Robinson Auditorium holds sweet memories for me, as I’m sure it does for most readers this morning. We’ve all heard about the efforts being made to repair and update the stately old building that occupies a prime location in our capital city. We know this building needs updates, and surely, it deserves them.
City officials have the almost perfect, if not completely perfect, plan to bring the old showplace up to date. Knowing that I have no vote in the matter proposed by Little Rock’s city officials, I should keep quiet, but memories say, “Speak up.”
Like many no-longer schoolchildren throughout the state, I remember my first trip to Robinson Auditorium. I wore my first grown-up-looking hat. The occasion was a statewide meeting of Future Homemakers. Young ladies from throughout the state filled the auditorium. Most, if not all, wore the optional but “nearly required” hat.
We were important! We were to become the Homemakers of America.
On my second trip to Robinson Auditorium, friends and I didn’t go inside, but posed for snapshots of our gang of seven on the steps, and also on the cannon in front of the Old State House. We were skipping school! Our parents, and some of our teachers, knew what we were doing. We were seniors. We had never skipped a day of school, and this was our last chance.
Cheerleaders among us wore red full circle corduroy skirts lined with white satin, white sweaters with a big B on the front, and saddle oxfords. We were out to see the city. It was our final high school fling.
Thinking back, I’m sure we were a nuisance to storekeepers. We tried on clothing we never intended to purchase, and turned more than one sales clerk’s smiles into frowns.
Another time, I actually appeared on the stage at Robinson. As my cousin and I and our husbands entered for the performance, we were handed cards and asked to write on them why we wanted to be on stage with the cast that night. I wrote “Because my husband doesn’t think you will call my name.”
Luck of the draw, they called my name and almost had to carry me onto the stage. All I had to do to win a prize was to name the song the band played. Of course, I didn’t know the title. But one of the band members, a little man with a fiddle in his hand, whispered the title to me. I won something!
For the life of me, this morning I can’t remember what it was. Probably tickets to see the band again, which I never did, and I never filled out a card like that again either.
If that’s not enough to cause memories of your trips to Robinson Auditorium, let me tell you about my daddy. All of my life I had been told he was named for the Joe T. Robinson, the Twenty-Third Governor of Arkansas. His birth certificate read simply “Joe T.,” and nobody in the family seemed to know what the T stood for.
Years later, while reading in the second edition of The Governors of Arkansas, I discovered the T stands for Taylor.
Upon hearing the news that her grandfather’s middle name was Taylor, one of my nieces exclaimed, “Oh no! I could have been named Taylor instead of Katie!” Her outburst surely had something to do with her admiration of the young singer Taylor Swift.
Remember the song “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and sung by Eva Peron in the musical Evita? I was in Robinson Auditorium with a best friend, sitting in the last two vacant seats up high in the huge auditorium, when I first heard the song. I was not the only one wiping tears from my cheeks as the musical ended.
I have not been a regular at Robinson, but several years later, I saw and heard a make-believe Patsy Cline thrill a huge audience, singing songs made famous by the real Patsy while sitting close to the stage with my husband and our host, our firstborn son.
You might not believe this, but I had until about that time thought I had been named for Patsy Cline. My parents must have said I had been named after one of the old country singers because Daddy liked her music so well.
Over the years, I had told people I was named for Patsy Cline. My bubble burst when I was viewing the exhibit of Arkansas-born musicians in the Old State House and saw pictures of Patsy Montana. Her birth date was prominently displayed, and I quietly realized I was not named after Patsy Cline, but the older Patsy! If you happen to be one of the people I lied to, please move on.
If you are one of the people eligible to vote for renovation of Robinson Auditorium, please do so. It is truly an Arkansas treasure. I’d like to tell you more about the building, which was completed in 1939, and also about the man for whom it’s named, but there is not enough space. Please read elsewhere the history of the wonderful building and about Joseph Taylor Robinson. It’s good stuff.
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Freelance writer Patsy Pipkin is the author of three collections of her columns and lives in Searcy.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 12/07/2013