Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(14)

The summer of 1973, I was eighteen, and Dad was inching a big ole rented RV up the side of some mountain in Colorado. Holed up in the RV’s bathroom, I buried my nose in the pages of Cyrano de Bergerac, a play I was supposed to be learning because Barbara Patterson wanted us to perform it in the fall. I wasn’t happy about reading the play. I wasn’t happy about this trip. And I definitely wasn’t happy about returning to high school. After the incredible experience with West Side Story at the end of my sophomore year, during my junior and senior years, theater had become my primary purpose for showing up at school. While I continued to play music in an expanded version of Half Day Road, now with me as lead singer and six rock and roll buddies from Glen Ellyn, my central focus at Highland Park High School was acting. I’d been involved in every play I auditioned for, playing leading roles in plays such as Tartuffe, Guys and Dolls, Look Back in Anger, and A Thousand Clowns. Acting had lifted me up, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

But there I was, the class of ’73, the end of my senior year, and all my friends had graduated except me. I didn’t have enough credits. I’d aced all my theater classes but bombed everything else. So I needed to return in September for one additional semester. I felt like a failure.

This RV trip turned out to be the vacation from hell. Everything went wrong. The air conditioner broke down. The plumbing got backed up. We ran out of gas. For most of the trip I tried to escape by hiding in the RV’s bathroom reading my script. The last thing I wanted was to be on this family vacation. One afternoon, when things were particularly hot and tense, the RV chugged along, and everybody was cranky. From inside the bathroom, the family heard me say, “Whose idea was this anyway?” I’d voiced what everybody was thinking. Dad snickered. Mom chuckled. The crankiness vanished. My brother and sister doubled over laughing. Even I couldn’t hold it back. Soon we were all howling.

When I started back to school in September, I’d forgotten about laughing. All my friends had gone to university, but I’m the dummy, I told myself. Depressed, I auditioned for Cyrano while still feeling ashamed for having failed my senior year, and I fumbled through my lines. I tried to get back on track, but my heart wasn’t in it and I fumbled again. Loser! Halfway through my audition I fumbled a third time, stopped, and muttered, “I can’t do this.” I shuffled my feet in frustration. Barbara Patterson looked uncharacteristically confused. I shook my head, walked out of the room, and headed home.

I simply couldn’t stand the thought of being back at high school again.

That evening Barbara Patterson phoned and said, “Well, Gary, you didn’t do very well today, did you? But you can play this part, so I’m going to give you a callback. You don’t deserve another audition, but we are going to do this play, and you need to finish this semester whether you’re in the play or not. So you’d better get in gear and give it your best shot.”

I didn’t say a word. She hung up, and I slept on her words. Barbara Patterson had helped me make many changes in my life since I first stumbled into West Side Story. Under her guidance, I’d seen how acting wasn’t about sitting in class and taking tests. It was about relying on instincts, going with your gut, and giving it everything you’ve got—all things I actually excelled at, I thought. Even though I was still a lousy reader, I’d found I could memorize lines easily. Onstage, I acted intuitively. Onstage, I felt free. Confident. At home.

During the previous two years, I had taken every theater class I could take—not only the performance classes, but the technical classes as well. I’d learned about lighting and set building. I’d painted sets and pounded nails. Theater had become my life. Each of the past two summers, Barbara Patterson had gone to Beloit College in Wisconsin to perform in a professional summer stock theater company, doing eight plays in eight weeks—and she’d asked me to intern there twice. They gave me a dorm room, some food, and thirty bucks a week. I’d worked around the clock, hanging lights, running sound, painting sets, whatever needed to be done. I’d even played small parts in a couple of their plays when they needed a kid.

One of the plays they did was Philadelphia, Here I Come!, about a son in Ireland ready to move to New York to live with his aunt. On the last night before the son leaves, he tries to break through to his father. The two have never connected. The part of the young man is played by one actor while his thoughts are played by a different actor. The play was so beautiful, so moving, that I’d called my friend Jeff Perry and urged him to come to Wisconsin and see the play with me. Jeff had driven up and been blown away by the play too.

The previous year, when I’d been a senior for the first time, Barbara Patterson began teaching a directing class, which had never been done before at Highland Park. Each student’s final project consisted of directing a play. It didn’t matter what play or where it was performed; she just wanted us to direct. Jeff and I were still so moved by Philadelphia, Here I Come! that we asked if we could codirect it. She gave us the green light, so we went to our principal and asked if we could use the cafeteria’s stage. Teachers used the stage for announcements, never for theater, but he said yes.

So we turned the announcement stage into our backstage area and built a theater-in-the-round in the middle of the cafeteria. We went to one of the technical guys in the school, a real electronics whiz, and asked him to build us a lighting board complete with dimmer switches. We built a lighting system by inserting floodlights into coffee cans. Somebody’s father owned a cable business, so we asked him to donate wire, and somebody else’s dad had a business that sold conduit piping. We secured the conduit to the ceiling, hung our lights from the piping, and ran the cable wiring from our coffee-can lights down to our makeshift dimmer board. We cast the play and rehearsed it, and that spring we performed the play in the cafeteria, four shows, and brought down the house. Jeff and I both received top grades, and the following year Barbara ended up turning the cafeteria space into a permanent theater. For once, I’d felt at the top of my class.