Dear Kith and Kin,
For my blog, ragbagmind.com, I’ve posted a cartoon strip instead of an essay. Some explanation is in order.
In the early 1970s I was a member of a troupe of actors that toured the eastern half of the country, from Massachusetts to Louisiana, and from Virginia to Iowa. We were rather grandly called the National Theater Company, but we didn’t play theaters. Instead, we put on a pair of plays in high school auditoriums: “Come Blow Your Horn,” an early farce by Neil Simon, and “The Miracle Worker,” William Gibson’s play about Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan. They had been chosen by the boards of the various schools, and I never understood the rationale behind the selection, since the plays had absolutely nothing in common. The first was pure fluff, and the second was nothing if not deeply serious. Never mind: it was work, and I signed the contract.
The National Theater Company did everything on the cheap. We were paid Actors’ Equity minimum, and instead of traveling around in comfortable buses, we were crammed into a rented station wagon that broke down from time to time. In addition to the actors, there was a stage manager and a technical director, who traveled in a van loaded with the sets and costumes.
The tour was exhausting. The stops had not been planned out with any degree of care, so sometimes we traveled for only an hour or two between schools, and other times we drove for eight or ten hours. We stayed in cheap motels and ate bad food in diners. For the most part, we got along with one another, as actors usually do on tour, where conditions can get tough and only mutual support, coupled with a sardonic sense of humor, can keep them sane. Our teenage audiences were generally appreciative; indeed, at one inner-city high school in Ohio, where we did “Miracle Worker,” a tough-looking kid told us at the curtain call that he and some of his friends had been planning to start a rumble with a rival gang that afternoon but the show was so good they changed their minds.
All of us had roles in both plays. There was a bit of a problem with the part of Viney, the Kellers’ black cook, since none of us were black. But the issue was resolved by using the guy who played the father in “Come Blow Your Horn” as the cook and calling him Vinnie. I doubled as Alan, the womanizing jerk in “Come Blow Your Horn,” which involved little makeup, and Captain Keller, Helen’s ex-Confederate-officer father, which required a serious transformation, complete with a false moustache, gray spray-on hair dye, and a fake belly under my Massa-On-The-Ole-Plantation white suit. At one school in Virginia the students were invited to watch me make up, and were amused by the transformation. On the other hand, at a school in Alabama, there was a question-and-answer session after a performance of “”Miracle Worker,” and one boy asked me, “Is that how they talk in New York?” “Nope,” I said, “but it’s how they talk in North Carolina, where I lived for awhile. “Aw, that doesn’t count,” the kid said. “North Carolina’s not the real south.”
Although all of us drank, and several of us smoked dope, we never went on stage drunk or stoned. But after a particularly grueling week of back-to-back performances in Iowa, we headed for a five-day stand in Chicago, where we would be put up in a Marriott hotel instead of the usual cheap motel, and only have to do one show a day. For us, that was a vacation, and we were in a holiday mood. Somebody fired up a joint, and the stage manager, who was driving, tuned the radio to an FM station that was playing Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
“What are you going to do when we hit Chicago?” I asked the gay actor who played Buddy Baker and Helen Keller’s brother. “I’m gonna go to Old Town and buy myself a baby,” he said. “Not, you know, a permanent baby that grows up to be a teenager and hates you. Just a short-term baby, like an accessory I can carry around on special occasions.”
We all cracked up, and for the rest of the drive we speculated about the kind of guy who would own a baby shop, the customers he catered to, and the babies themselves. Ray Kalanis, the actor who played Mr. Baker and Viney, came up with the most outrageous ideas. I carried a sketchbook with me, and at our hotel in New Orleans, later in the tour, I drew the cartoon strip. I think it manages to offend just about everyone except me and Ray. And the babies, of course.
Toby
