At The Fox

When I was working on a book of memories of my career a few years ago, I sometimes felt as if I had a memory bank in my head that was just packed plumb full and it was difficult for memories to break out free. I would just keep on pickin’ away day by day and a couple of cents worth might drop out. It might be the late1940’s I’d be working on, High school and dating and playing drums and a nickel or a dime’s worth would come to me. But I’d keep at it with great expectations using my imagination at the same time and a quarters worth of memory would come to me. It was discouraging work but I kept telling myself that there was a mother lode in there and I kept at my brain mining. Then Ker Plunk! A dollars’ worth of memory might come to me in the middle of the night and then five dollars’ worth and I would keep on pickin’ at it with high hopes and whole long paragraphs of memory would come streaming out to me. Then,for a short while maybe, a whole chapter of memory could come to me.

It was like a whole decade might be jam packed in there and if you could begin to pick it loose and keep at it I might stir that section loose.

First you have to really believe that it is in there and then this calls for patience but golly, what a reward if you might stir up joy or understanding or maybe a bit of ecstasy or so.

On the phone the other day I said to my 90 year old sister Barb, “Do you remember, Barb, when Mom used to take us kids on the Second Avenue bus downtown to the Fox theatre?” And she said, “I can’t remember.” And I said, “Sure you do and we’d go to the Fox Theatre. It was breath-taking inside with giant pillars, staircases, and mirrors and velvet curtains and gold towers inside and they had a huge Wurlitzer Organ, and the movies she took us to starred,” I stopped talking and without missing a beat she said “Shirley Temple.”

I continued, “And she sang songs in her movies and she tap danced and one of her songs was, I paused for just a second and sang out, “On the good ship,” and then I paused…And sure enough, Barb sang out loud and clear

“It’s a sweet trip to a candy shop
Where bon-bons play On the sunny beach of Peppermint Bay.
Lemonade stands everywhere Crackerjack bands fill the air
And there you are Happy landing on a chocolate bar.”

And Barb went on and sang on and on…the whole song. KerPlunk!

So all her friend that was with her had to do was go to this LINK on her cell phone and there it was, sure enough, It was the Fox Theatre in all of its splendor. Breath-taking in all of its gaudy magnificence. The theatre had been restored to its original beauty in 1987 by the Ilitch Foundation (Little Caesar’s Pizzas) and the now historic Fox Theatre is still in current use with live shows and other useful functions.

Memories, sweet memories, so many, so crammed together but when you keep seeking, keep believing, reaching out and pulling in, sometimes you have that Ker Plunk experience and it gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.