Writing the story of Barlowe Theater took me to the shadowy places of the theater in my hometown. Many of the facts you read about Barlowe Theater are based loosely on the Al Ringling Theater in Wisconsin, which was erected by one of the brothers of the Ringling Bros. Circus. It’s a beautiful masterpiece of architecture and comes with its own ghost stories. In short, there have been “sightings” of a woman in white who supposedly did drop a child from one of the balcony seats and who is still looking for her infant today.
The idea of the lost boys is based on the story of a few boys who supposedly got lost in the maze of a below-floors, behind-walls tunnel system. As the legend goes, the boys were never found, though you can still hear them clanging on pipes and shouting for their freedom long after the theater has been closed for the night. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to determine if this tale is true, but it definitely provided the inspiration for the story you just read.
I also wanted to take a moment to address the believability of the adoption/abandonment struggle that Kit faces in this story. We often hear of abandonment struggles in children who have been adopted in their later years or who have gone through the foster-care system. Less frequently do we hear of the elements of abandonment and anxiety that develop in those who have been adopted shortly after their births.
When one studies the impact of the immediate bonding of an infant to its mother and father, imagine an infant being taken instantly from its mother and transferred into foster care until the adoption process is completed. Granted, today more adoptions are including the adoptive parents in the actual birthing process, and the gap from birth to bonding is much shorter. But in the past—and in my own personal story—this was simply not the case. Infants were transferred from person to person until a few weeks after birth or perhaps a few months and they were finally “home” with their adoptive parents. What this has done to infants like me was to create a gap between bonding and security, thus instigating an innate sense of insecurity, instability, and the underlying belief that relationships are temporary and conditional.
Kit’s struggle that she will eventually run out of value and therefore become expendable was taken from my own personal hours of therapy and self-realization. Therefore, I felt it was important that this aspect of infant adoption have awareness brought to it. Adoption is a beautiful process and has changed and impacted my life for the better. I hope at some point, your life will be touched by its beauty, and that you can help an adoptee realize the permanence of your love and devotion.