Happy Birthday, Wanda June [antikvár]

ABOUT THIS PLAY This play is what I did when I was forty-seven years old -when my six children were children no more. It was a time of change, of goodbye and goodbye and goodbye. My big house was becoming a museum of vanished childhoods -of my vanished young manhood as well. This was on Cape Cod. There were widows all around me - in houses like mine. I was drinking more and arguing a lot, and I had to get out of that house. I was supposedly a right-handed person, but I found myself using my left hand more and more. It became the hand that did most of the giving and taking for me. I asked my older brother what he knew about this. He said that I had been an ambidextrous infant. I had been taught to favour my right hand. 'I'm left-handed now, and I'm through with novels,' I told him. 'I'm writing a play. It's plays from now on.' I was writing myself a new family and a new early manhood. I was going to fool myself, and spooks in a novel couldn't do the job. I had to hire actors - pay them to say what I wished them to say, to dress as I wished them to dress, to laugh, to cry, to come or go when I said to. Strictly speaking, I was rewriting an old play of mine. But that old play had been written by a right-handed stranger fifteen years my junior. Fifteen years ago my wife and I conducted a Great Books programme on Cape Cod. And when we read and