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ON THEATRE - -
A theatre is more than a building. It’s a world; fantastic world, of
exotic sounds and scents: of stark lights and dreadful gloom; of fleeting-
scenes and shadows. It's a mercurial place of quick-silver laughter and
tears, of transient hopes and fears, of ephemereal success and disappointment.
Oh no, a theatre’s not brick and stone—a theatre is life.
In it there’s a magic that binds you fast within its spell. The magic
swirls with its music, shines from its lights, and throbs in the pulsating
heart of it. Once it snows you in its powerful, sightless strands, it will
never let you go for, when the theatre’s mystic essence blends with man's
bloods, it infuses him with something of itself.
It strips men of conventions and formalities, establishing ’mongst
theatre people a bond of careless, intimate friendship—however superficial
and expedient. Because of that faculty peculiar to this world to know the
theatre is to know man. Purged of all concealing customs a man cannot
but reveal himself for what he is and in the fluctuating, alternating cir
cumstances of theatre life you see man—all his experiences and reactions,
past and yet to come, compressed to a few cogent episodes.
Yes, the theatre involves work, but who minds work when it is fun ?
Who would not care to strive towards a definite, pre-determined goal or
moan about the striving when dear friends are helping too '! Monotony conies
never—but sometimes there crawls in a lethargic apathy that is the gravest.
most insidious enemy of this world. Let this indifference sap the energy,
let it drain away the theatre's life and what but death can follow? Thank
fully moods, emotions in this world are phantoms only, departing ’ere
they come and leaving how light an impression on the mind.
Yet, still they teach.
Even in the empty building a something—strange, intangible, pervades
the air. A stagey ghost of life is there whispering in its cracks, calling
softly through its ceiling and beckoning irresistibly from its stage across
the rows of empty seats. Then when the building's full of gay anticipants
how the air does come alive. How thrilling is the music, how removed the
stage, how warm the glaring lights and how awful the black gloom encircling
them. How catastrophic are misfortunes, how insignificant success.
— J. Fleming (V).

RUSH - -

Gazing back down the track of the years that have waned
We see the great progress that man has attained
Looking forward we see there’s still much to be done
But to rest just a little is a lot of fun.
Some race through life and beauty is unseen
They tarry not for the pleasure of dreams
Of things long ago or yet to be
Racing on, as a blind man never to see
A rose in the morning heavy with dew K
Or the sky in the evening in brilliant hue.

Stop, tarry awhile and find
Beauty is everywhere even to one once blind.
— G. Cunneen (IIIC2).

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