I will try not to dwell on my most recent delay. My pain got worse so my doctor said maybe I had a compound fracture of the spine, maybe I should have X-rays. Good news: no fracture; bad news: degenerative disk disease. I joked that at least it wasn’t a degenerative brain disease and my daughter Kate asked, “Are you sure? Did you have an MRI?” Well, no. So I’m on stronger painkillers, with codeine now. I never take pills, just calcium and vitamin D, so it will take some getting used to. Yesterday I was nauseated and today I am drowsy. But I think I can think.
Back to summer, 1968. See, we were a swimming family. Well, I am Pisces and I looove water. Back in Winnipeg, we swam at a lake place (my parents’ cottage in the summer) and my they gave us a membership in a winter club where we could skate, curl, bowl, etc. and SWIM. The children all took swimming lessons.To this day Matt has a beautiful stroke, though his timing is off for the breathing, and John, who swam his first length (underwater) at age four, had to be coaxed into surface swimming with the promise of a trophy (?) by his swimming teacher. Bill took lessons, too, never having learned as a child due to his asthma and hay fever that made it difficult for him to breathe. He took his lessons over lunch break, attempting widths until he was ready for his first length, an achievement formally applauded by the patient swimmers who generously tolerated his efforts until they could go back to their lengths uninterrupted by his flailing. And I took my Bronze Life Saving so that I could ilfe-guard my children —and others, as it turned out. Because we moved to Stratford, a dry town.
The closest large public water was the quarry in St.Mary’s, 12 miles away, and we went there as often as we could, which wasn’t very often because the Stratford Festival season was in the summer and we had to be there for the openings and visiting critics and important Board members and prominent people. Like Prime Minister Trudeau (the first one). We thought that after the openings were over (they didn’t have August ones then) we could get away for a vacation and we took the kids to the Maritimes to visit friends. We had two days there when Bill was called back to Stratford because the P.M. was coming and he had to be there to bow. So we cut short the rest of our trip and drove like mad back to the theatre in time for a photo op. No more summer trips. (We took the kids places on Spring Break instead, like The Canadian Mint; Monticelllo; Upper Canada Village, Williamsburg; and of course Niagara Falls, many times.
That’s why we built a backyard pool; we couldn’t leave in the summer. We never saw our lake place again, inherited from my parents—n the Whiteshell back in Manitoba—not only because it was so distant but also because it burned to the ground, fortunately after we sold it, because the sale subsdized a larger pool than we might have been able to afford.
The summer of 1969, as I remember it, was very dry, weather-wise. We both felt so privileged, so lucky to have a pool, that we wanted to share it with others so we started to have pool parties every Sunday afternoon but one when we left town to visit our son, John, who was in summer camp. It rained that weekend, the only wet weekend of the summer.. We discovered later that most people don’t really like to to swim, they just like to sit by a pool and eat and drink, mostly drink but they eat a lot too.
That’s when I started entertaining, aka cooking. We both felt we should share our good fortune.It cost a fortune, too. I paid for the first summer with my box office royalties from my Canadian adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, produced at the St.Lawrence Centre. I think it was the first summer, doesn’t matter, really.I never saw the money; it went straight to groceries. It wasn’t until the final year, that is, the final year of Bill’s life (but who knew?) that he was granted an expense account for entertaining. I think we used it once, for a dinner party, that winter. What were we thinking of? Why did we do it? I think we were drunk with our own good will and we were grandstanding, playing to each other. And we loved the theatre, loved the actors, directors, designers, all those delightful creative people. And I wanted to write for them. But this is about Stratford and Bill, not me.
Anyway,I was busy cooking. We had the cast and crew of each show, about 75 people every Sunday. I didn’t have serving vessels big enough for those numbers. I used a large enamel dishpan for salad before I simply started chopping fresh vegetables into “kindling”: stacks of carrots, green and red peppers, celery, and so on. Bill barbecued stuff. He loved to barbecue. Early on, I came across a special on chicken drumsticks and I bought a few hundred. For the rest of the summer, that store warned that there was a limit on the number of chicken legs that a customer could buy. That was okay; by that time I couldn’t afford them anyway. I switched to hot dogs and big mushrooms (before Portobello). Plus beer. But it added up.
The only person who ever brought a contribution was one of the performers Hirsch imported from New York to sing in Satyricon (date). She was a bit late coming, because she had been phoning her granny in Alabama to get her recipe for corn bread, and then she made it and brought it to me warm from the oven. it was divine. I asked her for the recipe and she wasn’t sure, just, you know, a handful of this and a cup or so of that--whatever. That’s why it took so long with her granny. I remember it had evaporated milk in it. I tried all summer to make it and came close but not quite.
During the week, I made dinner for other guests, very seldom close friends, more like Friends of the Festival. I kept a Menu Book to record what i served, so that I wouldn’t repeat myself the following year when they came back for more.That’s how i know how many people came for brunch, lunch, dinner, and after dark skinny dips (on hot nights we’d go to the theatre and invite a few actors to come and cool off, and serve them brandy and coffee), and Sundays, between June the first and September the first…over 350, give or take, not counting the pool parties. I didn’t have time to write.
Do you remember the Greek myth about the Hydra, the many-headed dog that drew its strength from the earth? I don’t remember who defeated it — was it Perseus? But he did it by holding the creature above his head, not touching the earth until it was a mewling kitten and so weak that he could wring its neck. I’ll look it up. Anyway, I was the Hydra; I drew my strength from my typewriter. When I was deprived of it for too long I got sick. At the end of each summer, I was sick, or maybe just tired.
Boy, did I get it wrong:
“ANTAIOS (Antaeus) was a son of Gaia of the Earth, and it was from her that he drew his invincible strength. When Herakles encountered him in the ring, Athene advised the him to lift the giant up from the earth in the contest. He did so, and weakening the monster was able to crush his ribs and kill him.” Wikipedia
Well, I got it right about me. I got sick if I couldn’t write.
But I kept on cooking.