(For Lou Myers)

           I had forgotten how much noise we black folk like to make.  My experience with the cast of Motown the Musical reminds me.  We have a way of transforming a technical lighting rehearsal into a segment of full out praise and worship with little more than a hum. It happened tonight when the hum graduated to hymn, then sailed atop stunning, pliant voices from every corner of the building. A few honorary black folks participated as well, and Jason, our associate conductor, had found our key for piano back-up.  Holy dances commenced. (We’ll get to my involvement later).

            I’m sure this kind of festivity went on during the tech process for The Color Purple as well, but that was years ago, so I had forgotten the quickness of good noise.

            We like quiet moments too. 

            During one of them, long before the witching hour, a colleague with utter sensitivity broke the news that Lou Myers had passed on.  I was instantly saddened, regretful and incredulous, as I did not quite believe it possible for Mr. Myers to really leave the planet.

            He had made it clear during the creative process and in several talks in the quick change gondola that he was a Yoruba priest canonized by his tribesmen “in the bush of Africa.”  He was that authentic old black man from the deep South who told giraffe-tall tales and offered advice neither solicited nor filtered.  He would say incendiary things just for the sake of it, don a form-fitted, 25-year-old YMLA shirt without possessing the body it was designed for, and sleep through note sessions.

            And he half raised me and a generation of others for whom “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World” were staples in our life curriculum.  So Lou Myers was supposed to live forever.

            Perhaps he will.

            He gifted me with a particular quiet/noisy moment I will never forget. During an especially poignant scene at the end of Purple, when Celie has just finished seeing off the coquettish plumber—James Brown III that night (no relation)—Lou tapped me on the thigh.

            “I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember, but are you familiar with Wilson Pickett?”

            “Sure,” I said, understanding that the fly rail gate on which we sat backstage had become a large fallen log at a fishing dock on the Mississippi River.

            “Well James Brown was in love with Wilson Pickett.”

            “Oh was he?” I asked, as dazzled by his mental segue as by the amplitude of its destination.  

            “In fact James Brown was gonna have a sex change and marry Wilson Pickett but Wilson didn’t like him, I guess.” Lou cast his gaze toward a spot where perhaps a skipped rock finally sank. “The next thing I knew he was on TV as a man, talking ‘bout ‘I Feel Good.’”

            Maybe it was the slight tone of contempt about the marriage not happening that did me all the way in, as well as the fact that my cue to enter happened perfectly then. I had to gather whatever professionalism I had from where it rested (with my composure) on the floor and not be loud.  I had to try not to chuckle during the negative space between this very important denouement on stage and not make noise.

            When the laughter had no option for containment, I struggled to make noise somewhere in A-flat as per my job description.

            Anyway, Lou regularly got us all at the opening of the show too, where a classroom full of black people were actually paid initiate and carry-out praise and worship nightly and on matinees.  Lou Myers played the church pianist who decided to get so caught up in the holy spirit that a shuffle away from the piano ensued; he neglected to consider that the real pianist in the pit (occasionally the aforementioned Jason), never got the memo to stop playing as well so as not to confuse the audience.  There he was dancing amidst us different steps as the piano played itself.

            So it dawned on me that tonight, during our impromptu sing out, when I jumped up from my seat behind the on-stage drums and ran across stage to the hard wing edge for a head-in-wall spiritual overtaking, it was Lou indeed. He had answered my question before I had asked.

            “Nope, I’m still here,” he was telling me.

            And making noise indeed.