Son’s words make mom proud

It’s almost too much for one mom to be proud of in one weekend. Audrey Holmes, 91, has seen her son Clint and daughter Gayle perform in a new biographical musical about her family, and today she plans to be at the wedding of granddaughter Brittany.

Anyone who saw Clint Holmes’ show at Harrah’s Las Vegas already knows at least a little family history. Perhaps they were even there one of the nights Audrey sang a guest solo in the show. Holmes would introduce the song “America Was Waiting” by telling his audience, “My mother is a white British opera singer. My dad was a black American jazz singer. Which makes me … Puerto Rican.”

After the song, if Audrey was there he would call her up to sing a bit of “Summertime,” proving the opera-singing claim was no sham.

Last week, Audrey was a little apprehensive about the debut of “Just Another Man” on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus. It’s the second time to see herself portrayed (this time by Tina Walsh) in a musical adaptation of her son’s biracial family story. But it will be new for the Las Vegas friends she has made since moving here in 2000.

And “Just Another Man” is a darker, more dramatic effort than “Comfortable Shoes,” which was staged in New Jersey and Chicago. She’s worried about how fellow residents of her seniors center will react to the language. That might be the least of it.

Audrey has to admit she was enlightened by the musical’s first-act depiction of the rocky relationship between Clint and his father, who died in 1998, and its second-act parallels to his relationship with oldest son Brent.

The musical portrays Clint’s father as trying to tone down his mother’s influence, even though he’s not always around. That is echoed when Clint’s character as an adult is too busy to deal with his own son’s problems.

“Funnily enough, I never thought about it until I saw this piece,” Audrey says. Clint “thought he was doing everything right for Brent, but it turns out that Brent was very unhappy. But you see, the same thing happened with Clint. I didn’t know, because he covered it all up.”

She was more of a witness to Clint’s adult reunion with his sister Gayle, who plays herself in the show. “He hadn’t had a chance to know Gayle once they were teenagers,” she says. “I realized how great they were together.”

“I am so fortunate and proud of them,” she adds. “To think that Clint can write the way he writes, they’re not just ordinary words. … I’ve never been able to tell him that.”

She has one complaint, and that’s about the wig Walsh wore to play her in old age. “I was going to say afterwards, ‘Now look at me. Do I look like an old lady?’… Make me look older, but not scruffy older.”

Mike Weatherford’s entertainment column appears Thursdays and Sundays. Contact him at 383-0288 or e-mail him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com.