I pause on the walk back from Palau Mission Academy to the Norton House to pose with the greenery of Palau in the background.
We arrived at the home of Ken and Julie Norton on Wednesday night. (Ken is the pastor of the main SDA church in Palau. Julie is better known to me as Julie Alvarez. We went to elementary and high school together; she was one grade above me. They generously allowed our entire team to stay in their home since they were off-island at the time. I was genuinely shocked by their generosity and trust. Letting 16 strangers stay in your home, 13 of whom are teenagers is no small hospitality! Thanks Ken and Julie! We hope that we have lived up to the trust you placed in us). It was dark when we arrived so we had no inkling of the treat that awakened us on Thursday morning. I got up around 6:30 A.M. The kids were scattered about the house in various stages of sleep and waking. Bono Girl, The Princess, & Marine were in the master bedroom. CK Girl (who’d arrived in Palau with Babs earlier that day), Holly, The Diva, and the Vice Pres were all in the Norton’s kids’ room. The Gentleman was stretched on one of the Nortons’ immensely comfortable couches, The Man on another. Adam was on a futon next to the kitchen counter, Friday on a air matteress on the floor between the living room and kitchen, and Babs and I on an air mattress in the living room behind The Gentleman’s couch. The only remaining bedroom was being used by Larry, a videographer from Texas who was also staying in the house (perhaps to keep an eye on us?). And to think we’d have to find room for three more!
Anyway, I was talking about this magical treat. I got up and made my way to the shuttered blinds, peeked through, and thought for sure this couldn’t be real. It looked a vista from some sweeping epic film, some CG-created backdrop to a romantic and exotic storyline. My words and the picture below fail to do it justice. The misty jungles, the silhouettes of the rock islands out at sea, the glow of the rising sun. It looked like a painting of paradise. I quickly opened all the blinds, and we left them open, basking in the glory of that view the rest of our stay.
The view from the Norton House
A sad side note. This was the home where a little more than two years ago the then pastor of the SDA church in Palau and his entire family (except for his daughter) were murdered by a burglar. I have to admit when we first got there, I thought about it a lot. The killings sent a shock wave through the Micronesian Pacific community and I’d heard all the horrific details of what happened. I found myself wondering if someone had died on the very spot where I lay my air mattress. I wondered if Ken and Julie ever thought about it, if it spooked them a little, as it did me. But with the time these rather macabre musings passed, as the house was filled with the joy and laughter of our team. And I supposed that’s how the pastor and his family would have wanted it. By all accounts they were an especially loving and gentle family, and the story of the pastor’s mother’s visit to Palau after her son’s death and how she extended forgiveness to the murderer, even visiting him in his jail is legend.
Thursday was the latest wake-up call we had for the entire trip. It took awhile to get going, with 14 people needing to shower, and a team of people working with Babs in the Norton’s spacious kitchen to make breakfast. Here's Bono Girl helping with breakfast on Thursday morning.
But by nine o clock the team was sprawled in the living room while I led the team worship. Then we made the short walk to Palau Mission Academy where we had the luxury of a full day of rehearsal.
Walking to rehearsal--picture in front are (L to R) the Diva and the Palauan Princess. Behind them are Bono Girl and Marine. And behind them are The Man, Friday, and the Gentleman.
There were times before we left when I felt a bit guilty for taking the team to Palau on Wednesday when our first shows weren’t until Friday. Originally we had hoped to perform at some of the other schools on Palau on Thurs. but that ended up not happening. As it was, Maria, and the final two members of the team weren’t coming out until tonight. It seemed to me that we could have saved money and time out of school by all of us coming on Thursday. But now I’m glad we did it. We needed that rehearsal time. There was a lot of material that had gotten pretty rusty, and we needed—and used—the whole day. There’s no way I could have gotten everyone to skip school in Saipan so that we could devote a whole day to rehearsal. But having all of us sleeping and eating together in a strange place made it easy to focus in on rehearsal and devote some solid time to it.
We rehearsed in the chapel at Palau Mission Academy (PMA). It was comfortable place to work with spongy carpet, air conditioning, and padded chairs perfect for laying across a row to study lines. For our first two hour rehearsal block we divided into two groups. Friday worked with Bono Girl and a cluster of other actors on some of the rougher patches of Per Chance to Dream. I worked with the rest of the team on some of our school tour material. We took a short break and then met with our volunteer barriers for the final scenes for Per Chance. We needed six “barriers” who would spend most of the play sitting stock still wearing all black and white mask they would spring in to action for the play’s climactic scene. Sit still for more than an hour? And no lines to learn? How hard can it be? Very hard. Babs played one barrier, the Rock and Marine (both of whom had joined the team after the “regular” parts of the play were cast) played two more. In our Saipan productions we had some of our teachers cover the remaining three, but they could not tour with us, so we took on three brave PMA high school seniors as volunteers. I must say they performed like pros from the beginning. No complaining, no squirming, no quitting—just solid, uncomplaining faithfulness in a thankless and demanding role.
Around 1:15 we took a two hour break for lunch. Some wonderful Palauan ladies whom we never got a chance to meet or thank provided us with boxed lunch and supper through Saturday. Eric Johnson, the PMA principal, would drop the meals off for us but we never met the chefs. Yet another example of generosity in a thankless and demanding role.
Here's the Riverside gang, walking back from the Riverside store, from L to R, Bono Girl, the Paluan Princess, the Man, Marine, and the Gentleman.
During our lunch break, Bono Girl and Marine asked if they could walk down to a store near PMA. I agreed to go with them so the three of us plus the Gentleman, and later Princess and The Man, set off on our great expedition to find The Store. We hiked down through the jungle behind the school, past a massive, stinking chicken farm echoing with the eerie chatter of a million chickens clucking at once, along a rutted orange dirt road, over a small bridge over a stagnant stream, until we at last found The Store. The Store, called The Riverside, was a bit smaller than my living room and despite the open sign on the door was locked. We were about to walk a way when a man hailed us from across the street. He came over, unlocked the store and we were free to shop. There wasn’t much. No green tea, which is what we’d all come for. But they had lemon tea so I bought some of that. They also had little plastic bottles of what looked like drinking water. However on closer examination, I saw that the label read “white wine.” White wine in plastic water bottles. I couldn’t stop laughing over that or the hand-scrawled sign behind the counter that read “Absolutely NO CREDIT. . .Don’t Even Ask.” I really wanted to take pictures for my blog but I felt bad to do it with the owner standing right there. We nursed our drinks outside the store, and the owner had one of his lackeys chop down some coconuts for us to drink as well. After having our fill of coconut water and coconut meat we made our way back to PMA where I took a 20 minute power nap on the floor of the chapel before we began our third and final rehearsal block of the day.
The best thing about Thursday was having enough time. Enough time to really get some solid rehearsal, but enough time that we never felt rushed. Enough time to take power naps and walks to The Riverside.
Rehearsals finished around six. We walked back to the Norton’s house where we had a delicious fish supper fixed by the Invisible Chefs. Then it was off to the airport to pick up the last of our team. Maria, the other adult besides my wife and me, on this trip and Cowgirl (so named because the impossibly cute faux straw cowboy hat she bought that night and wore throughout the rest of the trip) and the Rock (I want to call him variously The Messiah, or the Lord or “J” because he did such a beautiful job of portraying Jesus in several roles over the weekend, but I think that would qualify as blasphemy so we won’t do that. . .)
The rest of the team arrives. Maria and CK Girl hugging in the foreground, the Diva and the Rock hugging behind them, and Cowgirl observing joyously.
Cowgirl is one of the few members who found her way into REAL Christian Theater on her own. She had no previous connection to the group, didn’t know anyone who’d been a member. She’d just seen us perform, decided she wanted to be a part of that, and shown up for auditions last season. She’s turned out to be one of our strongest actors. She’s extremely bright (top of her entire school last year—and that with sports and theatre commitments), classically beautiful (an athletic Filipina with long dark hair and a friendly smile), and remarkably humble. For someone so young—she’s a high school junior--she seems to have an unusually solid connection to her faith, without seeming to need a constant spiritual high. I don’t think I’d ever seen her upset until this weekend and then only briefly.
The Rock joined our team this year. He’s the oldest member of REAL. He graduated from Southern High School last year and is almost an adult, really. He’s tall with a mustache and a neat haircut. He just looks older. He’s softspoken and very respectful. To be honest, we weren’t sure what to expect from him on this tour. He’d missed a lot of rehearsals and as result, virtually every major performance we’d had this year except for the dinner theater. He had a couple of key roles we’d handed to him for the Palau tour including several as Jesus, and we weren’t sure how he’d perform. Suffice it to say he more than stepped up to the plate. He wowed us!
From the airport we went to the shopping destination of choice in Palau, Ben Franklin, an old fashioned department store located just a stones throw from the SDA Elementary School in downtown Koror. (Koror is the “main” island of Palau. Though not the largest, it is where most of the businesses are and where most of the people live). We shopped till we dropped (or at least until 9:30). The big purchase that night was sunglasses. I bought a pair and so did just about everyone else, the girls favoring those oversized glamazon shades with the ornate, bling-y frames. Very rock star.
Me outside Ben Franklin with the Gentleman, the Palauan Princess, Bono Girl, Cowgirl, and Friday.
Then we went home and to bed. The next day would be full, as our show finally got on the road.
No comments:
Post a Comment