Jamie Lyons

Look at them. Amber and Judy. First ones on the Roble Theater stage (now the Harry J. Elam Jr. Theater) in this space that still smells like fresh paint and possibility. You know what that means? That means there’s no roadmap. No one’s fucked it up here yet. No one’s nailed it yet either. Just empty space and two people willing to step into it.

Aleta’s there, pushing them. “Go further,” you can almost hear her saying. “Push the boundaries.” Because that’s the thing about being first, you have to push. There’s no trail to follow, no safe path worn smooth by a thousand feet before yours. You’re making the path. You’re the path.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about being first: history matters. Not the kind in textbooks, the kind that seeps into the walls, into the floorboards, into the fucking air of a place. Every theater, every stage, every performance space has a memory. And these two? They’re writing the first line of this one’s story.

Maybe nobody remembers their names in a few years. Maybe there’s no plaque, no mention in the program notes. Maybe Aleta, Amber and Judy become a footnote, if that. But that mark they’re leaving right now? It doesn’t give a shit about being remembered. It’s already there. In the marlay floor, the wood grain. In the way the light hits at this angle. In the molecules of sweat and fear and ambition that are settling into this space right fucking now.

That’s the thing about places, they remember even when the assholes who hold the keys to the place don’t. Every performer who comes after, whether they know it or not, they’re walking on ground these two broke. Breathing air these two charged with something. Standing in the gravity well of this first moment.

There’s a kind of terror in that, if you think about it. But also a kind of freedom that most people never get to taste. Everything that happens after, every performance, every stumble, every triumph on this stage, it all comes back to this moment. To these two. To the first marks made on an unmarked canvas.

I get it. They did what they always do, what they’ve been doing to everything worth a damn since some MBA sociopath figured out you could monetize nostalgia and sell it back as “progress.” They took something old, something with actual soul (remember soul?), something that had earned every water stain, every crack in its walls, and they scrubbed it clean. Full corporate colonoscopy. Now it’s gleaming surfaces and motivational slogans that mean nothing, probably smelling like eucalyptus and institutional wellness, which is just the smell of death pretending to be life. A place where people come to feel virtuous while feeling hollow inside.

It’s a gym that could be anywhere. Palo Alto, Bethesda, some soulless suburb of Phoenix. It doesn’t matter, man. Standardized, optimized, smooth, frictionless, calibrated so nobody has to feel anything real, anything that might actually wake them up from the consumer coma.

But here’s the thing, here’s the ONE FUCKING THING they can’t touch: the light.

That’s what destroys me about these photographs. Light pours through those massive western windows like liquid gold, like some kind of benediction. God or whatever passes for God saying, “Forget your renovation, forget everything,” flooding the space the same way it did twenty years ago, fifty years ago, the same way it will in twenty more when someone tears it down again. It doesn’t care about budgets, consultants, or LEED certification or any of the bullshit we tell ourselves matters. It just IS. And it’s magnificent in a way that makes everything else look like the sad joke it is.

I remember being in this exact space, back when learning happened without intending to, before we optimized spontaneity into an app. I showed up as the only guy in Susie Cashion’s Afro-Peruvian dance class. Forty women. You do the math: six-foot-five me, tallest woman maybe five-five. Ridiculous at first. Absolutely absurd. But the movement got into my body, the rhythms made sense in a way words never could, and suddenly the women stopped seeing me as the awkward outsider. They saw someone trying, someone learning, someone actually present.

Years later, at a wedding in Peru, those Tuesday and Thursday afternoons meant something entirely new. I was no longer the gringo doing that apologetic shuffle at the edge of the dance floor. I was IN IT. I knew the steps, the rhythm, and the grandmas (man, the GRANDMAS) they adored it. That belonging, that cross-cultural connection, happened because the space was real enough, lived-in enough, beat-up enough, to teach something true.

Places like this hold memory, transformation, the ghosts of everyone who learned, failed, bled, got back up. The corporate renovation erased that. Sanded down the history like it was graffiti instead of scripture. Made it safe, generic, neutral, which is just another word for dead. Now you can’t tell if anything real ever happened here. It’s every-place, which means it’s no fucking place at all.

Except for the light. EXCEPT FOR THE LIGHT.

Look at that light blazing through the windows, reminding everyone with their yoga mats and good intentions what actually matters. It doesn’t give a shit about budgets or aesthetic consultants or any of the metrics we use to measure everything except what’s real. It comes through day after day, relentless, turning amber and gold even on sterile, optimized surfaces. It makes the space sacred for a few hours, despite itself, despite everything.

That’s California light. Western light. You can’t franchise it. You can’t package it. You can’t turn it into a subscription service or a wellness brand. It belongs here, at this angle, at this time, hitting these floors.

The one thing they didn’t ruin, the one thing they couldn’t touch.

The gym’s different now. Better by every measurable metric, which tells you everything about our metrics and nothing about what matters: climate controlled, ADA compliant, energy efficient. All the things we tell ourselves matter. But something essential has been lost. Something we don’t even have words for anymore because we’ve been convinced that new is always better, clean is always superior, progress requires erasing the past like it’s a typo instead of the only thing that ever mattered.

All we can do is stand here and let the impossible light pour through. Remember. Feel a little angry, or a lot angry, it’s the same anger. Grateful, somehow, in that bittersweet way that’s the only kind of gratitude left to us, that at least this remains. That at least something here is still real, still beyond the reach of the optimization algorithms. That light reminds us that authenticity survives in the smallest, untouchable ways. It survives in memory, in movement, in moments of belonging, in the simple truth that some things can’t be sanitized, optimized, or sold. Not yet, anyway, though God knows they’re trying.

And maybe that’s enough. It has to be enough.

Reopening Roble Gym with The Chocolate Heads: Ghost Architecture, A site specific performance commemorating the Reopening of Stanford University’s Roble Gym.  Produced by Stanford Theater and Performance Studies (Stanford TAPS)