The Road Trip

I don’t know what the normal experience was for teenagers in America, where I might have grown up, had my father’s job not moved us overseas.  I don’t know how much freedom parents gave their kids, I don’t know what the parental relationships were like, I don’t know what parental expectations looked like.  I feel (and have always felt) like my parents gave me a lot of freedom from an early age.  I feel like my Sixth Grade year in Portugal was pretty restrictive, but I was a pre-teen drama queen with a lot of imagination and a lot of energy, and it didn’t always manifest itself in the most productive of ways.  By the time I was twelve, though, I was allowed to leave home and roam around Cascais on my own.  By the time I was thirteen, I was allowed to take the train from Cascais into Estoril and spend all day Saturday at the picture show, which was inside of a casino.  So, when we were moved to Switzerland, I was quite a free agent, which (I think) balanced out in my brain as perfectly natural and somewhat shocking.  The hours that I spent between school getting out at three-thirty and suppertime at six pm were all mine - and those hours lasted a lifetime.  These days, when I see that it’s three-thirty, I panic over not being able to get it all done by six.  A lifetime.

Eventually, the hours after six belonged to me, as well, and Me Mother and Father just let me go.  I don’t know where or how I got the money but I had it and I spent it going to the theater.  There was a city theater that utilized a repertory company of actors doing plays like On The Town, West Side Story, Man of LaMancha, The Fantasticks, Godspell, Romeo and Juliet, ballets like Aschenbrödel (Cinderella), operas like Don Giovanni, operettas like Die Lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow), and musical reviews like Wie Es UNS Gefällt (As WE Like It)... and I saw them all.  I spent a lot of time by myself, a teenager, at the theater seeing these plays.  And my parents supported it.  They didn’t question it, they didn’t question me, they didn’t pass remarks on it - they offered me their full and total support… even when I became friends with the actors, several years my senior.

The Stadttheater Bern hired a lot of American actors.  There wasn’t enough work for actors in America in the early Nineteen Eighties, and European countries seemed to have a thing for American musicals, so a lot of actors left the States, traveled to Europe, learned the languages in the various countries, and plied their craft there, in translated productions of these shows.  They became a family, there, and, for some unfathomable reason, they took me in.  Americans living overseas like Steve Barton, Denny Berry, and Carole Alston became my friends.  The Austrian actor Christoph Schobesberger, a Swiss actor named Andreas Krähenbühl, and a French (I think) dancer named Didier Erard were all very kind to me, a starstruck American teenager who wanted to go on the stage.  And, of course, there was the matter of the American ballet dancer who became my first love, an abusive relationship that would leave me scarred for life.  But, for the most part, the people I met through the Stadttheater Bern were kind, caring, and people that I would call friends.

So when Steve Barton (arguably the person with whom I was closest) and Carole Alston were hired to do the play Camelot in Karlsruhe, Germany, I had to go.  I just had to.  I had been obsessed with my cast recording of Camelot since I was fifteen, playing it over and over until My Mam asked me, politely but pleadingly, to give it a rest.  I wanted so much to see Steve play Lancelot but I couldn’t possibly go by myself - the trip was too extensive.  So Mama volunteered to drive me.

Me Mother and I had many adventures over the years.  She was always ready to go on an adventure with me, always ready to spend time with me, and always ready to be a part of the life that I intended to carve out for myself.  We planned a drive from Bern to Karlsruhe - that is over three hours in the car to see Camelot in German.

“Wann soll ich von dir scheiden?  Im frühling war is nimmer.  Deiner augen schimmer, er liest mich nicht frei….”    (I’m doing that from memory, so the spelling may be wrong.)

Mama didn’t complain.  She got herself nicely dressed for the theater, approved my own choice of clothing and into her sleek, chic white Mercedes Benz we piled, driving that three-plus hour drive all the way to Germany, arriving about half an hour before the play would start, checking in, settling down for the play and looking at our program.  The play, by the way, was fully translated into a language that my Mother did not speak.  Mama learned a few words of German but did not become fluent.  Still, there she sat, in the StaatsTheater Karlsruhe, watching a play she could not understand.  She did that for me.

We enjoyed the play.  It was very good.  And Mommy always loved theater, my whole life.  After the play was over, we went backstage to say hi to my friends and, in fact, to pick them up.  We had caught the last performance of the play and Steve and Carole were traveling back to Bern with us in the white Mercedes.  It was after midnight when the four of us were settled in and ready to hit the wintery, icy road back to Switzerland.  Mama didn’t know Steve and Carole.  They weren’t her friends.  She might even have been meeting them for the first time (although I think she had met them after a play in Bern one night - possibly Godspell, maybe The Fantasticks.  Still, we all passed the time back to Bern by chatting and listening to music in the car (nobody liked my choice of the current radio hit “Enough is Enough” - everyone was relieved when the song ended because it was so loud and with so much screaming.  That moment aside, though, everyone seemed to enjoy the drive back, the snow from the streets and the mountains through which we were driving illuminating the path for us as more snow fell to the ground.

Suddenly, everyone in the car sat upright.  We grasped at each other, at the door handles, and at the handles over the windows.  The car was hydroplaning in the snow.  At two am the highway was empty, so there was no danger of hitting another car as the white Mercedes did one, two, three pirouettes down the German expressway, each spin growing wider and wider, threatening to make contact with either the guardrail or the mountain - it was anyone’s guess.  Steve was in the front passenger seat telling Mama, masterfully controlling the steering wheel, “It’s ok, you’ve got this.  Stay calm, you can do it.”  Carole and I, in the back seat, braced ourselves and each other for impact.  Mama spoke not.  She did not take her hands off of the steering wheel, did not take her eyes off of the road.  She was calm and she was in control.  

With one final, wide, swooping spin, the white Mercedes slowly skidded to a stop.  And four human beings simultaneously exhaled a sigh, released the tension in their bodies, and, then, began to laugh.  Relieved, happy, safe… we began, once more, the drive back to Bern, arriving an hour or so later, at which time My Mam dropped my friends off at their respective homes, and, then, headed up the hill to Spiegel, where we arrived an hour before dawn would break, safe, sound, and so happy to be home.