Homecoming #2
There is, we agree amongst us before Saturday night’s show time, a particular smell to a theatre. Not just this one – the Levin Little Theatre – but possibly to each of them dotted around our country in the towns that have been careful enough to keep them.
The smell is distinct, but a combination of indistinct things. Probably costumes and heavy curtains, old wood, dust, pots of paint and metal fittings. A cocktail of scents baked into seating and carpets over long days when sun streams through backstage windows which remain, most often, closed.
I am instantly transported to childhood, back to when I was the child of the woman performing here (finding a place to hide and watch) or a kid performing here myself.
But I am also making new memories today – here to perform a comedy show with husband Jeremy Elwood and good friend Sera Devcich.
They are total pros, both holding the audience in the palm of their metaphorical hands. I’m more of a hot mess – have a bit of a cry when I first welcome the audience at the top of the show, and give an excellent display of my ability to start a lot of sentences but finish few of them at the end of the night.
Which is all as it should be for this gig on the weekend they’re adding me to the Heritage Horowhenua Walk of Fame.
To be fair, there was the odd moment of extraordinary lucidity, like the instant my brain (aware there was a full house watching, many of whom know this town and its history better than I do) pulled out the correct name of the magnificent librarian who, in the 1960s and 1970s, had filled my life with books.
“Miss Pickering”, I’d called her in an earlier Woman’s Weekly column – but it came to me in a blinding flash on stage that she was “Miss Picken” – Dorothy, even – and that as a kid I’d suspected the name had either been made up because her job was to help “pick” books, or else it was a fine example of nominative determinism – young Dorothy had chosen a life in libraries to match her name.
Other names came to me as I walked around my hometown, surprising myself with effortless recollections of who had lived where – that’s the Wylie’s place, the Sherman’s, the Baker’s I’d think, pulling those names out of memories I hadn’t dug around in for forty odd years.
Some names came more slowly than they should. Here is my best friend from primary school standing in front of me in our old school hall, prompting me with “Bev” just as it all falls into place. She is still awesome and it delights me that, in a group photo, Bev and I are still the shortest and would therefore be side-by-side in any front row.
Bev’s late father, Sonny Sciascia, is being honoured on this Sunday with a plaque to be placed in the main street for his dedication to the community, alongside a dozen of us in total, representing sport, politics, industry and the arts.
I have another cry, this time on Mayor Bernie Wanden’s shoulder as he presents my plaque, and then get the huge honour of sitting alongside broadcasting legend Hewitt Humphrey as the other creative being recognised.
Before we leave town on Monday – some of my family heading south, the rest of us north – we meet at the spot on the main street where that plaque now lives. Outside Knit World, if you’re ever in the area.