The Perfect Metaphor or how I explain the craziness in my head

This is the fourth summer when I haven’t given a tour at Beauport.  But there is something about being a tour guide that stays with you.  In theater speak, it is kind of like performing the same play every day, often several times a day, over and over again.  So the lines stay with you.  Even twenty years later – something I realized two weeks ago when I found myself helping out in the Knights gallery for Free (not so) Fun Friday and got on a long winded tangent about jousting armor.

That said, as much as it is a routine, giving a tour requires tuning into one’s audience and making adjustments to their attention spans, age, particular interest (be it wallpaper or furniture or antiquated gossip), a timeframe, or tolerance for the sweltering temperatures in the wooden rooms facing the harbor.  It requires a subtle skill of improvisation that I believe I gained as much from having to think on my feet while leading a group of tourists as I did in any show when someone dropped a line or a prop was left backstage.  A skill that stopped me from freaking out whenever a group arrived late or had too many people or required a last second (never mind minute) change in logistics. 

At Beauport, the change in logistics often meant you started in a different place.  It wasn’t like we didn’t have options.  There was the front door.  The terrace entrance.  The front door going into the China Trade Room (as opposed to Cogswell Hall).  Or just skip the front hall and go right up the stairs to start in the bedrooms. Some rare occasions a guide came in the door with the vaseline glass doorknob to the South Gallery or down the narrow passage to come in through the kitchen.  It stressed some guides out to have to make that adjustment and have to recalibrate the chronology of storytelling.  I liked it.  I liked how it tested the agility of how well I knew HDS’s story.  I liked knowing that it meant that particular tour group would have a very different experience than many others because what they saw first and what they saw last would change the impression of the house.  In fact, sometimes I envied them that version of seeing the house first from the ocean side and walking into the red and purple Octagon Room when my first entrance was through the kitchen on a dismal gray day.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately and using it as an analogy as I try to explain the series of books I’m writing.  Trying to explain in (somewhat) logical terms how a series doesn’t have to necessarily be in chronological order.  That you can enter the story at any number of points.  Yes, it will change your first impression.  Yes, you will have different information at the outset than someone else who enters from a different door discovers… but it is still ultimately the same story.

Are you with me?

Obviously if you start with me right now, you are probably going in the front door of the story.  Well… maybe.  This morning I ‘discovered’ another layer that would probably make it more like going in the not often used door with the vaseline glass doorknob into the South Gallery – where you can look out on the ocean through colored glass and technically you’re at the end of the tour, but in essence you have so many doors into rooms with secrets to open.  

Photo Credit: Historic New England

I hope to have this south gallery done by the end of the year, but if you want to understand my metaphor, go check out Beauport while it’s open for the season.  And look for that yellow doorknob.  It’s one of those details that if you blink, you’ll miss it.