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 and spend hours upon hours in the library (a remarkably well stocked trove of theatre treasures.) It was a time when there weren't many students in the room, becuase classes were at full tilt, so there was always the sounds of singing and acting traveling up through the air well, 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 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! how I loved his compact book, The Fools of Shakespeare. Mr. Frederick Warde seemed like a marvelous chap from another time. And 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 Grace, 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.