Drama (9 page)

Photograph by Bootsy Holler.

Nudes! I was sixteen years old, an age where anything with a curved surface was the source of runaway sexual fantasies. I had never seen a naked woman in my life and I was feverish with anticipation. I nervously adjusted my easel and pinned a sheet of paper to a drawing board, waiting for two radiant sirens to emerge from behind a screen, step onto the platform, and stand in front of me in all their seductive glory. Out they came. Clearly the wise minds at the Art Students League had had the sense to dampen the sensual enthusiasm of their teenage students. In two years of Saturday mornings, I saw a weekly parade of uniquely peculiar male and female bodies—old, fat, wizened, weathered, deformed. They were marvelous subjects for a figure drawing class but none could be called remotely attractive. All business.

Ethel was a gruff, unsentimental, altogether marvelous teacher. She challenged me as no art teacher had before. Simple truths poured out of her, in the coarse, nasal accent of a waitress at Katz’s Delicatessen on Houston Street. Under her watchful eye, my crabbed little scrawlings became bold and dramatic, with sweeping lines filling up the frame. She taught me to visually organize the complex shapes of two naked bodies. She ordered me to keep my eyes on the models, noting my tendency to fix my gaze on my own drawing as it grew tighter and less fluid. She tore photos of athletes out of the
New York Times
and brought them to class as chance examples of elegant abstract composition. Like a sponge, I soaked in every word and every image, then put it all to work. At a certain point, Ethel decided I was ready to move over to the other half of the studio where she unleashed me on watercolor still lifes. My big paintings swam with brilliant, liquid color, like nothing I’d ever dared to do before.

In all of this, Ethel would encourage me but never compliment me. In her view, nothing was ever completely mastered. There was always something more to strive for. And this could sometimes make her downright merciless. Her most pointed critique has stayed with me ever since, resonating with every other aspect of my life. She told me one day that I had a distinct, facile talent but that I had to be watchful. My facility was my greatest asset, but it was also my greatest drawback. It allowed me to get by with glib, hasty, lazy work. Things came easy for me, so too often I was perfectly willing to skip over difficult tasks. Art is hard, she insisted. If you’re going to be great at it, you can’t fake it. Faking it, of course, is the very essence of acting. Ethel Katz may have been telling me more that day than either of us realized, and more than I wanted to hear.

M
y Saturday classes at the Art Students League ended at noon. At that hour, the second half of my weekly Manhattan adventures would begin. Between midday and midnight, when the last Princeton bus pulled out of the Port Authority, the city was my oyster. Most Saturdays I would jump on the subway at Columbus Circle and head uptown to meet Robin in her Barnard dorm room. Then off we would go, to museums, galleries, art house films, and Greenwich Village coffeehouses. We occasionally tracked down beloved actors from the recent Ohio theater seasons, meeting them on their home turf. Sometimes they actually had jobs and we’d go see them act in tiny off-Broadway houses. On big occasions, Robin and I would splurge for tickets to shows we knew only from record albums in faraway Akron—
The Fantasticks
,
The Play of Daniel
,
Beyond the Fringe
. At one point, Robin even directed a Barnard student production of a one-act Yeats play and hired me to create masks and paint an enormous show cloth for it. New York seemed to me then, as it does to this day, a world of limitless creative energy and possibility. And experiencing it for the first time in Robin’s company sustained the brother-sister bond that we had forged in our itinerant grade-school years, worlds away from Manhattan Island.

H
alfway through our first year in Princeton, a stroke of good luck befell my father. In a happy reversal of fortune, he was invited back to Ohio to create yet another summer theater festival. This one was to be called the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival. It would take place in the town of Lakewood, just outside of Cleveland. The beauty of this invitation was that the new enterprise would not conflict with his McCarter job. He would be employed year-round. And, blessedly, we would not have to move. All of us were thrilled with this news. The new festival would have all the earmarks of Dad’s earlier ventures, and many of the same players. And once again he would be guiding the fortunes of his own theater company.

This time, however, I would be far away from the action. I was heading to Europe on my first trip outside the country. I had joined a group of East Coast prep school kids for a summer travel-camp tour of a dozen cities, towns, and villages in France. The trip was part of a program run by an old college friend of my parents who had offered a French tour to me gratis, in an effort to persuade my father to lead a corresponding tour to England. For weeks Dad strung along his old friend as plans for his new Shakespeare festival took shape. In the end, the festival was launched and Dad didn’t go to England—but I got my trip anyway. And what a glorious trip it was. I traveled to Brittany, the Loire Valley, the Riviera, the Alps, and Paris. I saw museums, galleries, chateaux, plays, operas, and towering alpine peaks. I ate
foie gras, crêpes Suzette,
and
croques messieurs
. On streets, beaches, and hillsides, I spent languorous hours sitting with a box of watercolors and a
bloc de feuillets
, painting landscapes and street scenes in my best imitation of Maurice Prendergast and Raoul Dufy. I was drunk with the experience of an exotic new culture and played the role of budding artist with romantic flair.

In the company of so many children of Yankee privilege, I was something of a poor relation. But in our seven weeks abroad, the fifteen of us grew into a happy, adventurous band. And by the midpoint of the trip, I had my first girlfriend. She was a feisty, worldly, guitar-strumming Jewish girl named Jane, born and bred on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Sexually, I still lived in a cave of benighted ignorance, but Jane led me toward the light. Although neither of us lost our virginity that summer, the swoony eroticism of perfumed summer nights in France kept us in a constant state of orgasmic groping. When I returned to Princeton for my last year of school, I crawled back into my cave, as sexually reclusive as ever. But my summer travels had vastly broadened my horizons, and I began my senior year of high school with a substantially broader sense of myself.

[8]

Big and Little

Photograph by Gerald Hornbein.

O
f the crowded cast of characters from my high school days, one person played perhaps the most important featured role. This was my little sister Sarah Jane. As with so many supporting players, Sarah Jane was ubiquitous, delightful, and sometimes slightly taken for granted. In hindsight, she completes the picture of my life during those Princeton years.

Back in Yellow Springs, when Sarah Jane was two years old, Harry Belafonte was a big deal. His album
Calypso
sold in the millions, and its first song, “Day-O,” was part of the sound track of the American scene. The album became the most frequently played music in our household, having finally displaced the swing jazz of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. The most lively, danceable song on Belafonte’s record was something called “Dolly Dawn”—

She gonna dance!

She gonna sing!

She gonna cause the rafters to ring!

For baby Sarah Jane, that song was her first ecstatic musical experience. She had only just started to walk, but every time she heard it, she would dance. For the whole family, Sarah Jane dancing to “Dolly Dawn” on the living room floor became our favorite entertainment. It was probably inevitable that she would become known to all of us as “Dolly.” Until her arrival, I’d been the youngest of my parents’ three kids. She was an afterthought child, ten years younger than I, so in effect she grew up with two actual parents and three surrogate ones. She was a beautiful child with an ineffably sweet nature, and the five of us smothered her with doting affection.

By the time our gypsy family pitched our tent in Princeton, Dolly was five years old. I was fifteen. Sister Robin and brother David had long since departed the scene. Dolly and I were the only kids left in the household, and we were a constant presence in each other’s lives. With her as my little sister, I happily embraced the role of big brother. I was her go-to babysitter and frequent schlepper, but I never begrudged either job. Mainly I was her primary source of fun, and she mine. I read her books, sang her songs, and littered the house with all kinds of crafts projects. Our big housing complex bordered a large woodsy tract of land on the edge of town. This became an exotic playground for us and the site of endless adventures. In the winter I taught her to skate on the vast expanse of ice covering Carnegie Lake. Together, we turned even mundane household chores into giddy drama. The layout of our building required a fifty-yard trek to its garbage bin. Dolly and I invented the characters of two undercover agents, named “Big” and “Little,” and turned the garbage run into an hour-long espionage mission, packed with suspense and hilarity. In spite of our cover names, at such moments we were no longer a big brother and a little sister. We were playmates, pure and simple, uncannily attuned to each other’s sense of adventure and fun.

Although the thought never occurred to me at the time, those idle hours with Dolly provided me with an unwitting primer on parenthood. Years later, when I became a father, I put all our projects, adventures, and games back to work. As a parent I was far from perfect (ask any of my children), but as a gonzo entertainer I was way ahead of the game.

As a matter of fact, gonzo entertainment was to become a major sideline to my professional career. Anticipating parenthood in my mid-twenties, I began to teach myself guitar, intending to sing and play songs for my first child. My playing never advanced beyond grinding mediocrity, but it was good enough for “She’ll Be Comin’ round the Mountain” and “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie.” Within a few years I was singing in my son Ian’s classrooms and school assemblies. I started making up my own daffy songs. I fashioned a fifty-minute concert for kids and perfected the demanding skill of unleashing and harnessing their wild enthusiasm without ever losing their attention. As the years passed, the concert venues got bigger. I performed with major orchestras. The concerts spawned CDs and bestselling books. I clowned around for two thousand children on the stage of Carnegie Hall. But if the scale of these escapades grew exponentially, their spirit remained the same. I never lost the sense of goofy fun that I discovered entertaining my little sister.

My own children outgrew my kids’ concerts years ago, but I’ve never stopped doing them. The more I perform for children, the more I love it. They are a sensational audience for a stage performer and an exhilarating change of pace from adults. The goal of theater is a suspension of disbelief. With grown-ups, you never completely achieve it. Adults never entirely forget that they are watching actors pretend. You can certainly have an impact on them. You can surprise them, move them, shock them, and make them laugh. But you’re not fooling them for a moment. Adults always sit in a theater with the unwavering knowledge that they are watching a calculated piece of fiction.

Not so children. They barely know what a theater is. For them, there is little difference between artifice and reality. Irony means nothing to them. Their disbelief is in a constant state of suspension. Over time I’ve invented all sorts of tricks to take advantage of their innocence. My concerts are full of them. For example, I always stride onstage for my first song wearing a jaunty bowler hat. I finish the song and begin to greet the kids. One of the musicians tugs at my sleeve, whispers to me, and points to my hat. I reach up, feel the hat, and shout out, with shock and dismay:

“Oh, no! I’ve done it again! I do it all the time! I put on my hat, I sing the song,
then
I forget to take off my hat
! It’s my worst habit! If I do it again, be sure to tell me, won’t you?”

In the next hour I wear about six hats. Each one is more ridiculous than the last. There’s a top hat, a pith helmet, a beanie with a little propeller, a pair of kangaroo ears, and so on. Every time, I forget to take off my hat for the next song. Try to imagine what the kids do when this happens. The sound reaches the decibel level of a Beatles concert at Shea Stadium.

Then there is “Guess the Animal.” On the concert stage, I place a huge easel at stage left. Using the easel, I play a game with the children: I tell them I’m going to draw an animal on a big piece of poster board and they must guess what it is before the drawing is completed. In bold felt pen, I begin a large drawing of, say, a hippo. Soon it is a clearly recognizable hippo. The children have begun shouting “It’s a hippo!” I turn to them and say, “It’s a what? It’s a
what
?” “It’s a hippo!” they scream. I stare at them, puzzled, and say, “Funny. I thought you’d get this one.” By this time they are shrieking at the top of their lungs, “IT’S A HIPPO!!!” After working them into a state of frenzy, I finally cry out, “RIGHT! IT’S A
HIPPO
!” I finish the drawing and launch into Flanders and Swann’s blissfully silly “Hippopotamus Song.” Hugely pleased with themselves, the children sit back and listen.

I repeat the game six or seven times in the course of the concert, but they never tire of it. They play the game passionately, over and over again, blithely unaware that I’m doing anything to manipulate them. They absolutely love to be tricked in this way. And in their response you can see the first stirrings of a grown-up’s appetite for entertainment. Deep down, adults long to be tricked as well.

And when did I invent Guess the Animal? On a rainy Princeton afternoon with Dolly when there was nothing else to do. She taught me to connect with children, to understand them, and to entertain them. And somewhere along the line, she must have picked up some of these skills herself. For years she has been a superb teacher in Ithaca, New York. She has directed spectacular school musicals and student productions of Shakespeare. And she has raised four marvelously talented and creative sons. Whenever we see each other, we revert to an adult version of our long-ago childhood selves, giggling and teasing like Big and Little. But she is Sarah Jane now. Nowadays there are only a handful of us left who remember that she was ever known as Dolly.