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From the The Tenement Series of non-fiction essays by Harry Buschman
© by Harry Buschman
Sweet Sixteen
Boys who live in the city have a reputation for knowing everything. Maybe it's
got something to do with being closed in with the competition and trying to
stay on top -- survival of the fittest, and all that. Anyway most city boys
want to be 'great' somethings? It's not enough to be something -- they've got
to be 'great' somethings -- or nothing.
I wanted to be a great actor, a great architect and a great writer. It didn't matter to me in what order I achieved greatness, as they turned up I would accept each of them in turn.
Of course I had credentials.
I had a part time job as a mailman every Christmas, I occasionally ushered at the Crystal Gardens movie house on Nostrand Avenue. My greatest academic achievement was a"B" in English at Samuel J. Tilden High. What a resume!
With nothing but these humble feathers in my cap I felt I had every right to criticize John Gielgud, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway -- again, in no particular order, and to anyone who would listen I would pontificate in a broad Brooklyn accent unaware that no one was listening, or if they were, were convinced I was a smart-assed sixteen year old with more brass than brains. There are few sadder sights in this world than the teenager who knows the answer to everything.
So when my sophomore (from the Greek 'sophomoric') term began I couldn't wait to sign up for the school play. The English Department decided to give a streamlined version of Romeo and Juliet in the spring. Jules Catchick, our English teacher had whittled the play down to run a little over an hour, retaining only the ball scene, the garden scene, the marriage, and the final scene in the tomb.
We had sets left over from a previous Julius Caesar and with a touch-up here and there they would be just fine. After all, Rome and Verona are not that far apart.
It was a terrible letdown to me when I learned two seniors were chosen to play the leads --Shirley Finkel would be Juliet and Ritchie Richmond, Romeo. I was picked to run the lighting and repaint the sets. Mr. Catchick, seeing my disappointment, finally conceded to let me stand-in for Digger Nelson as Friar Laurence in the wedding scene. Small consolation! Digger Nelson, the designated Friar, was a jock on the baseball team and there was no chance of him ever being sick enough not to play Friar Laurence.
Sophomores don't have much clout. My advice, given generously to the leads and to the company as a whole, was ignored. Mr. Catchick eventually told me to keep my mouth shut .... that he would handle this, and if I didn't keep it mouth shut he would get somebody else to be a stand-in for Digger. He didn't threaten to replace me as set painter, however -- he had no one else to turn to.
Wednesday afternoon rehearsals went on for three months. You can teach a turkey to play Romeo in three months. Maybe he'd have a little trouble with the prose style, but no more than Ritchie Richmond did. He was obviously miscast, and no audience would ever be convinced that Juliet could fall head over heels in love with a clown like Ritchie.
On the other hand, Shirley Finkel was five years older than Juliet was supposed to be and she insisted on wearing her green prom gown in the wedding scene. Juliet was a mere slip of a girl, (teetering on the brink of sexual discovery) you might say. Shirley had been over the brink at least four times that I know of, (once with Ritchie and close to once with me). She brought a bitchiness to the role that I don't think Shakespeare wanted Juliet to have.
On the outside chance that Digger would break a leg on the ball field I practiced the marriage scene daily before the mirror in my parent's bedroom. The scene was almost entirely in pantomime. Friar Laurence's costume was a large burlap potato sack with a hood left over from one of Macbeth's witches of two years ago. I thought I would have been a good Friar Laurence as I rehearsed my only line in deep sepulchral tones over and over again:
"So smile the heavens upon this holy act, That after hours with sorrow chide us not!"
I had no idea what the words meant .... I think I do now, but it was miraculous to hear how smoothly they rolled off the tongue, even though I had to talk through my horse-hair beard that hung from my ears. Like all true thespians I was confidant and comfortable in my part. It wasn't a big one, but it was one that centered on me .... the two lovers would kneel before me; Ritchie in his wrinkled leotard and Shirley in her knee length green party dress .... if only Digger would break a leg!
The big night
finally arrived and when the curtain rose on my freshly painted Roman Forum
set, no one would have guessed that Julius Caesar had been killed
there only a year ago. It seemed to be expressly designed for a house party
at the Capulets. The first scene went well, it was completely in pantomime,
and if you discount the clumsiness of Ritchie as Romeo, who couldn't help bumping
into things, everyone was where they should be. The music was supplied by Mrs.
Pryor and the school piano.
Then came the
garden scene. Mr. Catchick had volunteered to read the famous
Queen Mab speech to kick it off. He did it well enough, but he read it from
a school book copy of the play while sitting on the piano bench with Mrs. Pryor.
He read it hastily as though he wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.
Whipping us into shape for the performance had taken a lot out of him. He read
it the way a hostage might read a statement for the press. He got through it
however, and then Romeo walked on to recite those immortal lines:
"But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun."
Ritchie's accent
let him down, he was no Edmund Keene. A born and bred Brooklynite cannot speak
without sounding like one -- his interpretation went
more like this:
"Butts off
what like true yonder winderbrakes?
It's da yeast, an Juliet's da sun."
The message didn't get through, but the audience had never heard the words before, so it sounded just great to them. Juliet was better, I thought, in view of the breathtaking cleavage she displayed while bending over the balcony -- indeed, a few cat calls could be heard from her former admirers in the back of the auditorium. The curtain went down on the balcony scene quicker than it should have, in fact it almost beaned Ritchie as he backed away from Juliet.
As I snapped off the lights, Mr. Catchick, terror stricken, ran up to me and told me Digger Nelson had diarrhea and couldn't possibly go on as Friar Laurence -- my golden moment! I quickly got into my burlap robe, put on my witches hat, adjusted the horsehair beard and stood in the wings with Ritchie and Shirley.
"What happened to Digger?" Ritchie asked nervously. "What are you doing here?"
"Digger's got the runs," I replied.
Shirley started to fidget. "We never done it with you before," .... she started .... Jesus, I thought, who does she think she is Eleanora Duse?
Then Ritchie chimed in "You screw it up you'll be sorry hotshot." A threat to my physical being from a seventeen year old dressed in a leotard and wearing a wooden sword .... I laughed it off and sneered at him. "Just don't flub your lines, Ritchie."
In this uncooperative state the curtain rose on the marriage scene. Mr. Catchick was now operating the lights and he got the color mix all wrong. The stage was bathed in green, a vivid maritime green, which made it seem as though the happy couple were being married under water. The green light seemed to confuse Ritchie. He lurched and stumbled like a drunken Peter Pan until Shirley took matters in hand and led him to the altar.
Her knee length prom dress was now a Kelly green and she held a bouquet of green flowers .... even the dimples in her knees were green. It was not a pretty sight. They got through their lines like Punch and Judy. Mr. Catchick had burned the words into their subconscious with a branding iron -- they would remember them to their dying day.
I then raised the chalice from which they would drink their troth. In doing so my beard covered the communion goblet, like a towel on a waiter's arm. Shirley took the chalice and drank, then passed it to Ritchie along with my beard. Feeling it pulled from my ears I improvised, as I am sure many great Elizabethan actors have had to do when things go wrong:
"Thou shouldst
not drink from my beard my son,
Drink thy plight from the holy chalice!"
I retrieved the
beard and hooked it back over my ears. I was certain the unsophisticated audience
of mothers and fathers were convinced that Mr. Shakespeare, back in 1597, had
written those lines into the play. Shirley and
Ritchie staggered blindly off the stage leaving me alone -- a groan from the
lighting panel told me Mr. Catchick had caught on to the problem and did not
fully appreciate my quickness of mind. "Too friggin bad, I thought, We're
out here on stage, you're not ---- now back off and let me stand down front
and deliver those final lines.
So I did that; you remember them, right?
"So smile
the heavens
upon this holy act,
That after hours with sorrow chide us not!"
I bellowed them out loud and clear, loud enough for the sleepyheads in the back row to hear. I was alone, Shirley and Ritchie had scuttled off the stage, Mr. Catchick was glaring at me and the only one who stood firm with me was Mr. William Shakespeare.
The final scene in the tomb; well let's face it .... even in good hands it can go haywire. In the inexperienced hands of the English Drama Club of Samuel J. Tilden High School, it went very badly. Ritchie didn't seem to know Juliet's whereabouts at all, and by the time he found her, Shirley was so jittery she lost her timing and rose from the bier while she was supposed to be dead, even before Romeo had taken the poison.
But finally they were both dead. Thank God! The play was over, the curtain was down and there was nothing further we could do to humiliate the bard of Avon. We took our bows. Shirley got the biggest hand when she bowed low -- you could almost see her navel.
When I came out for my bow all I saw was the backs of the audience as they filed out of the auditorium. Only my mother and father were applauding.
My mother, all
feverish and energized by her first exposure to Elizabethan drama met me at
the stage door. On the way home she had only two questions: "Tell me,"
she said, "What's a "Holey yack?" and "What's a chider snot?"
She had a lot to learn about Shakespeare.
©Harry
Buschman 1997
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