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2
Grand Delusions
LIKE ANY GOOD, CLOSETED YOUNG LESBIAN OF THE seventies, I developed a raging crush on Ron Howard.
Not a well-known fact, but many young lesbians have gay boyfriends, or crushes so safe they might as well be gay. Happy Days was my favorite TV show, and Ron, who played all-American boy Richie Cunningham, was cute, boyish, and asexual—all Mayberry and apple pie. I thought Anson Williams, who played Potsie, was cute, too, but less so. As I wrote in my scrapbook, he was just “pretty good foxy.”
Ron and Anson came to town in the summer of 1974, just after I turned fourteen, to promote Happy Days. When they were on WGN, the big talk radio station in Chicago, I called in and said, matter-of-factly, “Hi, I’m fourteen and I want to be an actress.” I don’t remember exactly what Ron said, but it was something sensible like “Stay in school, be in plays, and then when you get out of college, if you still want to do it, you should come to Los Angeles.” Then, Anson Williams piped up: “Jane, here’s what you should do,” he said. “Go downtown to the Screen Actors Guild, get a list of agents, and start writing to them.”
My desirability assessments of the stars of TV’s Happy Days.
This was stupid advice to give to a fourteen-year-old girl in Chicago—especially one whose entire acting résumé consisted of a couple of school plays and a sixth-grade talent show where I pretended to play the guitar. But I didn’t know that. I decided Anson was right, so not long afterward, when I was downtown with my parents, I made sure we stopped by the Screen Actors Guild office so I could get a list of talent agents in Chicago. An office assistant made a copy on mimeographed paper for me, and I went home and wrote them all letters. Our family had visited Universal Studios on a vacation to California the previous summer, so I sent a letter off to them as well. I watched the credits of The Brady Bunch, to see who cast the show, and wrote them a note of my availability while I was at it. I think I even sent a school picture.
Needless to say, the talent agents and studio executives did not come knocking. But one afternoon, maybe six months later, I finally did get a reply. It was from the office of Monique James, the head of casting for Universal Studios.
Okay, so it was from Linda, assistant to the casting director, who perhaps was taking this opportunity to feel better about her assistant status by crushing the dream of a young girl in suburban Chicago. And … she spelled my name wrong. And … it was just about the most unencouraging letter she could have possibly sent.
An observant child, or maybe just one who wasn’t completely delusional, would have felt dismissed by this. But I was over the moon—it was on Universal letterhead! Yes, they got my name wrong, but Jamie is such a cute name! I was never a fan of my name anyway. I was so buoyed by the letter that I put it in my scrapbook. Linda Abbott and Monique James might have thought I would never come to Hollywood, but in my mind I was trying to figure out travel plans.
I had known early on, almost out of the chute, that I wanted to be an actress. My first theatrical experience happened at the age of about five, when my parents took me to see a school play one of the neighborhood kids was in. I remember going into the dark theater, and when the lights came up, there was this whole world that came out of nowhere. It was alive and bright and you could see that everyone had makeup on.
We were sitting very close to the stage, and as part of the play, there was a little kid in a cage, playing a bird. I remember thinking, Let the bird out of the cage, let him out! That is how real it was to me. I was transfixed by the whole experience, as if I were watching magic happen right in front of me.
My folks loved to sing and perform themselves, and even more so with an audience. This was post–World War II cocktail culture, and Rodgers and Hammerstein weren’t the only ones exploring the world through song and dance. Our parish church, St. Jude’s, put on a show every year called Port o’ Call, and this was the highlight of my parents’ performing lives. The various schoolrooms at St. Jude’s were transformed into McGinty’s Irish tavern, full of revelers, or a Hawaiian luau with grass-skirted hula dancers, or a risqué German cabaret for which the neighbor ladies donned fishnets, eliciting hoots and howls. The audience would go from room to room, taking in various spectacles from other ports of call. I was there with my parents every night until the final bow was taken. I was absolutely riveted by the frenzied backstage energy of putting on a show. I remember the smells and the sights, the thick pancake makeup, and how they all dropped trou in full view of one another in the tiny cloakroom that served as the dressing room. All the adults were so focused and engaged when they put on these shows. And I was literally beside myself with elation to be among this business called show.
Dad sings “Look to the Rainbow” in the Irish Room, St. Jude’s Port o’ Call show.
But to my parents this was something you did for fun, not for a living. My mom was not on board with my plan to become an actress. As I wrote those letters to agents at our dining room table, she asked, “Who are you writing to?” When I told her, she spoke to me in that flat voice of Midwestern reality.
“Janie, you know, people can’t always do what they want to do,” she said. “And it’s probably not realistic to think you’ll be a Hollywood star.” To her, my saying I wanted to be an actress was a little like saying I wanted to be an elf. “Well, honey,” she’d have said, “you can dress up as one, and you can have fun as one, but you’re not gonna be one.”
I’m sure that to Mom, this was just realistic motherly advice, like telling me to stay out of traffic. She wanted to convince me to dream a little less big, to protect me from heartache—but of course her words just made things worse. Sitting there at the dining room table, I started to cry from the depths of my soul, feeling my life was over before it had begun.
My mother felt terrible. She tried to console me, saying she wanted me to be the best actress I could be, but that I should be careful of aiming too high. Years later, she’d tell me that until that moment, she’d had no idea how dead serious I was about being an actress. But that realization didn’t change her message. She would reluctantly support me in the years ahead, but she still wanted me to have a backup plan, which usually involved learning to type.
About five months after getting the Universal letter, I got a reply to a fan letter I had sent to Vicki Lawrence, a star of The Carol Burnett Show, a program I so loved and wanted to be on that it hurt just thinking about it. She sent me an autographed photo, a soft-focus headshot of her gazing meaningfully into the camera, her hair gently feathered. It came with a form fan letter printed on blue paper, but at the bottom she’d written a note: “Janie, Keep working hard, learning, & be determined & positive!”
Vicki Lawrence wrote me back!
I knew that Vicki had gotten on The Carol Burnett Show because of a fan letter she’d written to Carol. So, of course, I had the fantasy that my letter to Vicki would produce the same result. The fact that it didn’t was of no consequence to me—I’d received a personal note from Vicki Lawrence. And she’d even spelled my name right.
These snippets of encouragement were huge to me—my bubble was now un-burstable. I pasted Vicki’s letter and photo into my scrapbook, along with the Universal letter and my Ron Howard photos, and continued forward.
SPEAKING OF MY SCRAPBOOK, I DUG IT OUT RECENTLY and was delighted to find it was a proud monument to absolute mediocrity.
Included are my report cards (mostly Bs and Cs), in addition to other cherished mementos of averageness:
An “Award for Achievement” from Vandenberg Elementary School—the award they gave to kids who didn’t win an award.
A handwritten schedule for my basketball team, the Dirksen Junior High “B” team, showing a final record of three wins and eleven losses.
Ribbons for third-place finishes in a 1975 swim meet.
I appear to be greatly amused by my own mediocrity, writing silly notes in the margins throughout the scrapbook:
Beside my basketball numerals, which were awarded to benchwarmers (starting players received letters), I wrote in all caps: “AGAIN! HA HA!”
Next to a note from my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Gerson, that read “Mr. & Mrs. Lynch, Jane has put forth much more effort recently. She is doing better work and behaving better. I hope this continues,” I scribbled: “It didn’t! HA!”
Beside the letter from Universal, in which my name had been misspelled, I wrote: “Jamie, Ha ha! I think I’ll keep it.” On the next page, I pasted the envelope the letter had come in, highlighting its return address of the “New Talent” department. I wrote, “New Talent! That’s me!”
There is no Volume #2.
I did not like his singing. I did not write a letter asking when he would sing again.
Of course, not everything in the scrapbook was a monument to mediocrity. There was also a photo postcard from Anson Williams, who kept writing me for some reason, with a handwritten note on the back.
As I recall, when Anson sang he sounded like a Lawrence Welk baritone. Not my cup of tea, so I never did his bidding. (Besides, he was only “pretty good foxy.”)
DURING FRESHMAN YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL, I WAS CAST as The King in a one-act production of The Ugly Duckling (the beginning, incidentally, of a lifelong pattern of being cast in roles originally intended for men). I was thrilled out of my mind—this was what I wanted to do with my life! This was my dream, and now I was officially taking the first step toward fulfilling it.
My name appeared in the school newspaper, The Bagpipe, along with those of the rest of the cast, and by all appearances, I was on my way. But when we started rehearsals, I found myself paralyzed with fear—the fear of blowing it. So … I quit the play and joined the tennis team instead.
I don’t think anyone understood why I had quit. I’m sure I didn’t. I know now it was out of pure terror. I was face-to-face with my destiny and I walked away from it rather than risk failure.
In my scrapbook, I pasted the article about The Ugly Duckling, then right next to it, I pasted another article about the tennis team. Underneath, I wrote this: “Had to drop out of play because of tennis, but mostly because I couldn’t get my character. Darn!” Obviously I had either read something or heard someone talk about the importance of “getting your character,” and I used that to feel better about what I had done. My poor little fourteen-year-old self had no idea how to process this.
But deep down inside, I knew I had killed the thing I most wanted in the world. I couldn’t stand to stay away, though, so I signed up to work on the stage crew. Stage crew—when I could have been in the thing! In the official program for the evening of one-acts, I made little check marks next to all my friends who were in the cast and crew—and I put a little star by my own name. I was putting on a brave face, but inside I was crushed.
My poor little conflicted self!
Making things even worse, I was now officially branded a quitter. In the spring of my freshman year, I tried out for another play, but I didn’t get chosen. One girl who got a part told my sister, Julie, it was because I’d quit The Ugly Duckling. When the same thing happened with Man of La Mancha—I was even passed over for the chorus!—I realized with dread that at age fourteen, my acting career was already over.
One night, as my parents sipped their “first today, badly needed” cocktails, I poured my heart out to them at the kitchen table. I cried as I explained why everything was ruined, and my mom tried to soothe me. “You made one mistake, Janie,” she said. “It doesn’t mean your life is over.”
But I was inconsolable. I started having dreams in which every one I knew had gotten a part in a play, and I was the only one who was left out. All these years later, I still have those dreams. And when I wake up, I hug my Emmy.
MEANWHILE, MY SISTER, JULIE, MADE THE POM-POM Squad. Julie was a big eye-roller, especially with me. She was always bugged by my corny jokes and goofy faces at home, but when I was about to be a freshman in the high school where she was a junior, she was wracked with fear that I would embarrass her. She was skinny and cute and looked like she just walked out of the Sears catalogue. I was clumsy and silly and had a belly. At the breakfast table, she’d say, “Okay! Get all the goofiness out now, before we go to school. Now! Get it out! Get it out! Get it out!”
My sister and I couldn’t have been more different. She went through a neatness phase where, every morning, she’d make the bed—but because I slept later than she did, I was usually still in it.
“Just slide out!” she’d say. “Don’t mess it up!”
I was a slob, so she didn’t want me touching her stuff or wearing her clothes. And she was right—I don’t know if it was the oil in my hands or what, but I had a way of ruining anything I touched. Everyone would get the same paperback math books at the beginning of the year, and somehow, by the end, mine would be completely destroyed—smudged black, dog-eared, bent cover. Everyone else’s was pristine, while mine looked like I’d taken a bath with it.
So my sister, sensibly enough, wouldn’t let me wear her clothes. “Don’t even touch them!” she said. “You’ll ruin them, or stretch them out, or both.” She even went to the trouble of locking her favorite pair of jeans to the hanging rod of our closet, through the belt loop. Which meant I had no choice but to cut them off. When she saw me strutting down the hall wearing them, she shrieked aloud. As I passed her, she mouthed, “I’m going to kill you.” I’m pretty sure I didn’t care one way or another about those jeans. I simply enjoyed tormenting her.
I tormented her in other ways, too. She wanted nothing more than to be able to sing, but the family musicality eluded her. So when I caught her in the downstairs bathroom pouring her heart into a pitchy rendition of “Edelweiss” into a tape recorder, I had to play it for all her friends.
Yet my goofiness and ability to woo with humor worked in Julie’s favor, too. There was a group of “cool girls” that she wanted so badly to hang out with. She was invisible to them. Despite the fact that she was blond and pretty, her shyness could be paralyzing. She wanted me to come to the rescue.
Two members of this cool group of girls were Carol, the good-time party girl, and June, the wholesome sweetheart who reminded me of Julie Andrews. They were both in my second-semester Algebra I class. I had barely passed the first and was hanging on by a thread as the second semester began.
When I told Julie that these girls were in my class, she instructed me on how to win them over for her: get them to laugh at me so they’d ask me to go out with them one weekend. I would then bring Julie with me. I said, “What am I, your clown?” This question didn’t really need an answer.
By the second week, the class was lost for me as far as the algebra was concerned. I obediently became the class clown and a pain in the teacher’s ass. I remember Carol and June doubled over laughing at what I’m sure were my hilarious shenanigans. They invited me to hang out with them one Friday night and I brought Julie with me. We hopped into several cars, cracked open beers, and drove around town. This was a huge group of girls, about fifteen of them. And they were a delightful mix of personalities: some were cheerleaders, some were popular, some not so much, some got straight A’s, some loved to party (my subgroup). What we all had in common was we loved to laugh and hang out. We had our own language and inside jokes. We’d scream from car windows as we drove by the boys hanging out in the St. Jude parking lot, “What’s your gimmick?!” This would just crack us up. I’m still not sure why we found this so funny.
I had started drinking in my freshman year of high school. At first, it was just a little Boone’s Farm or a beer here and there, but by my junior year, I was drinking every night. And now my new friends and I would party hearty on weekends together. We went to football games and Flings (school dances). We’d have keggers at one another’s house. There was no drinking behind my parents’ backs, though: it was all in the open. It was a drinking culture all round in this neck of the woods in the late 1970s. Our house was the place to go for singing and drinking. We’d sit around the kitchen table, and Mom and Dad would tell stories and sing songs from their youth. My favorite was their two-part harmony rendition of “Coney Island,” a peppy 1920s tune. My new friends adored my parents and couldn’t get enough of them.
My parents were creatures of their era—they loved to drink and throw parties. As soon as I was old enough to think of it, I’d sneak downstairs after everyone had gone and take sips out of the leftover drinks. I also liked relighting the cigarette butts that people had left behind, so I could practice smoking. Once, when my dad caught me lighting up outside (I was about twelve, and I had literally picked up a butt out of the gutter in front of our house), I overheard him proudly telling Mom in the kitchen, “She’s out there smokin’ like a pro!”
When my mom would have a few drinks, she might get a bit sloppy and sentimental, and my dad would gently prod her upstairs to bed. But no matter what she drank the night before, she never, ever had a hangover. She’d be up at five in the morning, bright-eyed and ready for the day. So drinking just seemed like a lot of fun. And with this new group of girlfriends, I was starting to do it for real, with the sole aim of getting wasted.
To the manner born.
My friend Peggy Quinn’s house was another fun place to party. Unlike the Lynches, the Quinns were good Irish Catholics who dutifully produced a tribe of redheaded children with saint names. What made their house the best place in the world, as far as I was concerned, was that Mr. Quinn had a keg in the basement. I don’t remember that we were allowed to drink from it, but I was captivated by the idea of it. He had a keg … in his basement.
I remember Big Jim Quinn sipping a glass of his Special Export out on his front porch and me out there with him, shooting the breeze upon a summer’s evening. I guess I felt comfortable enough to tell him the secret I had only ever told my mom, Ron Howard, and Anson Williams: I wanted to be an actress. I think he was the first grown-up who took me seriously. Instead of telling me to learn to type or some other surefire way to make a living, Mr. Quinn said, “You get out there and do that, Jane. And be sure to thank me when you get that Academy Award.”
I flunked that second-semester Algebra I class, by the way, but the class wasn’t a total loss. I had successfully pimped myself out for my sister and got us both into one of the popular cliques. But even in the midst of all the parties and goofing around, I still had that feeling that I was on the fringes of life and not genuinely a part of the world around me. Much of it had to do with my big gay secret and the fantasy life it spawned. I was noticing a different girl every week, but the one I fixated on most was in that same Algebra class, and she was deaf. I imagined romantically rescuing her from her alienated existence and making her feel that her thoughts and dreams were understood. I realize now that I wanted so desperately to be rescued that I projected it all on to her. But to a high school freshman that was irrelevant. I would blissfully slip into daydreaming about sweeping her off her feet whenever the teacher started writing equations.
What I didn’t know was that soon I would meet someone with whom I would feel connected and understood—my own unlikely version of Prince Charming.
3
Refuge
CHRIS AND I FIRST SPOTTED EACH OTHER ACROSS the crowded floor at a dance at St. Jude’s the beginning of our sophomore year. How I missed noticing him all of our freshman year at Thornridge High, I don’t know. But there he was: smaller than the rest of the guys, hair dyed bright red, and extremely fey. I was taken aback, yet attracted at the same time.
He seemed to see something in me, too. He sidled over to where I was standing, scanned me up and down, and said, “Hmmm … we’re going to have a lot of fun together.”
My friend Josephine, who was standing with me by the door, giggled. She thought he liked me and wanted to go out with me.
But I knew that wasn’t what he meant.
What he meant was that we had found a soul mate in each other, and he was right. We quickly became inseparable best buds. We even gave each other nicknames—he was “Gwiz” and I was “Trix”—just because we thought nicknames were stupid, and it was fun to make fun of stupid things.
Like me, Chris was not your typical teenager from Dolton, Illinois. But unlike me, he couldn’t have cared less.
Chris had a big mouth, and when I say this I don’t just mean he was loud (although he often was). I mean his mouth was enormous. Mine was nothing to sneeze at either. We talked about lots of things with those mouths of ours, but the fact that we were both gay was not one of them.
I had been a pretty solid rule-follower prior to meeting Chris. Chris lived to ignore or, if possible, destroy all rules. He reveled in questioning those in authority and throwing the ridiculousness of their rules back at them. Yes, he stuck out. But he just walked through the world exactly as he was—a goofy, funny, quirky guy. For the first time in my life, I felt like I’d found a kindred spirit—even if my spirit was not as fully exposed. I could look at him and see something of who I was reflected back.
“Jane is fine. Chris is fine. But Jane and Chris are trouble.”
Chris seemed to live to make me laugh. I would be walking down the stairs between classes at Thornridge High School, and suddenly, a few steps above me, a guy would trip and tumble down the stairs, arms flailing wildly and books flying past. He would land with a thud at the bottom, then look up at me, all Cheshire cat. It would be Chris, throwing himself down the stairs to crack me up. Again. My own private Stooge.
He loved to make prank phone calls, which gave me anxiety. He was sly and could be snarky and loved to shock people, especially adults. They never knew what hit them. Once, he said to our Spanish teacher, “Your hair is such a beautiful shade of red—why do you dye the roots black?”
On Sundays, he was the organist at St. Jude’s. For most of the service, he would play standard church fare, but if you listened closely to his incidental music after Communion, you would hear the dulcet strains of something like “Afternoon Delight,” played in minor chords. He’d catch my eye and solemnly mouth the words: “Gonna grab some afternoon deliiight …” No one mocked piety like Chris.
He was also immune to Catholic guilt, despite St. Jude’s doing everything in their power to break his defiance. He had been in school there from first to eighth grade, and the one person who seemed to be on his side was the hip young priest we all loved because he related to us kids. And it turns out, he did, but not in the way we thought. We later discovered this priest was actually a pervert (the extent of his misdeeds have only recently come to light when he was removed from public ministry in 2005). He’d targeted Chris at one point: when he was in seventh grade, the guy had tried to show him his underwear drawer at the rectory, asking him, “Have you ever seen a grown man naked?” (hopefully unintentional in his quoting of Peter Graves’s line in Airplane). Before he could get any further, Chris said, “If you touch me, my father will kill you,” whereupon young Chris was sent on his way. Christopher John Patrick would not be intimidated by anyone.
My whole family adored Chris, but no one more than my sister, Julie, who loved it when he made fun of her dumb-blonde ways. She begged him to mock her. He had heard the tape of her attempting to sing “Edelweiss” and was merciless in his imitation of it. She loved it. “Do it again!” she’d plead. She also loved that he colored his hair and cared about how he looked, and he played it up for her. A few years back, my dad was battling that awful lung cancer and we were all so devastated. But Chris called and said, “Tell Julie I had a full face-lift.” She belly laughed hard for the first time in a long time. He knew just what to say. (He lied. He’d actually only had a partial one ….)
One Ash Wednesday, Chris convinced me to cut choir, my favorite class, and go with him to the Chicken Unlimited across the street. Over Cokes and fries, we used cigarette ashes to make crosses on each other’s forehead, intoning, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” When we got back to school, we told the campus cop we had been at Mass. Nothing was sacred.
On the flip side of this disregard for our family faith, Chris had a love, a reverence even, for the pageantry of the Catholic Church. On Friday nights, when most of Thornridge High was drinking itself silly at a kegger, Chris and I, plus our pal John Carr, would do what we called a “church tour.” John was another sly and witty fellow, soon to come out of the closet. His other big secret was that he wanted to be a priest.
John Carr hearing confession in Man of La Mancha.
Back in the late seventies, some churches kept their doors unlocked because they were supposed to be a place of refuge, a place you should be able to enter at any time to escape whatever was chasing you. We knew which ones on the city’s south side were kept open, and we high school snots snuck in. We were usually drunk and doing poppers and giggling our heads off, but there would always come a moment when it got absolutely serious. We would perform the Mass, and we’d mean it. If Chris could unlock the organ, he’d play the entrance hymn, and if not, he’d hum it solemnly. My role was to lead the imaginary congregation in song. John would play the priest, making his ceremonial walk up the aisle toward the altar, kissing the good book and performing all the other ritualistic gestures, and begin the Mass.
If we could get into the confessional booths, we would take turns playing priest to the others’ confessor. We would mostly goof around pretending to be people from our own parish. We had them coming clean on ridiculous sins like having VD or something. Chris told me that John would actually confess to him. Of course, Chris wasn’t really a priest, so he told me everything. John told him that he was afraid he was gay; that he missed his dad, who’d died when he was a kid; that he feared he wouldn’t get into the seminary because his grades were so bad. John Carr was a bright light—funny and smart—but not a fan of school or studying. He died of AIDS in 1996.
On some level, I knew Chris was gay. It became harder to ignore once he started driving into Chicago for the weekends, not so secretly going to gay bars and hooking up with guys there—but I still somehow managed to deny it to myself. He lived like there was no tomorrow—smoking, drinking, doing drugs; generally doing whatever he wanted. Chris couldn’t help but be himself. He has always been constitutionally incapable of anything else.
And he never felt shame about anything he did. Chris’s attitude was The world just needs to catch up with me. In this way, he and I were very different. I really wanted to fit in, wanted to want to have a boyfriend, wanted to want to have kids. I wanted to want what every other girl in the world seemed to want. I did not want to admit, to myself or anyone else, that I did not.
I tried to act like the straight kids, but I couldn’t even fake it. I went out on a couple of dates with guys, but it was a struggle the whole time. I’d be deep in my own head, thinking, This should be nice. I should want to kiss him right now. I knew how I was supposed to act, how I was supposed to feel, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t be that person.
Chris was a lifeline, because with him I could be myself. It was also hard to be worried with so much laughing and goofing around, and his self-acceptance was contagious. As awkward as I felt around others, I felt like myself with Chris.
Choir was where we really flourished. We both loved to sing, so we never cut this class (except that one Ash Wednesday at the Chicken Unlimited). We’d even sing on the way there. It helped that we had to go through a breezeway with awesome acoustics that ramped up our harmonies. Then we’d spend the first fifteen minutes of the choir hour in the girls’ bathroom, smoking with any boy or girl who wanted to share a hot-boxed Marlboro.
But the real joy was singing in that choir, with so many different voices coming together. District-wide integration meant that black kids were bused into our white neighborhood for high school. This had caused riots in our school, and cops patrolled the hallways to keep the peace. The choral room in A Building was one of the only places at Thornridge High School where integration worked effortlessly. Black and white kids, football players, cheerleaders, nerds, and wood shop guys all lifted their voices in song together in this room. It was an idyllic setting, not unlike the version in Glee. Our differences seemed to disappear as our voices were raised in song, and the harmony lifted us beyond ourselves. For Chris and me, it was a refuge.
The other times I felt at ease were when I drank. My drinking self was good and had nothing to fear or be ashamed of. If I was drinking and with Chris, the good fired on all cylinders. Dolton was right next door to a suburb called Hegwisch, a blue-collar area with a famous record store and more bars per capita than any other burg outside Chicago. Al Capone had loved the prairies and heavily wooded landscape of this place and was said to have hidden out there a lot. For us, the winding roads of Hegwisch led to cash-strapped taverns more than happy to sell drinks to teenagers doing poppers. I used to love going with Chris to this one real dive bar called Jeanette’s, a place filled with toothless old men. One obese and gummy guy called “Uncle Frank” would sit immobile in a dark corner and yell at us. “I love you kids!” he’d slur. At those moments, I loved him right back.
Chris introduced me to a few new things, too. The first time I smoked pot was with him, during sophomore year. He failed to tell me that he’d laced it with angel dust, so I began to hallucinate at Pizza Hut and was so out of my gourd that I had to spend the night in his garage.
Pot scared the hell out of me, with or without angel dust. I panicked when I smelled it. If I went to a party where someone was smoking it, I expected the cops to swarm the place, and judgment and paranoia must have been written all over my face. I began to be known as “the Narc,” and I started to notice that I wouldn’t be invited to certain parties. It hurt my feelings, even though I continued to feel that pot smoking was evil. I was, however, very happy to get loaded on booze.
IF YOU LOOK BACK THROUGH MY HIGH SCHOOL scrapbook, you’d think I was one of the popular kids. I was involved in a million activities—speech team, girls’ choir, basketball, tennis, theater guild. And despite earning the “quitter” label after The Ugly Duckling, I even managed to get small roles in a couple of plays my sophomore year, playing a male police officer (go figure) in Arsenic and Old Lace and a tomboy (ditto) in The Brick and the Rose.
But it wasn’t until my senior year that something transformative finally happened. That was the year my theater arts class put on Godspell.
Somewhere in the back of my head I was aware that Godspell was based on a Bible gospel—we sang “Day by Day” at guitar mass at St. Jude’s—but I didn’t care. I just wanted to put on a show! I loved the music, and we wouldn’t have to try out; if you were in the class, you were in the play. Chris and I listened to the original cast album over and over.
We also went downtown to see the show live at the Drury Lane Theater. Chris, our friend Ed (another soon-to-be-gay musical theater lover), and I went at least ten times. That professional cast added some funny bits and one-liners that we claimed for ourselves and brought home to Dolton. We were obsessed.
Our production played one Friday night only. Everyone in my family, extended and otherwise, came. We thespians were beside ourselves with excitement. We put everything we had into this thing and made a plan to drink real wine during the final betrayal scene that closes the play. We wanted to be crying real tears, and we were pretty sure we couldn’t unless we were tipsy.
Ed played Jesus, Chris was John the Baptist/Judas, and along with being in the ensemble, I played the hussy who sang “Turn Back, O Man.”
I was now a part of the magic that had so mesmerized me when I was a kid seeing my first stage play. I actually lost my balance I was so excited—I almost fell over several times the day of the show—and I smelled funny. I would have this smell many times in the future and would come to know it as the pungent odor of pure, unadulterated fear. But because it was mixed with pure, unadulterated joy, I survived.
We were all swept up in the electricity of putting on this show. We were more focused, disciplined, and committed than we had ever been in our young lives. We had all pitched in to build the set together, and showed up after school for rehearsals. When we finally performed, no one missed a line or a cue. We were a team, and we supported one another. Being a part of this group of fellow actors, feeling needed and valued and there for one another, was a high I would chase for the rest of my life.
