Take a Bow, my Friend

Theatre has always been the love of my life and, predictably, it’s complicated.

Morton Wishengrad’s “The Rope Dancers”; thoroughly inappropriate for high school.

I don’t know what it is about theatre, but it does seem to attract the kinds of kids who cry when they miss the late bus. That’s how I met my middle school drama director, Bobbi. I had just auditioned for her at Bala Cynwyd Middle School in 1992, as one of dozens and dozens little sixth graders, unknown to her, for a role in a play I had never heard of, “Lil’ Abner.” (Spoiler alert: it’s bad. Any show with lyrics/rhymes like, “Jubilation T. Cornpone; all tattered’n torn-pone” deserves to be forgotten, cancelled, eviscerated, and maybe even peed on).

I doubt my audition was very good, but, as a sixth grade boy, I was virtually guaranteed some sort of role because, you know, boys and theatre. But I think my casting as “Lonesome Polecat”, a Native American who brews a swill dubbed Kickapoo Joy Juice in some kind of cave (cringe) was cemented when the late bus departed without me. I called home on the pay phone in the foyer and my oldest sister was dispatched to pick me up in her gray Nissan 240sx. Nobody was particularly mad at me over missing the bus, nobody yelled at me, or told me I was irresponsible or that I’d caused a problem. Nevertheless, I went outside and sat down on the curb of the front bus circle and I cried.