HIS BRILLIANT HOCKEY CAREER
A BEAUTIFUL GAME: THE MOSTLY TRUE STORY OF
MY LONG-TIME CONNECTION TO THE GAME OF HOCKEY
Written
and performed by Michael Parent
At Lewiston Public Library in Lewiston, Maine
On January 23, 2008
Reviewed by Laurie Meunier Graves
In
Maine, as in much of the Canadian Maritimes, the winters are long, icy, and
cold. From November through March, the weather is uncertain, bringing a
mixture of snow and freezing rain that can make both driving and walking a
challenge. Some people—snowbirds, we call them—leave as soon as the sky
turns pewter gray, and they head for warmer climates, say, the Carolinas or
Florida or the Southwest. Other more hardy souls, either because of
temperament or economics, eschew such cowardly flights, and embrace their
inner winter, so to speak. Nowhere is this better expressed than in the
Northeast’s devotion to hockey, a speeding, almost super-sonic, game played
on sharp blades, where the players wield sticks and attack a small hard,
black object called a puck, which in the wrong hands could be a deadly
weapon. (Perhaps the Coen brothers should give this some thought for their
next movie.) Fights often break out, blood is spilled, and a friend of ours,
an otherwise gentle Quaker, is a devoted fan, screaming himself hoarse at
games. It seems that hockey can cut across many boundaries.
Michael
Parent—who, along with Susan Poulin and Gordon Carlisle, is one of Maine’s
finest humorists and storytellers—has taken his obsession with hockey and
has created a one-man show that chronicles his history with the game. In the
process, mixing fact with fancy, he tells the story of his family, of his
city (Lewiston, a once-thriving mill town), of the early 1960s, and of his
ethnic group, Franco-Americans. To combine so many different elements can be
tricky, but once again Parent has come through, and the result is a rich,
entertaining show that manages to be humorous, sympathetic, entertaining,
and just plain exciting. As if all this weren’t enough, he also gives
viewers a sense of what it was like to be a Franco-American in the early
1960s, and as Franco-Americans have long been Maine’s largest but
most silent minority, this can only be good. As Parent observed in his
excellent One More Thing, Franco-Americans were taught to bite their
tongues. Yes, we were, and it’s a lesson we are just beginning to unlearn.
Parent
begins the show in the present, as a sixty-one year old who still plays ice
hockey and is a goalie, but he soon moves to the past, when the Lewiston ice
arena, “a local shrine,” burned to the ground in less than hour. Some people
even cried, which they didn’t do when they lost their jobs at the textile
mills or shoe shops. But Parent didn’t cry. He had not yet caught “hockey
fever,” and, in a town crazy about hockey, he was that rare soul who hadn’t
learned to skate as soon as he learned to walk. But he did like sports and
played basketball and baseball, and one winter’s day, he got roped into
being a “shovel goalie” in a pick-up game that was so casual the goalie was
allowed to wear boots. As the saying goes, Parent was hooked, and even
though he couldn’t skate, he tried out for the team. He did better than
expected because of the good reflexes he gained during his time as “pin-boy”
at the local bowling alley, where he learned to dodge the balls of malicious
bowlers.
He
played in junior high but had a setback in high school because of an elbow
injury and an after-school job. But fate has a habit of intervening in
mysterious ways, and during his junior year, when “goalies dropped like
flies,” Parent got a new job that was more flexible, allowing him to become
a goalie. In his senior year, the team hit pay dirt, not only winning the
state championship but also making its way to the New England Championship,
a big important game for a small high school from a small city where many of
the team members had learned to play on free, used skates and were so poor
they had to use Life Magazine as padding. They were a true underdog
team, and there is no more satisfying story than the rise of the underdogs
against incredible odds. Naturally, I’m not going to say whether Parent's
team won or lost. That would be spoiling the fun and suspense of the show
for readers who might go to a performance.
The
above descriptions might make A Beautiful Game sound as though it
were a straight narration down memory lane, but nothing could be further
from the truth. To round out his story, Parent brings in a number of
characters, including his laconic father, his supportive mother, friends,
opponents, and coaches. But my two favorites, aside from Parent himself, are
Gaston, an obsessed and devoted fan, and Fred Libby, a high-school sports
announcer. Gaston is both funny and sad, a man who has lost his job at the
mill and now works at a poultry processing plant. He longs for his old job
and is convinced President Kennedy “will take care of the problem.” And
besides, he doesn’t want to move to North Carolina, where the mills have
relocated in what would become a relentless quest for cheap labor. (We know
where those mills went next.) Gaston’s obsession is so complete that he bets
half his paycheck on the state championship games and his whole paycheck on
the New England Championship. To hedge his bets, Gaston says the rosary,
very, very fast and in French, convinced that even if the team loses, the
prayers will still be good for another time. Then there is Fred Libby, the
man who brings the game, via radio, to those who can’t see it in person.
Parent does such a good job with Libby that at one point, when Libby is
doing a play-by-play of the big game, I could actually “see” the action and
hear the skaters as their blades cut into the ice. Dear readers, I am not a
sports fan. In fact, I am so indifferent that I didn’t even realize that the
Red Sox won the World Series this year. If Parent can work his magic on
someone like me, then he can work it on anyone.
I saw
this show in Lewiston, Maine, Parent’s hometown, and the audience was full
of elderly, responsive Franco-Americans who had lived through the time of
the big game. Needless to say, they were with him all the way. But this
funny, humane show will appeal to those who are not Franco-Americans and who
are not sports fans. Parent has taken a time, a place, characters, and an
event and has brought them vividly to life. I know I am repeating myself by
ending this reviews in a way that I end most theater review, but do go see
this show if it comes to a venue near you.
