Sweet Old Ron

SweetOldRon.org
a tribute to the memory of Ron Replogle

As it says here in the programme notes, the Gentleman from Armenia (which must be a mythical land and not really a country, or at least we're not sure where it really is) comes in the door rocking back on his heels expansively with a hearty greeting and immediately, all disarmingly takes possession of the room. You can tell he's a character in a play at play, possibly between engagements, liberated from The Inspector General only to turn up in Animal Crackers. Restively he takes to a commodious chair or monopolises a couch. The fingers of his round pink hand curl savouringly at ease by his ear, as though appreciatively tastetesting the magical airs that occur to him unbidden. He is conversant in opera, baseball and the Okefenokee Swamp inhabited by Walt Kelly, all which pastimes are imaginary and highly improbable fictions. . .

You learn that he is a retired educator who never stopped professing what he knows (and if Blake School were ever to have owned a Professor Emeritus he should be accorded that Chair). You learn about his great friends the Chapelles who revitalized an entire small town community with their artists colony deep in Georgia (of all fanciful places on my mind). You learn most everything from this man, of anything that is interesting and exciting to him. He is what Henry Miller would have called A Living Book. They Were Alive and They Spoke to Me is the title to another chapter of his life. Miller quotes Gurdjieff (yet again a fantastical character in the play)

If you understood everything you have read in your life, you would already know what you are looking for now

Clearly a pair o'ducks, returning us to a prodigiously rambunctious Marx Brothers sense of life which we ought not to take altogether seriously. Humani nil a me alienum putanesque! Nothing human is too zesty a dish to be foreign to my palate or taken hastily between tricks (Free Reploglian transmission from Terence)

You realize that he is not a walk-on but the producer director choreographer of the play you are in. And only too expeditiously, too soon, he throws himself up, throws himself out the door, hurls himself on his horse and rides off in all directions. . .

Thank you for sharing the stage with us. Thank you for being our friend

- written by Charles Fowler