Ham (23 page)

The lovely long ago, we didn't have a dime

Those days of me and you, we lost along the way

I held out the last vowel and slid into a key change, tears welling in my eyes.

Oooh, how could I be so blind not to see the door

Closing on the world I now hunger for

Looking through my tears . . . I miss the hungry years

I finished the song and lowered my head as though I'd divulged my deepest truth. Actually, I had. All of the depth and drama of my life was laid out, messy, for all to see.

For a brief moment, it was pin-drop quiet. Maybe they thought I was dead. Then it happened. Applause erupted from the crowd of auditioners. The production staff rose from their long tables and came to where I was standing, beaming, shaking my hand. One man hugged me. A woman cupped my face in her palms and just stared into my eyes. The local news crews ran to the front of the ballroom. Camera lights switched on. Photos were snapped. Flashes flashed. I was asked to do television interviews. But not until I'd finished my paperwork and my contact information had been verified.

My father watched.

•  •  •

That summer, I left home at fifteen to perform at Six Flags Over Mid-America in St. Louis. Whatever trepidation my parents felt about their little boy going off to a new city with no supervision, to live in an apartment and have a job, was masked by enthusiasm. I was free at last—the canary flying cheerfully into the mine shaft, oblivious to the prospect of gas.

The show was called
Ramblin' thru Missou!,
a hand-clapping, foot-stomping revue that I performed five times a day at an outdoor amphitheater in the prickly Missouri heat, costumed in a red checkered shirt and denim overalls. I'd escaped Oklahoma but I was still wearing its uniform. None of it was remotely glamorous in the way I'd hoped, but I was doing what I loved and I thought of myself as a seasoned pro.

When I returned to Charles Page High the following fall, I was thrilled to find that our new drama teacher, Mr. Briscoe, was not religious. Given a choice, he would have preferred the label “anti-Christ.” He was a Vietnam vet with a salty tongue that wagged nonstop about brutal battles, blown-up body parts, blookers and big boys and boom boom—but not much about acting.

“Briscoe,” as we were asked to call him (perhaps to reinforce his military station), had a handsome, broad, slap-cheeked Irish face with sandy, floppy hair that he pushed away from his expressive eyes at the end of every heated sentence. He stood in a perpetual slump that accentuated the beginnings of a deserved postwar belly and planted his duck-footed heels at shoulder width, but was forever in a state of motion—slightly pitching left and right, as if he were at sea.

Briscoe saw me as a kindred spirit, out there in my own trenches fighting for what I loved. The fall musical was
The Fantasticks
and was perfect for me to play young Matt, who hankers for something outside his village.

It was also perfect for Briscoe and his choir director colleague, Mr. McConnell, who decided they would actually play parts in the show. Briscoe thought that since he was going to make his teaching debut, he may as well be front and center to really display his thespian qualifications. However, there are only eight characters in
The Fantasticks
—a small show for a high school of twelve hundred students—and Henry and Mortimer, two of the showier roles, were taken by teachers.

As the school year progressed, the differences between Briscoe and his predecessor became more and more evident. Whereas Mr. White had substituted profanity in all material, even classroom monologues, Briscoe encouraged expletives and obscenities and suggested scenes from
American Buffalo, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
(though there was not a single black girl in class), and my favorite:
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
There is nothing quite like the sound of Edward Albee's dialogue coming from the lips of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old Georges and Marthas with thick Oklahoma accents:

“Don't shoot yer may-outh off about yew-know-whut.”

“I'll talk about any goddamn thang I wanna! Any goddamn thang!”

“What'll it be?”

“I'm gunna stick to bourbon.”

George and Martha. Sad, sad, sadder than Mr. Albee could ever have imagined.

I loved everything about Briscoe's sensibilities. He was a rebel, if not so much an acting teacher; more Kerouac than Stanislavski. But he knew to play it safe for proper school productions.
The Fantasticks
had been a big success and I was feeling my oats. So was Briscoe. The next production was
Bye Bye Birdie
and I was set to play Albert Peterson, the English teacher/manager of the Elvislike Conrad Birdie. I asked Briscoe if he intended to be in the show this time. He said there were certainly several parts he could play and it would really be a chance to show the students and parents that plays are fun for everyone. “Oh,” I said, looking at him blankly, and let my silence hang like a mirror.

Briscoe did not appear in
Bye Bye Birdie.

Though not my intention, it seemed a turning point for him, and me: the moment when the fire that had, long ago, inspired him to make the theater his life was officially and permanently snuffed out, enlisting him to fully embrace the significance of his role
offstage
as a teacher, mentor, pathway to a generation that might go further than he had. And from that day on, he gave me free reign to do anything, try anything, and fully embrace the significance of
my
role as the incessantly curious, ferociously driven student.

He allowed me to have all my song keys reorchestrated to fit my register. He let me choreograph, supervise costumes, and throw in my two cents on direction and set design. And of course I would need my own dressing room.

There were only two changing rooms—one for boys and one for girls, but between them was a five-by-eight storage closet with costumes hung from floor to ceiling. The space was windowless and claustrophobic, like a moldy locker that reeked of decades of greasepaint and unventilated flop sweat. But with a little redecorating and some Glade Rose Garden air freshener, I knew it would be perfect.

I cleared racks of wardrobe from one wall and set up a makeup station and mirror against a bank of unpainted, chalky cinder blocks. A small side table sat empty to receive flowers and telegrams from opening night well-wishers. There was no one in my world who would possibly send a telegram, but it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that Michael Bennett or Mike Nichols or Bob Fosse would hear of my performance and wire:

SAM STOP COME TO BROADWAY IMMEDIATELY STOP STARDOM IS WAITING STOP

I taped my name to the outside of the door, but not in the shape of a star, so as not to appear pompous.

•  •  •

Briscoe had given me a playing field with no rules and had stomached and even rallied my puffed-up teenage attitude, so twenty-odd years later, as a
real
seasoned but hopefully less pretentious veteran, I was beyond thrilled when I got a call saying he was coming to New York with his wife, Marva, for a jam-packed week of Broadway.

I was appearing in Mel Brooks's
The Producers
at the time, which had become one of the biggest hits in musical theater history. I had replaced Roger Bart in the role of Carmen Ghia, the swishiest, most outlandish gay part ever written for the stage and, terrified of stepping into another actor's calf-skinned pointy-toed boots, had taken the advice of my onstage counterpart, the wonderful actor Gary Beach, who told me, “Just go out there and scare them!” One can't really be too scary or go too far in
The Producers,
where nothing says musical like a human-formed swastika reflected in an overhead mirror like a shot from a Busby Berkeley movie. The audacity of mincing and prancing and long sibilant
s'
s was oddly freeing for me. I was a
professional sissy
!—on
Broadway
!—paid and applauded for the very blemishes I'd desperately sought to cover for an entire childhood.

The Briscoes set a date, and I arranged for excellent seats at the show and dinner at a popular actors' hangout for after. I was excited. “Hometown boy does good” is, after all, the ultimate showbiz story.

It was the musical's second season, and patrons previously unable to secure tickets were now coming in droves. On the night that the Briscoes attended, the audience was, thankfully, low on the Japanese tourists who would sometimes fill nearly every seat and mostly just gape, smiling fixedly and hunching forward as if they were expecting something
really
funny to happen . . . that never seemed to happen. They didn't get any of the brilliant Mel Brooks inside jokes, and it was like playing high comedy to an oil painting of an audience. An anime oil painting of an audience. But on this night the house had been exceptional, laughing at every ridiculous gag, and I felt particularly
on.
As soon as the curtain rang down, I dashed up the stairs to my dressing room and haphazardly removed my makeup, changed into street clothes, and rushed back down to the stage door of the St. James to meet the Briscoes.

There they were. Briscoe looked exactly the same—maybe a few more pounds around the gut, but the same roseate face and swiped hair and that odd sea-leaning thing. Marva looked the same too. Squat and round and happy-happy-happy, with her uncommonly turned-up nose, bright green eye shadow from lashes to brow, and a vibrantly red-framed open mouth, wide as a yawning cat. They just stood there, smiling from ear to ear, like the Japanese audience I thought I'd avoided. They could have been a photograph but for Briscoe's oscillation, and I found myself swaying with him, slightly, slowly, side to side, just to keep eye contact. In the silence, I could already imagine the kudos and prepared myself for humility.

“How ya doin'?” they both finally said, practically in unison.

“Uh, fine . . . I'm so happy to see you,” I said, as I wiped my face with a towel, still a bit sweaty from the heat of the show.

“Ya look great,” said Briscoe.

“Thin,” Marva added, as if this was a bad thing.

I suppressed my need to ask,
So did you enjoy the show?
 
. . . And how about me?

Instead, I brought them into the magic land of backstage, where anyone, particularly anyone with any theatre in their blood, gets that undeniable euphoria of the inner sanctum where civilians are rarely admitted.

I waited for a response as they entered the hallowed vestibule, where the walls and pipes had been painted layer over layer in backstage beige, like rings on an ancient oak, marking the seasons of George M. Cohan, Beatrice Lillie, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Gertrude Lawrence, and landmark shows including
Oklahoma!, The King and I,
and
Hello, Dolly!

“Hmm . . .” was all I got.

I was sure their silence was evidence of their starry-eyed state. I took them on a tour, showed them the set.

“The wings are smaller than I thought they'd be,” Briscoe observed.

I walked them onto the stage where the ghost light had just been set and they could view the ornate house from the actor's perspective.

“I can't believe you have to walk up stairs to get to your dressing room? What a pain in the ass,” was all Briscoe could muster. “When I was at Oklahoma University, it was much better than this. Bigger. More up to date. This place is O-L-D-E.”

Marva nodded in agreement. They were clearly disappointed. Neither of them ever mentioned my performance. They never even acknowledged I'd been in the show. Or that there
was
a show, for that matter.

I found myself seeking, no,
begging,
for Briscoe's approval. I introduced him to the cast and crew, all of whom said lovely things about me. The praise prompted nothing. Nada. Ignored. We walked out of the stage door, where Marva commented on a chorus boy's ass. I signed a few autographs, apparently nothing unusual for them. We went into the restaurant where the owner, Angus, greeted me with a hug and walked us to a primo table I'd reserved. Zero. We ran into recognizable stars of other shows. Zip. I dropped so many names we were lucky the floor didn't give way. I tried everything. Every desperate trick from my
Actor's Kama Sutra Multi-Positions to Pleasure and Dazzle Relatives and Hometown Visitors
handbook. Zilch.

Throughout dinner, the Briscoes talked nonstop about their trip, including several incredible shows and performances they'd seen on Broadway, and details of their lives at the shoe store they now owned in Tennessee.

“The Earth Shoe is going to make a comeback. Mark my words!”

I finally stopped digging and sat back and noshed on seared tuna, attentively nodding and being a good host.

But my mind darted and fished for some possible explanation: maybe my flamboyance as Carmen Ghia really
had
scared them. Or perhaps Briscoe felt jealous, or somehow mocked, or completely outside the very profession he was supposed to have represented to me as a student, and his wife just followed suit to protect him. Or maybe they were just overwhelmed by my whole world and didn't know what to say.

I flashed back to the day I'd been so unsupportive of Briscoe performing in our high school production of
Bye Bye Birdie
twentysomething years prior—the day I'd snatched the last remains of his original identity and morally relegated him to the sentimental but inferior role of the wind beneath my wings.

It occurred to me that if I had been more aware, less brutal, perhaps Briscoe would have heaped on the accolades and shown the pride that every student, no matter how old, seeks from past teachers. But I hadn't been. I'd cheated him out of much more than a performance—and now, unconsciously or otherwise, he was cheating me out of much more than mine.