At play rehearsal, she uses her cane for punctuation, cutting question marks and exclamation points with thrusts and parries, planting it with authority when dialogue demands a period. "I'm tired," Birdie Schmidt Larrick recited, needing no one offstage to throw her lines from the play "I Was Young....Now I'm Wonderful."
"I'm lonely. I'm lonely, but I don't dare say so. My friends and relatives fret enough as is. They don't want me to live alone. They keep saying, 'Aren't you lonely?' And I keep saying, 'No,' because I'm not lonely in the way they mean.
"I'm lonely for people who were and are no more. I'm lonely for one person most of all. I'm lonely for the way things were."
Threescore years ago, Larrick watched many of those "who were and are no more" fly off on bombing missions from a U.S. air base in England.
They were the pilots and crews of the 8th Air Force. She was a young Red Cross volunteer from Columbus, Ohio, serving up good cheer and hot coffee, a familiar tune.
"Sometimes the best thing any Red Cross girl could do was listen," she recalled. "They wanted to talk — talk about home and their families."
She so endeared herself to the fliers that they christened a bomber for her, painting her likeness on the nose of the craft.
On the day after Valentine's Day, 1945, the plane was making a bombing run over Germany when it was struck by anti-aircraft fire. The fliers bailed out 5,000 feet above Muhlhausen and were taken prisoner.
The crew on that last mission was new to the plane and strangers to Larrick, who by then was preparing to transfer from England to the continent, as allies advanced across Europe.
"Who is Birdie?" the co-pilot puzzled as he climbed aboard.
"I thought," he wrote Larrick after tracking her down in 1990, "someday I'll find out who she is and tell her what happened to her B-24."
His letter and her abiding affection for the men who fought the war have helped conspire to reunite Larrick with 8th Air Force veterans gathering in Colorado next week.
She and the cast of the Senior Repertory Company's "I Was Young...." will present their play to some of the same men she entertained 60 years ago.
She followed them from England deep into Germany, driving a 2-1/2 ton truck that served as a showmobile.
"We were sent wherever we could be the most help," Larrick, 84, remembered. "We'd hit their chowline at about noon and find out who could play the kazoo or sing or whatever, then try to work them into our show."
She sang "Dream," "I'll Get By," "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else But Me."
After the war, the men of the 8th Air Force and the Red Cross women who bolstered their spirits throughout the long conflict scattered like splinters.
Larrick landed spots in a few New York plays while her brother John Schmidt and his wife Mary performed in several Broadway hits.
Several years ago, Larrick, after losing her husband and spending two years abroad teaching in China, was bitten anew by the acting bug and joined what was then called Grandparents Living Theatre.
A peripheral nerve affliction has made her gait unsteady, but her voice is strong and full of the conviction of one who has lived the lines she must deliver.
They are lines that, by turns, are wistful or bittersweet, harsh or melancholy, about marching through the generational passages of life's fits and starts.
"You grow into the part," Larrick said following rehearsal, though she knows it is not merely her story.
It is, as well, the story of all the veterans who will comprise her audience next week; men who fought back fear for the sake of beating back tyranny, and who remember a fresh face, a cup of joe or a beloved old tune from a Columbus, Ohio, woman who once was young.
© 2000 Scripps Howard News Service.
All Rights Reserved.
