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From: Marquette Monthly
June 2000
Ode to a Musical - Nancy Irish
Editors note:
With the musical drama of Marquette's history and ancestry,
Beacon on the Rock, starting its second season this month at the
Lower Harbor, we wanted to bring you this journal of the play's
affect on one resident in hopes it will spur others to examine their
own roots and connections through time—and to go experience a
performance of Beacon and Haywire.
••Morning sunlight filters through white pine and glass, landing
on the old wooden floor at the foot of my rocking chair as I write.
The only sounds I can hear are the fire roaring in the kitchen
wood stove as it warms the morning and the laundry I just hung
on the drying rack behind me, and the occasional calls of blue
jays, mourning doves, and a cranky raven. All is peaceful and
beautiful here at Big Creek, and coming alive with spring. I realize
once again, as I often do now in quiet moments of solititude, how
much my life resembles that of my U.P. Norwegian
great-grandmother. I recall a powerful experience with the art of
musical drama that helped me realize my deep connection with
her.
••The finest art, to me, is that which helps our hearts perceive
important truths in a way that our minds, so prone to distortion
and narrowness, cannot. Art, if powerful enough, and if we allow
it, can help lead us from the perception to the embodiment of
truth. It can help us realize—make real—what is true. Such a
realization is precisely what I experienced last summer when I
donned a 19th-century work dress and became part of the
dramatization of my great-grandparents' time in Beacon on the
Rock. I realized no less than the truth of who I am. I also found
my voice. This is quite a gift. I share my experience knowing that
the personal is often universal, with the hope that it may help
other sons and daughters of the Upper Peninsula reap the full
benefit of the gift Shelley Russell has given us.
••My great-grandmother's name was Anna ("Ah-nah") Larsen. My
daughter Anna, who was named after her, represents the fifth
generation of Larsen women to call the U.P. woods home for a
good part of their lives. I find great comfort and strength in that,
somehow. Anna Larsen left the shores of Norway when she was
nineteen years old, watching the parents she knew she would
never see again turn into specks on the shore as her ship sailed
away. She spent the rest of her life in a clearing in the Upper
Peninsula forest, where her husband Nels and their ten children
raised enough vegetables and cows to feed and support
themselves.
••Grandpa Larsen was strict and stern, and had rigid ideas about
discipline, work and moral uprightness. The story goes that the
grocer in town trusted him above all other farmers—he never
weighed Nels's vegetables, knowing that Nels would only err on
the side of generosity.
••I have heard these and other stories of my Larsen ancestors all
my life, and have always loved the Larsen spirit that shone
through Anna and Nels's children—my great aunts and
uncles—and through my gentle, hard-working, fun-loving mother.
It was Anna's spirit that the elder Larsen's I have known seemed
to embody most—there was a quiet, unpretentious beauty and
grace about them, and they got "tickled" over simple things. It
was only when I moved to a clearing in the Upper Peninsula
woods myself, however, and started raising children, buildings,
and vegetables here, that Anna and Nels's life started to seem real
to me. Many times as I have planted seeds in the spring, stacked
firewood, or made gallons of applesauce in the fall, I have
imagined the Larsen family engaged more than a century ago in
the very same tasks, listening to the very same bird songs. How I
have yearned at times to visit them and observe them, talk, laugh,
and work with them....especially my great-grandmother. She, like
I, left her familiar world for the U.P. woods to build a better life
for her children, and I know she could teach me a lot.
••All of these stories, thoughts and feelings about my Norwegian
ancestors surfaced unexpectedly during the first music rehearsal
for Beacon on the Rock, when we started singing "Step off the
Boat..." My great-grandmother was on my mind, as she stepped
off the boat to find Nels, who had come over first to find work in
the mines, and was waiting to marry her. Also on my mind was
my music director father, whose hands I kept seeing at the end of
Rob Englehart's arms as he directed us. I hid behind my music
and cried like a child, surrounded by mostly younger people
whose concerns of the moment were more hormonal than
ancestral and sentimental.
••In the play I assumed the role of a miner's widow with one
daughter, which caused me to ponder a simple twist of fate. I
wouldn't be here, if it had been Great-Grandpa Nels that died that
day in the mines instead of the neighbor's husband. In another
serendipitous twist, the lullaby I sang in Beacon on the Rock
during a tense moment in which my character fears the death of
her young boarder Joe, is the same one I've sung many nights to
my daughter Anna during the awful tension of a bad asthma
episode, fearing she wouldn't survive the night. I have since
learned that the Larsen family often sang "All Through the Night"
around the piano. I am beginning to understand what Shelley
meant when she commented to the cast that if we bring our real
life experiences to our roles on stage, our characters—and our
lives—become more real.
••The fateful intertwining of lives in the forming of a community
was another truth that was realized at Frazier's boathouse theater.
We were a cast of many ages, beliefs, and backgrounds, and
despite the usual dramas involved in people coming together with
a common goal, we learned to work together, and eventually
enjoy and appreciate one another (to varying degrees, as in a real
community!). We didn't face anything as trying as a mining
accident, but rehearsals were long, and it sure was hot some
nights up there on stage. We formed a community out of diversity
and shared challenges, both on and off stage.
••Playing out my great-grandmother's story in Beacon on the
Rock had a remarkable affect on the bittersweet yearning I had so
long felt for her. The experience transformed my deep longing to
be with her into a deep knowing that she is with me, because she
is in me. I, in part, am her. I feel her now in my blood and in my
bones, in my smile as I watch the red squirrels chase and quarrel,
and in my hands as I knead my daily bread.
••I remember a summer day during the month of Beacon
performances en I had washed my work dress costume and hung
it out on the line next to my own cotton summer work dress.
Later in the day when I was going about my outdoor business,
the scene caught my eye as the two dresses flapped in the breeze,
side by side among the sheets and towels and blue jeans. I was
taken aback by the poignancy of it. Wendell Berry wrote, "we
can't know who we are if we don't know where we are." Beacon
on the Rock helped me to see this land more clearly, and the
achievements, heartaches and indomitable spirits of the people
who came to this land, and of those who were already here.
Beacon on the Rock can help us understand where and who we
are, through the dramatization of where and who we have been.
And thank you, Shelley Russell, for your gift of illumination.
Whatever evolves I know that my life will be good, because I
finally know where I stand, inside and out.
••I stand on good ground.
—Nancy Irish
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