By moving to Stratford, we changed our lives and our children’s because John Hirsch wanted us to come and save the Festival but also because the still incumbent administrator had said, when offered a bigger job, that he wouldn’t move across the street for Stratford. Obviously we could—across half the country, in fact, and then some.
Bill got the job not because of the huge deficit he inherited (no one knew about it at the time) but because the Festival (Board and planners) wanted to tour, to go national, and international, and Bill was willing to take it. I believe that it had toured before (to Montreal and to Chichester?) but I’d have to look up the history. (I didn’t begin to keep a diary until seven hours after Bill’s death.) My memory of the first tour Bill arranged (well, you know—a lot of people were involved, of course), was to Ann Arbor, Michigan, an easy drive from Stratford. We travelled to Chicago a couple of times, too, with the company. The train ran from Toronto to Chicago in those days, stopping at Stratford, with one or two extra cars (not sleepers; it was not an overnight trip) added for the additional passengers. It was fun.
You must remember, we were the same age as most of the the company then, and we loved actors, though not in the carnal sense. Bill had undergone cartilage surgery on his knee. (In those days it involved a serious operation with overnight—two nights, as I remember, in the hospital. Nowadays a few minutes with a laser and the cartilage is out, like a ripped girdle. Anyway, back then Bills’s recovery was long, too, and he had to exercise his thigh muscles, lifting a large honey pail filled with weights, with a quiilted sheath around the wire handle so as not to cut his ankle. The props department made it for him. He also used a cane.
He was still using it when we boarded the train for Chicago that year and he showed off his sense of the dramatic, dropping the cane and walking to greet the actors with open arms as they arrived. (And suffered phlebitis after that grandiose gesture.)
That’s when I realized we were not always going to be as young or as active as the actors. They—different new young people all the time—would keep on being in their prime, the 10 or so years between the ages of 30 and 45 (sic) while we would keep on ageing. Old people trying to act or look young are neither convincing nor attractive. Fortunately (?), that never happened to us. Bill died in his prime and I dropped out of sight and memory.
But not before we planned the European Tour.