The Drama Teacher Part Two

 

 

This is me with some of the cast from The Clumsy Custard Horror Show - Jason Chachula is on my right and Mark Nixon is on my left.  I have facial hair because while I was directing Clumsy Custard I was also in a community theatre production of Man of LaMancha

I ended up directing a number of plays while teaching drama at George Jenkins High School.  

• Whodunit
• The Nut Factory
• The Mouse That Roared

Then I came to the best play I ever directed:  

• Neil Simon’s God’s Favorite.

God’s Favorite was a retelling of the Book of Job by one of America’s most competent playwrights.

One thing I learned from directing God’s Favorites is that directing a good play is better than directing a bad play.  

So often, when you put on school plays you get the Samuel French or Dramatic Publishing catalogue and study it before selecting the play or plays you intend to produce that school year.

While most of these companies have some classic, famous, excellent plays, they also might charge more for the rights to those “good” plays.  These companies also have tons of plays written specifically for high school or middle school drama programs.  Those plays are cheaper to put on, the authors usually know to limit the set to one location because having several locations is just more expensive and harder to do.  I put on some of these cheaper plays and they were OK, but when it came to God’s Favorite the script was just so very good.

I had a lot of problems I had to address.

In one scene, the character that was sort of the “devil” or “protagonist,” enters the stage by busting through a fireplace and scattering bricks everywhere.  I got around that by building the fireplace but when it came to the face of the fireplace I purchased foam blocks used for flower arranging.  They were brick sized blocks.  I used white Styrofoam about an inch thick and cut it to make the mortar.  I used watercolor and a lot of water to just dirty the foam so it wasn’t bright white, it was mortar looking.  The planter foam blocks were green, but I painted them red and used a darker color of red to give each brick some depth.
 

This allowed the actor to bust through the fireplace and after that play was over I just restacked the foam bricks and reset the mortar foam.  

 

The big stage set issue with God’s Favorite was that there was only one set, a living room, but in act one it was beautiful, and in act two there had been a fire.

I went to Salvation Army and found two couches that were identical.  Now my first idea was to set one of the couches on fire, have the fire department put the fire out, and get the newspapers there to photograph the event to add publicity to the production.  The fire department was full of spineless weenies who did not bend rules for a higher cause.  

I ended up giving one of the couches a makeup job.  I used a chainsaw to rip up the couch and then I used black and gray spray paint to make it look like that couch had burned.

Next I had to figure out how to have the walls pristine and bright in act one and dulled by smoke damage in act two.  I bought yards of black filmy cloth.  I attached this diaphanous sheer black material to the top of the set walls.  The cloth hung on the back side of the walls in act one, but during the intermission we used poles to push the cloth over the wall and allowed them to hang on the audience side of the set walls.  Letting the cloth hang over the paintings I had on the walls just made it look like the pictures were smoked too.  During the intermission the backstage crew switched couches, knocked stuff over, covered the walls with the Smokey cloth, and we used a fog machine to fill the set with smoke.  

The actors had ashen smudged costumes and put soot-like marks on their faces.  

When the curtain opened for act two and the smoke was there, everything really looked like the aftermath of a fire and the first night I could hear the shock coming from the audience.

God’s Favorite was a fantastic play.  I take some credit for the set, but the cast was just incredible.  We ended up running the show six times which is a lot for high school.

The play not only earned me a lot of money for the program, but it brought me into my first conflict with administrators.

During the rehearsal someone in the cast invited the principal watch a rehearsal because they were so proud of the play.  After watching the rehearsal, I was called into the office.  One of Joe’s children had a drinking problem.  Joe was the name Neil Simon gave his Job character. I had collected a lot of empty liquor bottles, several were donated by my priest, and I filled the bottles with tea or water.  Several times in one scene between the kid and his father, the kid was pouring himself drinks and acting drunk.

The principal asked me if I thought showing someone drinking alcohol was sending the wrong message to the students?  

I was flummoxed by the principal’s concern.  I explained that what is there does not matter.  What matters is what the play is saying about what is there.  You could show someone stealing something, but if the point of the play is that stealing is wrong, then it would not be irresponsible to have a play about stealing.  If the play was about a rape, but the rape was depicted as a crime, and that it was shown to be a criminal act, then wouldn’t the point of the play be good, even though there was something bad within the story.

I added that I had money invested in the play, that the cost of the set was pretty high, as far as high school plays go, and the students had rehearsed for many hours and their families were anxiously anticipating this play.  I had about 50 students involved in the production.  

I prevailed, and the play went on and was wonderfully received by virtually everyone who saw the play, but the experience was off putting.  I could not believe the fake drinking in the context of a play could be seen as risky and perhaps a promoting of immoral behavior.  It was a freakin’ play and we were not putting this play on in church.

THE COMPETITION

Lakeland had an Arts High School, and the teachers there were fantastic.  There was no way I could compete with The School of the Arts magnet school, but I did try to have as excellent a program as possible.  I started putting on two, then three plays a school year and one talent show.  

I found out about an organization for drama students called The Thespian Society.

Back in my days as President of the Putnam City teachers I was one of the people defending an orchestra teacher who was losing his job.  The district fired him because he had lots of complaints about his program and the numbers of students in his program was falling.  Plummeting is perhaps a better word.

It was a sad case because the man’s wife had cancer.  His wife was at the hearing before the school board.  His wife had a scarf covering her chemo-bald head.  We lost that hearing and it was devastating to the man and his dying wife.

One thing I remembered about that case was that if you are an electives teacher, and if you want to keep being an electives teacher then your kids have to like your class.  You have to do things to make the experience fun.  A dull electives class means the electives teacher is soon going to be reassigned or terminated.

When I found out I could escape teaching English and teach all drama classes then I was highly motivated to build my program.  At the end of each year I gave out engraved awards.  My drama club participated in Thespian competitions.  We always had cast parties.  I tried to make rehearsals as fun as that important work can be.

Another thing I tried to do is have at least one play that included a lot of students.  

I remember one wonderful effort with a play called The Competition.  I built some big square boxes on rollers.  I think there were four groups of kids competing in a one act play contest.  One group was preppies, one group was like Rock Metalheads, one group was doing King Lear as Kabuki theatre.  

It was the Kabuki part that got me in trouble.  There was a place where the stage directions said that King Lear was saying the words, “Let copulation thrive.”  Since Kabuki is silent, the actor delivering that line was to make hip thrusting motions.

Apparently one of the kids in the play when home with the script, and because literacy is so weak in this country, the student did not know the word copulation.  The student asked a parent what the word copulation meant.

So during rehearsals I hear an announcement [school was out so this was just a lazy way to contact me] saying, “Mr. Norman please report to Mr. Flander’s office.”  Getting called to the principal’s office is just as unpleasant for teachers as it is for students.

I found myself sitting in a chair and the principal sitting on the edge of his desk appearing to be casual, while being sure he was higher than me and sort of looming over me.

“Now tex, why would you put on a play like this?  Can you imagine how embarrassed that mother was to have her little girl asking her to explain what the word copulation means?”

“It was a line from Shakespeare's King Lear?” I thought that should be enough to defend the play.  I mean what was Flanders going to do, censor Shakespeare?

Apparently just saying it was from Shakespeare was not going to be enough.

“I just don’t know why you selected a play that uses a word like copulation in the script.”

“I didn’t, and it doesn’t,” I countered.  The line is in the Stage Directions.  The word copulation is never said in this play.”

Reluctantly I was allowed to return to the theatre and continue with the rehearsals.

I thought all was well, but all was not well.

The following day, yes, the very next day, I hear an announcement echo through the mostly empty school, “Mr. Norman, please report to the principal’s office.”

This time I’m told that the mother was not satisfied with his decision to allow the play to continue, so she had called a school board member, and the school board member had called him, and now Mr. Flanders was wanting to kill the play.  Again.

“The school board member wants some justification for why we would select and present a play to students that contains the word copulation.  What would you have me tell him?”

Well I was steamed about this.  I felt hassled.  I collected my thoughts and presented my case.

“First of all, as I told you yesterday, the word copulation is not uttered on the stage, not even one time, the word is in the Stage Directions that the audience never ever hears.”

“But,” Mr. Flanders said in a way that looked like he had just hooked me and was about to reel me in, “the actor makes silly fake Japanese sounds and  then they make thrusting motions with their hips.  Why would you let that happen in public?”

“Have you seen the cheerleaders perform at a pep rally?  They not only do thrusts with their hips, but they get on the floor and make humping motions.  They look like they are practicing for a career on a Strippers Pole.  And almost every student watches the cheerleaders gyrate in a provocative manner, and far more students see that that see the school plays.”

Mr. Flanders was silent.

“Secondly,” I continued, “the line Let Copulation Thrive” comes from the play King Lear.  They study King Lear in advanced senior English.  If the line in stage directions is so outrage to you and the school board, then why do you allow King Lear to be studied in a classroom where the line is not in stage directions but is part of the dialogue and it is said outloud if the play is read aloud, and it is certainly heard if they watch the play on film or in an actual performance.  You know Advanced English has done both.”

Mr. Flanders was silent.

Finally I just put it to the guy.  “What do you want me to do?  I work for you.  Do you want me to kill the play?  Then I’ll go down to that theatre and send the cast and crew home and we will cancel the play.”

“No, don’t do that,” he said.

“Well am I going to be called down here every day or two to justify the offensive word in the stage directions?”

Mr. Flanders was silent.

THE CLUMSY CUSTARD HORROR SHOW

The Clumsy Custard Horror Show was a fun play.  The main character has these special shoes that cause him to go into happy feet dances.  I cast the happy feet character with this kid I’ll call Gryphin Parks.  Gryphin Parks was the son of the Sheriff, or Chief of Police, or maybe he was a local National Guard Brigadier General.  Whatever, Gryphin’s father was a humorless tyrant who barked orders and expected perfect responses from his son.  I am not sure what happened, but Gryphin, like many oppressed young men, had a tendency to rebel.  His father got pissy about something and as punishment made Gryphin resign from the show two weeks before the show was to open.  I was upset, but I had a very talented kid that hung around and he was willing to take the role of Happy Feet, learn the lines, the blocking, and wonderful, wonderful:  his feet fit the shoes.  I’d taken some cheap pool shoes from Walmart and, in my almost negligible spare time, I had sewn silver sequins all over the shoes giving them the sparkly look from the audience point of view, that the shoes were made of pure recently polished silver.

Things went well, for a couple of weeks of rehearsal, but then the snag came.  

Then Gryphin was so upset about losing the lead role in the school play that he did something to convince his politically powerful father to lift his punishment back when his father made him quit the play.  Naturally I felt sorry for Gryphin.  But I had already given the role to Buz Rockford.

I met with Buzz and asked him if he would consider being the lead in two shows, and allow Gryphin to play the part in two shows.  Buzz agreed.  

I brought Gryphin back in and would have scenes with Happy Feet rehearsed twice:  once with Buzz and once with Gryphin.  I thought Gryphin would appreciate being able to come back into the show, but I was unwilling to jilt Buzz who had worked hard to come up to speed basically in a few days.  I was especially unwilling to give the role back to Gryphin totally, because, well, his father had pulled him out once -- so what’s to say the father wouldn’t pull him out of the play opening night.

Things did not go smoothly.  The two leads did not get along and most of the friction was coming from Gryphin who has some of his father’s asshole personal traits.  During one rehearsal the friction was so bad that Gryphin wanted to fight and threatened Buzz saying, “I’m going to break your fucking arms.”

For that remark, and the fact that friction is not what you need just days before opening night, I kicked Gryphin out of the play a second time.

The following day something familiar happens.  In a mostly empty building I hear on the PA system, “Mr. Norman.  Please report to Mr. Flander’s office immediately.”

Called to the office.  Again.  

I trudge down to the office and Mr. Flanders tells me that Gryphin’s politically powerful father has called him, the principal, and asked him to talk to me, the teacher and get me to change my decision to kick his son out of the school play.

I refuse to change my decision.  I could see Mr. Flanders squirming.  I could tell he felt pressure to do what Gryphin’s father was wanting.  

Now when you are in a position where you do not have the majority of the power, or, as in my case, hardly any of the power, the thing to do is to use your power to persuade through stunning rationale.  I turned on my persuade and rationale skills.

“Mr. Flanders,  Gryphin used the F word and threatened to break another student’s arms.  If this had happened in a math class what would you have done?  Wouldn’t you have suspended Gryphin for a couple of days or given him 5 days of In School Suspension?  Shouldn’t he have some punishment for his actions?”

Obviously I was right, and Flanders knew I was right.

He pressed me anyway, to relent, to allow Gryphin back into the play.  We were just a few days from opening the play.  When I could see Mr. Flanders was not going to stop pressuring me, I pulled out the only card I had left.

“I am not willing to let Gryphin back into the play, but if this matter will not go away, then I am willing to cancel the play.  But IF I cancel the play I will have to tell the cast and parents why I am canceling the play.”

Flanders could see that if the play was canceled three days before the play was to go on that he was going to get heat for his role in the cancellation.  So I won.  Temporarily.

The following day, during rehearsals, Mr. Flanders shows up at the theatre and pulls me away from the activities.  Mr. Flanders tells me that Gryphin’s father wants to talk to me directly.

I guess the idea was that if Mr. Flanders couldn’t get me to change my mind, then perhaps a direct conversation with a powerful elected leader would be just the kick in the crotch to get me to relent.

Gryphin’s dad:  Mr. Norman, this is Sheriff, or General, or Judge Parks, and. . .

Obviously I can’t recall the exact conversation, but Daddy Parks said he had gone too far pulling his son out of the play, that he was wrong about that, and I should not punish his son for something he the father had done.

I explained that I agreed he had been excessively harsh, and that he showed no regard for the ramification his actions had caused the drama department in our efforts to produce the school play.  I said that I had no way to know if Gryphin might upset you [his father] again, and you might pull him out of the play an hour before opening night.

Daddy Parks countered with an emotional punch.  He said his son was so depressed that he was suffering .   He reminded me that Gryphin was a senior and this was his last chance to be the lead in a school play.

I reminded Daddy Parks, and I used the language to make it clear WHY I had kicked his son out of the play, “Gryphin threatened another student and said, ‘I’m going to break your fucking arms.’  I can’t just ignore that sort of behavior.”

Daddy Parks would not relent so I resorted to my old broken record method when dealing with someone who will just not give up.  I had to wear him down.  The broken record method works this way.

Allow your loony upset person vent.

Then say, “I hear what you are saying, but I am going to stand by my decision to kick Gryphin out of the play.”

Loony person vents some more.

Then say, “I hear what you are saying, but I am going to stand by my decision to kick Gryphin out of the play.”

Loony person vents more.

Then say, “I hear what you are saying, but I am going to stand by my decision to kick Gryphin out of the play.”

If you can stay the course the loony venting jerk will eventually get frustrated and give up.

It took awhile.

Part of me loved teaching drama.  Dealing with a principal whose main concern was looking good and having the school look good, well, that part was the opposite of fun.

This was the cast of the Clumsy Custard Horror Show.  
 

This was Happy Feet, the good guy one, with the imprisoned Princess in Stage Lip Lock.

The Drama Teacher Part One

This is just part of the case from The Mouse That Roared.

 

 

Let me begin by saying I never should have been a drama teacher. I became a drama teacher with almost no experience. I'd been forced to put on a play while teaching a Mayfield Jr High school, ten years before getting a job at George Jenkins High School in Lakeland, Florida, but getting the job was a total fluke, a mistake, and at the time it happened it was intended to be a temporary situation. I was a place holder, a bookmark to hold the drama teacher position at this brand new, state of the arts High School, named after the Publix grocery store entrepreneur, George Jenkins.  George Jenkins High School was the new showcase High School for all of Polk County. I believe the school board named the new high school after the grocery store mogul, thinking this billion dollar industry would kick in a little money to help make a great new property even greater. It turned out that a billion dollar industries gets to be a billion dollar industries by investing their money in things that make more money, and not by throwing dollars into the black hole of public education.

When I took the job I believed that I would be a teacher in that school perhaps three weeks and would then be moving into a position at the school board. This is when my recent conflicts within the Teacher Union came back to bite me in the ass. The union was totally opposed to me getting a job working for “the other side.” I'd been the Associate Executive Director of the Polk Education Association, and I had burned bridges when I left there. Now PEA was burning me back.

So a temporary position at George Jenkins School became a permanent position.

I'd taught school before, 8 years at Butner Schools in Cromwell Oklahoma, one year at a church of Christ private school in Oklahoma City, the now defunct Living Word Academy, and about four years at Putnam City Schools, again in Oklahoma.  My efforts to do well in the teacher union was motivated by two factors:  I would earn more money for my family, and I would not be trapped in a classroom that I could not control teaching materials of which I had only a weak, moderate grasp.

The principal was being pressured to take me on as a teacher.  I’d asked the Superintendent to give me a job.  The Superintendent, John Stewart, ordered that his right hand man find a place for me in the classroom, and then find something at the school board.  He wanted me to go to Nova University to get my Leadership Master's degree, which would allow him to move me into a principal’s job.  The previous PEA President, Jose Farinas, had done something similar when he left PEA.  He was given some job at the head-head [the school board office], while Jose worked on getting his Leadership Masters at Nova University, then he moved Jose to Bartow High School as a discipline dean, and finally, Jose was going to be the first Vice Principal in charge of facilities at George Jenkins High School.

So I agreed to take the English and Drama teacher job at George Jenkins High School.  This was the newest high school and my son Ryan and I would be starting at that school at the same time.  Now I found out I was not going to be at George Jenkins High School for three weeks, I was going to be there until I could earn that Leadership Masters.

I was actually sick with crushing depression.  I knew the danger.  I was seen by most people as a competent person while in the teacher union, but if I was in a classroom for just a little while, I would be discovered as an incompetent, stupid loser.  Who would move me into administration if I had zero classroom management.

Classroom management is code for good control of your classroom, with students staying in their seats, not loud, and no need for frequent assistance from the office, and very few parental complaints.  The ability to actually get kids interested in your topic was mildly important, but it took a backseat to good firm classroom management.  I didn’t have that trait, and in all those years I never developed that trait.

I had always felt that I was weak in the areas of spelling, and grammar, a little stronger in the areas of literature and the teaching of composition [writing].  Now I found myself teaching a subject I had zero background for, and I was totally unprepared to teach:  drama.

I had never been in a real play. I had never taken a drama class in college. I had only directed on play, back when I taught jr. high school for Putnam City. I had no illusions that I was even modestly qualified to teach drama.

After a couple of weeks of depression over being trapped in the classroom again, I decided I needed to survive. I went out and bought some books on improvisation, and teaching drama to children.  

I had some experience teaching speech, and I’d taken some speech classes in college, so I started out my drama classes with activities that were appropriate for speech classes, but could also work in an Introduction to Drama class.  When school opened in 1993, I was forced to start the drama classes in a regular classroom designed for the subject of English.

What made things worse for me was that I was a traveling teacher, so I had to carry everything with me when the bell rang and I was required to change classrooms.  I taught Sophomore English, Drama, and I had one class of Advanced Senior English.  

Me teaching Advanced Senior English was a joke.  I’d been out of the classroom long enough that the rubrics of writing a research paper had changed.  When I taught the research paper we started out with footnotes, where the documentation was placed at the bottom of the page where the supporting documentation was sited, to endnotes, where all your documentation was placed at the end of the research paper.  As I started off teaching the research paper in 1993 I was informed that now the standard practice was something called parenthetical documentation, which was when you just interrupted your sentence with a parenthese inserted the documentation and closed it off with the ending parenthese.  I bought a book and got up to speed on this method.

I was most afraid of the drama classes.  I just had few ideas of how to keep the kids occupied.  In the beginning that was my goal:  not to educate them, but to keep them occupied.

I remember one of my first activities was to have the kids tell their most embarrassing moment. This activity had several advantages:

1. I had the kids come up to the front of the class and talk to the class. Part of the goal was to get kids to fight their fear of     speaking before a group.

2. Secondly, it was almost always funny which keeps kids slightly more     cooperative.

   

3. I had 32 students, so this activity had the potential of requiring us two and perhaps three days to complete.

I remember one girl telling what I thought was a wonderful story.

Well, Tiffany said, and yes this is just approximate, I have this brother that is close to my age. When we go to the mall, I would sometimes see some guy and start flirting with him. Well my brother would come up, put his arm over my should, kiss me on the cheek and then glare at the object of my flirty interest.

This was her exposition. She was giving us the background information needed to understand her most embarrassing moment.

Tiffany continued. One day my brother and I went to the mall and we went different directions to shop solo. I'd been shopping around for a while and I went into that Sonic Entertainment store, you know, the one that sells records, cassette tapes, and video tapes. When I went inside I saw my brother with his back to me, and he was studying the cassette tapes. He was also obviously with some girl. I decided this was my chance to get him back. So I walked over to my brother, pinched him on the butt, I said, 'Hello there sexy,' and I kissed him on the cheek.

That was when I realized he wasn't my brother.

I was so embarrassed and I tried to explain by saying, 'I am so sorry. I thought you were my brother.'

One lesson I learned from this Most Embarrassing Moment exercise was to start off with some instructions:

1. Don't     tell something that is private and embarrassing to anyone else,     without first having permission to tell the story from that person.

   

2. Don't     tell anything that you don't want anyone to know.

   

3. Keep     your stories at least PG-13.

I got these prohibitions from one of my Persian students who had an older sister in the school. Afari told a story about something that happened when she and her older sister Nafisheh were both young children. Afari said that they were on a car trip with their parents and she and her sister needed to go to the bathroom. Their father stopped at a Gas Station, got the bathroom key chained to a short piece of lumber, and the two went to the bathroom. When they got inside they saw there was only one toilet. Since both girls needed to go really bad, they decided that they would both try to sit on the toilet at the same time. Somehow each girl got one hip stuck in the opening of the toilet seat and then they could not get out. They had to call until their daddy came and opened the door and rescued the girls.

This was mildly funny, and did not seem to be a big deal, but by the end of the day the story had spread throughout the school and had reached the ears of the older sister Nafisheh.

Nafisheh went home and told her parents what Afari had told in the drama class. Not only was Afari in trouble at home, but this turned out to be the first time a parents called the principal to complain about my drama class.

Throughout my life I have felt like I was stuck in situations that were unendurable, and yet I had no choice but to endure. Teaching at Jenkins was just one more unbearable  situation that I had bear.  Obvious this insecurity and pain is not unique to me.  The truth is many if not most people have had much more difficult problems they have had to cope with, so I don’t want or deserve sympathy

“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”  

― The Princess Bride by William Goldman

It is clear to me, now, that I suffered from a horrible lack of imagination. There were other jobs I could have found, but I felt like the only thing I could do was teach. The fact that I hated teaching, and that I was not good at teaching did not seem to matter, the only thing that mattered was that I was teaching, and I needed the income so I had to put up with whatever happened.

I got some books on actor practice ideas that I used or modified.

[This is a side thought, but there is a movement today toward all education having some connection to a future job.  People want to leave college and walk into a high paying job.  In the past the idea was that a person would be exposed to lots a wide range of things, get a general education, and that the hope is that a student would learn how to learn.  Knowing how to learn something new is, in my view, more important than learning an employment skill.  Turning colleges into career training centers might be a mistake, and I believe it is a mistake.  When I was young TVs and Radios were filled with tubes.  There were people that were trained to repair these devices filled with tubes.  Remember, there were so many tubes that sometimes, when the TV didn’t work, your dad could slap the top of the TV set, which sometimes drove the plug-in tubes back into its place and the TV would start to work again.  But one day tubes were replaced with transistors and only the workers who could translate what they knew about vacuum tubes to transistors could continue to work.  Knowing how to teach yourself something new is one of the greatest traits of education.]

OK back to my drama job:

I developed some acting games.

Games LIKE:

The Name Game:

   

• I     would have 6 or 10 kids line up in front of the rest of the class     and each kid was suppose to step forward, say their name, and then     strike a pose that reflected their personality.

Letting Loose:

   

• Students sit in a circle to observe one another’s expressions and actions. I would stand     or sit in the center and gives them an emotion to express through     voice, gesture and expression -- for example, sorrow, joy, fear, ecstasy or hysteria.    

Guess Who?

• I would divide the class into two teams, Team A and Team B. I would put slips of     paper in a box or basket, with each slip containing a description of     a physical action, such as "Jumping off a bridge" or "Rescuing a cat from a tree." One student from Team A performs the action while Team B guesses what the action is. Winner gets to force the next team to perform.

Get Into Character

• I'd have the kids sit in a circle with one kid sitting in the center. The kid in the     center assumes a character that they've pulled out of a coffee can.     I, being the teacher, had to fill out slips of paper to make this work. Those sitting in a circle ask center him or her questions,     putting him or her on the spot. The ones in the circle can prompt     her or question him -- helping to give the character more depth and     testing the skill of the student actor. I picked characters off     popular TV shows and movies and maybe something like Romeo and Juliet if the kids happened to be reading that in their English class.    

Prop It!

   

• This game involves using ordinary and simple objects as props. I had a laundry     basket that I filled with junk I had collected over the years. I'd have the kids pass an object around a circle and each kid would     pretend it was something that it obviously wasn't. A bowl could be a helmet, or a shy turtle perhaps. The student could find an     imaginative use for. Maybe I'd have two kids have one object and     they would use it as a prop for and improvisation.

Everything I did didn't work, but I kept trying. I would go to GoodWill and buy dresses and sport coats and hats and keep them on racks ready to help get kids in the mood to mess around.

Over time, kids started telling each other that in drama they got to play, and there were not tons of tests and worksheets. More and more kids would sign up for drama. Within my third year at the high school I had so many kids wanting to take drama that I was able to stop teaching English and I had 5 classes of drama. The demand was high even among smart kids who don't have time for to fit in a throw-away elective when they want to get into an Ivy League school or to be doctors or lawyers, et cetera.

I was urged to teach a class of drama in Summer School. I ended up teaching drama in Summer School for years.

Was I really good at teaching drama? No. I was doing the best I could, and I was trying hard, but I knew I was faking it. I was a fraud, I was a scam artist and for awhile I was getting away with it. I can't say that some good stuff didn't happen along the way, but that was calculated luck. I was trying. I tried a lot. If you try anything enough you can't fuck up continually. It is hard to hate or disliked when you gave unhappy students a chance to play and be silly.

THE PLAYS

One of my responsibilities was to have a school play.

This was huge. I was afraid. First, I had never been in a play, and I damn sure had never directed a play. I'd never build a set. I didn't know how to work the light board. I had no money to pay for the stuff I needed to put these plays on, so how was this supposed to happen?

I can't remember the title of the first play, but I remember the first play very well. It was actually several short plays, shorter even than one act plays. I guess they were scripted skits.  One play was about three couples struggling with the stresses of dating.  I went to the principal and begged for a small budget of $500.  This money enabled me to build some set pieces.  

I had three couples, and three cars. I made cut-outs of plywood, and painted the front of three cars. I went to one of those PULL -A-PART junk yards to buy grills and headlights, so I could dress the cars up and make them look like real cars. I made paper mache steering wheels, and sat two chairs behind these car cutouts. Because I didn't know how to work the light-board I used a single spotlight that had a way to point the light and uncover the beam sending a sharp light on the couple that was talking. We would switch from couple to couple as they said their lines.

I had another story about a boy standing on the edge of a building about to commit suicide and his girlfriend comes out and gives him a reason to live. I building a wall, I used a 2 x 12 as the ledge. I painted the wall to look like brick including the mortar between the bricks. I made a real looking window.

It was my first high school play directorial experience, and it went OK. We made enough money to pay the principal back for an advance on the money I needed to build the set pieces.

It is likely that I have forgotten more of my work than I remember. I do remember the following plays, that I directed while working as a drama teacher.

• The Clumsy Custard Horror Show
  

  

  
  

What I remember most was the building of the set. I built a large structure on wheels so one side looked like an evil cave where the Clumsy Custer lived, and then we could wheel it around for the next act and it was a traditional look of a castle. I used paper mache for the cave side and big sheets of thick Styrofoam where I could use acetone and a brush to melt away some of the Styrofoam to cause it to look like a stone castle wall.  I bought a couple of plaster gargoyle.

It turned out that my skill with painting pictures translated well to creating stage sets.  I could make props and sets and make them look, well, OK.
 

Again, I do not claim that I was really good.  Actually, if I ever achieved OK, I was an overachiever.     
 

One piece of stage magic I had to think up was how to have a wizard like staff that could flash on cue to establish the power of this wizard. I end up using a porch-light cover to place on the end of a long staff [a found tree branch]. I used a camera flash powered by batteries and triggered by punching the button. I put the flash part of the device inside the porch-light frosted glass cover, ran the electrical line down the back of the branch, and the button that triggered the flash was in the same area where the wizard would hold the staff. Any time the actor needed a flash they could punch the button and the camera flash would flood the theatre with light. Dim the theatre and the flash from the end of this staff was all the more dramatic.

• THE JURY

In this stupid play there was a scene where one of the members of the jury was the bad guy.  

There was a part in the play where the bad juror takes a knife and backs everyone up against one of the set walls.  The play required that the bad guy throw is knife, and one of the other jurors was supposed to be standing there as the knife hit the wall inches from their head.  

I had to think, think, think how to pull that off.  

What I did was buy a spring hinge from the hardware store, one of those hinges used to make a privacy fence gate to shut by the power of the spring in the hinge.  I attached the hinge to a 2 by 4 that was supporting the wall.  I bent the end of the hinge and used screws to attach a knife so that the spring would slap shut and that would drive the handle of the knife through the wall.  I cut a square in the wall, put a frame on the wall and made it so I could slide a print into the picture frame.  I scored the paper so that when the butt of the knife hit the paper it would go through the picture easily.

I needed some way for the spring to not shut, and then to shut on cue.

I used one of those little locks like you put on a screen door, a Hook & Eye.

I tied a string to the hook and ran it behind the set and pulled the string through the wall.  When the actors were lined up against the wall, one of the actors was charged with the duty of pulling the string when the bad guy fake threw the knife.  They pull the string and the knife pops through the framed picture so suddenly no one notices if the knife was thrown, or if it came through the wall from behind.  Stage magic.  Yeah.