John

Shakespeare

Russell recently did a very credible job of playing a brutish military type guilty of several types of bullying including the rape of a prostitute played by a male actor.  As we reflected on his performance we were drawn to remember previous performances by family members including John. My first memory of John on stage came when he was still a baby and « performed » in the S.P.I.C.E. (Early Childhood) Center Christmas pageant, playing Santa Claus. John being John, he would not keep the beard on his face, and even as a baby kept pulling it off or letting it fall off.  Since Mary Ann worked for SPICE at that time, she was otherwise engaged and I found myself « backstage », the prototypical stage dad determined that my son not be « used » by the grinding machine of semi-spontaneous amateur theater.  John might not have been even one year old at this point, but dad was determined that John would not be humiliated wearing a beard that would humiliate dad, so I wasn’t very helpful in keeping the beard on. (As we know, John was very particular about what touched him.)  I looked at the young woman who was carrying John, and would carry him on stage, and I told her, « Don’t worry, John will act the beard. »  I thought this was hysterically funny, but the young woman just looked at me like I was deranged.  My irrepressible need to be a smart-ass did not produce an outpouring of Christmas spirit.  John was whisked away in her arms, and burst out on stage where he promptly urped and made his own “beard”.  SPICE was a woman’s world, but sometimes Dad does know.

John attended pre-K at a private school for two years, and in his first stage performance with this school, he once again managed to upstage everyone.  In this case, the teachers had been working hard to teach the kids how to take a bow, and John, who still couldn’t talk very much, took right away to this curious custom.  My memory of the show, for some reason once again seen from behind the scenes, was of John locking the audience into a loop of applause and bowing: the more they applauded, the more he bowed deeply and fully, and of course this sent the applause meter skyrocketing, producing more formal and obviously well-received bowing.  I think a teacher finally had to go out and grab him to break the loop, and let everyone go home.  Thus began John’s career as a physical comedian.

I come home one day when John attended Bent School to hear John announce to me “I hate Bradly.”  After considerable conversation, I learned that John’s class was going to stage a performance of “Alice in Wonderland” and that Bradley had snagged what for John was the plum role:  the Cheshire Cat.  John was always drawn to claws, and here was Bradley, not John, able to wear claws and be the cat.  John instead was cast as the 2 of hearts, and it took considerable persuasion by his mom to have him accept the importance of this role as well.  In the interest of Bradley’s safety, it was some time before any of us trusted John with the guard’s weapon.  Still, John came to take pride in the part, and delivered his line flawlessly, that is, so well that anyone in the audience could understand him.  For Mary Ann and I, this was the real triumph.

John went to the Shakespeare Festival in Normal with us one evening when he was six or seven years old.  He seemed intrigued with this new kind of video, and even though he couldn’t understand most of the words, he paid attention to the gestures and movement and constructed his own reading of the play in his mind.  At intermission, I sent Courtney and Russell off to the bathrooms with John in tow so that Mary Ann and I could have a few moments respite.  As I have said before, out in public with John meant that we had to always focus part of our attention on him, to make sure he didn’t wander off if bored.  Within five or six minutes, Russell was back, looking mortified, to tell us that John had locked himself in the stall, and wouldn’t come out.  Sigh.  Off I went to see what was up.  The men’s room at the outdoor theater had one urinal and one stall, and with John locked in the stall, was operating at 50% capacity.  A fairly long line of impatient dancing men grumbled out the door as I squeezed my way past.  Having shown me where John was, Russell announced that he needed to “check on Mom”, and fled. 

John and bathrooms warrants a post of its own, and I will get to that later, but suffice it to say that bathrooms provided John with a private space where he could escape all the attention he drew by his looks and his occasional socially awkward behavior.  It was no small feat to coax him out of a bathroom, as his predominantly female teachers at Bent had discovered.  As men hopped and groaned behind me, I cajoled, begged, and bribed John to open the door and come out.  Finally, he decided it was time to leave, and so crawled under the door, leaving the stall locked!  The collective groan moved like the wave down the line and out the door, as the latest development was relayed to those waiting in the corridor.  Back I sent him under the door, to open the stall.  I looked down at the floor where he had gone in and saw a bit of toilet paper fluttering back and forth; he was flying his toilet paper dragon in the stall again as men gasped amid muttered threats.  Finally we heard the bolt click open and John came out, satisfied, and walked over to wash his hands.  I told him this time it would be OK if he didn’t wash, but no, the ritual must be completed and to the sink he strode, ignoring the shuffling steps and groans of satisfaction.  The poor men in line; desperate, they couldn’t lash out at someone who was obviously “handicapped”, so I knew in their hearts they were killing me in a variety of ways as the irresponsible parent who had not accompanied his son into the stall.  But they were too late.  I had been so often “killed” by strangers on John’s account that I didn’t even notice the mental stones and spears that came my way.  We retreated to our seats, whereupon all four of us laughed hysterically at the way, yet again, John had upset protocol and custom.

John’s first extended role, as a sheep in a Christmas pageant at First Christian Church, was memorable.  Because he couldn’t accept that the sheep were to come on stage and sit in the background (no real sheep would do anything like that), John-as-sheep crawled all over the stage during the dialogue, shouldered his way past Mary and Joseph to look at baby Jesus, and then jumped off the stage, breaking the fourth wall, and crawling among the audience seeking pets and general shows of affection.  “If you want me to be a sheep”, he seemed to be saying, “then live with a sheep!”  Again, Russell, Courtney and I howled, in part because the directors of the play had never asked us for any extra help in rehearsal. John didn’t know what to do, and so he acted the sheep.  The directors were politically correct in including John, but they didn’t allow for accommodations, and so they wound up with a method-acted sheep.  It was perhaps unchristian of us not to have volunteered more support, but the directors did not want parental interference, and we had long ago learned that the raw experience of John was often the best teacher to outsiders.  Sinfully, we found the scene-hogging John charming.

In Mahomet, John finally got to play a lion in a Jr. High production, and spent many days rehearsing his roar and menacing us all with his claws.  In his one year of high school, John played a Dalmatian in the Christmas play, and again pronounced his line flawlessly:  “Arf, arf, arf.  The time to wake up is now!”  There were however, artistic differences between John and the director as to how a dog barked, John being of course the expert on all things animal.  To our great joy, John performed the choreography to the final song in perfect time with the others, the first time we had seen him accomplish this.  At the time of his death, he was rehearsing his part as a gang member in “Les Misèrables”.  On Tuesday evening of that last week I had taken John to rehearsal and then stayed to see if Judy and Carol needed a hand with him.  The students in the cast took John well in hand, and I was free to sit in the back and take pictures of him.  Control of such a large cast was best accomplished by the command of “freeze” at which the entire cast on stage was to freeze in place and remain quiet while the directors made adjustments.  John found freeze a great opportunity to stretch out on a bench.  The cast thought the picture of John lounging while everyone else froze like a statue wildly funny at his memorial service.  I was glad that the service gave John one more moment to be the clown.

I think John was drawn to the stage because in some way as a person visibly different, his entire life was theater.  I think he learned early on that he was always on stage when in public, and that this had both blessings and curses.  John was used to drawing attention, and he reveled in it as much as possible.  Yet, he cherished the times alone in his room, with his family, or in the bathroom stall when he could escape public notice and relax.  We rarely tried to force him out of his room to join us because we understood his need for time “off-stage.”  Even when he tied up a stall for unusual lengths of time, it was hard for me to be cross with him because I knew his need.  I am not sure his teachers ever quite understood his attraction to bathrooms, but they always found in him a willing and eager thespian, especially when claws were involved.  Theater, and the Mahomet-Seymour High School drama program will always hold a cherished spot in our heart.  It was a place where John found total acceptance and a way to develop a natural talent for imitation.  And, of great importance to us as parents, Judy and Carol accepted John unreservedly, not because of federal or state mandates, but because they believed it to be the right thing to do.  And because they thought he had talent  and they loved him.  Big squeezes for everyone.