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I Search My Father’s Playbill Collection but Don’t Find What I’m Looking For, Whatever That Is

Ten black binders, neatly chronological. First show seen: The Glass Menagerie, Broadway,
               1946. Just sixteen, high school senior (skipped a grade, smart boy). Special

trip with your parents? Only child, as you sat in the dark did you see yourself
               as Tom, aspiring poet who dreams of escape? Or fear

you’d be the gentleman caller, former popular high school athlete
               now a shipping clerk at a shoe warehouse? Next, college, the city

and a roll call of classic productions: The Country Girl, Mr. Roberts, Born Yesterday.
               Musicals, too: South Pacific, The King and I, Kiss Me Kate. Post-war,

heady times, drinks at the Algonquin, Royal Roost bebop. Brando, Burton, Cobb,
               Gielgud, Harrison, Fonda. Is this why you kept them—for us to marvel

at the stars? Then, the domestic decades—less Broadway, more touring companies
               wherever we lived: A Chorus Line in Miami, Amadeus in Washington. So. Much.

Sondheim. Retirement, and at last you take to the stage! Community theater
               lead roles right off the bat: The Gin Game, The Cocktail Hour,

On Golden Pond. Not the best actor, Pete says, too self-conscious
               but I disagree—like all great stars, always at once both your character

and yourself, impossible to separate. But where are you? I look
               in these binders for the programs from this last little explosion of light

but you didn’t save them. All I find are second-tier stars in regional revivals:
               Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire.

Bill Hollands lives in Seattle with his husband and their son. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, DIAGRAM, The American Journal of Poetry, Hawai`i Pacific Review, The AccountWildnessOne, and elsewhere. He was recently named a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize.

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