Homecrest Avenue
Silhouettes of an Accidental Family
by
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Mama kept a secret box under her bed, full of dolls and stuffed animals she had found. She collected broken things, and fixed them. The box was her hospital and she nursed everything by hand. She was forever picking things up, saving them from a terrible fate. Everything but herself. In a way she was a recycler before her time. One doll had the head stitched on. She made outfits for them from scraps, a hat and coat with fur, pajamas, and gorgeous clothes. She never wasted anything. The earth mother and fashion designer in her lingered to the end. But like her Greek forebears said, hamartia, we all have our fates. So much in this hurried life is crass and commonplace that we often fail to recognize the genuine from the false, nor what to think or how to react in the presence of quality. Indifference, disrespect, and iconoclasm are often excuses for ignorance.
Once, Mama, you showed me your umbrella collection. Umbrellas? I thought. How silly! People were always losing them- but then, to my surprise, I began to see beyond the obvious shields against the rain and deadly sun. Your umbrellas were antiques, works of art, period pieces that talked like heirlooms in a museum, especially the black one. It seemed to enervate me with a spiritual feeling. No Hong-Kong pop-up job. Umbrella was a misnomer. This was a black pongee parasol with ruffled edges out of Gone With The Wind, a straight spine and a hundred spidery ribs. An umbrella that spoke when opened like a sail catching the wind, its rigging solid sounding like the opening and closing of an oak door. It was another secret side of you, like the box of dolls. That indefinable creative urge took hold of you the day you were born. You knew it when you drew your first line, but it got buried like so many of our finest impulses. Yet it lingered until the day you died, always dancing on the edge of your imagination like a Lautrec silhouette, beckoning, beseeching you, "Take a risk," bust out of Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, Pendergast, and Wyeth; go through the crowd in Renoir's The Umbrellas, into Monet's Garden At Argenteuil and up into the mountains of Basho and Haiku, where you live now.
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About the Book
Homecrest Avenue is a humorous drama about a disenchanted, middle-aged Italian-American man. Retired with a cardiovascular bypass, he takes stock of his life on the occasion of his ninety-year-old father’s illness. In the course of sorting out his own failures and successes, reality from illusion, he gains insight about himself, his family and his mother, whose spirit permeates all throughout the book. The story moves from memories of youth to the onerous task of caring for a ninety-year-old bilious father. The father comes to live with the son, a bad idea. To stave off patricide, the family decides to put the irascible widower in a nursing home. The search is arduous, the conclusion unexpected but salutary. It’s The Actors’ Fund Retirement Home, situated on a hill in a country club setting. Here, at age ninety, the father becomes the new kid on the block, intruding his brand of excitement and romance into the staid lives of flagging residents.
About the Author
Louis A. Coppola is a produced playwright who retired from CBS. He has written for BENSON, prime time ABC/television; performed on THE LUCILLE BALL SHOW; and directed for THE LIEUTENANT, MGM/Television. He has been published by Samuel French; produced in Equity Showcase Off-Broadway; is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and Writers Guild of America. In 1986 he and his wife, Ann, co-founded The After 3 Theatre Company, Inc., a not-for-profit children’s theatre: