Woody’s highly anticipated new book “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” is NOW available! Order your signed copy HERE!
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Leave a Ghost Light on for 2016
It is time for the curtain to fall on 2016. And not a moment too soon, some would say, for it has been a surreal year – a Leap Year at that – of tumult and tragedy and tribulation.
But it has also been 366 days of highlights and hopefulness and happiness. And so, as with all years, it is bittersweet to turn out the lights and lower the curtain.
I was reminded of the theater metaphor recently while driving past the old Ventura County Star building on Ralston Street, empty now for a decade and a half since the paper moved to a new cavernous edifice in Camarillo. Seeing the abandoned haunts, I reminisced briefly and could almost hear the echoes of clicking keyboards – a pleasing newsroom symphony to these ears.
In journalism “-30-“ means “the end,” but I like to think “-30-“ has never come for the music inside those old Star walls.
I once mentioned to my friend, Stephenie, that the cacophony of a newsroom is one of my favorite sounds on earth and she replied that she delights in an orchestra tuning up before a performance because it is a prelude of “all the good yet to come!”
What a lovely thought, it seems to me, and so perfectly pertinent on this closing day of December for we are not only saying farewell to the old year, we are greeting the New Year and “all the good yet to come” in the next 12 months.
Thinking of goodbye again brings to mind the old Star building; I hope the last person to leave failed to turn off all the lights. Specifically, I like to think one solitary light was purposely left on, like a ghost light – usually a bare incandescent bulb on a portable light standard – aglow on the stage in a theater.
Superstition demands that a theater should never go completely dark, even when it is unoccupied, and that is a lovely thought for a newsroom, too.
While I have never been a part of the theater, my daughter has been. Not as an actor or stagehand, but as a playwright with her works performed in Los Angeles and New York and, firstly, Ventura.
That debut experience was life-changing. It was in high school and the drama teacher, Dennis Enfield, selected her play as the spring production and asked her to be the assistant director.
“ ‘Mr. E’ was an Irishman with a broad smile and an ever-present twinkle in his eye,” my daughter recalls fondly. She also remembers five months of casting and rehearsals; selecting costumes and music; working with set design and lighting; rewriting scenes and finally the curtain rising for an audience.
“On Opening Night, I had difficulty holding back my tears,” she says, her voice seasoned with emotion a decade later. “Seeing my words brought to life onstage was nothing short of magical.”
Closing Night, my daughter was tearful for a different reason.
“All of us were feeling glum,” she shares. “We had reached the end. Months and months of hard work and this was it – the last performance.”
Mr. E knew what his troupe was feeling. Before the curtain rose, he called the cast and crew together and told them this: “Theater is ephemeral and fleeting, like a dream. It doesn’t last forever. Each performance is unique and sacred. That is what makes it bittersweet – but that is also what makes it beautiful.”
This is true not only in the theater. Our lives, too, are ephemeral. So are calendar years.
As we step onto the stage of 2017, let us keep this in mind – that each day, like each performance on a theater stage, is unique and sacred. Let us try to make each day a masterpiece, enjoy its beauty, and then move on to the next fleeting performance and to “all the good yet to come!”
But first, as the curtain lowers on another year, let’s leave a ghost light on to illuminate the golden moments of 2016 we want to remember.
Give the world another John Glenn, Prince, David Bowie, Arnold Palmer and Muhammad Ali – well, as near facsimiles as possible – to fill the voids they left behind this year.
This novel of historical fiction was originally, and enthusiastically, recommended to me when I was browsing the “New Releases” at Barnes & Noble back in 2003 – not by a staff worker, but by a perfect stranger.
More precisely, a gift copy of “Gloryland,” a novel by Shelton Johnson, came to me in the mail out of the blue and anonymously. I searched the Barnes & Noble box for a clue as to whom to thank, but there was no name on the receipt nor a gift note.