This photo of Sandy: I remember seeing that play ... I was surprised when the actor on the left (in this photo) made his entrance onstage, as I fully expected that role to be played by Henriques. My friend explained to me, oh no, Darryl had a different role with the theater, a more physical one. Unbeknownst to me at the time, when I was at Berkeley going to school in 1964, was that Darryl had traveled up to the Bay Area to join with a group called the Actor's Guild.
So when I met up with her again, my friend Heidi was filling me in on what she and Darryl had been up to in the intervening span of time.
We were seated far back in a park, and I had travelled there from Berkeley with Heidi who had a CAR and who was Darryl's girlfriend. We were in a park somewhere in San Francisco, and far back and could barely hear the lines because of our seating. Of course, because I was with Heidi, we arrived very very late in the performance, it was almost the end of the play. So I remember a snippet of that play, but I can't place the year ... as I traveled up to the bay area in 1964 and then in 1965, I traveled up there a bit more, a few bus trips, an airplane ride, a hitch hiking trip that ended up with someone giving me money to finish the trip all the way on the bus, rides part of the way with friends in their cars sometimes until I could grab a bus ... hitch hiking across towns to get to the bus station and so forth that my movements were scattered ... and I was busy with other things, as well.
So I must have seen this in 1965 although they had obviously been performing it for awhile ... my sense is this was an early Spanish romantic piece and they'd had to get the park authority's permission to perform in a public park. That's when things were a little smoother, before events boiled up, and the collective decision-making came into it (which translated into a guy struggle between Ronnie and Peter, and Peter was hard to bring into line sometimes, because he tended to play differently ... he wanted to show that he shared the same values as and totally and completely understood all the longhairs and hippies in the audience and they were all together like they understood an in-joke, and Ronnie and others had a more traditional view of commedia dell arte and would try to pull everything back to its center. So it was a tug of war, and push and pull, even over the scripts and how they were written. And it's like the guys were so busy duking it out with each other in conceptual performance concerns that Sandy's more refined approaches would be shoved to the backburner. I kind of knew one time later, when I heard some little tidbit or piece of gossip, that this being shoved into the background and being disregarded would be hurtful, and might eventually cause Sandy to quit one day and to go her own way, though I hoped that wouldn't happen because Sandy could fight back and hold her ground. But eventually after years that was what happened, and it was burn out because every thing else had gotten so large in simultaneity with the performances.
A mexican vaquero costume, from a store in Mexico or maybe a distant part of Los Angeles where they sold clothes for the Mexican rodeo cowboys, which the band and players at Padua Theater would wear as well in their historic plays.
When the little handpuppet came out with a rainbow headband, that was really a rainbow wrist band that some merchandiser had dreamed up ... to provide matching accessories for the rainbow headbands everywhere ... they sold them as sets, sometimes. I thought they were funny, the wrist bands. I used to be able to tell a long joke back in 1965 about a Swiss guy named Alec Sanders who came from a long line of famous Swiss watchmakers and how he'd invented a new interesting time keeping instrument. He was a poor guy, Alec was, who broke the strap on the old wrist watch his grandfather had given him, and that was his entire inheritance from his grandfather. But Alec Sanders was so poor because he had been disinherited by his family in all other ways, he couldn't even afford to replace the strap. He was so removed from the family's business, he barely knew what to do to fix a watch even. But Swiss watch makers, even poor Swiss watch makers, can be clever, too. So he repaired his watch with some old cloth strips because he couldn't afford to buy material, and he called his invention "The Alec Sanders Rag Time Band".
But I could also, see the hurt that softly grows into a larger ache, sometimes I could sense that, when people were shifting subtly away from each other, and giving their attention to another, and I would sing a song appropriate for the moment, but change the words a bit for the current circumstances I was witnessing:
"I once knew a lass and she played as she willed
I hated for others to spake of her ill
But now she is gone like the fleurs on the hill
For she's gone te be wed tae another"
(And that would sober the room up for a moment because they realized they recognized themselves and their own parts in the song, and would try to straighten out)
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