Readers continue to share their special Bjorklunden memories. For this issue there are three wonderful stories that tell special experiences from the past and also as recently as this last summer. Please enjoy and consider sharing your own special memories by sending them to Teke O’Reilly at teke.oreilly@lawrence.edu.
A Midsummer Memory
By Paul McComas ‘79
1978: At 16, I played Demetrius in a high-school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I didn't really understand the part -- nor, fully, the play -- till I studied it at Lawrence three years later with Prof. Ben Schneider.
2023-24: I taught one Bjorklunden Shakespeare-seminar apiece for two years: "Best of the Bard: Shakespeare's Greates Hits," then "Romeo and Juliet: 'Such Sweet Sorrow' -- and So Much More."
What happened in between is downright supernatural.
2008: That July, I arrived at Bjork to teach fiction writing and found that Door Shakespeare was tackling Midsummer. My then-fiancee and I nabbed a pair of front-row-center seats smack-dab in the "Athenian woods" and proceeded, on one perfect midsummer night, to thoroughly enjoy a terrific production of our favorite Bard comedy ...
Caption: Titania and Oberon: Saren Nofs-Snyder as Titania and Nathan Hosner as Oberon in Door Shakespeare's 2008 production of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Jerry Gomes. Photos by Rick Spaulding.
... But the course of live theatre, much like that of true love, "never does run smooth." Fairly late in the play, when Bottom went missing from the troupe of "rude mechanicals" (his identity having been magically, as it were, re-ass-igned), the remaining Athenian-workmen-cum-thespians literally pulled onto the stage one unsuspecting audience member to fill in at their absurd "rehearsal."
Bjork's then-Director Mark Breseman may have been responsible for their choosing me ... or maybe it was just dumb luck; Mark has neither confirmed nor denied, and I doubt he ever will. Perhaps that's for the best, for there seemed to be a kind of magic at work: a shimmering, fairy-dust spell of sheer terror! Over decades of acting, both before that night and since, I've never suffered from stage fright -- but being pressed into performance instantaneously with no advance notice whatsoever was terrifying! "Surreal" understates the sensation; it truly felt, on that midsummer night, as if I were in a dream. Or perhaps on ketamine.
"Perform, sirrah!" Quince the carpenter commanded, as this brave new world swirled 'round my way-past-distracted globe.
I'm no improv comedian; not a line of dialogue, nor even a word, came to mind. Instead -- reaching back to the swinging '70s, aka my "Demetrius days" (when, as you'll recall, this serpentine tale began) -- I mutely assayed a couple of old-school disco moves. Win-win: (a) the audience roared, and (b) the rude mechanicals seized my anachronistic dance steps as their quite valid rationale for returning me to the seat whence they had dragged me, some 30 or so very long seconds before.
I'd like to think ol' Will would've approved. My fiancee, at least, must have: two months later, Heather went ahead and married me anyway.
Paul & Will
