The Mouse And The Moonbeam

The best Christmas I ever knew was wiped clean from my memory for forty-four years. I still can't recall the event, itself, but nothing much except giving birth has equaled the thrill I got when the Christmas of '57 was finally revealed to me in 2001. But we must first go back to 1952 to make sense of the tale.



Four must be the perfect Christmas age, the year the wonder really takes over. Although I wouldn't be a student there for another two years, my mother took me down Ball Street from my grandmother's house to Edgeville School's auditorium that December to see the students' Christmas play. The school would soon be named for William Sydney Porter--Greensboro, North Carolina's beloved O'Henry, author of "The Gift of The Magi." But on that Christmas it was still merely named for the center of the universe, my own sweet neighborhood and the blocks around my grandfather's corner store. Rows of curved, hinged wooden seats on wrought iron frames, a small stage with dark red curtains, my first time in a hushed and darkened playhouse...this part, I remember in minute detail. I can smell the green dusting compound that was used to sweep the school's wide-planked floors. I can smell the nearness of my mother. We were there for a homegrown production of Eugene Field's 1912 holiday fantasy, "The Mouse and The Moonbeam."

When the curtain opened, the stage was bare except for a tall grandfather clock with a curving smile on its face, a child costumed as a mouse, and a shaft of light, the only light on the stage, illuminating a pale ballerina in repose. And a voice offstage spoke only to me, calling me by a name that was new to me but undeniably mine.

From that gentle beginning, a lurid fable unfolded, both shocking and soothing, in the most rococo language, of what can befall a mouse for failing to believe in Santa Claus. There was a wicked brindle cat compared to Satan, a sister mouse maimed for foolishness. The old clock had hinged eyelids and eyeballs that rattled as they moved; he ticked and clacked, speaking of Time and Death, enabling all the shivery parts. "The cat that deprived my sister of so large a percentage of her vertebral colophon was the same brindled ogress that nowadays steals ever and anon into this room...!" Too graphic for a four year old, but those were the days of Grimm's Fairy Tales and I was little Dear-my-soul, gripping my fearless mother's hand. Stories always ended well in those days in my neighborhood and this one did, too, although not without the death of a young shepherd and a dramatic virgin birth in a stall.

Never mind. The imperative thing--the unforgettable thing--was that the moonbeam danced en pointe within the moving spotlight, adored by the old clock and the little mauve mouse and every eye in the hall. Howdy Doody had not prepared me for The Moonbeam. I had never seen anything so enchanting and I'm not sure I took in another word of the play...something on and on about exotic cheeses in mousey dreams and mankind in need of redemption and who cared? I was enraptured, transported into a world that promised something better than Saint Nicholas: a spot-lit white radiance, a curving grace and spell-binding beauty in a tutu.

Walking out into the cold Carolina night after the play, my mother said, "That was Susan Eubanks, a big girl in sixth grade. She's so-and-so's daughter and somebody-or-another's cousin, and she takes dance at Felicia's Studio." And, on the spot, I had a goal in life. I'd never heard a more beautiful name than Susan Eubanks. I would be Susan Eubanks. I would find Felicia's Studio.

The next day I told my second cousin Grace Ann about the play, breathing, "I saw Susan Eubanks dancing...!," in the same tone you would use for Nadezhda Pavlova, a whisper of royalty. The name was a spell I sighed to myself...Susan Eubanks...a spell that would make my neck long and white, my arms lithe, my toes strong enough someday to hold my whole weight. The toes, I could already tell, would be the hard part. I worried about my toes.

Felicia's Studio, my mecca, turned out to be a loft space above a shop on Greene Street in downtown Greensboro, where I spent every Saturday afternoon until puberty. In recital, I became a Sugar Bear and a top-hatted boogie-woogie tapper, among other things. I recall no elegant solos, no dreams-come-true. When I was eleven, we moved from the center of the universe out to Groometown Road near Sedgefield for the lake, and the stables, and the woods.

Forward to 1959. In the development of a dancer, eleven and twelve are crucial years, the years to begin en pointe work if the dancer is serious and strong enough. With the long drive back into town from our new house and a commitment of several dance classes a week for en pointe, my working parents would have spent every leisure hour in a car. And toe dancing "mangles the feet," my mother said. My father chimed in with something he learned in the infantry, "You have to take care of your feet and they'll take care of you."--lame words flung in the face of glory. I could have insisted; I might have prevailed. But I was an only-child and my job was the peace of the household. In the move, I'd lost my daily life with my cousins and my friends at Porter School, the proximity of my grandmother's house and my grandfather's corner store, and the entire center of the universe. I was not to know who I was again for many years. I had a training bra. I figured Fate was not to be argued with.

In the winter of 2001, I was well into my fifties. My own daughter had danced in white, graduated from college, and married earlier that year. My mother was dying, but we didn't know it that day as I sat at her kitchen counter going through a box of old photos with her. We talked about my daughter's grace and her love of dance. I asked my mother if she remembered Susan Eubanks as The Moonbeam, and she said, "You were smitten. And, when it was your turn, you were too young for toe shoes, but your ballet was just as good as Susan's."

My turn. My turn. I can't breathe right now, remembering what she said.

"You were The Moonbeam. When you were nine, they put on the play again at the school and you danced The Moonbeam. You were perfect."

And I still didn't believe her. But I had the ghost of a memory of tulle, of a complete stillness and hush, of a lifting in the diaphragm, of motes moving all around me in a bright, white light, of the sense of something big and unseen out beyond the light.

My mother went back to the cabinet for another box and brought me this relic, the program, entitled "The Mouse And The Moonbeam. Porter School. Thursday Evening, 7:30 p.m., December 12, 1957.

There were my friends I had lost. There was my cousin Marsha, who would die in the late Spring of 2001, just a month before my mother; she was cast in the play as an Angel. And my youngest cousin, Dianne, in the choir. There was Joan Knighten, my grandmother's little ringleted neighbor, a Flower; and jolly Michael Hornaday from the corner of Textile Drive and Tucker Street, as a Wise Man. There was my oldest friend, Steve Newton, as the Olive Tree, and my best friends, Cynthia Kivett and Pat Phoenix singing for Mrs. Smith's fourth grade class, my class. There were the small boys, Victor Schoolfield and Art Bulla, both favorites of mine for wit and kindness, and Page Dunlap, a gentle giant and my protector, who would one day send me a silk dress from Vietnam.

All the names had faces again; all my dear old universe came back to me. And I had danced in the light. I see from this distance that I have had a small life, but with moments so bright, they strike me blind.