After all the exciting news I received this past week, I can't say that my feet are actually back on the ground.  However, I want to tell you about the theater production of To Kill A Mockingbird that I saw while I was in Monroeville, Alabama.

It wasn't held inside of a theater and I think the way in which it was shown had a lot to do with the overall effect.  The first act was outdoors on the lawn of the Old Courthouse.

Folding chairs and bleachers were set up and in the photo above the local media was there to do some interviews before the play began.

Act I took place on the front porches of the Finches, the Radleys, Miss Maudie and Miss Dubose.

The cast consisted of an amateur group of local area citizens/performers.  They come together every spring to do this live production.   I was truly amazed at the wonderful local talent!  They did a superb job.

I was also deeply moved with the soulful and beautiful voices of the Mockingbird Choir......non-professionals, but they had a wonderful gift of voice.

The second act of the play was held upstairs in the historic courtroom of the Old Courthouse.  And I think this is what made the play so dynamic.  During the intermission, the attendees made their way around the courthouse, up the stairs and into the courtroom to find a seat. 

And even though all of us knew the ending, I could feel a tension in the air as we quickly grabbed a spot on the pews before the trial began.  And when Act II started the entire audience was silent and transfixed by the performance.  Above and to my right was the colored balcony and where Scout, Jem and Dill hid to watch the trial of Tom Robinson. 

I've been a few places in the world where it was so very easy for me to resonate with an event from many years ago.  Pearl Harbor was one......as I stood there watching the fuel from the USS Arizona continue to darken the water, it wasn't 1984 to me......It was 1941 and I heard and felt what it must have been like to be there.  When I visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and we were taken behind the bookcase, up the hidden staircase and I walked through the rooms where Anne had hid with her family and where she'd been taken down those very stairs to her eventual death.....the hush that pervaded those rooms forced me to "feel" what it must have been like for all of those in hiding.  And when I joined the throngs of people in Paris on New Years Eve to celebrate the Millennium, walking along Blvd. Montparnasse toward the Eiffel Tower, with crowds laughing and popping champagne corks.....I literally "felt" what it must have been like when Paris was liberated and WWII was over.

And sitting there in that courtroom in Monroeville, Alabama.....once again, I was transported to another place, another time.  The prejudice, the hate, the unfairness of it all was there.  But so was the uplifting human spirit..........and I witnessed my favorite quote from the novel when Scout says to Atticus that Boo Radley is nice and Atticus replies, "Most people are once you really get to know them."

Indeed they are and I'll see you here next time........................