Triggers to your memory....

...can be so random. I just read an entry from a fellow blogger. She talked about the Vietnam Memorial and her visit there. It made me remember the feelings that I had when I was fortunate enough to be cast in the play "A Piece of My Heart". The plays deals with the Vietnam War from the womens perspective...the characters were nurses, USO dollies, a career Army officer and a USO entertainer (Mary Jo Kincaid from Texas...who I played). The play followed their experiences through the war and the turmoil of the years after.

I had grown up with the war as part of my landscape...it was on the nightly news every evening and it was...well...just there. When you're a kid you don't really understand that something you hear about everyday can be a horrible, devastating reality. If you hear about enough...it becomes a drone...background music.

My sister was of the age that friends from high school would have been drafted. I don't remember that any of her friends were but I was still in the childhood bubble. When I got to high school, the draft was done, the rumblings to get out were mighty, and US involvement was limping to an end. The situation never quite had hit home.

Flash forward 25+ years and I am cast in this show with a brilliant group of actresses...some of whom I had worked with and some not. We start into rehearsals and the rumblings about sending soldiers to Iraq has begun. Betsey's Dad had been in Nam and everything became intensely personal for her. We talked about the protesters holding candlelight vigils in the green on the way to rehearsals (and this is not a community that would have seemed to do such things) and just the trepidation...the fear.

The play was taken from interviews of women who had lived this...we had a responsabilty to these people. Each night at rehearsal, we immersed ourselves into these womens lives...their pain and their hope and their memories. We bonded into such a tight unit. We were all scared about what could happen if we went to war...yet it seemed so surreal to be doing a play about an unwanted war while facing the prospect of another.

The final scene of the play takes place at the Wall. The first time that we did the scene in performance...I GOT it. I understood somehow what it meant. I can't explain it better than that...I just somehow understood what it meant...how it changed the people who were in country forever and how those changes paid forward in so many ways. I can't even fathom what is for someone to actually be there at the wall and touch a name.

Thank you to my fellow blogger for being inspiring and reminding me.