10/5/22
Newsletter118
The Crack of Dawn
In junior high school there were two shop teachers: Mr. Kaleta, who was a really nice guy and my teacher in 7th grade; and Mr. Collins, a big, booming, authoritative guy with a mustache, who was my shop teacher in both the 8th and 9th grades. Mr. Collins and I couldn’t stand each other. Our dislike of each other was so obvious that everybody knew it. In his class if you had to go to the bathroom, instead of a normal hall pass, Mr. Collins would have you grab a piece of scrap wood and he’d sign it. If I had to go to the bathroom he would make me take a four-foot by six-foot sheet of plywood. At the end of the last day of class of 9th grade, my last day of junior high school, I went out of my way to visit the shop class. There was Mr. Collins all by himself wearing an apron and sweeping the floor. I announced to him, “You know what’s the best part of finishing Junior high?” He asked, “What?” I said, “Never having to see you again. I hate you.” Unfazed, Mr. Collins calmly replied, “Yeah? Well, I hate you, too.” I was flabbergasted. How dare he say he hated me. I didn’t know what to say, so I turned and left. Three months later I started high school. As I walked down the hallway on the first day of school who should I encounter but Mr. Collins, dressed in a suit and tie. He saw me, smiled, came walking up and said, “Thought you’d never have to see me again, huh?” I was dumbfounded. “What are you doing here?” Mr. Collins grinned, “I’m the new assistant principal.” I thought, “Oh, fuck.” However, just the sight of me now amused Mr. Collins, and he was very civil to me all year.
However, Mr. Mal, the theater teacher, also didn’t like me. We had to do a monologue. I did James Cagney’s big speech at the end of the movie, Mr. Roberts (1955), which I knew by heart. I also did (and still do) a damn good James Cagney impression. After a dozen students bumbled their way through their monologues, I got up on stage and nailed my monologue. Henry Fonda has one short line in the middle of the speech, and I do a pretty good impression of him, too. Mr. Mal gave me a D, with the comment, “I didn’t ask for an impersonation, I asked for a performance.” The school play that year was the musical, Promises, Promises. Bruce Campbell and I went to the auditions together. I sang the song, Gigi, which is mostly talking and not singing. I could see that Mr. Mal wasn’t impressed, and halfway through the song he cut me off and told me to sit down. Bruce got up on stage and sang the one song he knew, Love Was Made For Me and You. “L is for the way you look at me/O is for the only one I see/V is very, very extraordinary/E is even more than anyone that you adore can—” Mr. Mal cut him off, saying, “OK, that’s enough,” but Bruce wouldn’t stop. Once he started he had to sing the whole song. Mr. Mal tried to get him to stop a couple of times, but he covered his ears and just kept on singing. Surprisingly, neither of us got into the play.
Every day is a miniature eternity.