Exceptional one of the best times of my life Always Leave 'Em Laughing by Mary Furlong The time of my life: writing prompt entry

The best time of my life? How could I -- or anyone -- choose just one. There are so many happy moments, so many happy days and years, so many different kinds of happiness. Given the impossibility of the task, I'll choose just one -- the best day of my life in the theatre. Notice that I spell it 't-h-e-a-t-r-e,' not t-h-e-a-t-e-r.' That's my way of establishing myself as a genuine theatre person. Not a theatre success, mind you. But a theatre person with a long, happy history of life upon -- and behind -- the wicked stage. To begin: a little bit of that history. My Brownie Scout leader was an actress, prominent in both professional and amateur show biz in our community. Toni, as we were told to call her, persuaded her radio friends to let us perform a play on the air. (Yes, radio. That tells you how long ago this was.) I played the leading role in the broadcast, mentally counting the pages of the script as I dropped each one, in turn, to the floor so that the microphone wouldn't pick up the sound of rustling pages. We must have done okay in that show, for Toni followed up with a little play that we took on the road to surrounding Girl Scout troops. I played a chicken in that offering, another leading role -- a costume piece, as you might imagine. The following year, when I was in third grade, I wrote a play and directed and produced it in my living room. The audience included several boys from the neighborhood, most of the girls having been dragooned into service as cast members. One of the boys wore a suit and tie for the occasion, a detail that I remember with clarity. He, a friend to this day, doesn't recall it at all, signifying that this wasn't his best memory -- not even close. Anyway, the dye was cast. Even during my pre-teen and teen years, when a congenital bad-hair-day syndrome precluded my participation in any drama other than my own, I thought of myself as a theatre person -- a serious theatre person. All through high school and college, I found ways to make myself useful to whatever drama department was at hand. After that, I not only worked backstage on Little Theatre productions, but also served on the Board of Directors and wrote newspaper releases and all kinds of stuff like that. I'm not sure just why everything changed when we did "Summer and Smoke," one of those serious Tennessee Williams numbers that were all the rage at the time. The more staid members of our audiences, who probably represented the last remaining members of the Noel Coward fan club, received the play kindly, with remarks like: "Well, that was different. Well done, but ... different;" "There are people like that. I don't know any of them. But I'm sure it's true to life;" "The set is wonderful;" "My, how do they learn all those lines;" and "That one scene was really funny." That one scene really was funny. In fact, the whole thing was funny if you looked at it from a certain angle. And that's how I tended to look at things -- from an angle. From that point of view, I noted the herky jerky way the lights went on and off between the fourteen scenes, the odd collection of patients who visited the dissolute doctor's office, the very fact that the cast included a dissolute doctor in the first place, the supposedly southern drawls that varied from actor to actor, the iconic statue in the park that had taken days to create and that served no other function than to be the statue in the park. Oh, this was a very funny tragedy indeed. On the last day of the run, I jotted down my from-an-angle observations in the form of a skit, called "Simmering Smoke Signals." It was all in rhyme, with a meter suggestive of the beat of a tom tom. The tom tom beat served the dual purposes of justifying the title and giving the feel of a musical, a form of entertainment that most of our clientele would have preferred to Tennessee Williams, no matter how trendy he might be. That evening, I shyly showed the script to a few friends on the stage crew, who in true Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland spirit, chorused: "Let's put on this show." So, we did. At the end of the real performance, someone yelled to the audience to keep their seats (which, to my utter amazement, they did), someone planted a cigarette between the statue's lips, the lighting technician manned his station, and the show after the show went on, with the dissolute doctor acting as prompter, one of the actresses taking over as lead performer, and the stage crew filling in all the other performance gaps. Even though I wrote the lines, I remember very few of them now. What I do recall is the gigantic wave of laughter that greeted the opening ones. It was the most wonderful sound I had ever heard -- people laughing at what I had written. And laughing. And laughing. A tsunami of laughter, it seemed. They laughed when the actress gave a deeply meaningful reading of some lines about 'bought red lips.' They cheered when the dissolute doctor shouted from the wings, "It's on page fo-ah, and Ah am not goin' to say ennathin' mo-ah." They laughed every time the lights blinked. And when Pete -- once a construction crew director, now a star -- died in the newly licensed dissolute doctor's office -- well, you had to be there. Okay. Okay. I'll tell you: Pete staged this tortuous death scene -- gasping, clutching his chest, rolling his eyes, all kinds of contortions. Then, just as he fell to the floor, the lights went out -- those blinking lights. "Hey. Nobody saw me die," complained Pete. "Die again, Pete," roared the audience. And to thunderous applause, Pete stood up and died again. Well, needless to say, I was hooked. I wrote dozens of little shows after that. I, myself always laughed as I wrote those silly lines. But it was the laughter of others that truly warmed my heart. It still does. Once, during a little musical review, the director pulled me to the edge of the curtain and pointed out at the audience. "Look at them, Mary," he said. "Look at how happy they are. That's what you do. You write happy shows." Of course, I was pleased by his kind assessment. It was a happy moment for me as well as for that audience. But nothing can match the thrill that I felt on that glorious evening of my comedy writing debut, when "Simmering Smoke Signals" brought down the house. Writing Prompt Write a short story. The topic is: The best time you ever had in your life. It can be as an adult or as a child. Please keep it clean. Minimum length 100 words. Maximum Length 4,000 words.

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