Uncategorized – Sidney Homan

At Four in the Afternoon

July 12, 2011/by danielhoman

“At Four in the Afternoon” [from A Fish in the Moonlight]

[1950: Every Sunday, almost without fail, we drove out of the city to visit my aunt and uncle on their farm. My brother and I loved to play in their three-story chicken coup, eat strawberries from my aunt’s garden, and explore the old shed where my uncle kept artifacts of a lifetime. One Sunday, however, we were surprised to find them gone. For a while my brother and I went through our usual routines, but somehow, without my aunt and uncle, it just didn’t seem the same. Here is an excerpt from the end of that story.]

Then we heard my father calling out “Boys! Boys!” We ran back to the house. My parents were standing beside the 1938 Dodge, and Mother said that we had better start back for the city. “Perhaps they’ve gone on a short vacation. Without a phone, we don’t always keep up on their plans.” My dad still looked puzzled, as if he wanted to say, “But they’re always here on Sundays. They’ve always been.” All that he could do was repeat what Mother had said, “We shouldn’t wait any longer. We need to drive back.”

As I was about to get into the back seat, my mother reached into the glove compartment and, pulling out a pad and pencil, said, “Here, Sid, why don’t you leave a note on the back door telling them we were here.”

I got back out and walked slowly to the door. Stooping down and resting the pad on one leg, I wrote:

Dear Uncle Willie and Aunt Missy, We came by to see you today, same time as we usually do. But you weren’t here. We had a good time. John and I played in the chicken hotel and then the shed, and the strawberries were good. But it wasn’t the same without you. See you next Sunday, OK?
Love, Sid junior

Then, just before I pinned the note on the door, I looked at my watch. It was four o’clock, and so at the top I put a “4 PM.”

Two hours after we got back to the city, there was a call from my Aunt Grace. She lived in a small town about an hour from Uncle Willie and Aunt Missy. My dad took the phone. When he was finished, he asked the three of us to come into the living room. He looked grim. In very simple words Dad told us that Uncle Willie and Aunt Missy had died. While traveling home that afternoon on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, they’d been hit head-on by another driver who had crossed the median and ran right into them. Uncle Willie and Aunt Missy had died at about four in the afternoon. After hearing the news from the state police, Aunt Grace had gone to Embryville to make some preparations for the funeral. On her way back, she had stopped at their house and seen my note on the door.

That night John asked if he could sleep in my room. As we lay there in the dark we talked about Uncle Willie and Aunt Missy. About their not being able to have children. About the country-fried steak and new potatoes Aunt Missy always served. About the strawberry field. And the chicken hotel. About the treasures in the shed. About being Uncle Willie’s “boys.” Then we tried to fall asleep, each pretending, for the sake of the other, that we had.

June 28, 2011/in Uncategorized/by sidneyhoman

“Poor but my own”–Shakespeare’s clown Touchstone in As You Like It

At the tender age of 74 I am trying my wings as a writer of prose fiction. With apologies for my having a long way to go, here is a link to my first small success. The story, “Beer Is Technically a Vegetarian Meal,” from my projected novel One Wednesday in New York City, appeared in the online journal Underground Voices: http://www.undergroundvoices.com/UVHomanSidney.htm.

And my “Prisoners As Audience,” which originally appeared in Underground Voices (http://www.undergroundvoices.com/UVHomanSidney2.htm), has been reprinted in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal 29.1 (2011): 12.

Note: Here I am morphed with–you guessed it!–Shakespeare, by the talented young artist Mike Werkle.

CURRENT PROJECTS:

ALL JOKING ASIDE: THE ART AND CRAFT OF COMEDY: I am collaborating with Brian Rhinehart, my former student and now a New York stage director as well as a member of the theatre faculties of the Actors Studio Drama School and Baruch College, on a book titled All Joking Aside. Growing out of our own experience in the theatre and with improv companies, the book attempts something of a “triple play”: a manual for actors on the craft and principles of comedy; for the general reader, an analysis of classic and current comedies from the perspective of those onstage and in the house; and a history of comic theory from the ancient Greeks to the present.

THE FÜHRER AND THE DOVE: My son Danny and I are finishing up a piece of historical fiction, a novel where a resistance group, despairing of attempts to assassinate Hitler, comes up with the idea of kidnapping his mistress Eva Braun and then substituting a look-like, skilled actress in her place. The actress then proceeds to undermine the obscene little man psychologically—a task both dangerous and yet promising, given all of his sexual and personality hang-ups—as a way of disrupting the Führer’s conduct of the war. Without distorting any of the known historical facts of Hitler’s life, the period from 1942-45, and the Third Reich cast of obscene characters, we follow the scheme from the kidnapping, through life with the fake Eva in Munich and at the Berghov, Hitler’s country estate, all the way to the (supposed) double suicide of the husband and wife in the bunker. This is our fictive take on the questions Ron Rosenbaum so brilliant raises in his study Explaining Hitler. [For my son’s site, Daniel Homan]

ONE WEDNESDAY IN NEW YORK CITY: A would-be novel where I look at the lives of very ordinary people, living within a four-block area of Brooklyn, who on a given Wednesday afternoon all experience one of those life-changing Joycean epiphanies. More than a touch of “six degrees of separation” here. The cast of characters ranges from a lovely soul suffering from agoraphobia, to an up-tight funeral director who for relief from his profession visits the Temple of Snake Handling and Redemption at night, from a grandmother charged with the obscene task of putting plaster of Paris covers on the genitalia of statuary in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to two middle-age bank tellers, their spouses deceased, who meet through one of those online questionnaires one fills out for a speed-dating service.

HITLER IN THE MOVIES: My colleague in Sociology, Hernan Vera and I have finished writing a book on Hitler in the Movies. We consider what his portraits in serious. comic, and fantasy films, docudramas and documentaries, and movies for television tell us about our conception of the monster. How we try to explain him, understand him through the media of popular culture.

In Memoriam

June 9, 2008/by danielhoman

Teaching Philosophy

June 9, 2008/by danielhoman

Teaching Philosophy:

Every class I give, whether an undergraduate course in Modern Drama or a graduate seminar in Shakespeare, has as its subtitle “Learning by Doing.” My students and I—for I learn along with them—study plays by performing them. Every student chooses a scene partner, and the bulk of each couple’s work during the semester involves staging scenes before the class, then working with me as director to polish the performance, with all members of the class serving as co-directors. Classes are, in effect, rehearsals prerequisite to performance. The students also write paper assessing their experience preparing the scene, from the perspective of both their character and their decisions as an actor.

In this way I underscore in my teaching the fact that plays are not just words on a page but dialogue enacted by live people in front of an audience, and that “text” of a play also includes gestures, blocking, movement, the entire stage picture. The final author of that text is the actor in concert with the playwright. For the former brings to the latter’s words his or her own insights, feelings, life experiences, as well as whatever subtext the actor devises for the character–subtext referring to everything the character is thinking, saying unconsciously or even consciously, beneath the actual dialogue.

Invariably, many of my students work with me in productions in the theatre, from acting to designing to being part of the stage crew. Our “classes” include improvisation troupes, even taking the theatre on tour. For example, we have done David Mamet’s The Duck Variations in nursing homes, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in ten Florida prisons. This latter experience, I should add, led to a book, growing out of my students’ work, called Beckett’s Theatres: Interpretations for Performance.

I judge the students not on the finesse of their performance—any degree of finesse I would consider a bonus—but on what they put into their work, their intent. The courses are about plays, playwrights, the theatre generally, and not primarily about acting. And so Mechanical Engineering majors have done as well, statistically, as Theatre majors who, in turn, have done no better than English or Anthropology majors.

One can, of course, approach the theatre in numerous ways, using various critical approaches (Marxism, Feminism, New Historicism, and so on), or stage history, or performance theory. And plays can be the subject of lectures or class discussions and reports. I respect all of these methods. My own approach as a teacher, however, is to take the theatre on its own terms, as something actually transpiring in space and time, and ratified by an audience, as a collaboration between the director or actor and the playwright.

Increasingly and inevitably, this philosophy of teaching has influenced my own work as a scholar. My most recent books, such as Directing Shakespeare: A Scholar Onstage and Staging Modern Playwrights: From Director’s Concept to Performance, have as their focus my work in theatre, that work often done in concert with my students.

Since the theatre, I believe, is also an activity inseparable from life, indeed, is a “tool” for living, my classroom has also expanded to include working with my students in the Arts and Medicine Program at Shands Teaching Hospital (an experience that led to a book from the Purdue University Press, A Fish in the Moonlight: Growing Up in the Bone Marrow Unit) and with at-risk students in the public schools in a nationally-recognized program called “Shakespeare, Summer, and Kids.”

And Gladly Teach

June 9, 2008/by danielhoman

“And Gladly Teach”

[1994: I have always been eager to find new ways to function as a teacher and an actor, and this is why I joined the Arts in Medicine program at my university’s Shands Teaching Hospital. The premise of AIM was simple: artists—actors, singers, painters, dancers, storytellers—had much to contribute to the health and well-being of patients. Their presence in hospitals could be something more than “mere entertainers.” When I left my position with children on the Bone Marrow Unit (the subject of my book A Fish in the Moonlight), I was transferred as Artist-in-Residence to the Teenage Psychiatric Unit on the hospital’s eight floor, a lonely place where seriously troubled teenagers lived for extended periods while they received treatment. It was a young patient who would teach me much about the theatre.]

As an Artist in Residence for the Arts in Medicine Program of Shands Teaching Hospital at the University of Florida, I gave a two-hour acting workshop once a week for teenagers housed on the hospital’s Youth Psychiatric Unit. I worked in collaboration with Maggie Hannan, a recreational therapist, along with psychiatrists and physicians. Because their illnesses were so serious, these teenagers had to live at the hospital, their stays ranging from a few days to months. There were schizophrenics, psychotics, young people suffering various forms of depression and anxiety, anorexics. There were manic-depressives. Some had been committed because of violence, or incest, or various other forms of abuse. More than one was the victim of self-mutilation. Removed from the mainstream of the hospital, the eighth floor on which the Unit is located is a lonely place, a world unto itself where visitors have to pass through numerous security checks. For the residents, trips to the outside are rare. Inside the Unit lives are regulated by a very strict schedule; for the teenagers, there is a complex system of merits and demerits governing behavior. This system was even extended to my acting workshop. The more a teenager participated, the more points he or she received, points that could later be turned in for favors, from extra desserts to attending a performance of my improv company in the Theatre Department.

In the acting workshops I purposely did not try to make links between the theatre and the real lives of the patients, nor did they directly use the theatre as a “mirror” for their problems, laudable as this function may be. I am not a psychiatrist or a mental-health practitioner; I have no skills in these areas. Rather, I conducted the workshops as if the patients were theatre students I was loosening up for a rehearsal.

This conservative definition of my role, I discovered, proved useful. Whatever their illness or its severity, I noticed that the teenagers generally had lost confidence in their bodies and their voices. No longer taking pleasure in their own persons, seeing themselves as “different” from normal people their age, they moved and spoke tentatively. Fetal positions were common. Their voices sounded bland, purposely so, as if to commit themselves to any texture, any rhythm, to search for the right word, to convey any emotion through their expressions would somehow expose them to the very world they feared, that “stare” of others as the existentialist might say. Whether on sedatives or not, they moved slowly, lethargically, as if putting a foot forward or raising a hand to gesture would likewise put them at risk. I have had teenage children of my own, know more than I want to about their style in speaking and moving, and also know how difficult a period these transitional years can be. But these young people had no such style. Unlike teenagers on the outside, they were not separating themselves from the adult world, defining themselves in opposition to embarrassing parents. Rather, they were afraid, and in that fear had withdrawn the body and voice, those extensions of the personality first greeting the world. A corollary was that they also withdrew from each other, had lost even the most minimal of social skills. I learned from the therapists that there was almost no social interaction among the kids, except for angry outbursts when someone stole from or insulted a fellow patient. Together for months on the Unit, they barely knew each other. Each existed in a very private world, in A Kind of Alaska, to invoke the title of a play by Harold Pinter.

Nothing, I reasoned, could be more appropriate for such physical, vocal, and social withdrawal as the warm-ups, theatre games, and exercises that constitute an acting workshop. For these activities are designed precisely to make one aware of the body, call attention to the voice, stretch the imagination, and develop an ensemble mood among actors.

We always started with an exercise called “Names,” where each person makes a gesture or some movement accompanying his or her name, something physical that captures the way you feel about both your name and yourself. Shouting out “Ted,” a boy might spin around like a dancer; “Cathy” could be signed with an outstretched fist. Once this is done, everyone else in the circle shouts out the name, along with its physical sign, three times. Afterwards, I would point to a particular person and have the rest of the group, on that cue, make his or her sign. With these teenagers, saying someone name, literally seeing how each felt about that name, was a small step in their thinking of something outside the self, responding to each other, developing that sense of “the company” actors cherish.

The first hour of the workshop would be devoted to physical exercises, stretching various parts of the body, pitching an imaginary baseball while forcing an “ah” sound from the chest as the ball leaves the hand, and so on. After that we would do vocal exercises: for example, jogging in place while making the consonant sounds in rhythm. Or doing all those tongue twisters and speed deliveries actors use to stretch their “instrument,” as they call the voice, from the generic “red leather, yellow leather” to one of the kids’ favorites, “The big black bug bit the big brown bear, and the big brown bear bled badly, but he didn’t bleed blue blood.”

From there we would move to exercises that force one to move outside the self and towards others. In “The Mirror,” for instance, two actors face each other. “A” begins moving his hands or legs, or both, in some sort of graceful pattern, and it is up to “B” to imitate A. If A’s palm draws near B’s face, then B’s palm does likewise with A’s face.
After these exercise we tried actor’s games that stress dependence, that working in concert with others essential not only to actors but, as I soon realized, valuable to asocial, troubled young people. For example, in “Panel of Experts” five or six people stand in a row; the audience then asks them a simple question, such as “What’s the first thing you do when you get up in the morning?” Starting with the person on the right, the five participants answer that question in a coherent sentence, each person adding a word. Thus, if the sentence begins “The first thing I do in the morning is shake all the cobwebs out of . . . ,” then the first person says “The,” the second “first,” the third “thing,” and so on. The object here is to sound like a single person answering without gaps or fluctuations in rhythm, and with a common “voice” having a recognizable and consistent quality and texture.

From here we would progress to actors’ games that make even more demands. For instance, in “Playing the Sub-text” two actors are given six to eight innocuous lines of dialogue: “Hello”; “How are you?”; “Fine–and you?”: “Fine–but you’re late”; “I know”; “Why?”; “I just am!” They develop a situation and subtext. For example, the person (B) entering the room is three hours late for an important appointment, but A, who bends over backwards in life not to judge others, tries to hide her anger. The fact is that B has purposely arrived late as a pathetic way of demonstrating her power over A who is everything in life B wishes to be but is not. Despite the banal dialogue, it is the group’s job to guess the sub-text, what is really happening beneath the otherwise inane dialogue.

The final exercise, “Freeze/Unfreeze,” was the most difficult, and the one the teenagers, once fully engaged with this world of playing, enjoyed more than any other. Two people get up and start an improvisation. At any moment, someone in the audience can shout, “Freeze,” and while the actors do so by holding the exact physical position they were in when the call sounded, that person comes onstage and taps one of the actors on the shoulder. As the actor takes a seat, the new person assumes his or her exact physical position. When the audience shouts out, “Unfreeze,” the actors begin an improvisation based on the present stage picture, but on an entirely new topic. And so it goes, with participants shouting “Freeze” for a variety of reason. Sometimes a particular physical position will suggest an idea for an improvisation. At other times volunteers go up blindly, throwing themselves into the situation to see if they can come up with a new skit. Very often the new person would rescue a fellow actor struggling with the material, or having run dry of ideas. The last reason the staff found especially telling: the idea of jumping into the fray to help someone else.

Improv is, I think, the hardest type of acting and makes actors especially dependent on each other. The best actors in improv develop a silent communication with their partner, know where the material is heading, steer each other away from dead ends, pick up on cues or suggestions dropped by the other. When it is most successful, an improv sounds like a scripted play that has been thoroughly rehearsed. The fact that the material is being created on the spot only enhances the audience’s pleasure in the playwright-like creativity of the actors. By the end of the workshop most of the teenagers knew how to work together in this exalted fashion.

It was a teenage girl–I will call her Nancy–who as an actor became my teacher, showing me just how powerful and useful the theatre could be. Nancy had been on the Unit six months and in all that time had never spoken a word. Severely depressed, having suffered unspeakable harm from her family, she had withdrawn deep into herself. She would always stand next to me during the workshop, yet remain totally silent. No one on the staff had every heard her speak; she seemed beyond the reach of all. Sometimes the other patients would taunt her unmercifully. Nancy was alert; that was certain: her eyes followed every gesture of her fellow actors. Still, she never took part in the warm-up exercises, let alone volunteered as an actor in the games. It was an eerie situation: this beautiful silent girl, there and not there.

Then, one day during an improv, she suddenly shouted out, “Freeze,” her voice clear as a bell. Everyone stopped. Therapists and staff silently formed a line at the rear of the room; the teenagers were stunned. The boy with whom I was working and I promptly froze, as in a very controlled, decisive way Nancy rose, walked to the center of the make-shift stage, tapped my improv partner on the shoulder, and took his place. We were so shocked that the group forgot to give the cue to resume and so I had to shout, “Unfreeze!” As was the rule, Nancy began the new improv. Now, thanks to having performed with my own company at the university, Strike Force, I was experienced in doing improv, yet I am happy to admit that Nancy outplayed me. She was the model partner, setting me up, swapping cues, helping us both devise a funny skit. The group let us go on for four minutes or so, an inordinately long time to be onstage for improv. For the rest of the hour, Nancy was up and down, shouting out “Freeze,” complementing any partner lucky enough to be onstage with her. The other actors relieved her only with reluctance; she was that good.

The end of these afternoon workshops was always a sad occasion. The teenagers needed a father figure, and I, for better or worse, filled that bill. My moment of departure was an awkward affair. An attendant would stand in one corner of the room to manage the teenagers, while another walked me to the door on the far side. There was, in effect, a no-man’s land, a demilitarized zone reminding all of us that the teenagers would stay on the Unit while I would go back to my wife and children, to that real world outside the hospital. The kids would stand there forlorn, reminding me to “be back next week, OK?” One fellow even asked poignantly, “You won’t forget me, will you—please?”

On this day, “the day Nancy blossomed,” as a staff member later described the occasion, I was halfway to the door when Nancy called out, “I supposed you’re wondering, Sid, why I talked today, after six month. The first time since I’ve been here.”

“Sure, Nancy, I did wonder why.”

“You oughta know the reason.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“Well, you see, the reason is because this theatre stuff you do doesn’t frighten me . . . the way all the rest does. You know what I mean?”

“I think I do.”

“See, the theatre is real, but not real. It’s about halfway to life, just like me. So, it’s real but it’s not as scary as life. And that’s as far as I’m ready to go now. That’s why I spoke. You can understand–right?”

“Right.”

As I walked toward the door, this precious student who had become my teacher called out, “You’ll be here next Friday?”

“You can count on me.” Glad would I learn, and gladly teach.

Changchun City

June 9, 2008/by danielhoman

“Changchun City”
[1986: I received an offer from Professor Zhang Siyang of Jilin University, in the People’s Republic of China, to come to Changchun City with my family, there to work with a local acting company on a production of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and to teach courses on the modern playwrights at the university. My wife Norma and our two little boys, David and Danny, came with me. I also would inherit the five graduate students who were doing dissertations with Professor Zhang. All this happened just months before we would leave and the country would be rocked by the riots at Tianamen Square. This is a section of that story.]

Three weeks into our stay, Fe May-may asked me if my family and I would come to the women’s dorm room for dinner. The invitation was a radical move, for faculty members at Jilin University seldom mingle socially with students. “If you wish, please invite Chen Young-guo [our translator] to come with you.”

As we approached the dormitory, there were hundreds of students who had gathered to see the rare event. A crowd followed us into the building as we made our way down the hallway to the tiny one-room apartment where the Gang of Five lived. We were greeted with gifts–rulers “all the way from Hong Kong” for the boys, a silk shawl for my wife Norma. From a cassette on the table came the sound of John Denver singing “Rocky Mountain High,” the only tape of American music they had.

“We know all the latest Western music,” Fe May-may assured me.

In the center of the room was a card table where the various items for jousa (a Chinese version of ravioli) had been carefully arranged–dough rolled into four-inch circles and the necessary ingredients (pork, onions, ginger, garlic), along with a large bottle of garlic sauce in which the jousa, once cooked, would be dipped. On a kerosene single-burner stove water was boiling away in an over-sized pot. After instructions from the Gang on how to fold the dough around the ingredients, then pinch the top so that the jousa, looking like a purse, was ready for boiling, we were soon busy around the table, chatting about school and the United States, while other students watched us, discretely standing behind the curtain that served for a door. Little did I know that two days later in the student newspaper the headline would read, “Shakespearean and Family Have Dinner in Student Residence Hall: Rare Ceremony Witnessed by Several Hundred Jilin Students.”

“Homan, we have some wine for you and Chen.”

Shi Lin produced two glasses and Fe May-may poured from a large bottle with the same “Great Wall Wine” label I had seen in Professor Zhang’s apartment that first night.

“Shu Ping, why aren’t you women having a drink?”

“Homan, it is the custom for the men to drink, as the women watch.”

“A custom?”

“Yes, we have always done it this way.”

“Do you think of yourselves as liberated women?”

A silence, punctured a second later by nervous laughter. At last Lee San-bing spoke up, “Yes, Homan, we wish to be liberated.”

Parodying a fatherly philosopher, I said, “Then fellow persons . . . sisters . . . surely you know that women are the equal of men. Maybe even more than equal. Am I not right?”

A silence.

“I will take your silence for agreement. How are you women ever going to show us men the way to true liberation if you stick to a politically incorrect customs like this? What do you think, Chen?”

“I suggest the women bring out six more glasses.”

In a few minutes we were all drinking deep of that strong Great Wall wine, making toasts to women’s liberation, parodying the old men-alone custom now thrown to the winds, locking arms as we sang together “Rocky Mountain High,” the boys dancing together around the table, all of us breaking out in those tears of joy that come when the human spirit, long damned up, is released.
With the Gang of Five now drunk, the conversation changed.

“Homan, you were a protester in your country in the 1960s. Is that true?”

“Yes, Wong Su-ling.”

“What did you protest?”

“Equal rights for African-Americans. And also the war in Vietnam.”

“What were your tactics?”

I naively assumed that the questions stemmed from the Chinese interest in the parallel histories of the two countries during the Mao era. And so, with Norma filming away on the camcorder, and John Denver singing in the background, I gave a scholarly lecture on the protest movements–how we organized, what symbols we used, the slang and political shibboleths of the cause, the range of protests from marches to sit-ins and shut-downs to the violence of the SDS. The women sat transfixed, once in a while asking for a clarification, at other times checking with Chen on a particular point of translation, and very often exchanging glances. The wine continued to flow freely; two more bottles of Great Wall Wine magically appeared. Even the crowd in the hall sang along as I taught the gang “We Shall Overcome” and “If I Had a Hammer.”

Hours later, with sleeping children draped on our backs, we were escorted to the outside door by our hosts.

Clutching an empty wine bottle, a very drunk Shi Lin pulled me to one side, her eyes alive with anger.

“Homan, I don’t give a damn about our glorious past, or about the Great Wall. I don’t care if the damn wall crumbles to the ground. I just want–.”

As she began to weep, I put my arm around her. This was the first time I had heard a Chinese woman curse.

“What, Shi Lin?”

“I just want things to be different here . . . different.”

Shu Ping came up.

“Homan, today we Chinese are thermos bottles with tea, like the ones you have at the Nan Hu Hotel. Cold on the outside, but boiling inside.”

Four months after we returned from China, a graduate student of mine went to teach at Jilin University, just two months before the student riots in Tianamen Square. He reported that there was also a massive demonstration in Changchun City, though it received no press coverage in this country. Five thousand people marked down the Joseph Stalin Boulevard to the steps of the Post Office. Circling the city was a contingent of the People’s Army. My graduate student served as liaison between the military and the citizens. Leading the protesters were the Gang of Five, my Gang of Five, their right arms held out straight, fists clenched, in the very protest gesture I had described that night we made jousa, the five women urging on the crowd as it shouted a Chinese translation of our own defiant “Right On!”

After the riots were quelled, Fe May-may and Shi Lin were sent to workers’ camps in the country for political “re-indoctrination”; Lee San-bing lost her job with a printer and left Changchun–nobody knows where she is now. Shu Ping was expelled from the university, and Wong Su-ling came to this country to do graduate work in English.

Seeing that evening in their apartment as preserved on video-tape provides an unsettling experience indeed, as I expound like a pedant on the 1960s, the jousa spread on the table, the boys bouncing on the beds, the crowd watching from the curtained doorway, and the Gang of Five listening intently, their minds racing to that moment when the Great Wall itself would crumble, a future when things would be “different.”

You Do That Endgame Thing Tomorrow

June 9, 2008/by danielhoman

“You Do That Endgame Thing Tomorrow”

[1975: In my third year at the University of Florida I got a call from a student’s father, the Warden of Florida State Prison, our maximum security prison in Starke, where all the “lifers” go, home of the infamous “Old Smokie,” the electric chair whose current often sets on fire the flesh and hair of its victim. My student had told her father about a production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with which I was associated. The Warden offered to pay us state rehabilitation money to bring the show to the prison. Having performed before “straight audiences” and at that time knowing nothing of its history—the Actor’s Workshop, twenty years before, had staged Godot at San Quentin—we were in for a surprise, one that would alter my own notion of the theatre and the relationship between actor and audience.]

The Warden encouraged the audience to clap but no applause was forthcoming. Gogo took the stage in deadly silence, sat on the rock, and began trying to take off his boots. That same silence greeted Didi five seconds later when he entered on, “Nothing to be done.”
Didi’s crossing line to Gogo’s cry of despair was “I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me–.” Didi never finished the sentence.

Suddenly, an inmate leaped to his feet and cried out, “What the hell do you mean by ‘put it from me’?”

We were dumbfounded. This had never happened before. Of course, actors are conscious of their audience and the parabolic curve of awareness uniting house and stage. But audiences don’t speak to you in character. The inmate was still standing there, hands on hips, awaiting an answer.

“Ignore him,” Gogo said with his eyes.

But the inmate wouldn’t be denied. “I said, what the hell do you mean by ‘put it from me’?

“You better answer him,” Gogo whispered.

Crossing downstage, Didi approached the inmate. “Well . . . I can’t bear the idea that I’m caught in life, that I’m so powerless.”

“Why?”

“I just don’t want to believe it’s true–that I’m a nobody, that I don’t count.”

“You’ve spent a whole life doing that?”

“Yeah.”

“OK, I know this guy! Now, you can get back in the play.”

A shocked Didi thanked him, crossed to center-stage and continued. “All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t tried everything yet. And I resume the struggle. So there you are again!”

“Am I?” Gogo’s line led to a second outburst, from a different inmate. “Doesn’t he know whether he’s here or not?”

This time, it was our Gogo who had to break character, cross downstage, and confront a barrage of questions.

This is how it went for the first act. Every few lines, an inmate would challenge us with a question, a comment, demanding we explain a character’s motive or chat about a bit of dialogue.

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“Now, wait, why are you treating him that way?”

“Hold it! You two guys can’t be serious. Come down here–I want to talk!”

Lucky generally got little sympathy, yet the audience had a special fondness for Pozzo, the authority figure. Gogo was put down for being too stupid and compliant, Didi as an “egg-head.” In their dialogue with the actors, the inmates focused on how characters were feeling, what their emotions were with each beat in the dialogue, how a remark affected someone else. For the actors, trying to stay in character, trying to preserve the illusion of the playwright’s stark, minimalist world that we had managed to preserve for numerous performances until this night, the interruptions from the house were maddening. Lucky’s three-page speech, where he miraculously regains his voice and delivers an oration on everything from sports to death, was interrupted fifteen times.

“‘God quaquaquaqua with white beard’? You taking His name in vain or something?”

“‘Strides of alimentation and defecation’–you’re making poetry out of shit, right? That’s fantastic!”

“You know something those ass-holes behind you don’t?”

Normally taking forty minutes, act one ran almost eighty with all the questions and interruptions. At intermission we were alive with speculations about what was happening.

“They’re not being rude, you know. It’s not rudeness–it’s as if–”

“As if they want to get into the play.”

“Yeah, that’s it, as if they’re seeing themselves onstage in our characters.”

“At first I thought they’re wrecking the show, but, you know, it’s sort of exhilarating.”

“Like they’re acting along with us, getting into the dialogue–like, actors in the house.”

“Hell, nobody probably ever told them audiences are supposed to be quiet.”

“I bet none of ‘em’s ever seen a play before.”

“They’re not against us–that’s for sure.

“I thought we were gonna bomb after that warden’s intro.”

“We’re not bombing–this is the best performance we’ve ever given!”

“Well, at least the weirdest.”

“What we’re doing is giving two shows at once, the one we rehearsed and this new one–with a cast of thousands.”

“I love it!”

The second act duplicated the first, both onstage and in the house. If anything, the questions and comments flew thicker, were more intense. I would learn later that what was happening to us this night, these twin plays fashioned simultaneously by actors and inmates, was exactly what had happened to the Actor’s Workshop production at San Quentin twenty years earlier.

When we finished, the inmates leaped to their feet, applauding us wildly. Assessments of our characters intermingled with our bows.

“Hey, Gogo! Stop taking all that crap!”

“Way to go, Lucky–you kicked the shit out of him, man!”

“You guys–you oughta live here. That’d show you!”

As the Warden barked out orders for the inmates to get in line to leave, we started to pack up for the trip back to Gainesville.

“All right, you slobs. Single line! Single line for each door. Move it!” He looked angrily in our direction, clearly blaming us for fouling up the schedule. It was almost eleven; the play was supposed to have finished by nine thirty.

Suddenly, the inmates broke rank and started running in the direction of the stage. A riot? As they came thundering towards us, I panicked. Thoughts of being raped ran through my head, mixed with all those fears when the unexpected shatters everything you’ve ever known. I remember thinking: did I leave my credit cards in the car? Instinctively we huddled together.

At the center of the crowd now surging around the stage was a tall African-American inmate. He grabbed me by the shoulders.

“Look, we’ve got some ideas about who this Godot character is. You know, the guy who never shows. We want to talk with you about him!”

Who Godot is? Scholars and students, actors and directors have pondered his identity for years. Is he God? Or death? All those things we wish for that never materialize? A trick by the playwright to keep all of us waiting? A joke on “both sets of characters, onstage and in the house,” as a director once suggested to me? A deity laughing at us in our despair but who makes suicide a crime? The abyss into which we fall if we don’t wait? There’s no answer, no single identification. There is no Godot, and yet we can’t bear the thought of a vacuum, that black hole at the center of the play, its silence. So, we fill the emptiness with words, an identity–with something. Something, because we can’t live with the possibility of nothing.

We were dumbfounded when the Warden made an impromptu decision that we could have an hour’s conversation with the inmates. Soon each of us in the cast and crew had gathered with several hundred men. Everyone shouted at once, until an agreement was made to raise hands, the discussion leader’s picking the speaker as a teacher would in a classroom. Those discussions were the most eloquent I had ever had. Each man fashioned his own personal image of Godot, filling up that void with a figure who was alternately despotic or benevolent, passionate about or indifferent to our human condition, a father or a jailer, a kindly observer or a torturer flaunting us with non-being. The Warden and guards stood on the perimeter of the dining area, motionless, only their eyes disclosing that some were cynical, others confused by the groups of animated guests and their audience, discussion leaders and students with hands in the air, waiting their chance to pin an identity upon the play’s enigmatic center.

When we finished, the inmates grabbed our hands tightly as we exchanged good-byes, much to the concern of the staff who consider any such physical contact with visitors a potential danger. As a wedge of guards hustled us out through the men, I felt, we all felt incredibly sad. However unspeakable their crimes, this had been a marvelous audience, articulate beyond applause. They were an honest audience for, knowing little or nothing of theatre etiquette, they had been as direct, as believable in their role as were Beckett’s characters who continually expose the razor’s edge of their own meager lives

It was a silent drive back to Gainesville as each of us sorted out emotions, reviewing the night’s various stages–the entrance to the prison, the shake-down, awaiting the audience, the performance itself, the rush of the inmates to the stage, and, most of all, the discussions, those extraordinary discussions where these hardened, sullen men had opened up their hearts, had confronted a mystery in Godot that we can no more solve than avoid.

Ladies of the Plain

June 9, 2008/by danielhoman

“The Ladies of the Plain”

[1968: to supplement my Assistant Professor’s salary at Illinois I taught a course in the extension school; my students were wives of farmers from the small towns south of the campus. I loved my “Ladies of the Plains,” as I called them, because they brought a practical, real-life, adult perspective to the plays we studied. In turn, I treated the women as people with minds and imaginations and so our weekly class was a welcomed break for them. One student, however, began to act strangely during the course of the semester; her comments in class degenerated to babble, her behavior became erratic. Her fellow students began gossiping about her, though being careful to hide their actual comments from me. Finally she stopped coming. At the end of the semester I received an invitation from one of my favorite “ladies” to have Sunday dinner with her and her husband on their farm. I was eager to see this world that was so far strange to me.]

A month after the course ended, I got a call from Millie, asking if I would come down and have Sunday dinner with her and her husband.

That distant grain elevator, seen from the windows of the clubhouse where we had held our classes, now served as my beacon as I drove to Tolono through the flat Illinois fields. Tolono itself was the generic small country town, its Main Street lined by a gas station, the county post-office, a grocery store, and four abandoned buildings, reminders of better days. Branching off from Main were four streets, lined with basic white-framed houses, that ended in dirt roads winding their way to the farms surrounding, indeed overshadowing the town.

Looking at the stark landscape, I thought of what one of my students, a free spirit who drove a Harley, had remarked a few months ago when he invited me to take midnight ride with him over the fields west of the campus. As we were racing along, rows of corn blurred on either side, a bright moon above, he said that, for him, the Rockies were “too beautiful, like some proud cat that’s indifferent to you,” and New England “too neat and conservative, like an over-landscaped garden.”

“But the Midwest, now there’s a place that puts you in your place. It’s flat, dull, ugly, and it says to you, ‘You’re only here temporarily. I’ll wait. I’ll be here when you’re gone.’”

Tolono’s main street was almost deserted. An unkempt man, doubtless the town drunk, leaned against a telephone pole, warming himself in the sun. Two women, still in their Sunday dress, passed by, halting for a moment to look at him and exchange knowing frowns before continuing on. A rust-eaten pickup truck, its cargo bed full of freshly-picked corn, turned right from one of the branch streets and headed toward Champaign-Urbana. A young boy, with a very prominent Adam’s apple, waved a greeting as he sped by. When I turned down the road leading to Millie’s farm, I could see families gathered together for early-afternoon dinners. “There’s not much to stay up for,” Mary had told me, “And then again, the work’s there waiting for you at five the next morning.”

The road to the farm was full of holes and traps of soft dirt. I felt very much like a tenderfoot navigating what was surely the only non-American-made car in the area. Punctual to a fault, I was a half-hour early–as always–and so, in order to arrive on time, I pulled over to the side. The weather was crisp but inside the car, with the sun beating down, it was so warm that I decided to step outside and stretch for ten minutes. Acres of tall corn grew in several fields abutting each other at various right angles so that the effect was of a green maze whose paths met at ninety degrees. With time to spare, I decided to explore, walking down a row of corn until it ended in an adjacent field, then making a right turn into a new row. Soon I was completely engulfed by the thick plants towering another two feet above my head. As the wind blew down the rows, the ears of corn, drawn tight in a cocoon of green overlapping leaves, bobbed back and forth; cutting against each other, the leaves on the stalk sounded like dry palms rubbed together.

Suddenly clouds covered the sun, and when I looked at my watch, I realized it was time to head back to the car. But without the sun in the west to guide me, I was soon lost. Although I had made six right turns, six left turns did not bring me back to the road. Being late for the Sunday dinner, or stranded in this field forever–the possibilities, either practical or melodramatic, were enough to make me panic. After a few halfhearted attempts to retrace my steps by repeating the pattern of six left angles, I started to run frantically through the corn, at right angles to the parallel rows, trying all four directions on the compass. An absurd figure, now sweating profusely, my heart pounding, trampling plants as I cut through the fields, I kept my eyes dogged ahead, hoping to spot the road’s slim clearing. Suddenly, the clouds blew off the sun. I had my guide once more, and in a few minutes was back at the car, with one minute to spare. A single-engine plane flew overhead, and I imagined the pilot, if he had looked down, would have spotted the insane path, a Sherman’s March of destruction I had carved through corn that now seemed as harmless as, minutes before, it had loomed sinister and alien.

I did not tell Millie and her husband Frank of my close escape as they met me on the front porch. Frank was an enormous man, slightly bent with age, but still several inches taller than me. Dressed in a heavily starched white shirt and farmer’s overalls, he bolted forward.

“So, you’re that cracker-jack professor Millie and all the ladies been raving about. From the big city up the road. I’m Frank Freeman, real pleased to meet’ya.”
Millie brought out ice tea and joined us as we sat on porch rockers and chatted. Conversation was easy with them. I was not the usual visitor–they made that clear–and they were determined to be the perfect hosts. We talked mostly about the class, as if Millie had waited for this moment in her husband’s education, having before her the living proof that professors were not only smart but sociable. For my part, I was determined to be the perfect guest.

“Frank, if it’s not too much trouble, I’d really like to see your farm.”

A wide grin came over his face. “Well, there’s not all that much to see, but I’d sure like to show you.”

“Perfect timing,” Millie popped up, “While you two are doing that, I’ll set the food to the table, and everything’ll be ready when you get back.”

A city boy, I was not all that interested in farms, but Frank’s passion for his place made me a temporary convert. We didn’t just look at the barn; we inspected the hayloft, the third floor where supplies were stored, the elevator, the stalls, the milking machines. I got a detailed history of the roof, the various repairs it had undergone, the additions made to the original structure. Then, it was off into the fields and wonderfully thorough accounts of Frank’s own personal system of crop rotation, his experiments with various grasses for the cattle, the trials and tribulations of the irrigation system. We made great circles around the thirty-acre farm, including journeys through the corn, wheat, and soybean fields. Tearing off the leaves on an ear of corn, Frank told me to bite down quickly, then withdraw my teeth from the kernels–a farmer’s way of testing for strength and sweetness. At one point, he bent to the ground and scooped up a handful of dirt, which he promptly put in my hand.

“Glaciers passed through this area three times. That’s why the soil’s so black and rich. Have to be a damned idiot not to grow something in this stuff, now wouldn’t ya?”
I thought of my student’s description of the inhospitable Midwest, waiting for man’s departure. Frank was here to stay; his father and grandfather had worked these same fields.

“You best keep an eye out, Sid. We’re in the cattle field now, and if ya don’t watch out those little dew-drops’ll jump up and bite you.”

“You don’t call them cow-chips? That’s what I heard.”

“Well, now, there’d be some that calls ‘em cow-chips. And some field-saucers, but when my Frankie was a little guy he called them dew-drops, and it’s been that way with us ever since.”

“That’s your oldest son?”

“Yeah, I had five.” He paused, then added, “but the moment they got ta legal age, they moved away. All of ‘em went to that university where you teach. I guess this place must’ve seemed too dull, maybe even too hard for them.

“Do they live near? Within driving distance?”

“The youngest, Sammie, lives in Evanston, and he comes ‘round once a month or so. But the rest, they’re scattered all over the country.”

We walked in silence for a bit. Then Frank continued.

“Yeah, this place probably’s too dull for them. Not to mention a little peculiar.”

“Peculiar?

“Yeah. You see, there’s been no new blood in Tolono for years. We’ve all grown old together. Know each other well, sometimes too well. Hell, for us Tolono’s the whole world–there’s nothing much beyond it. My neighbor Sanders? He and the misses thought they’d move to Champaign? Were there for six months. Just couldn’t get used to it, and now they’re back here.”

“But it must be comforting living in such a close-knit community? Where everyone’s your friend?”

“Well, way I look at it, you’re half right there. We sure don’t got no strangers. But sometimes it gets too close. Everyone’s knowing your business, making your business their own. That’s why the ladies enjoyed your course. Doing something you can’t do here in Tolono, and having to drive twenty miles up the road to do it. Of course, then, they always had to come back. Millie never said a hill of beans about the course until just now, when we was sitting on the porch.”

Just then the smell of fried chicken wafted through the air. I had been listening to Frank so intently, interpreting, in my own scholar’s fashion, his views about living in this country town, that when I looked up the farm house was right in front of us.

“Ya might want to use that outhouse there before dinner. We’re having new plumbing fixtures put in the house so we got to use the same old outhouse my dad used when he ran the farm. Now that was years ago.”

“Thanks.”

“Be careful now, Sid. My dad used to tell about a fellow who had to go to the facilities. A thin fellow he was, very thin, I gotta tell you. When he didn’t come back after a spell, Dad went out to look. Know what happened?”

“No,” I replied, suspecting the answer and barely suppressing my laugh.

“Son of a bitch’s so thin, he sits down on the pot and jackknifes through the hole and lands ten feet below. When Dad got there, he’s swimming in five feet of shit. Took fifteen minutes to get him out.”

“He have any appetite for dinner, after that,” I said, unconsciously lapsing into a country accent and now playing straight man to my host who was shaking with laughter.

“Dinner? Hell, he said something about suing Dad. Hopped in his car, drove away like a bat out of hell. Never came back, though. So, you be careful now. You’re OK. Dad never liked that skinny bastard anyway.”

The dining room had floor-length windows on three sides, and Frank explained his father had built them “so we can see where we are while we’re eating.” Millie had cooked a marvelous meal, just what you’d expect for Sunday dinner on a farm–fried chicken, new potatoes, green beans in a honey sauce, home-made bread and butter, and mint-flavored coleslaw, the latter billed as “Frank’s contribution.” With all three of us perfectly at ease, relishing each other’s company, they regaled me with tales of life in Tolono, the gossip, the rumors, the myriad of facts, some expected, others odd, which, taken together, define and circumscribe a life that for me, until today, had been little more that distant silo. I heard of the clothing store that had failed and of the woman suspected of having an affair with the mayor, the weekly pot-luck supper and the town drunk’s scamming the residents by pretending to be on an errand from the minister to collect moneys for the church’s new furnace, the community meetings where legal disputes were settled and maintenance bills authorized, and of Tolono’s refusal to pay part of the county’s sheriff’s salary. “When we got troubles, we settle them among ourselves. Never had no use for a cop,” Frank proudly informed me.

They feared they were boring me; I begged them to go on.

“Millie, if you learned something new coming up for that class, then I’m your student now, and enjoying every minute of it.”

Confessing she had almost forgotten desert, Millie excused herself from the table.

“Those women’ll talk your head off, won’t they, Sid?”

“Hey, Frank, you’ve been doing quite a bit yourself.”

We both laughed at that as Millie returned to the table, with three plates of strawberry short cake, topped with mounds of whipped cream.

“You don’t think we’d let you get away from here without a taste of Millie’s strawberry short cake, now do you?”

When the dishes were cleared and washed, we retired to the porch and sat there, cradling large cups of rich black coffee. The sun had set and the evening shadows softened the otherwise harsh landscape.

For a while we were silent, savoring the good day, the conversations, the successful meeting of town and country. Lights were going on about the town, the residents enjoying a short evening before that early bedtime about which Millie had joked earlier. I decided to break the silence.

“You know, I’ve been wondering about what happened to Ellen.”

There was no reply. I went on. “I’m worried about her. She was a good student–you were all good students. Any news about how she’s doing?”

Husband and wife exchanged glances. With that wordless communication between people who know each other so well that a mere gesture serves as a sentence, Millie seemed to be asking Frank’s advice. That advice taken, she said simply, “We’ve taking care of Ellen.”

“Taking care? You got her some professional help, I hope?”

Frank intervened. “No need for any fancy mind doctor, Sid. Poor thing, she was crazy, you know. We all knew it was just a matter of time. Had a town meeting about her, about what to do.”

“So . . . ah . . . what did you decide?”

Millie now spoke up, her voice firm, supporting her husband. “Fact is, Sid, she had become a downright embarrassment to herself . . . to all of us. So, we decided to keep her with Mrs. Andrews.”

Frank must have seen my puzzled expression. “Oh, she’s just fine. Got her living up in the widow’s attic. Widow takes care of her. Brings her three square meals a day, cleans up after her.”

“She can just stay up there, real comfortable like, for the rest of her days. Wouldn’t want her out on the street . . . outside. No telling what she might do. Just embarrass herself all over again.”

“And the town,” Frank joined in. As he scanned my face, he added, “Might not be the way you city folks would handle it, but things, you see, are a little different here.”

“We got our own ways.”

I managed to get out a startled “But,” for I wanted to say something about Ellen’s rights, about seeing a psychiatrist, about letting the court decide. But Frank, sensing my objection, jumped in.

“Oh, it’s all perfectly legal. Judge Winslow, he’s the county judge lives right here in Tolono. He got her to see that we’re only doing what’s best for her. I believe she signed a paper or something.”

“So, she’ll spend the rest of her life in that attic?”

“Yeah. Like I said, it’s real comfy. She may not realize that right now, but we know what’s best for her.”

“Sid, can I refresh your coffee?”

I stayed fifteen minutes longer, then made some excuse about its being late and my having to get back to Urbana.

They walked me to the car. I noticed that Frank had his arm around his wife.

We exchanged good-byes, and as I got behind the wheel, Millie poked her face through the car window.

“We’re just like a big family here, Sid.” Then she added, “And Frank and I sure did enjoy your visit. You’re a fine, fine teacher.”

They stayed waving good-byes until the dirt road turned toward the town. As I passed the cornfield, I shuddered at the memory of getting lost there earlier in the day. When I turned left onto Tolono’s main street, I could see the grain elevator to my right. Twenty miles down the road, due north, the lights from Champaign-Urbana cast a haze into the night sky.

Chris Farnham

June 9, 2008/by danielhoman

“Chris Farnham and the Enema Bandit”

[This is a section from the larger story where a fellow newly-minted PhD gives the performance of his life, under bizarre circumstances signaled in the title above.]

In 1965 the University of Illinois’s English Department made offers to twenty recent PhDs, myself included, expecting one, perhaps two to accept in what was then a seller’s market. By some surreal coincidence, however, fifteen of those twenty accepted the offer, and the department was suddenly overwhelmed with new Assistant Professors. We were a diverse group, some of us to enjoy such relative fame as the scholarly world confers, others to perish by not publishing, a few to leave a research university and find happiness at a junior college where teachers were judged on their work in the classroom rather than in the pages of a scholarly journal. Fourteen of the fifteen of us quickly bonded, young Turks, eyed at first suspiciously by older members of the department, and later accepted.

As the would-be young Shakespearean, who had published the grand total of one article and not on the master but a minor Elizabethan dramatist, my own debut was not auspicious. The senior Shakespearean, a man of great erudition who had written numerous books, was retiring, though to say I was there to take his place would be a gross distortion. Rather, the distinguished elder scholar was leaving to spend his sunset years in southern Illinois, and the brash young Harvard PhD was . . . well . . . was simply there, without any reputation, and time alone would see what became of him.

I dutifully called the senior Shakespearean my first day in Urbana, asking if I could come by to pay my respects. The voice on the other end of the phone was tinged with what struck me as that affectation of boredom you might find on the lips of one of Oscar Wilde’s aristocrats. He let forth a gruff “My library study at 3,” without so much as a preface of “What about meeting me in . . . .” Still, I was at the bottom rung and in awe of the academic hierarchy which stretched from the green and un-tenured Assistant Professor who had six years to prove himself or herself, to the Associate Professor admitted to the exclusive club of the tenured but at present only as a junior partner, to the Olympian heights of Full Professor. His library study at 3 it would be.

That afternoon, five minutes before the appointed hour I stood before his door and at ten seconds to three knocked politely. After several minutes he bellowed out, “Come in!” There the great man sat, his back to me as he gazed out the window onto the plaza below, the rectangular office lined with bookshelves packed to the gills.

“Sir?”

“Yes.”

“It’s me, Sidney Homan.” A silence. “The new man.” I cringed at having wrenched grammar with that “me,” and the cliché of “the new man.”

“I already know that, Mr. Homan.”

He still offered nothing but his back, remaining in that position for the next five minutes as I desperately tried to make conversation and, what is more, to get him to turn around. To no available. I had depleted the available topics—my boyhood in Philadelphia, undergraduate years at Princeton, graduate work at Harvard, writing my dissertation under the direction of his counterpart, Alfred Harbage, my excitement “as an Easterner coming out to the Midwest.” Like unwanted lint, each topic was brushed off with a curt “I see” or—even worse—a “So?” I was desperate and desperate times demanded that I stoop to base flattery.

“Sir, you’ve written so many extraordinary books about Shakespeare that I suppose in the course of your career you must have seen hundreds, perhaps even thousands of productions.

A silence. Then he turned around! His expression was grim.

“I’ve never seen a production of Shakespeare in my life, Mr. Homan.” Then he added, “Never will.”

“But, sir, why wouldn’t you . . . I mean, how couldn’t you . . . that is, I mean to say, I can’t believe that you haven’t seen productions. Not a single one?”

“Not one, Mr. Homan?”

“But why, sir, why?”

His answer came from somewhere deep down in his soul, the answer unrelieved by sarcasm, let alone irony.

“Because I wouldn’t want any mere director or actor to spoil my ideal conception of the playwright.”

I can’t remember the rest of the conversation—it was that inconsequential, for I was stunned by the confession that to him was, instead, a badge of pride. Within minutes I was making excuses to leave his office. This would be the only time we spoke.

Jimmy and Leslie

June 9, 2008/by danielhoman

“Jimmy and Leslie”

[1961: Harvard didn’t give teaching assistantships to graduate students their first year, and so I had to find employment elsewhere in Boston. I landed a job at Evergreen Junior College, a fraudulent school that existed for no other reason than to allow less-than-bright girls from nouveau riche families to come to Boston and there, hopefully, get engaged to a boy from Harvard or MIT. Everything at the school was dedicated to this single purpose; academically, Evergreen was a sham. But I needed the money and so taught two courses designed to familiarize the students with current novels, whose names and authors they could then drop in fashionable chit-chat at cocktail parties. Jimmy was the name of Evergreen’s Dean who gave me this dubious job. I did meet one student, however, who decided not to follow the Evergreen trail. This is the second half of the story from An Embarrassment of Swans.]

Two weeks before my year at Evergreen was over, I had a visit from one Mary Furman, a quiet person, unusual in that, not given to gobs of make-up, she was something of pariah among her fellows students because of a half-empty date card. It was rumored that on the sly Mary had been seeing a sophomore from Tufts– “of all place” I had heard her roommate, Harrison Medgar, remark in the hallway.

“Mr. Homan, I’ve made a big decision.”

“Yes, Mary.”

“I want to become a nun.”

“I see.”

“There’s a convent just north of Boston. It’s a great place. The nuns there divide their days into three parts: prayer, running a shelter for the homeless, and making fruitcakes for sale during Christmas. I want to join the order.”

“I’m sure you’ve made a good decision, Mary. What can I do for you?”

“The Mother Superior’s asked me for a letter of recommendation from one of my teachers here, and I wonder if–”

“Of course, I’d be happy to. Just give me a form, or tell me where to send it. OK?”

“Thank you.” She rose, crossed to the door, and then, turning towards me, added, “You know, Sid . . . can I call you Sid?”

“Sure.”

“You know, Sid. This place sucks.”

Mary was right, of course. Evergreen sucked. A finishing school parading as a college. Even the faculty were a joke. None of them had any real degrees, let alone experience in the subjects they taught. The Evergreen handbook proved marvelously evasive on such issues:
Arthur Maddox: summer study at Stanford University [a misprint for Stamford University, a small Baptist college in Georgia, the entry had gone uncorrected for twenty years].
Mildred Lummox: author [in reality, Mildred had written a few short stories and then sent carbon copies to her friends].
Betty Jo Sweeney: studied jazz with Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, and others [Betty Jo attended a lot of concerts where, paying extra for a front row seat, she took copious notes during the performance].
Earle Elsworth: PhD, “Distinguished Alumnus,” George Wilson University [a degree-by-mail-school, the designation “Distinguished Alumnus” representing a surcharge on the basic fee for a doctoral dissertation, for which “life experiences” could substitute for the “usual boring written work required by other universities”–to quote GWU’s glossy brochure].

On my final day the faculty staged an elaborate luncheon. My going-away present was a reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Sunflower,” across the bottom of which had been written, “For Sidney Homan–Gone but Not Forgotten at Harvard.”

Wine flowed plentifully, and with the French teacher Charlotte leading the way, dining soon gave way to drinking games, rather silly games, I thought, but then the Evergreen faculty, not a close bunch to begin with, indeed relative strangers to each other–“I takes my money each day and I runs,” Betty Jo had once confessed to me–typically used such games at social gatherings as a substitute for conversation.

Fortunately, classes had been canceled that afternoon, for soon the faculty, bored even with these games, were very drunk. Their silence at the banquet table was interrupted all too infrequently by labored stabs at conversation.

The dowager Arnette Swan, President of the College, finally took control, introducing the one topic, perhaps the only one that might unite her faculty now lost in their personal hells.

“You know, the one thing I think in which all of us–and I mean all of us–can take special pride here at Evergreen is the fact that one year after graduation ninety-four percent of our girls are married. Ninety-four percent! And mostly to boys from good families. This year–that’s where that ninety-four percent comes from, by the way–seven of our girls married Harvard boys. Isn’t that just marvelous?”

As one, the faculty broke into applause. Smiles and self-congratulations pervaded the room, re-animating what had become a rather dreary crowd. Charlotte rushed into the kitchen to prepare more drinks. Whatever else Evergreen did not do, it did get its girls married, ninety-four percent, to be exact. Ruining an otherwise perfect score a mere six percent–radical feminists, girls with some physical or social defect that had escaped the scrutiny of the Admissions Committee, perhaps lesbians. Ninety-four percent, way above the national average for women that age. Way above. Evergreen women could allude to Valley of the Dolls at the charity ball, or when leaving a party match their hostess’s pedestrian “Chou” with a tony “Au revoire” of their own. I couldn’t resist making an observation.

“I know one Evergreen woman who’s going to wreck that ninety-four percent.”

“Wreck?” There was a general gasp!

“Yes, Mary Furman.”

“Sid, she’s engaged to be married. We’ve already counted her.”

“She was engaged to be married. But she’s changed her mind. She asked me to write a letter of recommendation for her–she’s entering a convent.”

“She’s becoming a nun?”

“Yes.” I could see faces droop, the conviviality dissolve. Mental arithmetic was stamped on every forehead: they were re-dividing the number of marriage prospects by the total number of graduating students, and coming up with something closer to ninety-two percent, an unexpected and precipitous drop. After all, when you’re accustomed to that rarefied atmosphere of ninety and above, a two-percent decline is a stock-market crash.

Amidst murmurs of “Mary Furman, who would have thought?,” “How could she?,” “Did you have any hint of this?,” and “A nun, for Christ’s sake, a nun, of all things!,” I tried to make light of the situation.

“Well, you know, in a way, she is still getting married.”

“Married? But she’s becoming a–.” And here the speaker choked on the dreaded “N” word.

“Yes . . . married. I recall that in the Catholic Church, at the ceremony where she’s accepted into the order, the nun is said to become the ‘Bride of Christ.’ She weds a heavenly, a spiritual husband–of sorts.”

“That’s right! That’s right!,” cried the stately Arnette Swan, restoring a wisp of hair that had fallen over the same forehead where, seconds ago, long division had driven her to the frontiers of despair.

Mildred Lummox exclaimed, “Remember? In The Sound of Music? That big scene in the church, when Julie Andrews becomes a nun? She walks down the aisle in a wedding dress, and when she gets to the altar . . . remember? . . . all the other nuns are singing as the priest marries her, the priest marries her to Jesus Christ!”

Circling the table with an enormous tray of dry martinis, Charlotte added, “And she has a wedding ring on her left hand. Just where the real one goes.”

A tremendous sigh, no, a downright hymn of praise spread around the table. The precious ninety-four percent was intacta. True, Mary was not going to marry a Harvard boy, but Christ was, to quote Jimmy Simmons, “a fine fellow.”

“Just like a real husband–in a way,” a snickering Betty Jo assured her colleagues.

“Well, not so good in bed,” Arnette Swan cracked, setting “the table on a roar,” as Hamlet once said of the clown Yorick.