It was not a marriage made in heaven. Petunia Valley’s fair board and the Persephone Little Theatre may have been hatched in the same log cabin 150 years ago, but they split up almost immediately and have lived separately for six generations. So when we heard that the two groups had joined forces to fundraise for a new building to house sheep and Shakespeare, a few of us raised our eyebrows.
“Oil and water, isn’t it?” I asked my friends in the Kingbird Café.
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“Mink and manure, I would say,” replied Vern Bunton.
“The herbal and the herbicidal,” added Bob Pargeter.
But we kept our thoughts to ourselves, remembering that Orville and Wilbur Wright had plenty of people like us watching them try to get their first airplane off the ground.
The push for all of this came from the new artistic director for the Little Theatre, Grant Stegner, an elegant young man with a gold earring. I guess he’s not so young, but people seem to age more slowly when they live inside under low lights the way theatre people do. Grant inherited the Little Theatre’s sizeable debt and received an eviction notice from their rented quarters upstairs in the bowling alley at about the same time the fair board decided to halt operations until the economy improved. Grant thought maybe the two groups might do better if they combined their efforts and finally put up a decent building on the swampy fairgrounds east of town.
His concept was pretty good. Grant proposed a fundraiser to kick off the building campaign based on the Myth of Persephone. In a sound and light show performed in the Agri-Bowl, the natural outdoor stage area where they usually do the combine demolition derby and the midget tosses, he would bring to life the story of beautiful Persephone, goddess of spring, stolen away by her evil Uncle Hades, Prince of the Underworld.
Grant liked the parallels between Persephone’s story and the whole business of food production, because Persephone’s mother Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, went into a steep depression with the loss of her daughter and all the crops withered back into the ground. Great Zeus looked down on this situation and ordered Hades to give Persephone back to her mother for six months of the year.
It might have worked at another site. Even in a good year, it takes three sump pumps to drain the water off the fairgrounds. This has not been a good year. The volunteers were barely able to keep the water level from rising past the first row of seats in the WaterBowl, as they call it. They might have succeeded if two thousand people hadn’t flocked into the grounds and tripped the circuit breaker on the septic tank pumps.
It was raining hard during the telling of the Persephone story, but folks were impressed at how hard the people on stage were working to bring us this ancient story despite the possible risk of electrocution. Anyway, the critical moment occurred when lightning hit the stage and poor Grant tore off his laurel leaf crown and jumped on it and said some bad words and then wailed, “It’s a mess! Why don’t they all just go home?”
And Bert McNabb, the lifetime volunteer, who was playing the part of fleet-footed Hermes, messenger of great Zeus, (although he had been off stage several times resetting the circuit breakers) stepped forward and said, “They’re not going home because they’re Presbyterians. They may be wet but they’re not cold. They’ve paid 35 bucks and they want to see a show.”
So Lorie Pargeter and Chloe Bell, who had been playing Persephone and Hecate, came to the microphone and sang Bird in a Gilded Cage, just like they did when they were in the Irish Derry Airs choral group, years ago. Then Bert brought out a guitar and told some jokes and recited some of his cowboy poetry. The crowd loved it. Even Grant recovered enough to do a patter song called “At the End of Every Rainbow There’s a Crock.” It brought the house down.
When the sun came out next morning the two groups counted up their winnings and found they’ve made enough to get some building plans drawn up and prepare the site. Everybody is asking what the next event will be.
Dan’s latest work, “Fair Play” tells the story of a merger between Persephone Twp.’s fair board and theatre group. It premieres at Theatre Collingwood August 18 to 27.
