I was quite honored to be asked to be the keynote speaker at the Annual Episcopal Actors Guild Memorial Service on Sunday – even after I was told that Boyd Gaines was their first choice and couldn’t make it.

The Guild, which operates out of “The Little Church around the Corner” at 1 East 29th Street, has an annual ceremony where it remembers the artists who worked in and around theater but died in the last 12 months. My speech would precede the naming of the names.

Said Father John R. Sheehan, SJ, who recruited me, “The objective is to celebrate the theater. It should be a joyous occasion. It is not intended as a eulogy but more a tribute to this wonderful profession."

It IS a wonderful profession, and I told of some of the plays, performers, and experiences that changed my life. Some were as significant as A Raisin in the Sun, sure, but even lesser works such as Flower Drum Song and an obscure French play, Days in the Trees – which I saw simply because it was the only left at the TKTS booth – turned out to be profound influences.

Actually, it was the movie of Flower Drum Song that taught me an important lesson when I was 15. Soon after the picture began, I felt the presence of two men coming in and sitting in the row behind me. A bit later I noticed that we seemed to share the exact same sense of humor: Any joke that made me laugh made them laugh, too, yes, but it was more than that: The second I started laughing at a joke – and the second I stopped – were the exact same seconds that they started and stopped laughing, too.

At the end of the picture, I couldn’t wait to turn around and say, “Wasn’t that great?!?!” And that’s when I saw that they were black.

That they were would have never occurred me. Because I lived in a lily-white suburb and went to a Catholic school where there were no blacks, I was used to everyone around me being white. Oh, the nuns had said to us, “Everybody’s the same,” and we parroted back, “Everybody’s the same” – but I doubt that we really believed it. That day, though, I learned that we all really are the same. And isn’t it interesting that black and white people were relating to a story about Asians?

Flower Drum Song was co-written by Oscar Hammerstein, who did the lyrics for “Carefully Taught.” I think he would have liked that story.

Days in the Trees told of a miserly woman – the type who, as Oscar Wilde said, “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Time after time, you’d see her go into a restaurant with her grown son, open the menu, and start complaining about the prices. When the bill arrived, there was more carping and insisting that the waitress had added incorrectly.

Finally, the grown son could take it no more, but stood and said, “Mother, it’s so simple. Here’s what you do: You look at the bill, you see how much it is, you put the money on the table, you leave, and you forget about it. That’s it! You forget about it!”

And since that matinee, that’s exactly what I’ve done. And it’s spread to the rest of my life, too. I’ve become much more generous in many more situations simply because I saw Days in the Trees.

“By being in the same room with live people,” I told the crowd, “I feel much more a part of the action and more emotionally involved than I do when I’m at the movies or at home in front of a TV set. Over the years, I’ve come to care about people more from feeling their pain on stage. I once even came to care for a creature.”

Some of the crowd looked confused for a long moment, and then assumed that I must have meant a dog such as Sandy in Annie. No.

I told about the time one of my former students asked me to come see her in a Moliere play in a black box. Of course I said yes, even though I know that seeing amateurs do Moliere can be painful.

I arrived at the theater – a room, really, with folding chairs of all shapes and sizes. Eleven other people were in the room, all scattered about.

So the stage manager came out before the show and said, “Listen, because we don’t have much of a house tonight, how about everyone coming down and sitting in the front row?” And that’s what we did in the dozen seats right next to the playing area. (I can’t say “stage” because there was none.)

The play started, and it wasn’t a terrible production, but it wasn’t a particularly good one, either. All of us were half-watching it, when suddenly something caught our eye. Zooming out of the stage left wing was an enormous water bug, easily going as fast as the turtle in the Bye Bye Birdie movie after Albert gives it his Speed-Up compound.

But suddenly the water bug stopped in its tracks – aware that it had just come in in the middle of something. I – and everyone else in the first row – was looking intently at it. We could almost feel its thought processes:

Wait a minute. I come through here all the time, and there’s never anything going on here. Who are these monsters clomping around? Hmmm, I think I’m in real trouble. I could really get squished in a situation like this.

Should I go back? No, I can’t see what’s behind me, so I might be walking into something even more dangerous. I’d better go forward where I can see where I’m going. But I’d better be careful, too.

I was so impressed with the bug, for it shrewdly waited until the actors moved upstage to play a scene, and then forged forward. Once they returned, it stood still. Eventually, it made it a full halfway across the stage.

But then, all too suddenly, an actor moved backwards and came within less than an inch of stepping on the bug. Immediately all 12 of us screamed and moaned, for we had come to care about this creature, the hardest working bug in show business. We couldn’t bear to see it killed now, not after we’d seen it work so diligently in hopes of getting to its destination.

The actors froze a bit when they heard our noises, unaware of why we’d reacted the way we had, but they were busy acting and looking at each other’s faces, and just plowed on.

So did the bug. It continued to guess correctly on when to move a step or two, or sprint a lot, and when to play possum and hope for the best. Finally, after about 10 minutes of this cat-and-mouse game (to mix a metaphor), the bug made it to the other side of the stage, and zoomed off into the stage right wing.

And the 12 of us all burst into applause, confusing the actors even more. But, come on, it was the best damn performance we’d ever seen from a bug.

Now of course, had this same bug come into one of our apartments, it would have been “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” or we would have stomped down on the floor with an intensity that would have made a Flamenco dancer seem like a gentle ballerina. But seeing the bug on stage and empathizing with the long journey it had made despite impossible odds made us care deeply about him.

You don’t get that at your Quad or on your Quasar.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com