After the meeting with Daddy I felt better in spite of myself. I was shaken but we had finally established contact in the hereafter. I rushed down to see what Jerome was doing. I wished I could tell him I had finally seen Daddy. He was in conference with his playwright actor friend, Chase. They were still talking about forming a theater company. I could feel energy flowing to me from their words even though I was in the hereafter. I began to understand even more how people transmitted energy to each other through powerful communications. If Jerome would just do my play on earth about my conflict with Daddy that would be as energizing to me as Jimmy producing it in the hereafter.
I thought about establishing a connection with Jerome, as well as with my daughter Vivienne, that could be perpetuated by him still producing my plays. I would still have a voice through my plays in his theater company. Jerome was almost reading my mind as I heard him saying to Chase--"I want to do some of Mom's plays because I think her voice is so modern. Her plays were not done because she was ahead of her time with her visions and perceptions. And that way she will still be alive to me. I will not have lost her. She will still be speaking to me and to other people through her work."
Chase was sympathetic. I didn't think he had heard any of my plays read in the workshop. He had been in the workshop a little bit but I don't think he was there when Jerome produced my play about living in the ghetto interacting with a schizophrenic with learning disabilities who was married to Santos' former baby sitter, Becky. I had taken them in until they could get subsidized housing because they had a new baby and I did not want to see them homeless.
Jerome was talking about doing a play of mine I had written about a visit from an alien from outer space called BLUE. It was a play with the second title of "The Spiritwalkers Convention" about all the characters meeting in their spirit form to honor a sister who was dying of cancer and would soon be in her spirit form in the hereafter. Theater was a metaphor for the Spiritwalkers Convention. The characters knew they were in their spirit forms in a play. BLUE was a character who had auditioned to play the alien. He comes dressed in a blue alien suit and strange things begin to happen. A space ship pulsates just outside the windows. The theater space glows in blue light. The other actors (spirits) get nervous as the play appears to have called up actual space aliens. Is this actor a real space alien? And so on. I thought there were some very provocative ideas explored in this play
Jerome said he could see great possibilities in staging this play. It could be very theatrical with the dying sister being revived by energy from the visit from an alien, his space ship now pulsating just outside the theater, monitoring all that is taking place inside as the connection between aliens and spirits is explored.
Perhaps Jerome's close call in the fire that consumed most of his belongings had brought him within shouting distance of his own death. He would now be thinking of how he, too, was going to have to survive only in his spirit form at some point down the road, just as I was doing.
He had been too young even to think about producing a play like BLUE when I wrote it twenty years ago but now perhaps he had embraced more of the realities of passing from body to spirit. My spirit would come alive as he staged this play, more alive to him than I had ever been. Thus our work could perpetuate our lives in another way. As long as a play like BLUE could be staged I would not be dead to the world.
I could feel Jerome thinking about his own work and how he could extend the life within his plays with a stronger message.
"I need to revise my play about Dad's death," he said. "I have come to some new insights in just the last few months. I know if I did my show about him, I could find him better, where he might be now, I mean. Going through this fire has helped me to see how helpless he must have felt when he was in the grip of circumstances beyond his control."
"Have they ever found your dad's body?"
"No, they are still testing the DNA to see if that one corpse in California is his. If it is he went far astray from where he was when he started his journey. They said the corpse was in terrible condition, like this man had lived a very rough life in his last couple of years. If Dad was still alive then, he was without an identity. It is painful to think of him wandering the earth not knowing who he was."
"Maybe he did know who he was but didn't want to come home."
"Maybe not, but how could he live without money at all? He never tapped his bank account. I tend to hope that he died before he had to suffer starvation and complete amnesia on the hard cruel streets."
"Maybe you will never find his body."
"That's a possibility, too. We may never be able to find any trace of him."
"Everybody loves a mystery, even a sad one," mused Chase.
I thought about Jerome's father. He was undoubtedly in the hereafter somewhere, but I had been so consumed with avoiding a meeting with my dad, I had not even considered an encounter with him. My God, there was so many to see. I hoped I would not have to work up to meeting all the rest of them as I had to work up to meeting Daddy. Maybe one of these days I would just run into Paul, too.
I would put the word out. Maybe Jerome would do the one man show he had created about his father when he went missing--music, pictures, memories.
Paul would surely attend. We could meet to the theater.
Jerome said, "I think I am going to have to do my show about my missing dad, if I can just get some resolution. They are going to have to tell me this corpse was either his or it wasn't. Maybe after I find out the results of that DNA test, I can resurrect my one man show about him again."
No comments:
Post a Comment