Notes in November 6

On Crucibles & Curtain Calls Part 2

Original Post: Monday, April 12, 2010

Weia, waga!

wander you wave

wall to the cradle

wagalaweia,

wallala weiala weia!

Das Rheingold

Scene 1

Gold, even Rheingold, is a poor metaphor. It signifies something very valuable, which is presumptuous, and quite malleable, which is false. I was a teenager, and typical to my breed I had a will of steel. I was smart (my teachers told me so, and my IQ scores were in the highest percentile) and I was confident. I knew I could do anything that I wanted to do and I knew just as well that I would not do anything that I didn’t what to do.

Sports? My dad liked sports; I loathed them. Music? My dad loathed music, unless it was country western; I embraced it. Theater? My dad never saw a play in his life and never read one; I decided to be an actor.

My music career did not survive much beyond high school, but it was notable while it lasted. In music class I leaned I had no aptitude for notation, in spite of my hearing wonderful melodies in my head and writing pages and pages of gibberish, which my music teacher would mock. She did have me try out for chorus and discovered what she considered a fine tenor voice.

I sang first tenor in the school chorus in both the junior (11th grade) and senior (12th grade) years. The high point was singing Handel’s Messiah to an appreciative audience; one that duly rose for the Hallelujah Chorus and one that did not include my father. For the rest of my life the Messiah became required listening in my own home at high Christian holidays, even long after I drifted away from the Lutheran church of my forbearers, and from brief stints with universalism and agnosticism, to become a godless humanist. Even today, I can’t hear it without joining in.

My interest in acting started off innocently enough. I had dropped my first Bethlehem girlfriend because she wouldn’t let me kiss her and was deeply involved with a big-breasted, brown-eyed teaser who would do just about anything but let me take of my boxer shorts. She asked me to join her in trying our for the junior class play. We both got parts. I think I was made for acting. I could be someone else. I could be the center of attention when my character was onstage. I could be part of an imaginary family as different from my own as the playwright could imagine it. I was in competition only with myself: how can I say these lines better? How can I make the audience believe me?

In one audience was the director of a small theater company who came backstage and asked me to meet with her. Her odd name was Blanche Truse and during my first visit to her house I met six of the members of her company, all adults, all exotic, all fascinating. We played charades, a game I had never heard of. In my family all anyone did at a party was play poker, eat pretzels, drink beer and talk.

When the game ended there seemed to be a consensus: I would be welcome. I read for and got the part of “Road Wanderer” in their next Children’s Theater production, Land of the Dragon. It would mean cutting classes in order to tour schools in the region with the play. My folks had little idea of what I did, and, at the time, I was acing all my classes.

It was a wonderful role: I got to talk to birds and other imaginary animals that came to my prison cell; there were grand villains and innocent maidens. On the rare days the audience was inattentive (they were kids, after all) Blanche would storm around backstage yelling “Fucking brats, fucking god damn brats,” which I thought was so cool and sophisticated.