The Team

There are two ideas on my mind, one relates to team and the other to integrating into a new community, or at least the way I do/did it. I’m not sure which to pursue so I’ll do both but one at a time. But wait just a moment, the two are related so I’ll do both together.

The French word for team is équipe. Because it is a language that we are not using every day, the word has a more profound meaning than what we think of as a team. Yet our word team, when stripped of connotations, means exactly the same thing. It is a group of people with disparate skills that work together to achieve a purpose (this is the fourth definition in the Merriam Webster dictionary after three that refer to animals.)

I worked in the shipyard for twenty-two years and like to think that I achieved a certain level of success and I did by any objective measure. Yet it only dawned on me recently that I was one member of a team of more than 20,000 people who were engaged in the building of ships. This concept didn’t dawn on me when I was working there, although I did feel that way even if I didn’t realize it.

When I went to Tenneco in Houston, Case in Racine, Case at LePlessis, or even in my own business, the realization was not there nor the feeling. I just didn’t see myself that way after NNS. Things may have worked out completely differently if I had but that is conjecture.

I seem to have always felt a need to belong to something bigger than myself, to identify with it and feel like I belonged in/to it. This is a need that has been with me since I can remember; Holy Cross, Scouting, my high school, college, the fraternity, and in a very a big way NNS & DD Co. It has also been fed by delving into the communities where we have lived because the more I knew about the place and/or the organization and the more I participated in local activities, the more of an understanding I developed and the more at home I felt.

This delving in to the community was, now that I think about it, something that was taught to me by my father, much like the parents of a baby robin teach it to find worms by showing them how; he would take me with him to various places in Saint Louis and see the history of the place. We went through neighborhoods where he would recount the way it was, to museums to see the artifacts of the past, to the “backsides” of many buildings, restaurants, theaters, and businesses, even the streets on which we rode had stories of how they got thataway.

When I went to Newport News, I took with me this idea of delving into the past and did the same thing there that he’d shown me in Saint Louis. Because NN was smaller by far than St. Louis, I expanded my view to include the entire peninsula, from Williamsburg and Jamestown, to Yorktown, Poquoson, Phoebus, Old Point Comfort, and Hampton. I spent quite a bit of time crawling the area finding gems of history, especially the old houses. Wherever I am, old houses and neighborhoods hold a fascination for me.

Then when I went to Houston, perhaps because it is so much larger, I made a science out of it. I found photography studios and went to see historical photos then went to the present locations to see how they now looked. I read history and tracked down the locations of events, I talked to people to hear how the area developed. I made plans weekly to see something new and unique to the city. In four years I knew as much as anyone who’d lived there much longer but certainly not the details necessary to put it into perspective.

I repeated some of this in Racine but quickly soured on it; it just didn’t hold my interest very long. Then when we went to England and France and Europe in general, my interest was piqued. I was lucky enough to find “A Literary Guide to Paris” and tracked down many locations that were referenced by the authors who lived there, for example Victor Hugo’s elephant in Les Miserables, and the burial location in the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I have likewise done this in Louisville. The UofL Archives are a rich storehouse of photos and I’ve driven the wheels off the car traipsing around the old City of Louisville to see neighborhoods, cinemas, parks, thoroughfares, and buildings. Like most other places I’ve been, the old houses and neighborhoods are particularly fun to see.

One reason I am drawn to acting is being a player on a team. The thing about acting that attracts me is to be in a cast, work cooperatively during rehearsals with almost no politics, developing friendships that are mutually satisfying and beneficial but not relationships that get in the way. The cast is together; we all have a script and a part to play, rehearse, perform, and then go on about our lives. The team is formed for the production and then goes away and yet there is a feeling of belonging to a larger community of performing artists who are of one mind, and on some level part of “the Theater.”

There is a history of the theater much like that of an area, an allure that includes famous actors and actresses. Yet even when associated with it in as small a way as I am, my perception of them has changed. Instead of seeing them as somehow apart from the rest of us, I see them for what they are, people engaged in a profession much the same as any other. Some are more involved in marketing efforts, taking advantage of the public persona they have. Others are quietly working at their craft to become as good at it as they can. The Leonardo Da Vinci movie at the Frazier yesterday is a good example. None of the actors was a recognized name but each was remarkably cast and performed the character with remarkable sensitivity. I am pleased to belong to it.