"SUSAN STROUPE!"

 “SUSAN STROUPE!”

Caroline and I were  playing balloon ball with 2 year old David  in our duplex in Nashville in the late evening of September 11, 1982 – years before that date became one of infamy in American history.  Caroline said:  “I think that my water broke – I believe that the baby is coming.”  It was a few days early, and I was skeptical, but I’ve learned that Caroline (and other women) may know more than I do on this subject.  We went to the birthing room at Vanderbilt Hospital, and Mary Susan came out a couple of hours later early in the morning of September 12.  We have been celebrating her ever since.  

We moved from Nashville to Decatur five months later, so baby Susan was a hit at Oakhurst Presbyterian for many reasons, including the fact that she was the only infant there.  She grew up there, and it was a great blessing to her and to us – many grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles.  She also learned how to be a good listener there – hearing many different cultural approaches and voices.  With so many African-Americans at Oakhurst and so much African-American music there, she learned to clap on the back beat!  

Though we are her parents, she has been (and continues to be) our teacher on so many levels.  She took us up into the cold north when she went to Macalaster College in Minnesota.  She majored in English and drama, and we were introduced to the world of theater in a way that I never thought possible.  We took a trip to the headwaters of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca one year when she was there.  I was amazed that I could walk across the beginnings of the River that swirls and eddies and flows fast in its mile wide crossing at my hometown of Helena, Arkansas.

        She worked for Americorps for two years in Albuquerque, and we learned a whole new world of the Southwest.  Given her compassionate heart, she worked in Albuquerque with adults with developmental disabilities.  She made lifelong friends there among the artists in that Americorps Center, and they helped their students do a play by Shakespeare.

She moved to Baltimore in 2009 to work on her MFA in theater at Towson University, and she has been thriving and growing in Baltimore ever since.  We have enjoyed getting to see her develop her personality and leadership.  She joined the church choir at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church.  Soon after that she called me to ask if I knew who Taylor Branch was.  When I replied that of course I knew who he was because I had read and used his great trilogy on MLK, she said:  “Well, he sings with me in the Brown Memorial Choir!”  She later joined the church as a member (with some sadness about transferring from Oakhurst), later chaired the Worship Committee there and now is an elder on the Session.

As an artist in American culture, Susan has to cobble “day jobs” together for income, but she has been blessed to find theater-related jobs in order to do this, for which we are grateful.  She is one of the founders of Submersive Theater, a group of colleagues who approach works of art in an “immersive” way.  Yes, another learning for us – “immersive theater” invites the audience to be participants in the performance of the play itself.  For those such as I who like linear plots, I’ve had a learning curve on this.  But, it is great and pleasing to watch Susan develop and perform so well in these contexts.  As Susan put it to me, “There’s a lot of similarities between worship and theater, and I learned a lot of this in worship at Oakhurst: the willingness to not rely so much on script; the belief that the congregation/audience are integral parts of the performances; the necessity of recognizing and learning to cross cultural boundaries without colonizing the other.”

Susan is deeply passionate for justice and has a deeply compassionate heart, a combination that makes her so impressive and such a good theater (and church) leader and performer.  She has been a gift to us ever since she popped out of Caroline’s womb in 1982. We had not done amniocentesis during the pregnancy to determine the gender identity or anything else about the baby whom Caroline was carrying in 1982, and we were expecting a boy.  We even had a mild disagreement on the way to the hospital about what name we would give a boy, but we were agreed that if we were blessed to have a girl, we would name her “Mary Susan.”  When Dr. Betty Neff helped to slide Susan out of Caroline, she said: “Welcome to the world, Mary Susan!”  And Caroline almost leaped up from the birthing table in joy – the girl that we so wanted.  Susan has been blessing us and teaching us ever since, and we give so many thanks for her on her birthday today!