A YOUNG JEWON THE MASON-DIXON LINE

Junior high was liberating. I still was an academic disaster, but now we had electives like shop, choir, art, and gym, and I was good at all of those things. There were so many new kids to be friends with—Jewish kids, Black kids, Latin kids and, most importantly, little hippies. David Rosenthal had the exact same schedule as me, every class, every day. Not only that, but David and I were starting at a new Hebrew school together, so we saw each other after school all the time as well, and that was where the real bond formed. Our bar mitzvahs were only a year away, so our class met three days a week. There were about eight or ten of us, all of us Little Jewish Hippies, being taught by Big Jewish Hippies, young college students living in Washington, DC, in 1969 with a passion for the teachings of Judaism. Three days a week they had us deeply engaged with Judaism and its relevance to the changes that were taking place in America. Judaism came alive as we debated the meanings of the Torah, the existence of God, the political landscape, and the cultural landscape. To have a group of Jewish friends was something I never knew I needed until I had it. The teachers took us on field trips to war protests in Washington and to the Orthodox Jewish community in Williams-burg, NY. The friendships in the group became very deep, and even after we all had our bar/bat mitzvahs, we stayed on into the Confirmation class, until we were about sixteen.

The music director at the school was a college kid named Eleanor Epstein, a true dynamo who taught music to kids from ages five to sixteen, all at the same time. She was from New York, loud, charismatic, and funny as hell. And she loved to put on shows. I had never been around the theater in any fashion or even gone to a play. I was way too shy to ever be in the shows, but I enjoyed the technical side, doing the lights and building the sets, and got that amazing feeling of camaraderie that comes only in the theater. David Rosenthal was a natural show-off and incredibly talented, and Eleanor gave him great shows to star in—everything from The Tales of Chelm to Fiddler on the Roof, where David was an outstanding Tevye at thirteen (and probably grew his own beard for the role, as he matured very quickly). He was my best friend, and I was so proud and amazed by him, literally shining the spotlight on his talent from backstage. But as he got the laughs and attention, my young competitive spirit was being challenged. It still looked terrifying to me to be in front of an audience and I really loved working backstage, but a seed had been planted.

The summer after seventh grade, my parents sent me off for six weeks to a canoeing camp in Northern Canada called Wigwasati that was owned and operated by my gym teacher, Mr. Wrightson. It was life-changing, being that far away from home for so long, paddling on lakes for weeks, hauling our own food, building tents, and carrying a waterlogged wooden canoe on my shoulders on a mile-and-a-half portage. I overcame challenges and did things I never thought I could, and I came back from there really ready for my bar mitzvah and the manhood that it represents. My haftarah was from Amos, and my dad helped me write a very powerful and political speech, with the words, “Let justice roll on like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” as a launching point for my statement on how I intended to live my life as a man.

David and I also took up hitchhiking as our means of transportation, and the world opened up to us. We would hitchhike to Georgetown to see old Marx Brothers movies, getting picked up by hippies in vans who would offer us Ripple Wine and pot. We’d hitchhike to folk festivals, peace marches, and to get back and forth to Hebrew school. It felt so empowering and grown up. In the summer, David and I, still thirteen years old, somehow talked our parents into letting us hitchhike up to Maine to visit one of the girls from Hebrew school, about a five-hundred-mile trip each way. We did the same trip two years later and there are enough stories in those trips to make an awesome Cameron Crowe movie. We got rides from truckers, hippies, and a couple of very creepy people. We slept anywhere we could—the back of a gas station, the woods along the highway. The airport police in Bangor, Maine, took pity on us and let us spend the night in their jail, eating dinner out of their vending machine. (They did not, however, even try to call our parents or ask us what was going on.) We broke into Tanglewood in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, and spent several nights in the storage room where they kept instruments and equipment listening to the concerts in the evening. These adventures gave me the confidence and independence to operate well in the adult world. I was flunking all of my classes, but I became great friends with my teachers, not just in school but outside school as well. I would hitchhike to their houses on the weekends for visits—Candy Means and her husband Howard in the suburbs, Mr. Wallace in Georgetown, and Mrs. Snyder at her rural home in Takoma Park.

I dreamed about dropping out and getting a job and my own place, but the only job I could get was still as a paperboy. I was now delivering The Washington Post, a very prestigious job in my mind, and supposedly the best-paying paper route. I had to get up at four thirty in the morning every day of the week, for three straight years. The guy who gave me his route also gave me his double-sided paperboy bag and a full-sized baby carriage to carry all of the heavy newspapers. It took me about two hours to deliver those seventy newspapers, each one placed inside the door. I would try to go back to sleep for a few minutes but then my mom would wake me to go to school. The real scam of paperboy human trafficking was the paperboy had to pay for the papers up front each month, out of his own pocket, and then at the end of each month, go door to door, at night, to collect the money from each customer and hope for a tip of some kind. I would end up clearing about twenty-five bucks a month. But I delivered the Post all throughout Watergate and got to read Woodward and Bernstein’s articles before anyone else. I am glad I did it, but between the exhaustion from the job, the dyslexia, and the lack of structure at school, what little academic skill I had totally evaporated and I truly didn’t care. My teachers took pity on me, and somehow I graduated junior high school.

Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School had just opened a new theater at the school and David Rosenthal jumped into the theater scene right away, getting the lead part in a Shakespeare play, and building a very cool reputation right out of the gate. I worked backstage with the manager of the theater, Mike Boyle, and ended up with an after-school job there, hanging lights, running sound, and cleaning up when they rented the theater for concerts and dance performances. The idea of being onstage as opposed to backstage was beginning to take hold, but with my lion’s mane of knotted hair, I really couldn’t imagine what possible role I could play or have the nerve to even try out for.

But during the section of English devoted to studying Lord of the Flies, I found an opportunity to write my own part. The book was so good that I made it all the way through, and then we watched the movie, which was absolutely riveting and inspiring. I asked the teacher if instead of writing a paper, I could write a musical play version of the book, and he said okay. That’s right, Lord of the Flies: The Musical was my first dramatic effort both as an actor and playwright. I persuaded Mr. Boyle to let me use the big theater, since we would only be presenting it during the school day to our English class. I took songs of the day and changed the lyrics to fit the story. Cat Stevens’s “How Can I Tell You That I Love You” became “How Can I Tell You That The Beast Is Within You” and the Spirit song “Nature’s Way” captured the themes perfectly. I became obsessed with writing it and directing it, using my sound and lighting experience to make the music sound okay and the show look cool. And on top of it all, I played the lead role, even with my very long hair. I am sure it was horrible, but everything clicked into place for me. I felt myself begin to take flight, a flight that would last for the rest of my life, finding the deep joy of creation and collaboration in the telling of stories, and communicating with an audience through a shared imagination. I must have ended up reading the book fifteen times, which also was a first for me, and began to open my mind to the idea that maybe there was such a thing as a good book, after all my bad experiences with literature up until then.

The day came for us to present the show to our class, maybe forty kids in a theater that sat fifteen hundred. I can’t remember if I was petrified or confident to start with, but by the time the performance was over and I took an actual bow at the curtain call, I was higher than I had ever been in my life. The adrenaline rush was enormous, and the dopamine hit from people treating me like an actor, like a “star,” applauding and telling me I did a good job, was like nothing I had ever come close to imagining. I had been working so hard on the play that even my parents took note, and my mother actually took time off of work to come during school hours to watch the play. She had to get back to work afterwards, so it wasn’t until I got home that I got to see her. This was the most successful thing I had ever done in school, and I was expecting my mom to have been impressed. And she was, just not in the way I had anticipated.

“So, what did you think?”

“Truthfully, I found it very sad.”

“Sad? You mean the story was sad?”

“No. . . . You were sad. It was sad watching you.”

“Why was it sad?”

“Is there something wrong with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why would you do that? Why are you getting up in front of people and showing off like that?”

“It was a play.”

“I know it was a play. And you were in it, up there on the stage, showing off in front of everyone. I am seriously worried about you, that you feel the need to do something like that. Showing off like that just to get attention. We haven’t been giving you enough attention and I have been feeling bad all day that you have been in so much pain and I haven’t even noticed until it comes out like this.”

Ironically, my parents love the theater. They had season tickets to Arena Stage in Washington for decades, went to New York to see the shows every year, and loved talking about the terrific plays and actors they saw. So I really did not see this reaction coming at all. They knew David Rosenthal was in plays and thought he was great, never mentioning what kind of cry for help he might be exhibiting. My sister’s friends were in school plays and my parents might have even gone to see them. But me doing it was shameful. An embarrassment. Either an ego trip or a mental breakdown of some kind. Obviously, it still rings in my head. Who the fuck would say that to their kid in that situation? I have asked my mother on many occasions if this really happened and if that was her real reaction. She stands by all of it, and still feels it to a certain degree. I laughed her off, truly not hurt by what she said and maybe, in fact, a little sad for her, that she couldn’t see the joy and awakening her son was experiencing because of remnants of the old Jewish shtetl mentality of never drawing attention to yourself. I had found my voice and my identity. My connection to the world of theater, first backstage and now as an actor and as a creator, was bonded for life.

For a Mother’s Day present that year, I got a haircut. Not only did it reduce my mother to tears of joy, it was the perfect excuse to get out of the trap of my physical appearance and open myself up to try out for the prestigious summer stock theater program at our high school, run by our esteemed Mr. Dalla Santa, head of English and Theater. I got a couple of small parts, including one where I got to yodel my own song in Leave It to Jane, a campy 1920s-style musical. I was already over six feet tall and weighed about 120 lbs., and the sight of this pencil-necked geek yodeling got laughs every show. The next fall, I got the lead role in Prom-ises, Promises, a Burt Bacharach musical in which I played a young businessman. It was a huge part, with nine or ten songs to sing, and I had to learn how to sing for real. This was before all of the wireless microphones they use now; I had to project my voice over the orchestra. I think I was pretty good in it. My parents came to see it, both of them nearly fainting from nervousness, but they ended up loving it, amazed at what I had done. WNET Public TV was doing a special series on the schools in the area, and we got to go to their TV studio and do two songs on television, which felt incredibly cool. The next summer, we had another high school do a joint production of Fiddler on the Roof with our school, directed by their theater director, Mr. Perialis. I really went for it at the audition, dancing and singing “If I Were a Rich Man” with abandon, and I beat out the star of their high school, as well as David Rosenthal, for the role of Tevye. That was a confidence builder and turning point. I had to actually act in that one, play a character that wasn’t me, wear a beard and a costume that weren’t mine. The show was really good, caught a buzz, and sold out the fifteen hundred tickets a night for its summer run of six shows. They decided to restage it in the fall, which was the beginning of my senior year, and we sold out again for the run. I was living the life of an artist—I’d built a potter’s wheel in the basement, I was making metal sculptures in my metal shop class, acting, and singing in three different choirs—but I was flunking every non-art class. The guidance counselor told me I was going to have to go to summer school to graduate and it was only November. It was obvious what the next step had to be—I dropped out of high school and never went back.

To my parents’ credit, they supported my leaving school. My sister was brilliant, in her second year of college and heading for a law degree, but they could see academics were not going to get me anywhere. They had to accept that I had some kind of acting talent, even if they didn’t understand it at all. They had no concept of what a career as an actor would even look like, and neither did I. But I needed to find out, and soon, because like Big Ben, I was met with a near-hourly reminder from my mother—“I don’t care what you do but you are out of this house when you turn eighteen.” That gave me about eight months to figure out where I would be going.