"Am I Too Loud?", 1967, by Louise Porter-Cleaves (pen/stage name Lisa Forestier)

From MemoryArchive

Who:Louise Porter-Cleaves (pen/stage name:Lisa Forestier)
What:"Am I Too Loud?"
When:1967/2007
Where:Surrey, UK/Washington, DC,USA

I finished "high school" at a British boarding school, St. Catherine's in Surrey. After our final exams in the Spring/Summer of 1967, I spent the final days in the UK with my best friend at the time, Sally Moore. We had lively political discussions with her father and mother (especially about the final days of the British Partition rule in Palestine till 1948; his wife extolled the British friendship with the Jewish people but he said unfortunately he did not remember Britain being a good friend of the Jews.

An "A" student in the States, I had struggled with the transition to British education. (I later redid my exams through the British private study/public testing tradition back in the States and my grades were then equal to my American grades.) Sally briefly trial-ballooned the idea of asking "Daddy" if he would pull some strings and get me in to the Univeristy College, Dublin where she was going but I was too proud to have her even consider.

We went galoshing through the rougher lands of the neighborhood with her golden retriever Bracken who had a penchant for tearing through her father's emmaculately crafted rose garden leaving havoc in his wake.

The final night I was in the UK we stayed up all night storytelling. We traded back and forth imaging how our futures would be unfolding. I don't remember the details but I do remember she had me married to an Eurasian man and I saw her having a full meeting with beloved British actor David Warner. At some ungodly hour of the early morning, her father, Gerald (a British Civil Service careerist who had recently come back from Singapore to take up the post of Queen's Private Secretary) opened the door and popped his head into the room, and said:"Good-by, Liza, dear". (Liza was my nickname, then;Sally even called me (Liza) Doolittle after the character in MY FAIR LADY.) Sally mumbled in her semi-sleep something like:"O Daddy, really!". Then he was gone.

In the morning, after breakfast, Sally and her mother drove me to Heathrow Airport. . Then they went off to summer vacation at Balmoral Palace in Scotland with him and I returned to the States to prepare for my freshman year at St. John's College in Annapolis.

This memory came to mind recently in an overlay/pintamento effect. Researching the theatre of Polish theorist Jerzy Grotowski I suspected that his work may have inspired Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopolous in the making of his ALEXANDER THE GREAT (O MEGALEXANDROS.):the opening castle scene of the film and Grotowski's Western debut at the Edinborough Festival in the shadow of Castle Rock, Edinborough Castle of the era of Balmoral Palace were eerily similar.

I also had learned by now that there was another Gerald Moore -- a piano accompanist, who wrote an autobiography "AM I TOO LOUD?". The most focused I ever was on THIS Gerald Moore was when I was singing along with his CD with Victoria de los Angeles, especially the "Siete Canciones polulares espanolas" by Manuel de Falla, especially "Jota" that I sang at the final recital arranged by my main voice teacher Inga-Britta Elgcrona, on Capitol Hill, shortly before she passed.