Scrolling down my, now, all-too-ridiculously-lengthy key word index to “Westport” there is a score of entries, a testimony to
the strong feelings I have towards where I worked and lived for some thirty
years of my life, receding with the speed of light into the forgotten
past. The essence of this blog is a
written record of remembering. I speak
not of major events, but the nuances of fleeting feelings. I was reminded of this today by an entry from
more than six years ago. Although it is
a review of Happy Days by Samuel Beckett,
bravely produced by the Westport Country Playhouse, it evoked surreal feelings
of place and time. I quote the first and
last paragraphs of that piece. It could
almost be read as a stand-alone (without the details of the theatre production)
as it says as much about time, and wistful remembrances.
What a cynical
title for Samuel Beckett’s brilliant play, courageously presented by the
Westport Country Playhouse to celebrate its 80th anniversary. It is not the
kind of light fare one might expect on a languid summer’s night at a country
theatre far off Broadway, and it was a brave choice by the Theatre’s Artistic
Director, Mark Lamos. But this is Westport, Ct - a bedroom community of NYC
where we lived for so many years. In fact, we were there during the celebration
of the Playhouse’s 40th anniversary – half of its lifetime ago -- so although
we are now only summertime visitors, its byways are subliminally imprinted on
us.
It was a night of
powerful theatre. We exited to the parking lot. It had just rained and the
humidity hung in the air, also rising off the steaming macadam and fogging our
glasses. So we drove the back roads of Westport, returning to our boat, passing
landmarks indelibly imprinted and always remembered such as the location of the
old Westport National Bank (gone) turning left onto the only road that runs
west and parallel to Riverside Avenue, along the southern side of the Saugatuck
River, passing homes where we had partied in our youth (including one Christmas
eve where guests in an alcoholic induced stupor set a couch on fire and it had
to be dragged out to the snow to extinguish the flames), the building our first
Internist once occupied (who later died in the same nursing home as Ann’s
mother), the Westport Women’s Club where my publishing company held our annual
Xmas party for so many years, my old office itself across the river where I
worked for the first ten years in Westport, now the Westport Arts Center, past
the street where Ann and I went for Lamaze classes when she was pregnant, over
the old bridge crossing the Saugatuck, turning left then right under the Turnpike
past the structure which used to be The Arrow Restaurant (long gone) where Ann
reminded me they made her favorite dinner, crispy fried chicken, and then
further west to Norwalk, all fragments of our own earth mound, being earth
bound, trying to understand. Theatre to think about. Oh, happy days.
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View of Westport, CT from my office circa 1972
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