Growing Out

When Allie Jean moved in next door, she didn’t speak. That is not to say she couldn’t speak. Rather, Allie Jean didn’t speak. She was four years old. That first summer, all I saw of her were shy glances from beneath her eyelashes and the occasional creeping smile.

We slowly befriended each other. She six years my junior, I awoke one morning nonetheless to discover Allie Jean was nearly a sister to me.

By the time I was fourteen years old, there were 19 children living on our block, of which I was the oldest. A bolt of creativity struck me that February, and I stubbornly decided we would come together to do theatre. We would put on Peter Pan that summer.

Scripts were written and distributed; Peter, the Darlings, and Tinker Bell were cast; my mother was roped into lending her sewing machine, garage, and spaghetti pot to the production.

Once school was out for the year, barefooted twilight rehearsals ensued among the song of the cicada. The twenty of us children, hidden in backyards and beneath the grime that is a summer of outdoors, scripts and cardboard swords in hand, made-believed our way to Neverland and back, until the lines between Neverland and “back” became blurry.

On a sweaty Friday evening, timed just right for the western sun to beat down on all in the audience, the players of the Garage-in-the-Alley Theatre invited parents, friends, fellow neighbors, and even a local newspaperwoman into the place of blurry lines.

Before any of us could really understand what was happening that evening, a growing-up unfolded.

In the years following Peter Pan, we continued as a troupe of line-blurrers. However, growing-up continued to unfold as well, and as it may be assumed, our troupe of 20 began to take different paths.

Allie Jean pursued theatre. She now attends high school, where I recently had the pleasure of watching her perform in The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged). She was a crack-up. After the performance she cheerfully met me in a crowd of well-wishers and congratulators. This is the skin Allie Jean is comfortable in: one of creativity, one of community, one of chattering young thespians.

I am unable to take any responsibility for Allie Jean’s growing up. Perhaps it was the empowerment of her first applause. Perhaps it was scripted interaction with close friends. Perhaps it was the line-blurring. Perhaps it was the infusion of the song of the cicada.

And perhaps it is not a growing-up that she did, that I did, that any of us did, in the first place. Perhaps instead it was a growing-out. Growing out of insecurities, growing out toward new adventure, growing out to the far reaches of the humans we were meant to become. I believe theatre, done in community, grows us out.