Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(13)

A senior named Jeff Melvoin played Bernardo, leader of the Sharks. Jeff Melvoin came from a superacademic family. Later, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and much later he became a Hollywood producer and writer for the hit TV shows Remington Steele, Northern Exposure, Alias, and Army Wives. Even in those high school play rehearsals, Jeff Melvoin was solid. He became someone to look up to, to emulate. This was important because with no experience or training, I needed to throw myself into West Side Story by instinct only, acting on intuition. I was totally raw, with nowhere to go but up.

After five weeks of rehearsals, it was showtime. The house lights came down, the curtains parted. Two star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of the street, Tony and Maria, fell hard for each other, and just like Romeo and Juliet, they were meeting in secret, avoiding their familiar friends. The play is shot through with hate and passion and rage. Chino shoots Tony, and Maria holds Tony in her arms as he takes his last few dying breaths. We presented four shows only—and we hit every line on Thursday and Friday nights, nailed it completely on Saturday, and on Sunday night blew the house wide open. And then it was all over. The show. My new community. Me.

The lights came down. The audience burst into applause. As one of the Sharks, I was part of the gang that carried Tony’s dead body offstage. We Sharks set down the body behind the curtain, and Tony came to life again as just good old Jeff Perry, a high school kid who was quickly becoming one of my best friends. Jeff gave me a huge hug, and I burst into tears, and in glorious pandemonium offstage everybody was hugging and slapping each other on the back, with no chance to blow away the snot because it was time for the curtain call.

Out in the auditorium, the audience continued their applause, cheering, shouting, whistling their congratulations, and all the supporting players and chorus members came out onstage in a pack. Including me. As a member of the chorus, I stood far in the back of all the people on stage, and we all took our bows while the audience continued to pound their applause. And then the leads each came out one by one and bowed. They stood at the front of the pack. Tony. Maria. Bernardo. Riff. Chino. Anita. The decibel level in the auditorium notched higher with each lead. Everybody stood to their feet. A standing ovation. The leads all took their bows together. I still hung far in the back. Sobbing harder than ever. My eyes scrunched tight against the tears. Then, in the midst of all the commotion, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

Opened my eyes.

The hand was Jeff Melvoin’s. Jeff the senior. Bernardo the Shark. He reached back, grabbed me. Pulled me up toward the front of the pack where the six leads stood. He shouted in my ear to take a bow with all the leads. So I did. Me, this sophomore screwup. Still bawling my eyes out. I stood at the front of the pack, and the audience was still standing, still applauding. Cheering for all of us. I took one long, glorious look around, trying to wipe my nose with my sleeve, and we all bowed again, all together, and I suddenly realized I’d fallen in love with this new community of students. With this new life of theater. It was almost too much to take in.

Later that night, back in the quiet of my room, I flopped on my bed and wondered if maybe Jeff Melvoin had seen far off into the future, to the person I had the potential to become. Because he’d grabbed me on impulse, I was pretty sure, and I doubted if the audience ever knew the fuller story of why he’d pulled this crying sophomore up to the front of the pack. In the last couple of schools where I’d been enrolled—including this one—if I was known by anyone, I was known as a kid who smoked a lot of pot and struggled to find his way in school. But in the past five weeks this play had morphed into a tent revival of sorts. Theater had pointed me toward redemption. The performers in the play had drawn me toward the river, plunged me under, pulled me up, and pushed me forward. Dripping and new. I’d been handed a fresh start, and I felt hopeful.

Grateful.

I realized theater had become my second chance at life, and this second chance caused me to understand I had a lot to be thankful for. A wide-open future. Boundless opportunity. My newfound buoyancy made me want to do something far more with my life than I’d been doing.

Ah. But here I was on my bed, exhausted. Poured out. The morning after I couldn’t move. I felt like I was in the valley now, after standing on the mountaintop, and I was a wreck. I’d told my mom I didn’t feel good and asked her if I could stay home. She said okay, so for the rest of the day I moped alone in my pajamas on the sofa in front of the TV. Occasionally I would get up, go to the record player, and put on the record from West Side Story—and it just made me sad. So I’d take it off and go back to the couch. I was brokenhearted that the play was over. This life-changing moment in time. I felt completely emotionally spent.

Later that afternoon, Barbara Patterson came over to my house, along with some of the kids in the show. They cheered me up, nudged me in the ribs, told me to knock it off and get to school tomorrow. There were more plays ahead, they reminded me. I couldn’t help but buck up and grin. Their love felt so wide. Their support so broad. My first play and the lead guy had grabbed me, one of the chorus guys, to take a bow with the stars of the show. That entire cast had seen who I was before the play and what had happened to me during those five weeks. Now I had so many new friends. It was powerful. Something had really changed for me. I was going forward again. I had been baptized.

My life of purpose had begun.





CHAPTER 3


The Start of Steppenwolf