stageshouston.com<\/a><\/p>\nOne person who will be attending the official opening night on Sept. 24 remembers those days quite well. She is Scranton-born, Houston-based, retired Houston Public Library employee Syma Zerkow, who was on one of those planes with her husband, Walter, who passed away last year at age 73.<\/p>\n
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\u201cMy husband and I had been in London, and we were on our way back to Houston,” recalls\u00a0Zerkow, 75, by phone from Silver Spring, Md, where she is visiting. \u201cWe were Continental 5, which was a nonstop flight from London to Houston. Before we left the airport in London, my husband changed into shorts because he knew that when we got to Houston, it’d be over 80 degrees, and he wanted to be comfortable, right? That was not a good move.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zerkow remembers landing in Gander International Airport, where the entire flight stayed on the runway for 24 hours until passengers from other planes deplaned. \u201cThey pretty much filled up Gander,\u201d she says. \u201cPlus, they apparently only had one or maybe two rolling stairs that you could actually use to deplane with, because they weren’t set up to handle all these big aircrafts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zerkow says the townspeople couldn\u2019t have been more helpful and comforting. \u201cThey got the stairs over to our plane and came on board the next morning, and first asked if anybody needed any medications or supplies of any sort,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd, then, they came back with Subway sandwiches, because the locals had gone into the little Subway sandwich shop there in Gander and spent all night making turkey sandwiches so we would have food to eat that day, because the airplane had run out of food. So, that was really a wonderful example of how the Canadians treated us.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Zerkows and their fellow passengers eventually got off, boarded school buses, and were sent to Gambo, another town an hour outside Gander, where they had temporary accommodations waiting for them.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe were part of the group that ended up at the church hall,\u201d says\u00a0Zerkow, \u201cand they had the army cots that are like stretchers with just canvas and sticks to hold them together.\u201d<\/p>\n
They spent the next few days eating cereal for breakfast, and sandwiches made by the ladies from the church, watching the news. A toll-free phone was set up for people to call loved ones, while others went to the town library (located in a double-wide trailer) to send emails. A candle-lighting ceremony was also held for the victims. As Zerkow puts it, \u201cThat was a very harrowing time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cut to the mid-aughts; some friends from Tacoma alerted the Zerkows of a stage musical they caught in Seattle. Back then, \u201cAway\u201d was going around the country doing tryout runs before its Broadway debut in 2017.<\/p>\n
Says\u00a0Zerkow, \u201cOur friends saw the play, loved it, and immediately contacted us and said, \u2018You gotta see this play. If you’re anywhere where it’s playing, go see it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Fortunately, the play would make a stop in D.C., right when the couple would be in town for a family get-together.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe were coming up for one of the Jewish holidays and bought tickets for us and all of our family that lives in the D.C. area,\u201d says Zerkow. \u201cSo, we sort of took up a whole row of Ford\u2019s Theatre and saw the play there, which was lovely. It’s very heartwarming, you know. It takes a horrible, horrible time, and manages to find some love and redemption out of the Canadians’ response to our tragedy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zerkow has seen \u201cAway\u201d twice now (the North American tour made a Houston stop in 2022), and confirms she\u2019ll be there on Sept. 24. She\u2019ll also be taking part in a post-matinee discussion\/Q&A on Oct. 4. As a longtime, local arts patron who served as a producer (along with her husband) on past Stages productions (\u201cMostly, it\u2019s just giving them money,\u201d she amusingly admits),\u00a0Zerkow is looking forward to seeing how Stages adapts this play, a much-needed, musical refresher course on how we should treat our friends and neighbors \u2013 especially those who were there for us during our time of need.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it’s a very timely reminder of how important good relations and friendships are,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd it’s not all just quid pro quo, which unfortunately seems to be the attitude of our current leadership. But the Canadians really stepped up and they did, you know. They were not rich people. The people in Gander were lower middle-class, and they sacrificed a lot to help us out.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Houston’s Syma Zerkow in Newfoundland. Courtesy Syma Zerkow The Newfoundland church that housed Americans who couldn’t return to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438800,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":["post-438799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}