Theater in the Snow

On this first working weekday after the inauguration of our new, freshly-minted President Trump, I felt strongly that I should write about something completely different, as in far, far away from politics, government or anything else typical.

Last week I wrote a piece about meeting people for the first time in our respective sixties, and how fascinating their lives are if you just sit back and listen to their stories.  I am certainly one to swear to that, as this site has more than enough of my own stories that I once thought interesting enough to document.

But I forget them, too, even ones I had to tell.  And such was the case when last week I was reminded of something that had happened to me 40 years since.

I was, in 1977, acting professionally at night in Boston, while doing some IT work during the day, programming for the old Burroughs Corporation.  Burroughs made computers, mostly for banks, before being merged with the equally old Sperry Corporation into what is now called "Unisys".  My friend Neil Ferguson also was at Burroughs, except he was an engineer working in a rather vital facility downtown that did the data processing for multiple large banks and, I'm told, drew over 10% of all the electrical power consumed in eastern Massachusetts.  It was called "Bankers Data Processing" or "BDP"

In the fall of that year, I was engaged to play the lead role in a downtown production of The Fantasticks, a very long-running piece that is still generating royalties for its creators to this day.  The lead, "El Gallo", gets to sing "Try to Remember", the one song from the show that everyone knows.  And I sang it, and did the role, for months, for eight performances a week -- Wednesday and Thursday night, two Friday night performances, a matinee and two evening shows Saturday, and a Sunday matinee.  Whew.

At the time we lived in a third-floor flat in the Brighton section of Boston, about seven miles west of the downtown theater district, an area that included the Charles Playhouse.  The Charles had two professional stages, a full-size playhouse and the "cabaret", which was where The Fantasticks was running.  In the playhouse was the long-running Boston company of "A Chorus Line."  Some memorable names were in that production in the lead roles.

On Sunday, February 5th, 1978, with the show well into its run, a heavy snow began falling after I had returned home from the Sunday matinee.  I went to work downtown the next morning with the snow still going strong -- in Boston, the buses and trains go through almost anything -- but by noon we were sent back home with instructions to return when we were called back.

My friend Neil, who also lived in Brighton, had no such option.  His job was vital, keeping all that computing equipment going that kept the New England banking industry going.  Burroughs immediately rented a big suite at the Park Plaza hotel downtown for a week.  Needing 24/7 staff coverage, three shifts, they told all the dozen BDP field engineers, Neil included, to get themselves there and plan to stay there for a while so they could easily walk right over to work.  By Monday night he was already there.

By Tuesday morning, 29.1 inches of snow covered the city, which immediately banned not only vehicle traffic on its streets (except for police, fire and food-delivery trucks), but also the MBTA, the public transit that went everywhere.  With three-foot drifts covering streets and tracks, no buses were on the streets, and even subway trains were shut down, with no reopening time known (it would be Thursday before the first trains, to a few areas, were allowed).

On Tuesday night, I got a call from Norm Goodman.  Norm was the producer of The Fantasticks, and apparently he was not interested in losing a night's house, even though it was unclear who would actually make up that house.  So he informed me that the Wednesday night performance was "on", and I needed to figure out how to get myself there in time to play El Gallo.  I pointed out that I had no way to get there with the closed roads and the non-existent MBTA service nor, I also mentioned, would an audience.  Norm said in so many words that it was my problem, and I had a contract.

So sure enough, the next morning I called Neil to see if I'd be able to crash in the emergency Burroughs Park Plaza suite they were using for the BDP team.  I threw a few things in a bag, put on a heavy coat and boots, and started out the door.

Now, I know that the generations before mine took great pride in telling stories of how they walked miles to school every day ("Shoes?  You had Shoes?).  But where those just might have been a tad exaggerated, this was not.  I walked seven miles in (mostly) thirty inches of snow and got to the Park Plaza in the afternoon, tossed my clothes in a corner of the suite, and walked a block over to the theater.

Yes, if memory serves, all of the cast showed up in time, though none of them lived nearly as far as I did; most were already downtown.  One way or the other, we did The Fantasticks that night.

And we did have an audience.  It was not a big one, but it was an audience.  I remember it because every single person in the seats that night was part of the production of "A Chorus Line" from upstairs, whose producer had had the good sense to cancel for their Wednesday night's performance.  With nothing else to do, they came downstairs to watch us, doubtlessly thinking that our producer was nuts and our cast was a very unlucky bunch.

After the performance, Norm decided that maybe it wasn't worth opening the house anymore, and mercifully cancelled the rest of the week's shows.  I went back to the Park Plaza to grab a night's sleep and wait for subway service to return, with the noisy BDP engineers coming and going between their shifts.  Next morning I learned that the MBTA had opened a few subway train lines, including one that would get me within a couple miles' walk of our home.  A few hours later, I was finally there.

I was driving a 1969 MGC-GT at the time.  It was around the corner from the flat, at an auto service place getting repaired (temperamental MGs perpetually were in the shop).  I walked by the shop and, even though I knew where the car was, I couldn't see it.  It had been buried beyond a shred of visibility in a four-foot drift.  It was late February before I got the car back.

The production lasted a few more months, all at that eight-shows-a-week schedule, and it was the last professional theater production I ever did; we left Boston not too long after, for good, and that was that.

Norm Goodman passed away in 2013 and, save for the accompanist (the actor Tom Gilligan, one of my all-time favorite people ever), I have not kept up with any of the other cast members -- I'm not sure I remember any of their names now, actually, and I threw away the Playbill from that show, along with a lot of things, when we left Virginia last year.  But the memory and the story are still there, and I'm glad to tell it.

Hope you feel better now :)

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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