When I was a young child and thought with a young child's mind, I did things then that I now look upon and wish that I could, again, see them with the eyes of my past.
      It was at the age of nine or ten that I lived in a small Ukrainian town in the heart of Alberta, where the summers were dry and dusty and the winters were as bitter as could be. And so, not by chance, after school on those winter (days) you would have been able to see a group of children moving towards the old abandoned theatre that stood near our school, seeking refuge from the wind and privacy from probing adult eyes.
      There were only about fifteen of us as I remember, at any given time, who would gather at that old theatre and though its last picture had faded from the screen many years before, the drama and life of those fifteen or so children continued to enrich that great old building, keeping it living.
      This was the Stardust Theatre, and when I first set my eyes upon its bulking mass I felt the fear only a young child creates for the sake of fun. Its front door and windows had long since been boarded up, and there were obvious telltale signs of loose boards and easy accesses where travelers had entered. I imagined countless images of bank robbers holed up in its depths counting their loot quietly and listening for the sirens, or for the escaped insane man called "The Hook" who waited just behind one of the loose boards at the door, waiting for me to came just one foot closer so he could pull me into his darkness and do things only a child's mind could dream up.
      For the first while after we moved to that town, I dared not to enter the shadows of the monstrosity for fear of becoming lost in it's depths, and it wasn't until the day my older brother and his best buddy, Jeff, pulled me in by force and brought me into the Stardust interior. Taking me in, as well, into the private workings of a children's hierarchy. We were a group, and though we hung together as a family inside that movie house, rarely would we be seen with each other away from it. We had no name, as a gang, that I recall; whenever we talked about us we were "everybody".
      Most of the members of our group were boys, and although there were a few girls, you could see right away by the way that they dressed and acted, you'd get a punch in the nose if you called them a girl to their face.
One of these girls was Elsie Desurlie, and even now I can still admire her bravado. She had the biggest balls out of us all and she proved her heritage to our "throne", as it was referred to, by giving all of us a sound beating, individually, at one time or another. But by heart, I knew she was good, for whenever she saw us fighting amongst ourselves, she would always intervene, and we would hold court and she was always fair.
      It was Elsie who first introduced me into the world of acting. She would be up on the stage, stomping around in the shreds of an old velvet curtain that had long since been turned into a royal robe, shouting commands to imaginary soldiers, fighting a battle, the enemy only known to her at the time.
      And so began my short life as an actor, for when I was, after my initiation, allowed on the stage, I believed that the eyes of the world were upon me, waiting for me to perform.
      Often I would sit in the audience, watching, as some of the other older children would play always a battle or war. And thru these battles, real life would emerge with a bloodied nose or black eye.
      This was also the base of the hierarchy, the stronger being generals and colonels and so on down the line.

David was a boy in my class who was also one to frequent these gatherings and at one point in time, his father, who taught at our school, died a long and painful death battling cancer in the hospital. For two months after his father's death, David was not seen at the Stardust and when he did return to our gatherings, he was not the same as he had been. He would sit among the seats in the back and was always looking at his hands as they lay unmoving in hi lap, and when he did join in on the stage, he always seemed to have his mind elsewhere and often a few minutes would wander back to the back of the theatre or disappear thru the splintered boards of the back door.
      One day, when the attendance was low, myself and about five others, including Elsie and David, were having a heated battle aboard our pirate ship, engaged in battling of a ship of our most feared and hated teachers who were trying to come aboard. As usual, there was much shouting and running about the stage as we filled the imagined weak spots in our defense, when David collided with another boy and was quite suddenly thrown to the floor.
      I don't remember if he had yelled or not when he landed, but when he sat up, I can remember seeing tears in his eyes. He had caught his hand on a nail in the floor, and there was a gash that went up and down the fleshy part of his palm below his pinky.
      So there he sat, with his hand full of blood and his eyes full of tears. All of us stood watching, waiting, for what I don't know. After a moment, as David's crying grew into full body wracking shudders, Elsie sat down beside him and put her arms around him as though, in her mind, she was cradling one of her soldiers struck down in battle.
The only sound I can remember hearing now, thinking back on this, was of how David huffled and snuffled himself back into silence. He turned his eyes from his torn hand and looking at Elsie, he said, "My Dad died," as though he had just been told and was now feeling the shock of it.. Then the tears began again, but this time David was not alone in his sorrow, for I could see that Elsie was also crying as I sat down with them, wanting to be close and fearing to touch.
The other children there as well sat down and we formed a closer circle and did a lot of floor staring as we each in our own way remembered David's father, and who he had been to us.
      After a while David began talking about what he had been feeling, and though I remember nothing of the words, the feelings he portrayed live on in my mind and gut.
      When he was done speaking, and silence ruled the Stardust once more, Elsie got up and walked to an area on the stage where the cold winter sun shone in thru a vent window near the ceiling that Elsie had shattered with a stone to create just this effect. And there she sat, head hung low, as dust motes played cat and dog about her in the light, swirling lazily thru the air.
      We all sat and watched her, and after a moment, or hours, she lifted her head. The sun shone right down on her tear stained face, and though I knew she could see nothing of us but a dim outline in the shadows of our universe, I felt as though she was looking right into me, and she began to speak. She began by telling us how she hated her mother and how she wished she was a boy so that she wouldn't have to listen to her mother nag at her for looking like one, and on she went.
      I had never seen this side of any of my friends and found in myself new feelings for these children that I sat with. A new sense of bonding, or family, arose in me, that weekday afternoon as we all sat together in that world that was showing itself to us as we watched Elsie feel her pains and sorrows, sharing them with us. And forever after, Elsie was changed. We all were changed in our own way, I know, but in Elsie it was the most evident and dramatic. At first is it was just in our plays, for now, there were no more battles and Elsie was no longer a "King" as we had so often referred to her. Now we were families and neighbours working things out amongst ourselves, playing house, in essence.
      A lot of the children who hadn't been there on that afternoon noticed the change in tone of our playing, and the more aggressive ones began finding more fun and exciting things to do with their afternoons, and so attendance fell till there were but seven or eight of us who would gather at the theatre. Much more of our time was spent talking than playing and as winter moved to spring we grew much closer together, as friends do through talk.
      That spring was the first time I had ever seen Elsie wear a dress. Actually, I think it was the first time any of us had. Suddenly she was a girl again. And pretty too. She smiled more those days and even though she put up with a lot of teasing about it from other kids at school, she continued to dress as a girl, and in our circle she became a big sister to us all.

It was late June that they began to demolish the Stardust, and in the afternoon of that fateful day we all stood and watched as the walls came down. I, wiping snot and tears from my face as I cried squinting thru the dust as my castle collapsed before me. Elsie was crying too, and I wanted to hug her as she shook with her rage and her fists at the men who stood about the rubble and watched us, not understanding our grief and frustration.
      That evening, after the workmen had left to tend to their dinners and families, we gathered. Almost all of the children who had come and gone over the winter and spring came that evening to bid farewell to an old and dear friend. We stood quietly for a while and slowly descended into the heart of the rubble, searching for and finding a little of something that survived the attack. I can remember picking up a piece of red velvet and stumbling towards Elsie with my hand held out to her. She looked at what I had and I could see the tears on her face as she smiled and took what I had to offer her, memories. "All memories now," she said to me.
      She called the others over then and we all stood on the sidewalk facing the last remains of our own private Eden, where some of us discovered our own interpretations of Heaven and Hell. She stooped then and grabbed a handful of rubble. She looked at it closely as though searching for one last piece of life, and then she slowly rose and held her hand out before her. As I watched I could see her shuddering and I knew she was crying, and then, as she let the rubble sift thru her fingers and fall to the ground, she said, "Ashes to ashes, Stardust to dust."
      There were a few who chuckled, but they didn't outweigh those who were silent.
And so ended the days of the Stardust Theatre.
      Our group quickly fell apart after that, as though we could not recover from the shock of no longer having a place we could call our own, and each of us went our way. Me, to a bunch of boys my age, and Elsie to a bunch of older girls, once shunned and now accepted.

This is how I remember it, an d though I see it with these older eyes, I still feel it young in my heart and caught in my throat, and I'm sure that someday I'll return. I'll stand there with my hands in my pockets and look at the Red Rooster market or house or whatever in there now, and I'll remember. Cause its all I got. It's all memories now.

Norman Allan

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