When my son and his wife named our first grandson Silas, after the biblical character, I went back to the text with renewed interest. There it was, in the book of Acts, chapter 16. Silas and the apostle Paul were in prison. There was no possibility of escape. They were in the innermost cell, their feet fastened into stocks.
Sometime around midnight, Silas and Paul were singing hymns and praying, the other prisoners curious as to how they could be praising God at a time like this. And what was the result? A powerful earthquake that rocked the earth and flung the prison doors wide open. The chains came loose.
Singing…an earthquake…and a miraculous answer to prayer. Why did that bring back to memory something that had once happened to me?
As a kid, I loved to sing. (Still do.) In sophomore year at my suburban California high school, I yearned to be in the spring musical. But not just as a member of the chorus, as I’d done in my freshman year. I wanted to play one of the leads. To sing a solo. To have a starring role. The show selected was Brigadoon. We’d do four performances in May, rehearsing for months.
Auditions began in February. I knew the musical well, having grown up listening to the record over and over, learning all the songs. That was another impressive thing about being in the musical. The school recorded the whole thing on an LP. It would be like hearing myself on one of those original Broadway cast albums I treasured.
I auditioned for the second male lead, Charlie Dalrymple. As the tenor, Charlie sang the upbeat “I’ll Go Home with Bonnie Jean” and the lyrical “Come to Me, Bend to Me.” He even got to get married on stage. A dream role in my eyes.
Brigadoon, if you don’t know it, has , a magical, mystical plot. An American tourist, Tommy, stumbles upon a Scottish town, the so-named Brigadoon. The town appears out of the Scottish mist once every 100 years—and for only 24 hours—because a towns person had prayed it would be hidden to keep it safe from evil. On that magical day of the town’s appearance in the twentieth century, all of Brigadoon is celebrating the wedding of their own Charlie and Bonnie Jean. Meanwhile, the American Tommy falls madly in love with Fiona, one of the residents of Brigadoon. What will be the couple’s fate when Brigadoon recedes, with Fiona, into the fog for another 100 years?
I’d done well enough in my audition to make it to the callbacks, but there my nerves got the best of me. My voice seemed to get lost in a fog of its own. The director, our drama of teacher, went into a snit fit, something he was famous for doing. He declared that the show couldn’t go on. It was impossible under the circumstances. We didn’t have the talent, he said. We had no male leads good enough to play the parts.
I went to bed that night feeling utterly disheartened and said a few prayers of my own. I didn’t have the problems of the imprisoned Silas, but this dejected high schooler saw no way out of his situation. All seemed hopeless. Would I ever get my big chance on stage? My surfer brother in the next bed wouldn’t have understood, so I kept my disappointment between God and me.
Shortly before dawn, I woke to the earth’s tremble. My bed shook. I sat up and watched a tennis shoe bounce into the air. My brother sat up just as the other shoe took flight. “Cool!” he shouted. “An earthquake!” Which was as exciting to him as catching a monster wave.
The tremor lasted about a minute, at which point my mom poked her head into our room. “Did you feel the earthquake?”
Yes, Mom, we did. As it turned out, we weren’t far from the epicenter.
School was canceled that day. Fortunately, there was no apparent damage in our town, but it was certainly a reminder of how fragile life could be. Some of my drama friends and I gathered at the coffee shop for lunch, all of us in dismay about the show. We wanted to do it.
Back at school, the director surprised us. He was willing to give us another try. Maybe the earthquake had put things into perspective for him, softened him a bit. This time I sang my heart out, quelling my fears and giving the performance my all. In the end, I was cast as Charlie, a lead role in my sophomore year!
In the play, Charlie and Bonnie Jean’s isn’t the only love story. Everything works out for Tommy and Fiona, his one true love of Brigadoon. The town schoolmaster gives the final message: “When ye love someone deeply, anythin’ is possible. Even miracles.”
Someday I’ll sit and watch Brigadoon with Silas, and maybe he’ll even sing along. Silas was quiet during the hymn singing when we took him to church on his first birthday. He was mesmerized by the stained-glass windows, staring at the worshippers who were enchanted by him. But soon he’ll be ready to talk about miracles, like the big earthquake that freed his biblical namesake and the little earthquake that led me to my breakout role on the high school stage.
