The Cameo
by Ray Fry

THE STORY: A play of memory, the action begins as Dan Hamilton, a successful writer in his middle years, recalls his parents, his youth and, most particularly, the day he brought his widowed mother to the nursing home where she would live out her final days.

As Dan tries to attend to the practical matters of getting his mother settled, she eschews the cold, institutional present in favor of memories of happier, times and events, when home and family were still a tangible, joyful reality.

Moved by her recollections, and deeply aware of his debt to his parents, Dan wrestles with the guilt he feels at cutting his mother off from the last vestiges of the richly purposeful, independent life which had been hers—but, sadly, there is no alternative.

When he leaves his mother he takes with him both the cameo which had been one of her prized possessions and, also, the wrenching knowledge that the frail, forgetful old lady he leaves behind and the vibrant, lively woman of his childhood are still, unaccountably, one and the same person.