FRIDAY JULY 13

Thank you Whitney, LD, Jeff, Rita, Sarah, Patrick and Katie for braving the flood waters to rehearse. I'm really pumped at what I'm seeing onstage. Everyone is committing so much to this story; you're going to have audiences eating out of the palm of your collective hands.

Tonight, we touched on arranged marriages. While Doc Gibbs seems to imply that he "married a total stranger," I think he was using symbolic language to convey the fear and anxiety he felt on his wedding day rather than factually relating a bartered marriage. 

Grover's Corners is a small town- only 2642 people when the play opens. When Frank Gibbs and Julia Hersey were courting, there had to be even fewer people, perhaps 2000. The town was full of Herseys and Gibbs. They had already lived there for generations. So their extended families likely knew one another. Wilder also implies that Frank and Julia are nearly the same age, unlike Charles and Myrtle Webb. So they were probably in school together, perhaps separated by just a year or two. It seems unlikely that they had never laid eyes on one another.

Now let's look at what Doc Gibbs says:

"I was the scaredest young fella in the state of New Hampshire. I thought I'd made a mistake for sure."

If this was an arranged marriage, he would have said something along the lines of "I thought they'd made a mistake for sure." But it was his choice to marry Julia. He compares his fear to someone who might be marrying a total stranger. After all, how well DO you know your future spouse? How well CAN you know them?

Emily echoes these sentiments in the moments before her own nuptials. She's alone, she's frightened, she bargains with her father to get out of the marriage. George likewise harangues his mother because everyone is pushing him when we know good and well he chose Emily and asked her to marry him.

I think what Wilder is getting at is that the walk down the aisle is more scary than joyful. Hollywood would have you believe that you float a few inches off the floor in slow motion as rose petals swirl gently down from heaven. Real life is far more traumatic: you question the choice you have made, nothing seems right, you'd do anything to just walk away.

But as Emily and George discover, if you take that chance and commit to someone, you do experience joy. It happens not only at soda fountains, but also at kitchen tables and in bedrooms and nurseries and on back porches. This is the same joy that Emily longs for on the day of her funeral.

Thanks again for embracing this wonderful story. Be sure to take a moment to linger on the joy in your life.

Here's a wedding photo from 1890, around the time Frank and Julia Gibbs married.