shipping clerk at a shoe warehouse? Next, college, the city
and a roll call of classic productions: The Country Girl, Mr. Roberts, Born Yesterday.
Musicals, too: South Pacific, The King and I, Kiss Me Kate. Post-war,
heady times, drinks at the Algonquin, Royal Roost bebop. Brando, Burton, Cobb,
Gielgud, Harrison, Fonda. Is this why you kept them—for us to marvel
at the stars? Then, the domestic decades—less Broadway, more touring companies
wherever we lived: A Chorus Line in Miami, Amadeus in Washington. So. Much.
Sondheim. Retirement, and at last you take to the stage! Community theater
lead roles right off the bat: The Gin Game, The Cocktail Hour,
On Golden Pond. Not the best actor, Pete says, too self-conscious
but I disagree—like all great stars, always at once both your character
and yourself, impossible to separate. But where are you? I look
in these binders for the programs from this last little explosion of light
but you didn’t save them. All I find are second-tier stars in regional revivals:
Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire.
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Bill Hollands lives in Seattle with his husband and their son. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, DIAGRAM, The American Journal of Poetry, Hawai`i Pacific Review, The Account, Wildness, One, and elsewhere. He was recently named a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize.