The Vance Avenue Players

Summer theatrics to satisfy the neighborhood's toughest critics

by

Ah, the performing arts, where “theater” becomes “theatre.”

When the heat index met the boredom index under hot, blue skies, the unsophisticated players of Alexandria’s Vance Avenue put on back yard or front porch shows. Location depended upon whose mother had to be jollied into hosting the production.

Our front porch was a favored spot in late summer. Its smooth, cool, shaded concrete felt like ice against shirtless stomachs. If our porch wasn’t the stage, it was often the place where shows began in the imaginations of us grammar school kids.

A 10-year-old director with a cast of small children has just so much to work with. But it wasn’t the shows I remember best. It was the preparation. An hour-long show in the afternoon required brainstorming and rehearsals starting just after breakfast.

"Pre-schoolers were an enthusiastic audience for whom suspension of disbelief came naturally."

Before cell phones, children communicated by neighborhood telegraph, a complex signal to the nervous system determined by the elevation of the sun, weather, and who was around to be in the show. Vacations were short to non-existent in our crowd. Few of our families went anywhere exotic. For us, vacation was that time between school’s dismissal for the summer and our re-internment in September.

Acts were a low brand of silliness. We attempted tricks we’d seen at circuses and in the movies. The acts had this in common: They could be accomplished as well by members of the audience as the performers.

Shows required an admission that let the performers know they had crossed the line from fooling around to professionalism. Admission was not enforced because the audience was mostly pre-schoolers who, as a rule, did not carry money. Pre-schoolers were an enthusiastic audience for whom suspension of disbelief came naturally.

The acts: juggling, firing stuff out of a cannon, a lion tamer who worked with a large indifferent cat, tight rope walking, and joke telling. The finale was a disappearing girl which required a girl, a screen, and a cleaned out garbage can.

Cries of “She’s in the garbage can” were ignored. The vanished girl eventually crawled out when it became too warm inside the garbage can or something real or imagined crawled on her. The girl’s cries of alarm were met with riotous laughter from an audience yet to develop couth.

"Tight-rope walking was a fraud. To make the short walk over thick rope stretched tightly from one side of a swing set to the other, the walker maintained contact with the swing set’s ridge pole using a long, slender tree limb."

The cannon from which stuff was fired was a long, thick-walled, cardboard and carpet cylinder obtained from our store of general material: dumpsters behind the Sears that bordered the neighborhoods in which we children lived and scavenged. Inside the carpet cylinder went an empty oatmeal container, also cardboard, also cylindrical.

The oatmeal container, filled with purloined baking flour, was arranged so that a third of it protruded from one end of the larger cylinder, which lay over a wheelbarrow. A child of sufficient height and strength struck the butt of the oatmeal box with a croquet mallet to produce an explosion of flour at the business end of the carpet cylinder, which is to say, cannon.

Early experiments with cats had proved hilarious and futile. We did not hit cats with croquet mallets. That would have meant we’d succeeded in getting a cat to stay inside the cylinder long enough to be fired from the cannon. It never happened.

[Read another essay by Ed Cullen: "The Shed—Where to go when the world is too much"] 

Tight-rope walking was a fraud. To make the short walk over thick rope stretched tightly from one side of a swing set to the other, the walker maintained contact with the swing set’s ridge pole using a long, slender tree limb.

One lame trick had to be followed quickly by the next or the audience got restless and began yelling, “Anybody can do that!”

On rainy afternoons, our enclosed back porch became a movie theater. I had rescued from a curbside trash pile a 16-mm projector, discarded because the motor had quit. But the lamp worked, and movies—small reels of Tom and Jerry, Sylvester the Cat, Bugs Bunny, and short cowboy movies—could be projected.

The projectionist doubled as the motor. Inserting one’s index finger in a hole in the side of the main gear wheel and moving hand and finger in a clockwise motion, film moved between lamp and lens to produce—tra la!—moving pictures on a bedsheet screen thumbtacked to the porch ceiling.

I wore one of my mother’s dishwashing gloves on my projector hand to protect my finger from abrasion.

Anticipation and preparation consumed most of the time on show days. Audiences knew not to expect much, but no matter how many times we perpetuated these little frauds, we neighborhood friends turned out. Thus did slow summer days speed into fall, shorts yielding to stiff, new blue jeans and a new room in a familiar school.