The Courier-News from Bridgewater, New Jersey • Page 15

Astrology. -B-2 Religion. B-2 B-6 -B-3. 4. 5 HELPL Television Theater, arti tander The Courier-News Friday.

December 1 6. 1 977 B-1 Tor Coloured For some, a drama of painful memories -1; 1 By MICHAEL SHAPIRO Courier-News Staff Writer CLINTON The excuses can haunt. Lisa Howard heard them whenever her baby's father wanted to come back to her and told her how much he wanted to marry her. And with the excuses came the pain with which she became intimate. But now Lisa listens to an actress named Robbie McCauley rant about refrains like "Baby, you know I was high." and "Shut up bitch," or "I ain't gonna love you like you want me to." They are worn and their edges have been frayed from abuse, but Lisa is sitting on a folding chair in the gym at the Clinton Correctional Institution muttering "nasty bastids." A woman named Ntozake Shange put the excuses in a play she calls "For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf." The play opened downtown Manhattan at the Public Theatre and has played on Broadway for a year and a half.

Yesterday its cast came to here to perform before an audience of women like Lisa Howard who had heard the lines before and could not get over listening to them again. It is a play that talks about living but in a tragic vain. It is about disappointment and crying and men. In the end everything that is sour in the play has to do with men. Robbie McCauley says that a Broadway audience will boo and scream during a performance.

The women at Clinton sat in silence; there was no coughing or shuffling of chairs. They smiled or nodded their heads or clapped. One male inmate giggled. Sometimes they called, "All right," and "Dish it out." And when it ended they stood up and applauded. Then Robbie tells the story of Crystal and Bo Willie and bow Bo Willie comes back to Crystal and wants to marry her after beating her with a chair.

Robbie tells how Crystal refuses and how Bo Willie takes their children and holds them out the window and makes her tell the neighbors five stories below that she will marry him. When Crystal cannot speak Bo Willie drops the children. "Anytime a man says, 'I wanna marry you, I wanna marry he'll cry, 'Give me my Lisa says. "You don't wanna go back into that. "You can picture yourself when it happen to you." It is also making Dolly remember.

"My old man, he was a a drug addict He'd come up with a sob story and I'd end up taking him back." Dolly's old man is doing seven to 10 in Bordentown and she says that when they get out she'd still take him back. "I still got the feelings for him," she says. Barbara Williams heard all the excuses and felt all the anger and now she is in Clinton for killing her husband. When the play ended the 150 or so inmates who came to see it showly headed back to their cottages. Some were invited to a party in one of the rooms near the gym where there were hors d'oeuvre on celery and pastries.

These inmates moved through the room and collected autographs from the five members of the cast all of whom were pleased to sign. Robbie sat down in the gym to talk with Barbara, Dolly and Lisa who looked nervous and could not think of questions to ask. Robbie told them how good it would be if there were a theatre group in the prison. Lisa wondered about how good an actress she would make. Lisa Howard came dressed in a bright blue jump suit and had pulled her short hair into a series of tight curls.

When she got the chance after the performance she told Robbie McCauley that she had dressed just for the play. Lisa came to Clinton three years ago after she was convicted of manslaughter. She hopes she will be home soon. Home means a life with her fiance who has given her a diamond and has waited for her from her arrest when she was 20. "Lucky me," says Lisa because this man is not like her baby's father or the man who left her.

This man does not tell her that he can't write because he ran out of stamps. She sits with Barbara Williams and Dolly Thomas. They watch and smoke Kools and are touched by the same moments. Talk about being a little girl and going to dances are nice, they say, but there is no impact because they were never little girls. Barbara Williams married when she was 16.

Lisa says that she stopped being a little girl when she was 10. Her boyfriend was 16 and her brother and sister had older friends and there was little need for friends who were 10. "I wouldn't know what it's all about," she says of youth. Being young for Lisa was having the name "Snake" tattooed on her wrist. Memories make Lisa smile and tell is so beautiful I could cry." Then comes talk of rape and being pregnant and being beaten.

"I couldn't stand being sorry and colored at the same time," Robbie McCauley says during the perfomance. "It's so re-dundent in the modern world. "My love is too delicate to be thrown back in my face." CV Jt i Courlw Nw Photo By frti Keesing Inmate Vera Montgomery, left, and actress Roxanne Reese share hors d'oeuvre, coffee and conversation after yesterday's performance of "For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf at the Clinton Correctional Institution. Actress Robbie McCauley, on floor, has heard audiences boo or scream during performances on Broadway; at Clinton, the audience was silent. In the background Is performer Roxanne Reese.

i I I ,1 Actress Robbie McCauley, on floor, has heard audiences boo or scream during performances on Broadway; at Clinton, the audience was silent. In the background Is performer Roxanne Reese. On stage, the performers present a play embodying frustrations, disappointments and hurts; for some members of the audience. It was all very real. NYC may have cold shoulders, but the tree takes chill away grandson down to see the tree and all the lights and decorations.

He's 10 months old. I don't think that's too young to enjoy it." No, certainly not, and neither is any age too old. At Christmas time in Rockefeller Center, young eyes brighten with wonder and branches to the trunk and tie them. A crane hitches a cable to the top so it won't fall when cut. Police cars escort it to Rockefeller Center.

Electricians erect a scaffold and spend 10 days decorating it. "This is the 45th year they've had a tree," Mike Russo said. "I've seen the last 20. I believe this is the prettiest one I've seen. Of course, I say that every year." city's concrete canyons.

Usually, Reed explained, finding a tree isn't so easy. Even when a likely one is located it has to be accessible. Often it entails a year-long search, following up tips, answering letters from visitors to Rockefeller Center they number in the hundreds of thousands every year who have been awed by the annual tree. Once located, workmen lovingly fold its yard, the one in Rockefeller Center, the hundreds of friends he has made over the one that is lit each year on television to years among the 60,000 who work in this the oohs and aahs of the nation. Mike city within a city.

Russo has watched it work its magic for 20 "When I was a kid," he said, "I never years. got a chance to come to Rockefeller Cen- That's how long Mike Russo, a native ter at Christmas time. Those were hard New Yorker well versed in the city's times back then. I lived on the Upper East moods, has worked in the security depart- side and we rarely got out of the neighbor- ment of Rockefeller Center, watching the hood. doors of the great buildings, greeting the "But this year I'm going to bring my By JULES LOH NEW YORK (AP) This is the city of the cold shoulder and the granite heart, so it is said, the island of cynicism with no room for sentiment.

Bah, humbug! "When that tree goes up, you can't find a more neighborly place," Mike Russo said. "That tree works like magic." The tree is the one in New York's front 'Socefy set' had lit frees TTTTTrfr ir7777 rkU fi tt VH it a 1 2 7 3 1 tjit 5 i i i TJJXhr ft ft 12 I 1 41 fc-Mm I i a it f. ''J- (C' ft Im i i mi litt''" r' in I Jl rfA mi, inn .1. old eyes glisten with their own best memories of childhood. Lights, tens of thousands of them, warm the gray December sky like winter fireflies signaling a time of hope.

Bells, tinkly bells on sidewalk Santas and deep-throated bells of St. Patrick's Cathedral, serenade ice skaters circling and dancing on the plaza rink. At noon, school choirs from all over the city bring their own sounds of innocence and on Fifth Avenue Salvation Army trumpets summon joy to the world. Roasting chestnuts from vendors' carts perfume the air. Dickens himself might have designed the setting.

Above it all stands the magnificent tree, a perfectly tapered pyramid of green with branches swaying in the wind like a sequined ballerina skirt. "Every year when they bring the tree I get anxious," Mike Russo said. "I always wonder if it's going to be as nice as the last one. So far, I've never been disappointed. I don't know how they always manage to find a perfect tree." Not by accident, that's for sure, though luck can play apart This year, two Rockefeller Center employees, Jim Reed and John Godwin, traveled 8,000 miles inspecting trees, about 40 of them, before Godwin stumbled upon this beauty in Dixfield, while fetching his two sons home from summer camp.

It is a soaring white spruce, 65 feet tall and 35 feet across at its lowest branches. Anything smaller would be dwarfed in the Edison's electric company. There at the rear of the beautiful parlor, was a large Christmas tree representing a most picturesque and uncanny aspect It was brilliantly lighted with many colored globes about, as large as an English walnut and was turning some six times a minute on a little pine box. "There were 80 lights encased in these dainty glass eggs, and about equally divided between white, red and blue. As the tree turned, the colors alternated, all the lamps going out and being relit at every revolution.

The rest was a continuous twinkling of dancing colors, red, white, blue, white, red, blue all evening. It was a superb exhibition." Immediately, the novel idea of electrically lighting the Christmas tree became popular. Christmas tree parties to show off the electrically lighted tree became exciting social events for children of the society set during the first yeas of electricity. From this small beginning, with their use largely in the homes of the wealthy, Christmas tree lights spread MENLO PARK (AP) On New Year's Eve, 1879, 3,000 people flooded into this little town of Menlo Park, N.J., to see Thomas Alva Edison demonstrate, for the first time in public, the light bulb he had invented on Oct. 21 of that His laboratory, the streets of Menlo Park, and some of its houses were illuminated by electric lights.

This demonstration was followed just three years later, in 1882, when the world's first electrically lighted Christmas tree was decorated. The event took place in the home of Edward Johnson, a colleague of Edison who became a vice president of the newly formed Edison Electric Company, according to Phillip Snyder, author of "The Christmas Tree Book." Johnson lived in the first square mile of New York City, or any city in the world, to have electricity. The event was not reported in the New York papers of the day but it was seen and recorded by a young reporter named Croffut for the Detroit Post and Tribune. The story he posted began: "Last evening I walked over beyond Fifth Avenue and called at the residence of Edward H. Johnson, vice president of across the nation and this Christmas according to the National Ornament and Electric Lights Christmas Associa Mike Russo.

center, wearing a Rockefeller Center security force uniform, says, "When the tree goes tion (NOEL) more than 50 million Christmas light sets will be sold. up, you can't find a more neighborly place." Russo has watched the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree work Its magic for 20 years..