A Memoir by Orleans Saltos
Tucked inside a red brick theater in the downtown Arts District is a windowless rectangular room—not the main stage, but a modern multi-use space for classes, lectures, or small plays. Beneath a high black ceiling, long-hanging lighting hovers over 60 sleek plastic chairs arranged around a low stage in a half-circle. The stair-stepped floor ensures clear views from every row. Today, the theater lights are off, replaced by soft, even office lighting. Students trickle in, carrying backpacks, notebooks, purses, or nothing at all.
Someone mentions this theater class has been meeting for decades—twenty or thirty years—and another adds they’ve been attending for ten. This is my first time here, a transient presence in a permanent space. I settle into a back-row seat, surprised by how comfortably the molded chair cradles my butt. The perfectly calibrated lights make reading and note-taking effortless. I am not sure when I reached the age to appreciate a well-lit room to sketch in.
The view in front of me is a landscape of gray bobbed hairdos and shiny bald heads. Although the temperature is mild, 65 degrees outside, almost everyone is wearing neutral-tone sweaters brightened a little by the reds and purples of scarves, purses, or caps. One student has purple stripes added to her white hair.
“How’s Laura? Oh, good.” I hear someone say.
“We need to get together to try out that new restaurant.”
“I’m thinking of not renewing my Shotgun Theater membership. I hate all the plays there.”
All this is the chitchat of smiling, wrinkled faces.
Everyone seems to know each other in that kind of friendly way only decades can produce. They speak of each other’s losses and deaths, children’s and grandchildren’s names. I glance around expectantly, hoping for a nod or a smile. I am not invisible as I feel the occasional glance, but their eyes skim over me as their conversations float around me. I’m not part of their shared history. Although I have been accustomed to being an outsider all my life, the weight of being an interloper sits surprisingly heavy in my chest. I wonder if I’ll ever be woven into this tapestry of gray heads and familiar laughter.
When the instructor takes the stage, the woman next to me immediately begins to knit with gnarled fingers. As old hands deftly knit and purl, knit and purl, a scarf or sleeve appears. I open my notebook and sketch the faces in the crowd with all their folds, jowls, and hook noses. The woman beside me peeks at my work as I glance at hers.
The instructor introduces the guest lecturer, an actor named Julie. Julie is in her late 40s, still pretty, with fluffy bleached hair falling in professionally cut layers around her face. A turquoise knit top cuts to her breasts in a V, emphasizing a long and graceful neck. She sits self-assured and asks the audience with a voice that projects clearly, especially in this acoustically sound room, “Any questions? I’m told this is a crowd very knowledgeable of Thespian pursuits!”
A woman raises her arm. “Tell us a little about yourself?” she asks with a rough graveling voice.
“Is it harder to find roles as you age?” Someone else yells out.
“Betsy, you must wait for your turn. You’re Number Two,” the instructor admonishes.
Pointing an index finger to the audience, the instructor assigns numbers to questions. “I see you, Bob, you’re Number Three. And then Martha, Number Four, Kris…” She counts down to them with familiarity, forming the numbers with her fingers.
I raise my hand, but the instructor doesn’t know my name. “OK, and you there, Number Six.” She doesn’t form a six with the fingers for me. “Everyone, please stand when it is your turn and speak loudly.”
“Well, I was mostly a Shakespearean actor, but now I do more contemporary theater. I like playing someone real.” Julie says. “And, yes, roles are getting harder to find, but it is the life experiences that inform characters. That makes it all more enjoyable when I get my jobs.”
Someone releases an emphysemic cough. The woman beside me has finished half a sleeve and changed to a circular wire-type needle. My eyes drop to my hands, looking to see if they mirror hers. The veins are more prominent than I remember, and the skin is starting to look loose, like a soft warning of time passing too quickly. Not yet, I think. Not yet. I think of famous movie stars and how film could capture their beauty as if that would make them immortal. Yet in real life, no amount of botox, fillers, or facelifts stop the march of time.
“If a play endures, there is a paradox at the core.”
“Theater is art, and art is redemption. It’s alchemic into something beautiful.”
I listen as my ballpoint pen scratches and scribbles onto a moleskin notebook. Pale yellow unlined pages fill with different faces, forming scowls or smiles. I draw a man with eyebrows that angrily push together when someone’s cell phone rings. I draw the hands trying to find the button that shuts off the smartphone’s tone. I draw many glasses and scarves covering necks. Each sketch I do is an attempt to anchor myself to this moment, that person, this place.
The hour is up before Julie gets to my question. The instructor never looks my way, and Number 6 remains unasked.
Instead, Julie ends with a joke. “You want to know what my new play is about? Oh, it’s about an hour and forty minutes.” The room only chuckles slightly. Tough crowd.
“See you next Monday,” the instructor says. “We’ll be discussing The Children playing at The Aurora. Be sure to use your discount!”
Stuck behind a woman with a walker, it takes me a long time to descend the stadium seating and get to the exit. The woman with the walker, one of the eldest of the class, is painfully thin. Her bones look like they would shatter with a single misstep, so I’m patient. Her head comes up to the height of my chin.
Outside, the cool marine wind brushes against my face, a crisp reminder of the world beyond the theater’s warm bubble. Straightening my spine, I pull my sweater tighter and walk toward BART. The faint chatter of the others lingers behind me:
“You should go to MY doctor.”
Their voices fade, but their community feels as solid as the brick walls I’m leaving behind.
Waiting for the train, I flip through the pages of my notebook filled with faces whose names I don’t know. The faces stare back as if withholding their stories until I’ve earned the right to hear them.
* * *
Orleans Saltos is a Latine writer and illustrator born in New Orleans to Ecuadorian immigrants and raised in rural southeast Louisiana. She has contributed to award-winning books, educational materials, and magazines as a professional children’s book illustrator. She is an active Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators member, serving as regional social media manager. Under the pen name Orleans Saltos, her fiction and creative nonfiction appear in The WriteLaunch, New Feathers Anthology, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and Blue Earth Review.