My childhood home in New City, New York has a beautiful magnolia tree in the front yard. It blooms in the spring for just a few days. My mother and father delight in those blossoms every year and worry about how the wind or the cold or the rain will effect them. They are fragile. They are beautiful. They are pink and they are a sign of new hope and promise of good sunny days to come again.
My memories of that tree always include people hanging off of it's branches. My sisters and brother an I when we were young and my own sons as well as my nephews and nieces as our family grew. The blossoms may be fragile but the tree itself is strong. It has weathered many a blizzard, blazing heat and chimpanzee - like children swinging from its arms. It is a contrast in extremes; the delicate blossoms on a steely strong stem.
One of the delights of my post children life has been my involvement in theater. It is on a very small scale beginning with my work at the school I work at and continuing with the local community theater. I love reading plays, watching shows; being involved in some way. The past two summers have afforded me the opportunity to be a costume designer for two straight plays: The Survivor, which is a dramatic and powerful Holocaust show and Steel Magnolias, a drama laced with comedy. Both involve real life situations that force us to examine our beliefs, our faith, our hopes and our dreams for life and our shared reality of death be it at the hands of evil or the seemingly unjust reach of medical conditions causing chaos. I, of course, knew the Holocaust was real and that the play The Survivor was based on truth but, I did not know until very recently that there really was a Shelby from Louisiana and that this story was very real. The author of the play, Robert Harling, wrote it about his sister. She did actually die of complications of diabetes following the birth of her son and the rejection of the kidney her own mother had donated to her. Susan Robinson was 32 when she died. Out of the tragedy of her death and his trying to deal with his emotions Robert Harling wrote Steel Magnolias. He had never written anything besides term papers before.
I have now seen the show over a dozen times be it in rehearsals or in the theater. I will see it a few more. Six women with six stories. Sweet Annelle finds a family, Ouiser and Clairee have a lifetime love/hate relationship, Shelby and M 'Lynn are moving forward together as grown daughter and overbearing mother, not always easily. Truvy is the touchstone, the refuge to all their drama with her neighborhood salon in the carport. It always makes me laugh and it always makes me cry. Now it makes me marvel at the strength of people like Robert Harling and his sister. It makes me understand that we all have the strength of the magnolia tree as well as the fragility of the blossoms (pink, like Shelby's signature color). I realize that life is full of risk and leaps of faith and that we should all find a reason to live life our way regardless of the possibilities of bad things. We need our 30 minutes of wonderful vs. a lifetime of nothing special, and, when push comes to shove we all need someone to take a whack at and remind us that "life goes on".
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