Bob Sanders: AU Theater takes me back to school

Got a card from the Auburn University Theatre Department informing me about the theatre menu for the summer.

It said that the first serving will be “The Complete History of America (abridged).” You can see that it would need to be abridged to run in one night. The picture on the front of the card gives an indication of the tenor of the play: George Washington and Ben Franklin with Groucho Marx type mustaches and glasses. Sounds good, “A ninety-minute roller coaster ride through the glorious quagmire that is American History.” It runs June 18-22. There are pre-performance dinner and theatre packages available.

Sounds like a lot of fun. And it reminds me of the similar events of my elementary school days.

Oh, we had some. Even when I was in the first grade. That’s when I went through a panic-producing episode. In this production, which included nearly everyone from the first through the sixth grades, a few of us were supposed to be red birds and a few were supposed to be robins. Our mothers, of course, had to make the costumes. I was supposed to be a robin. But somehow the instructions got mixed and mother made me a red bird costume. Oh, the frustration, the anxiety. What would I do? How could I face the world? They got it straightened out.

There was a production like that every year. We’d practice for weeks. Classes? Think of the show. The show must go on, people. We had a marvelous play period teacher in our school, Miss Crawford. She would play softball and kickball with us, and on rainy days, she’d play the piano as we did the Grand March in the auditorium. And she would play the piano for our grand productions.

The biggest one was when I was in the sixth grade. It was not a good year, study wise. A war was raging (it was in all the papers), and our teachers kept leaving to be with their husbands or something. We must have had five different teachers that year. But we found time to put on our History of America play. No. It was more than that. It was a United Nations
extravaganza.

I remember it well. I was Benjamin Franklin in one scene. But my show-stopping moment came during The Westward Movement. My friend Jaybird Carr and I both did a little guitar picking in those days, and there was a scene with a bunch of cowpokes sittin’ around the ol’ campfire, singin’ some Western songs. Jaybird and I were the main ones. We picked and sang “Back in the Saddle Again” and “I’m Going Home to Mother When the Work’s All Done This Fall,” and maybe one or two others. It was a touching picture, as the light bulbs softly glowed under the red crepe paper.

The finale involved a parade of representatives from all of the United Nations, marching down the aisle and up on the stage. Virginia Turner, a blonde, was a little Dutch girl, I remember, and cousin Willadine was a Dane or one of those blondish people.

I’ve forgotten a lot, but if you people in the Theatre Department need any advice, I might be able to help.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.