Working For The BBC

     While I was in school in Lincolnshire, I had the opportunity to work as an extra on the BBC/Time Life series The Fall of Eagles. I played a Prussian officer in a ballroom scene. More specifically a Prussian officer in the ballroom scene who danced.
     I have two left feet. I spent days with an older girl in my neighborhood as a teenager learning to dance for my first high school mixer. My senior year of high school I spent an afternoon with two girls who tried to teach me to two-step for our school's production of Carousel. I met with such success that my featured dance bit was cut at the next full cast rehearsal.
     Yet when I put on the officer's uniform, I waltzed perfectly with my partner who wore a hoop skirt, no less. The scene took place in England at around the time of the American Civil War. I have felt a magnetism for the 19th century ever sense. It's as though something awakened in me.
     Some of my favorite books are from the period, such as Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy, to name a few. My favorite composers also worked during this time: Chopin, Berlioz, Verdi, Tchaikovsky.
   This other life bubbles to the surface periodically, especially when I hold some object from the time. There are flashes of light and glimmers of gold, as the song says. Partially formed memories rise to my consciousness and I know I have held the thing before.
     So when I was in school in Lincolnshire, living in a manor house built in the mid-1800's I was at home. I had come home to a time and place I somehow knew.