To this day, even the liveliest cocktail conversations quiet when my father silently asks for the spotlight. Sitting very still, smiling slightly and staring down toward the floor as if the memory were projected at his feet, he’ll let the room sit hushed a moment before he begins.

One of my favorite stories is his ode to my mother’s authority.

“It was 1972,” Dad starts. “We were doing a production of War and Peace, if you can picture that on that small Asolo stage. Of course, one of the key characters in that play is Napoleon Bonaparte, and we had an actor who was very much into the role. He studied the man, and with nose putty and makeup, made himself look like Napoleon as much as he could. He also drank prodigious amounts of Napoleon brandy to put him in the mood.

“Now, one of his props in the show was an antique telescope, and it was a beautiful thing but also had a tendency to fall apart.

“One day, he went into his scene to use the telescope and sure enough, it fell into pieces in his hands. Marian, who was very pregnant with the twins, was off stage right with a derringer in one hand and some other pistol in the other, concentrating intently to hear the upcoming sound cues. And Napoleon came offstage, with his hands full of this broken telescope, and started yelling at her—as much as you can yell backstage—but yelling at this very pregnant woman holding two hand guns. Marian, to her credit, brushed him off and proceeded with the sound effects. But when she was finished, she stormed off to his dressing room.”

At this point, my mother steps in to explain that despite her extreme frustration, all she’d said when she got to the dressing room was, “Listen, buster, don’t you dare distract me in the middle of a show.”

Dad pauses again, smiling, then finishes:

“Walter Rhodes was an actor in the company—mischievous, but a company man—and Walter had been privy to all that was going on. He was curious about the aftermath, so he went upstairs and looked in the dressing room. And there in the corner, by himself, sat Napoleon. And Napoleon was weeping.

“And Walter said, ‘My heavens, what happened?’ And Napoleon, with tears streaming down his face, said, ‘You can call me son of a bitch, and you can call me bastard, but nobody calls me buster.”

I can see now that much of Mom’s career boils down to 40 years of middle management, coordinating actors’ egos, directors’ God complexes and executives’ grand plans. And for many of those years she’d then come home to play peacekeeper between three excitable daughters and a man whose job required him to memorize a script every month.

This season, for the first time I can remember, I won’t see my father on stage at all. I’ll admit I’m a little heartbroken. But he’s been looking forward to retirement and wanted to test it out; despite his poise, he’s always had what I consider the typical actor’s unsteady relationship with attention. He’ll happily spend the year among his books and his cats, writing his one-man play about Thomas Merton and restoring the 1957 VW Beetle that first brought him to Sarasota. For this year, at least, he’ll get to be himself. Fortunately, I’ll still get to be his audience.