Fifty Years. Mr. Warde

FIFTY YEARS, MR. WARDE
Oh, To Live Again in Scenes of Other Days

Cut school, take the streetcar downtown, go up to the fifth floor of 450 Geary of our rehearsal building for the American Conservatory Theatre, and spend hours-upon-hours in the playscript library (a remarkably well stocked trove of theatre treasures.) It was a time when there weren't many students in the room, because classes were at full tilt, so there was always the sounds of singing and acting traveling up through the air well, which was a chimney of sound. That was the score whirling through the air as I sat on the floor of the library, a mouse consuming paper as if it were cheese. I would almost always end up sitting on the floor of one particular aisle, reading scripts. You could sit at the end against the wall and you wouldn't be in anyone's way. Consequently, this is where so many of the W's were shelved, and so I was acutely aware of being watched by Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, Frank Wedekind, Richard Wilbur, a brand new playwright named Lanford Wilson, and a theatre chap I didn't really know, but-my! Mr. Frederick Warde seemed like a marvelous chap from another time, and how I loved his compact book, The Fools of Shakespeare. I would only really investigate who he was all these years later, well 50 years later, when I would stumble upon a copy of Fifty Years of Make Believe, which was both signed by the author to one Miss Ella Gardner, and including the newspaper clippings she had clipped and pressed within the pages - of a poem he had written and had published in the trades. Miss Ella Gardner was a fan, and it was noted that Warde would sign his books at readings, and so Miss Ella surely was dazzled...as I am now.

Mr. Warde, as it turns out, spent some concentrated time in California, and in the Bay Area...and the poem in question was a sweet small rhapsody about the very Golden Gate that I was so lucky to be born near. Not a bridge, mind, until; the 1930's, but always an entryway...into a bay of sweet smelling herbs (Yerba Buena) and rivers of nightly fog.