Stage in Wellsville
Saturday, December 6th, 2008
Maybe as many as 1,000 Xs and scuff marks are imprinted on the wooden stage top. The criss-crosses made with tape once identified a particular place on stage for an actor to stand or a dancer to step were peeled away leaving sticky bits on the grainy wood. Carved so deeply darkly into the wood, the scuffs where nervous children dragged their feet during a performance appear to be intentional, like some form of graffitti. Many of these imperfections date back to the 1950s, when the high school was brand new and the times were simpler – but not by much.
While the rest of the world has taken signicant leaps forward in technology and style, Wellsville, Kan., is still rooted by the same strengths it has always been – a farming community with a few square blocks of modern 1950s houses. But on this cold Saturday morning, the stagetop in the school’s auditiorium and the goings-on around it seemed timeless and common to any small town.
Once the harvest is in, the attention that is usually on the rolling farm properties – all seemingly divided tall lines of Oaks and Cottonwoods – turn to indoor pasttimes. Today the small auditorium space was transformed into a dance recital and bazaar. So frequently have recitals, plays and musicals been hosted in this space that no one could ever know with any certainy the number of performances that audiences have come to see.
There is only one high school in town. This small town still believes in small churches, in tight congregations, and the affinity for sprawling worhsipping facilities haven’t swept through the cobblestone streets the way they have the suburbs throughout the Midwest, which means the auditorium and gymnasium become community centers after school hours.
Though the churches are small here, god isn’t. The religious folk still make it here together – they know each other’s weaknesses and they pray and disuade the drunkards from entering bars or the one’s whose beliefs are waning to be faithful. Those are not actual examples, merely imaginations taken from a few-minute drive down its streets and through its historic downtown – and yet they feel true for any town that is this way.
Old women in sweaters and sweat shirts sit behind folding tables at the auditoriums edges watching the little girls in costumes and their parents perform, for everyone in on stage at a social event such as this. The tables are spread with peanut brittle, tobasco sauce, necklaces, crotched pillows and dish towels, old barn windows with snowmen drawn and painted on the glass, doll clothes, false license plates, pens, knives, corscrews and trinker toys.
The auditorium doubles as a lunch room. Like the old women, a boy scout troop has set up a table and is serving boiled hot dogs and chili straight from the crock pot at 10 am. They’ve come to show their support and turn a profit, to be supported, to belong to something and to learn skills that they’ll actually use over camp fires and following creeks on the Kansas prairies later, as teens. One boy steals his own bite from the chili pot when the line dwindles, adding his germs to the community pot.
Group after group takes the stage. The girls are various ages and the youngest acts are interspersed throughout the show. They older girls saunter out wearing everything from cheer outfits to more risque, almost burlesque-type garb, and the women who have grown up here and now sit in aluminum chairs selling crafts share well-intended, not malicious thoughts that can almost be heard aloud: “Un-ugh … I wouldn’t let my little girl wear that in her bedroom let alone in front of all these people! What are their mother’s thinking?”
When the show is over and the girls’ revealing outfits are covered with jump suits, the younger children and the boys who have waited patiently while their sisters danced take the floor and chase each other in hollow-sounding circles. This lasts for about five minutes until they pass behind the backdrop curtain and their parents, sitting on the stage ledge, decide the game has gotten too wild.
The new marks on the stage, if they were left at all, are undetectable. They simply faded directly into the trail of other years. Memory, it should be commonly understood in Wellsville, lives on longer than the act.
