My Darling Ladybug

On marrying into theatre.

(A fictional short story.)

It has been almost seven years since I have been to a play. It may be a new record since childhood. That last play I went to, seven years ago, was a very serious avant-garde drama starring my ex-wife. Not only did my ex-wife completely shave her head for the play but at the end of the play she appeared on stage completely naked.

That was really, really weird. It was a good thing we were already divorced. But, anyway, I have not been inside a theatre since that night so long ago.

Until tonight. I am not sure I can technically call it a theatre, though. It was actually the cafeteria at the elementary school my seven-year-old granddaughter is currently attending. She was performing in her very first theatrical production. Metal folding chairs were lined up on the large empty floor of the cafeteria and risers at one end of the cafeteria created a make-shift stage.

The title of the production was, Bugs. All the little first graders were dressed up as bugs. My delightful granddaughter was a ladybug. She wore black pants, a long-sleeve red t-shirt with small circular black pieces of fabric spaced out all over the shirt, on her head she sported some antennae and on her hands she wore white gloves. She was way cuter than any button I’ve ever come across.

This particular granddaughter, in her seventh year, is incredibly intelligent. She’s one of the smartest people I know. Countless times the words she has spoken to me have thoroughly blown me away. It’s like talking to a wise old sage. The next minute she’s a seven-year-old again.

What really gets me is the unabashed confidence that she has exuded ever since she was in diapers. There is not a shy bone in her body, in fact there might not be a shy molecule in her entire being.

And her mouth never stops. And everything she ever says is accompanied by a hand and arm gesture or some kind of body language. She speaks with her whole being. And she smiles a heck of a lot.

I knew she was a little drama queen but I had never seen her on stage before, live before an audience of scores of sweaty people. It was 82 degrees Fahrenheit in that cafeteria. Just before the program commenced the music teacher apologized to the audience about the air conditioners being down. Her announcement somehow made it seem hotter.

My charismatic granddaughter had eight lines in the production. The first four she sang (early in the play) and the second four she spoke (near the end of the play). Yes, I am partial, but I think any theatre critic worth their salt and willing to go to a sweltering elementary school cafeteria would agree that my granddaughter’s performance ranked at the very top. While other students were silently staring off into the distance or scratching their ass or blowing snot bubbles, my granddaughter belted out a rousing professional performance. She was a natural. She had the mojo.

That is when I saw it.

I saw her mojo.

I have experienced this intensity of mojo emanation only twice before. The first time was a hundred years ago when I was sitting in the audience of a play and I was profoundly overcome by a young actress in the play. Within a minute of seeing her I was convinced she was my soul mate. I was drawn to her mojo like a moth is drawn to a bonfire.

I courted her for over four years. For two of those years we were separated after she dumped me. But I never gave up. Four days after we got back together again we got married. I was then married to an actress for twenty years, the last year of which we were separated; she was living with her boyfriend while I was living with our daughter, our dog and our cat — along with over a hundred houseplants.

She wasn’t my first actress. I must admit that I have a bit of a weakness for actresses. It’s one of those things I can’t seem to control. I had dated a few actresses before my wife and I lived with one of them for a year and a half. But the wife was different than all those other actresses.

She had the mojo. She could step onto a stage and transform into anything in the universe. She was without a doubt the most talented actor I have ever met. Towards the later years of our marriage she had become somewhat of a local celebrity. Together with some fellow actors she co-founded a theatre production company.

One day I came home from work and as I walked into the kitchen/dining room of the apartment my jaw dropped as I looked at the big empty space on the floor where our dining table and chairs used to be. I looked at my actress wife who was on the other side of the kitchen fixing herself a cocktail then I looked back at the empty space, a thin layer of dust on the floor revealing the outline of where the tables and chairs once were. Then I looked back at the wife, “Did we get robbed?”

She giggled then took a sip of her drink, “Uh…. about the table…. it, uh…. well, you see…. uh, the new play we start rehearsing tomorrow calls for a dining room table and chairs and, uh, well, uh no one else had a spare table and chairs to spare. Don’t worry, we’ll have it back in five weeks.”

I looked at the empty space on the floor again then again back at my actress wife. She tossed her head, sending a long cascade of gorgeous wavy auburn hair back behind her shoulder, “You wanna drink?”

“Please.”

For several years our home was a de facto props department. Things would mysteriously disappear for five or six weeks at a time. I would have gotten to the point that I no longer noticed that whatever thing was missing was missing…. Until I found myself sitting in the audience at the dress rehearsal for the current play (I saw all of her shows numerous times, including both before and after opening night). And there on the set of the play would be the item that had disappeared. Nothing in our home was safe.

But I almost never complained. Almost never. I was my wife’s biggest fan. For a quarter of a century or so I lived in the world of theatre. It is a world where I really don’t fit in. I have zero mojo when it comes to the dramatic arts. ZERO. I avoid the stage but I have spent a large portion of my life in the audience. I am listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the one human who has seen more of my ex-wife’s plays than any other human on the planet — including her mother. Even though I haven’t been to a play in seven years, much less one of hers, that record still holds.

Speaking of her mother, she was an actress, too. She was also a choreographer and a master costume designer and a life-saving master seamstress. My actress wife’s father was a theatre director as well as a professor of dramatic arts at the tiny local college. The ex-wife grew up steeped in a world of theatrical drama. She was in her first play at the age of three.

That world is what she grew up in. It is what she sees as her reality.

I, on the other hand, am a freaking writer. I live in a very different reality.

As two very different worlds merged, it was not long before a whole new world showed up; our daughter. Her arrival was one of the most glorious days of my life. My teacher had arrived.

She came gushing out of the womb with arms flailing and a permanent smile on her face. If she could have talked at the moment I am sure she would have said, “Let the show begin!”

Like her mother, she was a natural-born performer. She lived her childhood on center stage.

Unlike her mother, she didn’t get into theatre until after succumbing to puberty. But when I sat there in the audience that night I was overcome with a mind-shattering dose of deja vu.

My daughter had the mojo!

It was glaring and undeniable. She had the exact same mojo as her mother! Goodness gracious, could it possibly be something genetic somehow? Is there a thespian gene? But it wasn’t just her and her mother. There was also the grandmother. It was a force far greater than any human energy dynamic I had ever experienced. I had no idea what I married into. It seemed there existed a powerful genetic matriarchy in possession of dramatic mojo.

Our daughter’s thespian inclinations flowered throughout her teenage years. She became instantly an extraordinarily talented actress. She blew me away.

She was just like her mother.

Even better than her mother, my daughter had the extraordinary ability to read through a script one time and instantly have all her lines memorized. This freaked me out. How the hell could she do that? I’ve never met anyone who can do that.

When my daughter was on stage she exuded the most incredible confidence that one could feel in their bones. It was like electricity.

This confidence was also apparent offstage at times but it was never as strong as it was with the spotlight on her center-stage.

But then came the day that she renounced it all. At the age of nineteen, our daughter announced her retirement from theatre. It was a very surprising announcement to me but it was both shocking and horrifying to her mother. It was like a slap in the face. It was also sad for the local community who had grown fond of her appearances in almost all of the local plays.

Of course that was the thing. Our daughter was doing between five and twelve plays a years and had been for a few years. She simply burnt out. It was around the time that she announced her engagement to her boyfriend that she completely, thoroughly gave up all involvement in theatre.

It was about a year or so after her actress mother and I began the long and arduous task of untying the knot. Her mother had left our home to go live with her boyfriend. My daughter left home about a year later to go live with her boyfriend. The only ones left in the nest were me, the dog and the cat. No one mentioned this back when I took La Maze classes with my actress wife in Santa Fe twenty years before.

It has taken me a lifetime to realize the profound power of the matriarchal lineage in which I stumbled into. They all have that crazy stage mojo and they seem to gift it to an offspring to keep it going through eternity. It’s a soul-group kind of thing.

And I was part of that soul-group and my designation was to sit in the audience, third row, center stage. I was the designated observer. And I was the one holding the energy for those on the stage. I was the one recording it into my brain structure. I was there being a portal through which the matriarchal stage mojo could come through in its process of imprinting its energy upon the skein of time and space.

I was the guy.

The near-time events of my actress wife leaving to pursue her dharma and my daughter proclaiming her departure from the stage led me into seven years of complete separation from that world on stage. I went seven years without sitting in the audience. It’s been wonderful.

And there I was in that hot sweaty elementary school cafeteria/auditorium. I was not only watching my granddaughter on stage but I also had a granddaughter on my lap. The other granddaughter (aged 4) was on my lap to get a better view of her older sister on stage.

My two granddaughters could not be any more different (just like my actress ex-wife and I). While the oldest granddaughter exudes energy and mojo at all times like a non-stop geyser, the younger one is shy, she keeps back and she is an observer, just like me. She is afraid of the stage but she has her own mojo waiting to explode. It is a mojo I strongly resonate to.

So there I was sitting in a very uncomfortable metal folding chair in a rather loud box of heat and sweat with an incredibly cute granddaughter in my lap as I watched my other granddaughter perform on stage. It was a different audience but the same mojo. It was undeniable.

My granddaughter had the mojo!

After over seven years I thought that I had purged that powerful matriarchal theatre affiliation but then I saw my granddaughter perform on stage and I realized that I had not escaped that bondage to the female actress lineage that I had succumbed to. I was still a slave to it.

My granddaughter had the mojo, too!

My other granddaughter sitting (kneeling) in my lap was different, though. She didn’t seem to be part of that strong matriarchal acting bug. Like me, she was an observer. Unlike her radiant older sister, she was shy. She was expressive but that is not detectable unless you are looking at her face. Looking at that mesmerizing face it is obvious that a lot is going on under the surface. She is a thinker. She is an artist in a different medium.

And that is when it hit me. Oh my God! My youngest granddaughter is going to be a writer — just like me. So I have one granddaughter who is a born actress and another who I see as a potential writer. They are like me and the ex-wife.

That’s weird.

Anyway, after the production of Bugs was finally over I showered my granddaughter with praise. I didn’t mention anything about her being the fourth generation of a mojo-wielding theatrical matriarchy. She wouldn’t understand that.

Or would she?

My daughter is a Libra so if she is in a room full of people she will immediately start organizing everything. Being a mother to her two growing little girls is the joy of her life. Her organizational tendencies are fully satisfied. She is the boss of the house and she runs everything. It is something she has in common with me. I fondly remembered back when I was her male mommy. But it is a far cry from a theatre stage and I can now see that this is the perfect place for her to be; where she wants to be. A mommy. I so thoroughly empathize with her.

Yes, my daughter is authoritarian and has certain rules that my granddaughters immediately and unquestioningly obey. One of those rules is that one always holds the hand of an adult when crossing the street.

After we finally made it out of that stifling hot elementary school cafeteria/auditorium we all took a deep breath of cool evening air and proceeded to the car. When we got to the intersection and were about to cross the street I suddenly felt a little hand clutch my hand. It was a hand that still had on the white gloves of the ladybug costume. I had forgotten about the rule. Apparently we had not gone walking lately.

Little jolts of electricity went shooting throughout my body. It was mojo and I could feel it very intensely. It wasn’t just because I had not held anyone’s hand in many months. Gosh, how long had it been? Seriously, when was the last time I held someone’s hand?

I then realized that the last time I held someone’s hand it was the hand of one of my two granddaughters. Before that I can’t remember holding anyone’s hand for many years. I sure remember holding my daughter’s hand when she was a wee one and I sure remember holding her mother’s hand when we were dating. I even remember holding her mother’s hand once when I was helping her out of a car back when her knee was acting up.

Yup, I have held hands with four generations of actresses, a familial force to be reckoned with.

When we got to the other side of the street my granddaughter did not drop her hand from mine. She kept holding it all the way to the car as she talked incessantly and feverishly about the play.

As I walked down the sidewalk hand-in-gloved-hand with a ladybug I was overcome with joy.

Looking at my darling ladybug I realized that marrying into a matriarchal lineage of actresses was something I simply cannot walk away from. Once you’re in, you’re stuck. I may have gone seven years without any theatre in my life and I may have purged it from my daily thinking processes and I may not be living with an actress but holding that little ladybug hand I knew that my time in the audience is far from over.

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