{"id":4627,"date":"2019-12-29T20:22:08","date_gmt":"2019-12-30T04:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/?p=4627"},"modified":"2021-09-01T11:33:13","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T18:33:13","slug":"show-notes-a-knock-on-the-door","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/show-notes-a-knock-on-the-door\/","title":{"rendered":"A Knock on the Door"},"content":{"rendered":"

A KNOCK ON THE DOOR, written & edited by Caitlin Hicks, from a true story told by Lise Langlois<\/p>\n

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A January morning, in rural Pender Harbor, West Coast of British Columbia. The Seventies. A mother wakes; her child has vanished into thin air.<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n
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Notes: We were doing a lot of theatre in the late nineties and I had begun gathering stories from \u2018old timers\u2019 for a show I later called The Life We Lived<\/i>. We knew this crackerjack musician named Len, who got around quite handily on crutches, had wispy red hair and a robust personality. He could sing and play guitar and was often part of a rotating \u2018band\u2019 of musicians who played at The Roberts Creek Hall in the Nineties. He had been in a car accident and told us he was paralyzed \u2018from the tits down\u2019. It was the day his life changed irrevocably, as his car tottered over a cliff and he was trapped, suspended in pain between life and oblivion. Miraculously, the car balanced there until hours later, when he was rescued. Instead of living in a wheelchair, Len got around on crutches.<\/p>\n

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Len said, his tale of woe might be interesting, but his partner Lise, had this really amazing<\/i> story with unexpected and weird elements. He wouldn\u2019t say anything further about it. So Lise and I met. She wanted her story told. I worked with her to listen, to take down her words, to edit them together, get the continuity, make it understandable and presentable so that it could be told again to people who had never heard it before. Lise was excited to hear it told. Since it begins with a knock on the door, I named it simply, from that. As part of an early show called STORIES FOR A WINTER SOLSTICE<\/i>, I performed A Knock on the Door <\/i><\/strong>at The Gumboot Caf\u00e9 in a Christmas show. Lise is French Canadian, and so I exaggerated her \u2018accent\u2019 to put the character of Eva into that persona. It allowed me freedom to express what was required to tell the story as well as I could.<\/p>\n

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I was thrilled to be the medium for expressing this story. Lise had invited her other daughter to see the show; she invited Jackie and Steven (mentioned early in the story); they were the two people who had seen Lise\u2019s small daughter the night before she disappeared. It seemed to me that the story had come full circle.<\/p>\n

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But there was more.<\/p>\n

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I had been in the audience at The Sunshine Coast Arts Centre when Susan Crean read the prologue to her book, In the Name of the Fathers<\/i>. Here, Crean described the scene of a woman stealing her child from a pram in a park in Toronto, a scene she had personally witnessed. Crean began her discussion of her book with this incident to show the irony of a mother being accused of stealing her own child. It turned out that the woman who kidnapped her own daughter was Lise; the child, Rachel who went missing that January morning of this story.<\/p>\n

Lise had heard of Susan Crean, and her book, but neither of them had met. Someone put me in touch with Susan and I arranged for them to ride up to Pender Harbor together prior to the performance of Lise\u2019s story at a show I was performing at The Sundowner Inn that night. After the performance, we posed for a photograph together. I still have the photograph my refrigerator.<\/p>\n

In the photo: Maggie Guzzi, me, Lise Langlois, Susan Crean.<\/p>\n

And then, this Christmas Eve, I heard that Lise had just died. This is her story. I tell it here to honour her.<\/span><\/p>\n

Remembering Lise Langlois.<\/p>\n