The mercury’s dropping tonight and most Southerners I know hate the cold.  We’re starting school later, turning on space-heaters, taping shut doors and doing every last thing we can think of to avoid exposure to frost.   Well, some Southerners can’t handle cold.  We can tolerate endless heat, corrupt politicians and bad manners from visiting outsiders but our homes and our lives aren’t made for frigid temps and sub-zero windchills.  So we check our weather apps and complain about the artic blasts because most Southerns prefer not to suffer in silence.   For cold tolerance and stoic behavior you have to travel to the plains where I grew up.   Kansans have made an art form out of endurance.   Maybe that’s why William Inge’s prairie characters work so well in his plays, especially “Bus Stop”.  These folk know how to deal with a cold, dark night.

If you’ve seen the movie Bus Stop (and if you haven’t, don’t bother) you may think this is another Marilyn Monroe vehicle but the play is not.  Bus Stop is really about feeling cold and lonely  and there are few places as cold and lonely at a diner in the middle of Kansas.  Some of the characters wear their loneliness like a uniform and they accept it as part of their being.   To others, it’s an ache they want to ease or medicate with booze.  All of the characters in Bus Stop are familiar with isolation, from the grass-widowhood of Grace, to Bo’s orphaned life on his ranch and all of these unattached people seek love as an antidote for their solitude.

But love is a questionable entity as the characters in Bus Stop understand it.  The much-used Cherie wonders if, “You hear all about love when you are a kid and just take it for granted that such a thing really exists.  Maybe you have to find out for yourself it doesn’t.”  Dr. Lyman comments, “How defiantly we pursue love, like it was an inheritance due” but he points out that love requires a person to think of someone besides him or herself and many don’t have that ability.  During the stay in the diner, each of the characters in Bus Stop learns whether he or she has the ability and chance to be that generous and not all of them do.  Nevertheless, it is clear they are loved as characters.  The playwright gives each of them a resolution that fits.

So when you’re on the road some night, in a place that progress forgot, try stopping at the local diner.  Fast-foods franchises can’t qualify as diners and the menu must include pie.  Chances are you’ll like the waitress and if she smiles it’s because she means it; if she doesn’t, she’ll still try to give you decent service.   The prices will be reasonable and if the food’s not on a heart-healthy diet, it will satisfy your hunger and warm you.  If you’re out on your own, it will still be all right because you won’t be completely alone. And that’s good to know when you’re living life in a wide, cold spot in the road.