Empty Venues

When I was fifteen, I had the honor of being invited to attend my twin friends’ extravagant sixteenth birthday celebration in New York City. My friends had chosen to take a group of us out to a nice dinner and a Broadway show and afterwards, we all had a slumber party at the Waldorf Astoria. We snacked on decadent Godiva, chocolate-covered strawberries and Twizzlers from Walgreens and once we were all sugared up, we wandered the halls of the historic hotel in search of adventure, movie filming locations, and a ghost girl with a red balloon.

We never did find the ghost girl, but we rode the elevators like John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale in Serendipity (2001) and roamed the glamorous lobby in our hotel slippers and pajamas. I remember wandering into the empty Grand Ballroom, a cavernous hall with box seating all around the walls and a massive, glittering, chandelier overhead, illuminating the room in a dimmed glow.

We walked up onto the stage and looked out at the room, each with a feeling that it was exactly where we were all supposed to be at that exact moment in time. Aside from the Waldorf already having established itself for its serendipitous traits in Peter Chelsom and Marc Klein’s movie, it was something else to feel it for ourselves.

We looked out at the spotless ballroom, the banquet tables and chairs stored away in some closet or basement, the red patterned carpet – vacuumed, and the wooden dance floor – waxed and shining. We were the only things in the room to fill the space, a group of teenaged girls, our souls and energy so immense in the company of each other that the wallpapered walls and towering ceiling could hardly contain us.

I feel very alive in an empty venue. Perhaps it is the minimalist in me or perhaps the possibility that empty venues hold or once held. More likely, it is my love of Cameron Crowe’s movies and the impact they had on my adolescence, namely Almost Famous (2000) and Elizabethtown (2005).

Cameron Crowe has a talent for creating flawed, loveable, relatable characters and for developing relationships between them. He is also able to give empty venues as much life as full ones. His movies push me out to the stars and bring me safely back to the ground with each watch.

My favorite scene in Almost Famous depicts Kate Hudson’s character, Penny Lane, dancing around the floor of an empty concert venue after a Stillwater show has ended. The scene is set to Cat Stevens’ The Wind and captures the sense of clinging to something special extra hard when you don’t want it to end and the melancholy of accepting the fleeting nature of the experience once it’s over. The stage lights glow golden on the wooden floor as Penny slides around the venue alone, balancing on discarded cocktail napkins, while gracefully swinging a single rose around in her hand. It is beautiful, hopeful, and heartbreaking all at once and it reminds me that great experiences would not be so great if they were not so fleeting. Loss is a necessary evil of life. Without it, life’s experiences would hold no weight and coping with it is the first step back to joy.

Crowe’s Elizabethtown illustrates this cyclical concept well. There are two scenes in the movie that depict a hotel banquet hall. There is one in which the room is full of people for a very epic memorial service, courtesy of Susan Sarandon’s exceptional acting skills, Crowe’s incredible writing, and a rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird that is literally on fire. There is another in which the banquet hall is empty aside from the main characters, Drew (Orlando Bloom), Claire (Kirsten Dunst), and a cremated Mitch, Drew’s late father, in his urn. The scene with fewer characters has just as much energy and tension as the scene with a crowd and I feel Claire’s apprehension, brevity, and excitement as she marches up to the podium and announces to Drew, “IIIII LIIIKE YOU!” through the echoing microphone, with only a cremated Mitch for an audience. There is so much life in the scene despite the obvious presence of death in the movie and the slow build of the characters falling in love without recognizing it in real time, amid a period of loss, makes my heart swell every time.

I did theater in high school and college and it was always bittersweet to end a show. On one hand, I’d have free time again and on the other, it made me sad to help break down something that I had devoted so much energy to for months, from auditions to strike.

I think I love being in a theater more than I like being onstage. On stage, there is nowhere to hide and it is hot and harrowing under the bright lights. The darkness and secretiveness of the wings and the catwalks were always my favorite parts of participating in shows – the anticipation and the adventure, the whispers, the intense listening for cues through heavy curtain legs, and the intimacy, trust and speed of a quick change or stage transition. In theater, working together makes these changes so much smoother. Theater is art imitating life but it is also so much life behind the scenes. It transforms empty venues to alternate realities and puts them back to their original state afterwards almost as though nothing ever happened.

I have spent many moments in empty venues and have come to realize that in those moments, they are not really empty at all. One person can fill a space with their voice, a dance, silence, love, or even just with their imagination. There is possibility resting in the dimmed lights and the energy of past moments seeps into the floors, hangs on the walls and curtains, and tarnishes the fixtures. Like Stevens and his music, I let these moments take me where my heart wants to go. And even when the time comes to move on, I do not waste it on regret or disappointment, and instead prefer to anticipate what lies ahead.