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It's about nine o'clock in the evening and I'm outside at the Zeller Amphitheater. I'm here walking to the car to go home. It's already getting dark and the shadows are creeping up on the east side of the stage. By the steps leading to the parking lot there is a sign on the retaining wall that says 'Zeller Theater.' A single spot lamp shines down from the trees onto the polished metal letters of the sign. The letters shine from the lamplight and there is no light in the rest of the theater. The enveloping darkness seems to make this sign the sole object of interest, as if the Zeller family had paid for that one light to shine on that one sign, and no lights to shine on anything else, not even the moon on the grass. The rest of the amphitheater is getting darker and neither the moon nor the stars are out tonight. Sometimes I can see the amphitheater as a child of the Greek ones that came before it--there are the actors lined up on the skene and in front of them a dancing chorus is singing so that we may hear the story told first as a prelude, and then again as a closure. But the steps leading down from the limestone seats are finished concrete, and the handrails are a tawdry, yet tired shade of brown that is too pastel to possess any self-esteem of its own. To match the timid iron handrails, three dark lightposts tower above and behind the stone seats. Their concrete footings and square steel construction attest to the architect's clear and thrifty mind, but all this economy, this function over form, is distracting me, and I can think of the Greek dialogue no more. I dream of architects long gone and the great quest for design as I walk up the concrete steps and past the lightposts, onto the newly sodded grass towards the hills that will bring me home.
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