Ham (22 page)

I had crossed the line, entered No-Sam-Land, and hurt someone—with a Frisbee—the single most innocuous form of sports equipment known to man. Mark's lip was swollen and purple as a ripe plum, and though he didn't blame me, I knew I could never again attempt anything remotely jocklike in the future. If this was the result of a simple Frisbee toss, a game of Ping-Pong might result in quadriplegia and anything with a ball or a bat would undoubtedly mean certain death. I swore in my heart that I would stick to things at which I was completely proficient, natural, superior, the best. Which was a bit limiting, since it meant not trying anything new, ever, when the world was full of literal and figurative Frisbees landing at feet left and right.

I justified my oath in knowing I was an artist, and persons as unique as myself didn't have time for kids' games. As my “uniqueness” grew more evident, I decided to take the bull by the horns—and decorate them! I began wearing 1950s pleated and cuffed gabardine pants and knit pullover sweater vests, tweed-twilled two-button suits, wing-tip shoes, and skinny belts and ties, all of which I'd found stuffed in mildewy barrels at my Memo's storage garage. They'd all belonged to my uncle Darrell, who died before I was born but left a treasure trove of fashion.

Still, something was missing.

What could be better than Sun-In, a spray-on hair lightening product that could give me a natural, summer-streaked appearance, and at under three dollars?! I couldn't resist. I bought a bottle and read the directions carefully:
Apply sparingly and test on a strand of hair before using.

Kind of like testing a carpet before applying cleaning fluid. It went on:
Highlights are permanent.

Well, why shouldn't they be?

Subscribing to my typical now-quicker-more philosophy, I saturated my hair with the stuff and used a blow-dryer to hasten the process. Within minutes I had a new look. And that look was bright orange-blond hair.

Highlights are permanent
 . . .

There were no highlights . . . just a head of orange-blond hair.

I hoped that my locks would grow out before my new life in high school, which was only a few weeks away, but that seemed unlikely unless I shaved my head and started from scratch.

On the first day of high school, I entered the double glass doors in a stylish fedora but was told to remove it immediately, as no hats were allowed in the building—even a fashionable chapeau that matched my retro outfit. No one commented on my clothes. Everyone commented on my hair. Actually, they asked what had happened to me. I told them, matter-of-factly, that I'd “spent a lot of time at the public pool and it was totally natural.” Forget that the
natural
color of my hair could not be found anywhere in nature, except perhaps in those creepy bioluminescent jellyfish skulking miles beneath the sea. And never mind that I sported the same pallid, sunless skin. And that everyone knew I couldn't swim.

But bigger things were at hand. Prior to high school, there had only been Christmas shows and band or choir recitals, but no real musicals or plays. At lunchtime, a sign-up sheet for tryouts was posted for the fall musical:
The Music Man.
I hoped the starring role of Harold Hill could be seen as an apricot blond.

I learned the complicated and wordy song “Ya Got Trouble” for the audition, thinking that already knowing it would give me an advantage and save them the agony of teaching it to someone else. Seniors were usually awarded the lead roles and I couldn't take any chances.

I sang both Harold Hill's part and the townsfolk's echoed melody in the chorus with gusto, and immediately knew I'd won the part from the relieved sparkle in the eyes of the drama teacher, Mr. White.

What a coup! We began rehearsals the next week and I was so excited about a full cast and costumes and a real band. However, since I was used to directing my own extracurricular shows, being in a production that I wasn't overseeing proved a bit of a challenge. The keys were too low for my first tenor voice and I sounded terrible on most of the songs. Transposing the music for the entire orchestra was out of the question, so I struggled, unsuccessfully, to hit the long, low notes in “Marian the Librarian,” which mostly resembled an elongated burp. But I figured I could act my way out of it. There were other matters of concern. My little brother, Matt, was cast as Winthrop, the lisping trumpet enthusiast, and I knew he'd deliver. But the rest of the cast was suspect.

The Music Man
must be performed with energy and zeal and rhythm, especially in the opening number, “Rock Island,” which is basically a fast-paced rap between traveling salesmen in a train car. However, most people in Oklahoma talk slow. Really slow. No matter how much we rehearsed, my fellow cast mate David couldn't wrap his mouth around “Whadda-ya-talk, whadda-ya-talk, whadda-ya-talk, whadda-ya-talk?” and the song would plunge from the cadence of a quickening train to a dreadful dirge every time he spoke. It gave you the feeling the train had hit a deer or a small bear, and then it would rev up again with the next salesman.

David was a handsome boy and one of my first teenage crushes. He'd lived next door to us on Washington Street and we'd been lab partners on a biology project where we made a life-size human body out of papier-mâché with the vascular system painted on. We'd named it after our social studies teacher, Miss Liptack, and gave the dummy ample breasts to solidify the likeness. David had one silver-capped tooth right in front. It gave him a pirate kind of look that I found very manly and slightly glamorous. Even with our history, my crush, the Liptack bond, and his shiny tooth, I couldn't forgive his tardy tongue. It was exasperating.

But I wasn't directing so I just kept my mouth shut.

The role of the mayor was played by someone very tall whose name I have blocked from memory but is forever etched as the Guy Who Never Made a Cue. Ever. If there was a lull, it was because the mayor had dropped a line or failed to make his entrance.

But I wasn't directing so I just kept my mouth shut.

I began to attend all rehearsals, including scenes I wasn't in, simply as an observer. One day, when they were rehearsing “The Wells Fargo Wagon” number, a boy in the ensemble who sang the line “I got some salmon from Seattle last September” pronounced the
l
in the word “salmon.” After the song, I privately and politely pointed out that the
l
is silent and the word is pronounced
SAM-on
.

The next time they did the song, he blurted out “I got some saLmon from Seattle last September.” I waited until the song was finished and tactfully corrected him again, but this time in front of the company. “
Sam
-on,” I said. And then enunciating, ever so slowly, “Saaam-ooonnn.”

The next time they ran the song, I had my eye on him and he knew it. Just before his line he saw me arch an eyebrow nearly up to my bicolored hairline (my orange-blond mop was growing out), but he buckled under my glowering intimidation and sang “I got some saLmon from Seattle last September.”

I jumped up onto the stage in one furious leap and threw my hands in the air, yelling, “
Hold it!! Hooold iiittt! It's sam-on! Sam-on! 
” The music stopped. “Have you never heard the word
sam-on
? It's a fish. A fish called
sam-on
. It swims upstream! Like me!
Saaam-on
! Now do it again and get it right this time!”

Mr. White stared at me, flabbergasted. He said nothing. I was back on my game—back in the director's seat. No one dared stop me. Having thus far only been in shows of my own design or productions with real adults, and now working with these amateurs who looked at the show as something “fun to do,” I was a living, breathing terror. The Jerome Robbins of Charles Page High School. But we would never hear the word “salmon” pronounced incorrectly again.

I suspect that, to this day, the saLmon culprit has not so much as ordered the fish at a restaurant for fear that I would creep up from behind his booth at Red Lobster and strangle him.

As the school year progressed, Mr. White was becoming somewhat of a Jesus freak. I'd heard it had begun the previous year when he'd chosen
Godspell
as the musical, but now his devotion had accelerated as he grew longish, scruffy blond hair and his lenient blue eyes took on a tranquillity that reflected either redemption or quaaludes, I couldn't know. He started wearing baggy linen pants and leather sandals and walked with a staff. In drama class, he insisted we cut all curse words in all monologues we performed, and even the word “damn” was replaced with “dern” when we did Neil Simon's
Plaza Suite.

New Yorkers don't say “dern.” Ever.

Mr. White started hosting prayer circles and Bible study meetings and Jesus hayride retreats with bonfires. One step away from sacrificing a goat. He painted
JESUS LIVES!
in giant, bold letters on his teal-trimmed garage door. At the end of the term, rumor had it that he would not be returning. “He was let go,” it was whispered, “for being too religious.” Being
too
religious in Sand Springs was hard to do. One would have to be medically diagnosed with OCJD—obsessive-compulsive Jesus disorder—to be considered too religious. Unlike regular OCDers, who can't wash enough or clean enough or turn off lights/stoves/toasters too much, Jesus OCDers can't testify enough or get God-fearing enough or morally good enough. But even in the nucleus of unquestionable religious zealotry, Mr. White's devoutness rode the fine line between sainthood and crazy. And crazy won. If Joan of Arc had lived in Sand Springs, she might not have been burned at the stake, but she would definitely have been labeled a lesbian and her house would have been egged. But then, she probably would have had the good sense not to paint
VIVE JÉSUS!
in giant, bold letters on her garage door.

•  •  •

Sand Springs was feeling more and more beneath my professional and sanity standard. It was clear that if I was going to pursue my dream of acting and singing and dancing, I needed to cross its borders. While visiting relatives in Dallas, my family had been to Six Flags Over Texas, a theme park which featured multiple live shows that played several performances a day. I begged to audition. Sure, I was a hotshot in Sand Springs, but who knew if I was even qualified for the next step outside our little world? There was only one way to find out, and since my parents had no knowledge of legitimate acting programs or any real theatrical opportunities, Six Flags seemed the most accessible option. I was only fifteen and the minimum age was sixteen, but my parents recognized that my lust for a real stage could not be restrained, so my father agreed to back me in lying about my age and make the five-hour drive to Dallas for the cattle call.

Three days before the audition I came down with mononucleosis: the kissing disease. If only. My throat was practically swollen shut and I was feverish and weak and couldn't sing a note. But nothing was going to keep me from my big chance and, as usual, my parents let me forge ahead like King Henry V unto the breach, Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, or Barbra Streisand on the bow of a tugboat.

My father and I began our trek before sunrise and arrived midmorning at the hotel where the auditions were being held. We entered the enormous ballroom, an entirely new, breathtaking world, where hundreds of hopefuls were humming and bleating, stretching like Gumbys on row after row of stackable burgundy banquet chairs. At the front of the room was a long production table, behind which sat a dozen directors, choreographers, and staff. I signed up and got a number and my father and I found a place among the throngs to wait my turn. In the back of the room were camera crews from local news stations covering the event, as this was the largest turnout in their audition history.

The auditions began. One after another, names were called and singers and dancers, ages sixteen to twenty-five, dashed to the front of the ballroom to sell their wares, often barely heard over the distracting chatter of the crowd. Regular warnings to be respectful were ignored.

After several hours, my name was called. The antibiotics had kicked in somewhat, but I could still barely swallow. I wondered what would come out. My father gave me a nervous pat on the back and I walked to the pianist and handed him my music: a medley I'd constructed specifically for this audition of “Be a Clown” and “The Hungry Years.”

“Be a Clown” is a zippy Cole Porter song written in the 1940s about the foolish jubilation of show business. “The Hungry Years” is a dirgy but catchy Neil Sedaka ballad written in the 1970s about looking back on one's salad days and missing the struggle after having made it. I was fifteen. I'd neither accomplished anything nor suffered salad days. In fact, I'd probably never even eaten a salad. (Iceberg on a burger was as close as was legally allowed in Oklahoma.) And—I was a little fat.

I was singing “I miss the hungry years” and I was a little fat.

Sensing I had to change things up or I'd be just another drowned-out wannabe in this mass of competition, I told the pianist to forgo the introduction on the page and just give me a low bass roll, after which I would come in on two high notes, long and out of tempo, to get their attention, and then go into the song.

I found my spot and introduced myself, though I was uncertain I could be heard above the commotion. The pianist rolled the low note for my pitch. I planted my feet and took a deep breath and belted, at the top of my lungs. “Be-e-e-e- a-a-a-a clown, be a clown . . .”

My out-of-the-gate, powerhouse notes quieted the room like a gunshot. I had 'em. Who was this short, fat kid and where did that come from? I made my way through “Be a Clown” for sixteen bars and then moved into the tearjerker:

I miss the hungry years, the once upon a time