After 1968, the psychologist Shirley Ann McNeil, PhD, became increasingly involved with Transcendental Meditation by introducing to Detroit public schools that New Age panacea for stress and a possible cure for addiction. Until her death in 2001 at the age of seventy-three, McNeil stayed in touch with many of Ziggy’s former students, giving advice when asked and keeping track of their more-public successes. She kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings as an evolving memorial to Ziggy’s work, documenting the dozens of doctors, lawyers, professors, ministers, and teachers who had roots in his School of the Theatre. One of the doctors who attended Shirley during her last illness was a former principal dancer in the 1965 Youth Colossal, which Shirley herself had written.
Shirley McNeil
PATRON SAINT OF: Teachers, Psychologists, Meditators, and All Manner of Black Zen
Like so many people I love—especially Lloyd Richards, Artis Lane, and Bob Bennett—Shirley McNeil had a Canadian connection. She was born in Toronto. She arrived in Detroit not long after she graduated from the University of Dayton where she was the first Black majorette, and, in ’51 or ’52, the first sepian English teacher at Eastern High School.
I love a schoolmarm. If Mama is from Natchez, I am from Wendell Phillips High School, from 244 East Pershing Road, Chicago, Illinois. My first great girl crush was on Mrs. Borogf, my French teacher at Wendell Phillips, where I was president of the French Club. And my true side woman, my work wife, is Shirley McNeil.
Shirley has been with me a good long while. Others have helped me in a hundred different ways to mount the Youth Colossal, but Shirley McNeil was my secret weapon. Whether it was “Youth Moves In” or “Youth Accepts a Challenge” or “Youth Travels the World” or “Youth Designs for Tomorrow” or “Youth Builds a Bridge” or any one of the other Colossals, Shirley wrote the scripts for my Father’s Day shows and she wrote them smart.
When I was a boy in Chicago, I read every issue of a magazine for children, called The Brownies’ Book, that the NAACP put out back then. That magazine entertained me and it taught me; it uplifted me while overturning stereotypes that were designed to hold me down. From jump I wanted every Colossal to do that same work—to do what the Y Circus didn’t manage to do, but what the old Negro pageants did. I don’t get that done without Shirley McNeil, PhD. Shirley found faded scripts for Star of Ethiopia, The Pan-American Kermiss, and The Answer to Birth of a Nation, my favorite pageants, and she studied them. She begged, borrowed, and stole old issues of The Brownies’ Book. She dipped into all of that when she was writing the Youth Colossal scripts.
Then Shirley went above and beyond. Shirley wrote my scripts to be more than pageants; she called my shows “play therapy.” She talked about Carl Jung’s sandboxes and Jean Piaget’s stages, talked about all of that, something nobody cared about except Shirley, Katherine Dunham, Bob Bennett, and my aunt Sadye. Shirley declared, for all of them and for me, “We are creating antidote and answer.”
I didn’t follow half of what Shirley said. Sometimes listening to her was like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant. She had so many big ideas and talked so fast. Be it tickets to see Nureyev dance, View-Masters, playbills, encyclopedias, or just a book about African dance that she tucked into the little library she set up in the waiting area of our school, she was always tracking down and serving up that little something extra that just might engage the imagination or curiosity of a child we hadn’t yet truly reached. To engage her own curiosity, she spent time over at the Freer House sitting up under the folks from the Palmer-Merrill Institute and started work on her doctorate in psychology.
By 1963 I was continuing to publish an entertainment and gossip column and she had begun publishing scholarly articles. She would always give me a carbon copy of any article she was working on, then badger me into reading it. Her articles would be studded with words like “bibliotherapy” and would discuss dance school as “dance therapy.” The articles were a lot like Shirley’s bar conversations where she would assert that “our” purpose was not teaching dance or teaching citizenship, but improving self-image.
Shirley believed better self-image led to sharper motivation and more self-discipline, though she preferred the phrase “self-direction.” I teased her and told her James Brown thought hunger led to sharper motivation and more advanced self-direction.
If two people could be exact polar opposites but about the same business, it would be James Brown and Shirley McNeil. James spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what you do to get a band to do its best; Shirley spent the same whole lot of time trying to figure out how you get a classroom to be its best. They both were all about maximizing potential. Their biggest difference? Shirley loved the carrot and James loved the stick.
It was Shirley who first called my School of the Theatre a citizenship school. Working with Shirley was half-party, half–road race. It was fun and sweaty, and you discovered something about the other person and something about yourself. We had us a big time, infusing my small fry with a life-changing love of an art and a willingness to create and go their own way.
All that was important to Shirley, but that wasn’t all there was to the woman. Shirley was a good singer who performed weekly on the House of Diggs radio show—but my students knew, because we let them know, that Shirley’s being teacher, psychologist, and writer was more important than being Shirley the singer, but only because brown psychologists, writers, and teachers were few and far between in our world.
We figured this out in the middle of the night over rye: Crying with your guitar, or in your voice, or in your dance, or on paper is almost the exact opposite of crying salt tears. Crying in art prepares you to do something other than cry. When Shirley announced to a gathering of educators at a dinner in the Ebony Room of the Gotham that the Ziggy Johnson School of the Theatre was the perfect place to teach students how to dance, not just to live the blues—how “a body can bear articulate and soul-elevating witness,” I cosigned on that.
Igniting the will and the skill for my students to cry with their taps, with their toes, with their guitars, with their songs, and not with their eyes was our goal.
Father’s Day 1968 will be the Colossal of Colossals. Shirley and I have decided the theme will be: YOUTH BUILDS A TIME CAPSULE. We’re plotting two Hannibal strong numbers: “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and “They Got the Whole World in They . . .”
“Saints” will play right before the first-act curtain. We’re bringing in students from the Eastern marching band to play the music. They will stride across stage in a procession that will be a cross between a cakewalk and second line. Our best dancers will follow behind the musicians, performing the Black Bottom dance. My students will be costumed to pay homage to individual and specific greats of Black vaudeville. Leading the line? Butterbeans and Susie!
The final number, “Whole World in My . . . ,” is an extravaganza that will include every child in the school. Voices and taps will provide all the music. There will be no instruments. Students from the Ballet Babes up to the Jazz Workshop will be singing a new version of that old Sunday School standard “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” And each student will improvise their own dance steps, so it’s like this: “They got the whole world in they PAUSE SNAP SNAP, they got the whole world in they PAUSE SNAP SNAP; PAUSE SNAP SNAP”; everybody will be singing and tapping to “They Got the Whole World in they PAUSE” but only one dancer will perform each of the SNAP SNAP beats except on the fourth-line climax when everybody will dance their own original dance on the SNAP SNAP and together they will make a whole new polyrhythmic sound. And every few verses there will be three solo lines: “I’ve Got the Whole World in my PAUSE SNAP SNAP” and followed by the original fourth-line climax.
The seed for my choreography came from one of the Ballet Babes. She said, “I got the whole world in my . . .” and then she rolled her hips like she was hula hooping, and then another girl sang back at her, “I got the whole world in my . . .” and she popped her fingers. Those girls snatched that fine AME church song back from Lawrence Welk and all those straight-beat Lutherans. And now they are going to share their truth loud, large, and syncopated.
Shirley has a lot to say about a time capsule’s being about the past and the future. It includes what you want to take with you because you treasure it; and also what you want to take with you so the future knows who you were; and maybe, just maybe, if you don’t make it to the future, someone not yet born when you bury your time capsule can start to become some of who you used to be.
Shirley calls that Black Bottom reincarnation. She wants me to choreograph a dance that involves a modern shout circle with girls and boys in the lotus yoga position with the only visible movement being their chests heaving and deflating and maybe their fingertips fluttering. I said, “NO!” to that. Then I started thinking about how I might-could make it work if we incorporated Lionel Hampton vibraphone music. My unofficial associate dean of the dance school can get out there. “Out there” is contagious.
That’s why Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Contours, and the Fantastic Four are backstage every year helping the young performers get ready. They admire how out-there we get. In ’66 I worried if I would have a big act. Didn’t know for sure that I did until two weeks before the show. Anna came through with The Temptations and they were thrilled to join our students onstage because, as David Ruffin said, “Y’all all the way wild!”
When I am gone, Mari will edit and publish my book and remind the world that the very first Youth Colossal was held in June of 1952. It was before Brown v. Board of Education, before the Civil Rights Act. It was before a lot of things. I almost closed the school in 1957. I felt like maybe my job had been done. Brown was part of it. Then I realized if our kids started going to integrated schools, they would soon need now more than ever a sacred brown, black, and tan space, where the past could be remembered in ways that were useful to us, and a future could be dreamed that reflected our wishes.
I once confessed to Shirley that I didn’t believe in integration.
I said, “All the integration I need is already in me. Mulatto. I’ve had that word spat at me. We can be fully integrated without many, or any, from the other side of the tracks. We are Black and white already.” Shirley laughed and declared me a radical, “red to the bone, short, pretty man.” And I laughed back and said I couldn’t afford to be anything but what I was, yellow and Black as the ace of spades. Life was too brief and I was too vulnerable to play to anything but to my strength.
It takes will and skill to get to that. We got to that. Thank you, Shirley.
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LIBATION FOR THE FEAST DAY OF SHIRLEY MCNEIL:
The Will and the Skill
1 pony of bourbon
1 pony of sherry
2 chunks of pineapple, juiced
½ lemon, juiced
½ pony of simple syrup
Fill a highball glass ¾ full of ice. Add all ingredients. Stir. Add additional ice, if necessary, to fill glass.