"Finally, I was excited, I had gotten over my random kicks of nerves and had been looking forward to my prison visit the whole week. It's a strange thing when the highlight of your week is driving 45 minutes to the middle of nowhere and sitting in a sea of bright orange for a few hours, but at this point, I've accepted the fact that excitement in my world hasn't been aimed at anything 'normal' in a while.
"That night, all I knew was that Linda and John King were somehow involved in bringing a play about domestic violence to Perryville. I had no prior knowledge of the characters, the actors or the plot before I got into the van that evening. I started to learn more when we met the couple at Paradise Bakery for a little 'pre-prison' snack. There is no way I would have imagined that these two people radiating strength and genuine smiles had gone through so much. Not only was their daughter a victim of domestic violence, but several of their other children had been lost to chance traumatic experiences and the fact that they had kept going in light of all this made those smiles that muchmore incredible. There was no reason they had been singled out to go through so much pain, and it made me think about the low points in my own life. It makes you realize that those trivial moments were just that, trivial. An argument, a little mistake that you thought were the end of the world, were just little blips on the path to the person you are now. When you see the optimism in the Kings' eyes, after all life has thrown at them, you're given a perfect example of when things really do get that bad, there's always going to be a reason to wak up in the morning and something great to be thankful for in life. . . . . . . . .
As we pulled up to the prison, I tried to make out all the buildings and maybe remember some of the names . . . . . . . I watched the faces, and took in the general atmosphere of the cafeteria. And as far as I could see there was no difference between the people underneath the orange and those under the brown and those of us in bright pink and blues.. . . . . . I realized how hungry these women for anything with color, with words, with a connecion to anything outside the barbed wire . . .
I was a little unrecpetive in the beginning to the simplistic approach of the play, but over time it began to grow on me. I had blended into the audience . . . . to form one laughing, attentive bunch of people listening to the story unfold. We were one single unit in my mind until the Kings' started playing out the story once the physical violence happened. All of these women knew this part of the story inside and out and in each, 'Aw hell no" and F bomb dropped, I could hear them relating their life back to this girl's story whom they had never met or heard about until that night. Later during the discussion/question portion, one woman actually stood up and said that seeing this play touched her more than her own story, because she was never able to step back from her situation and see all the details played out like the King's had done. . . .
The slow realization that the person behind the black and teal was in a different place in life than those seated next to me was when the biggest impact of the play came. . . . . . .
There is more, and if you would like to read the entire essay, just let me know. Marissa has given me a gift on three sheets of paper with 1,600 words. Thank you, Marissa and Sue Ellen.
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