All the Girls Were Laughing

In the morning I was in the company of four ebullient fifth-graders whose laughter trailed on the windy autumn air like ribbons of silk.

In the evening I was in the company of a woman whose death from breast cancer lay over a theater audience like a funeral shroud.

It was a very strange day.

As a newspaper columnist I’m always seeking comparisons, to measure one segment of life against another, to give height and scope to the extremes of their dichotomies.

On this particular day I wasn’t searching at all, but events have a way of presenting themselves when a corner of one’s mind is open.

The four girls were Eleni, Sindy, Annabel and my very good friend Nicole. Their class wanted to visit the Valley Edition of the Times and I was asked to be one of the drivers.

It’s not the kind of thing I usually do, but Nicole is a persuasive beauty and I am putty in her small hands. So I said yes.

It was a morning to remember with four of the most enchanting sprites I’ve ever known celebrating that element of youth that lives for each bountiful moment, and that moment alone.

They sang, they giggled, they barked at passing traffic, waved at boys and enjoyed the cluster of our company with magnificent ease.

When we parted we hugged, and I watched them dance off into the sunlight, whirling with the wind that caressed their joy.

Then evening came.

*

The Met is a small, second-story theater tucked into a corner of Hollywood, one of probably hundreds scattered throughout L.A. County.

I attend many of the performances offered by Equity-waiver houses because the talent there is immense, and I don’t want to miss anything.

The play this particular night was called “Purple Breasts,” a title that alludes to the markings on the breasts of a cancer patient being treated with radiation.

It was a one-woman performance by a remarkably talented actress named Allaire Paterson, who was also one of the five writers originally involved in creation of the play.

Another of the writers, Daryl Lindstrom, died of metastatic breast cancer seven years ago and this adaptation of the original script was about her, and in a larger sense about the other 44,000 women who die each year in the United States of the same disease.

I wanted to see the play, God knows, not for its “entertainment” value but because two people very close to me have had to undergo surgery for removal of malignant tumors in their breasts.

I suppose I was seeking insight into their traumas, even though both have fully recovered. Allaire’s performance, taken from the viewpoint of half a dozen different characters, allowed me that glimpse into anguish.

We saw the slow decline of her character’s life from a dancing, singing paragon of vitality, not unlike the sprites that accompanied me that morning, to a bitter, ashen-faced “victim” whose life ran out with the sands of an hourglass next to her bed.

“I’m only 36,” she cried at the end. “I can’t die! I want to run the marathon! I want to have a baby. . . .”

*

The day put itself together for me like pieces of a puzzle that constitute a picture, and the picture was life.

Sprites never grow old, but little girls do. They become women in an age that celebrates women. Their futures are brighter than they’ve ever been.

But with the beauties of maturity come burdens of pain, and breast cancer is an anguish that one in eight women in this country will have to face.

Zoe Miller, the main character in “Purple Breasts,” was forced to confront not only her own desperation but the reactions of those around her that ranged from maternal denial to medical indifference.

Allaire’s interpretation of Zoe’s pain claws at the heart, evoking feelings that cause shivers of uneasiness in the satiny warmth of an L.A. evening.

I realize we are a world at war with many life-threatening diseases, some of which attract more attention than others. The war is being fought on many fronts. Breast cancer is only one of life’s enemies.

I write about it now because the contrast of a day last week, a day of laughter and despair, of morning sun and evening shadows, pulls at me with a force I can’t deny.

I keep thinking about the ebullience of those four sprites and about the painful message in “Purple Breasts,” and wishing that the laughter of little girls could go on forever.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com)