PINTA PARADE

 

 

Mom picks me up the next day from high school, since there is no indoor track practices on Friday until mid-February. The sun is tackling mounds of dirty snow transitioning them into taupe puddles that looks like medicinal tea.  I step into he side wing of our 86’ Mercury station wagon with the tinted windows.  We are going downtown to get my passport and then to drop the papers off at the Journal Star.

 We go to the Bank one building downtown, the building with the ruffled spire acending into a corrugated peak overlooking all of downtown Peoria. The building where my mother keeps her safety deposit box containing my birth certificate.

Mom says that it is really thoughtful for the Journal Star to reimburse us for everything.

"Did anyone see your face in the newspaper at school today?" Mom inquires.

I am embarrassed. I don't want to tell her that in two classroom the article is cutout and placed on the back wall. I don't want to tell her that Coach Mann gave a soliloquy in front of the classroom and even Cool Jow Thomas who I have lovingly reviled since the first day of school even made me march up to the front of the classroom so he could shake my hand.


"Yeah, I think a couple of people saw it Madame Suhr seemed really excited."

Mom tells me that Madame Suhr is a really sweet lady. I am called into the passport room. The photographer seats me in front of a white canvas.Again they are telling me to tilt my head a certain way so that the shades of my glasses are not evident. So the apparatus I use to see does not cast a pernicious shadow across the slope of my nose.

                                                       

                                                                                ***

Upon arriving home we sift through the paperwork. There are three copies of the consent and release form, one for myself, one to be kept on file at the Star and one for PARADE. There are several sheets offering CONGRATULATIONS followed by the date of the trip. Apparently before leaving for overseas the group as a whole is attending orientation in New York where I am to meet my counselors. There is a form stating that I need a physical, mom telling me that she has already made plans to visit my doctor Monday after school so that we can drop the paper work off ASAP.  There is a slip for jacket/shirt size. A slip for camera insurance that dad says we're just not going to do so don't lose your camera or any rolls of film. There is a consent form my parents' have to sign stating that if I am in need of medical attention.


There is a form for life/accidental death insurance, which I am to sign, stating that my family will be compensated 100,000 dollars if an accident occurs on the trip.

I am picture flying overseas, the plane exploding into a morning glory of incendiary sparks, bodies sparkling above the icy swills of the late-night Atlantic in a blink of loss.


"They have to do that David." My  father says, "For legal purposes. They have to place in a life-insurance form. Every member of your trip has to sign the forms."

Father says that its no big deal. He tells me that I am going to go to England and have the time of my life.



                                                                       ***

The final slip in the package is the Young Columbus pledge. It is Faustian, I am bartering some undiscovered facet of my soul with the cursive loop of my inky signature. I am agreeing that as a Young Columbus delegate I am to follow the

I want to sign in blood.


                                                                         ***

Later that  night I am at Roosevelt. It is the play I was in last summer. It is the play where I fell in love with life. I am a pending world traveler. I am seated in Roosevelt’s moribund yet refined auditorium with the shellacked brown chairs and the feeling that the audience is ensconced together in a cigar box.  I am watching last summer float across the stage.
The person playing Charlie the Anvil salesman is a burly bearded man who roars on stage.

He is gruff. He is downright acerbic. He looks like a vile antagonist to an unwritten Disney movie about the dangers of shaving. When he says Girly-Girl it sounds like a convicted White Trash pedophile offering a Blow pop to an innocuous eyed four year old.

When he says no-good-two-bit thimble ringer Harold Hill I am the only person in the audience who cackles, thinking of Pam.

I was the better Charlie.

I will always be Charlie.

At intermission Uncle Larry calls me out to his truck and tells me he has something for me. It is a laminated copy of the Journal Star. In the corner he has scribed out a novella telling me that persistence and kindness definitely pay off.  I've always looked up my Uncle Larry. I smile at his approval.
 

As I re-enter the theatre I look at the stage, reflecting over last summer, my production in the theatre—the odor of Peoria players, the wafting musk and painted vignettes from past show. How backstage at the theatre somehow connotes that all this life really is is a dress rehearsal, that the audience has yet to enter the finish the final act, how even with a tautly-rehearsed script nobody can be quite certain what the rise of the second act curtain will bring.