Me and my shadow

Me and my shadow

Strollin’ down the avenue

Me and my shadow

Not a soul to tell our troubles to

Billy Rose, 1927

In my family photo archives there are two color photos of our mother, Bette. In one, she’s walking down a set of wooden steps dressed in a tuxedo and top hat, with a walking stick in her hand. One step down from her is a much younger woman in the same outfit. The music has started, perhaps just before the first lyrics above, as the two mirror each other’s steps to the song.

Through various clues we arrived at 1994 for this performance on the stage of the community room at Spencer-Ripley Methodist Church, putting it five years after our father’s death and Bette’s age at 72. The choreography may have had them walking up the steps and offstage at the end of the song:

And when it’s twelve o’clock

We climb the stairs

And we never knock

For there’s nobody there

None of us saw the performance, but my sister remembers that Bette choreographed it. I wonder if she borrowed any steps from Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr.’s 1962 performance I found on YouTube, and clicked on with hesitation: ‘No, please, this is not going to be Sammy (black) following Frank (white) as his shadow?’ But no, they trade places throughout.

The second photo is of my mother alone on stage, holding her top hat over her head, looking up and smiling, as though she, or her shadow, is telling her, ‘Well done.’

Bette was shy outside her circle of family, friends, and neighbors, but shy people are often drawn to theater—it lets them play their inner lover, clown, hero, villain. There more here, though, I think. Bette stepped outside the shadow of her husband, a shy person himself with a genial side, who stole down to his basement workshop evenings after work to carve birds and fish and mount them on castoff wood. Bette became an independent, active woman for well over twenty years, as likely many women who survive their husband’s do, whether recognized by Vanity Fair and Vogue or not.

‘Me and my shadow’ was written and first performed in 1927 near the end of the Roaring Twenties and in the shadow of the Stock Market crash of 1929, though Billy Rose and almost everyone else didn’t see it. Sammy and Frank were performing in the shadow of racism in America with the next stage of the Civil Rights Movement gaining momentum.

Shakespeare knew all the world’s a stage. Does this mean our selves outside social interactions are our ‘true selves?’ No, that’s too easy. It lops off too much our lives, although more repressive societies (or maybe even more ‘presentational’ versus person-based cultures, like ours?) may tilt the scales toward that argument.

And grief? There’s grief for the self you can’t show others, maybe can’t even find the key to anymore, that may send you fleeing to the magical fakery of theater where you can claim you were only acting a part, though the one that made you feel most alive.

‘Something happens’ to all of us. For Bette, it may have been her father’s death in her teens when cancer was a word that rarely passed people’s lips outside the doctor’s office. Or being a ‘housewife’ for so long, she and her husband playing the assigned roles of their times. When her independence faded into poor health, leaving home to live with her daughter was the right thing to do, but Bette grieved the loss of her home and neighborhood where she raised four children, and over the loss of her independence. I’m guessing she remembered the tip of the hat she gave herself on stage, which modeled for her, maybe, the person she would become both onstage and off for the next two decades and more.