The Horror

It's a snow-covered world here in Harrisburg, much like so many other places in America today. Alexis and I trudged up to our friends' apartment a few blocks away and ended up snowed in all day, which was a lot of fun.

I am sorry to have missed another friends' party that had been scheduled for last night, but I had a nasty experience driving in the snow years ago. I was in Pittsburgh visiting my dear friends Marty and Kelly, and I was their ride home to State College. It started to snow lightly as we were leaving, and by the time we'd been on the road for forty minutes there were already several inches accumulated. It just got worse and worse. We rode along at 20 miles per hour and the car periodically would just lose control and spin out into any old direction. We slid off the road 5 times. It is only by the grace of God that we survived the harrowing trip. I can't recall many (if any) other points in my life where I felt so jarringly close to death. It was awful. The idea of driving yesterday kept sending me back to those horrible hours on the road in that snow. I will avoid it at all costs.

We stayed in and watched a couple of horror movies last night. First up was The Bad Seed. I've wanted to see that one for over ten years now, ever since I worked at the Video Center back in State College during my undergraduate days. Finally! My goodness, was it ever good. It was quite possibly one of the finest scary movies I have ever seen, and it wasn't really all that scary, just chilling. Next we watched Thankskilling, the story of a cursed killer turkey out for revenge. This one was just as bad as The Bad Seed was good. Bad horror films are, in their own strange way, a lot of fun. This one may have been the best of the worst. I've seen some awful, awful horror flicks in my day, and this one kind of takes the cake. It's so unbelievably terrible.

Awkward Ball

Tonight Brianna, Jeremy, Alexis and I invented a ridiculous game. The sole purpose of the game is to create laughs. Here are the basic rules of "Awkward Ball."

All players stand in a closely clustered circle, a la hackeysack. The ball must be something awkward and misshapen. We used a stress squeezer thing. A kooshball might work nicely, too. Players can serve the ball normally with a soft toss or a volleyball-style bump. Once the ball is in play, however, players can only hit it with awkward parts of the body: elbows, stomach and butt.

We laughed a lot.

Ray Bradbury Quote on Finding Inspiration

"Leap off the cliff and build your wings on the way down."

(thanks, AoM interview: So, You Want My Job: Ghostwriter)

Quote from Gabriel Grilli via facebook

"Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream." ~ Jack Kerouac

Spider in Switzerland

This past Wednesday I got to spend an hour or so at the Ebensburg VFW with George "Spider" Dow, Alexis' grandfather, and Neal Dow, her dad (my father-in-law).

Spider told me a story (at Neal's prompting) about how the president of Switzerland once bought him a drink. He'd been on leave in Switzerland towards the end of WWII and went out for a nice meal one night. He happened to walk in to a restaurant where the president was hosting a large-scale dinner party. He was going to leave but they told him to stay because American GIs were welcome. He ordered a glass of wine ("just seemed a little too nice for beer") and when he pulled out money to pay for it the server informed him that the drink was covered by "that gentleman over there." He looked over to the head of the large table and the man who waved at him was the president of Switzerland.

"What'd you do then, Dad?" Neal asked, grinning.

"I stood up and gave him one of these," Spider said, and he stood and shot off a crisp, proud salute.

Cryptic Poems Footnote

One of the authors whose work I posted got in touch with me! How cool is that? Look at the internet working the way it's supposed to for once, bringing people together with common interests! I was pretty excited about that, and I can't wait to tell my class.

For the record, the poems I posted were some of the ones I liked quite a lot. My initial reaction was, "Oh, why are they searching so basically? Why are their research skills so unrefined?" I resolved to work on our being savvier surfer-researchers at some point soon...

But then...

The poems they found, however haphazardly, were all pretty decent poems. Some were, in fact, excellent.

The lesson I learn in all of this? There is a world of online poetry out there that is vibrant, huge, and (like most things on the internet) filled with wide-ranging qualities of work. However, it exists "outside of the academy," which is a rather exciting poetic development.

Cryptic Poems found by Googling "Cryptic Poems," Part III

from: http://zenvirus.com/poems/hallucinations.html

HALLUCINATIONS

The man with the burning mustache
Is busy faxing my fingernails.
Through Monday's telescope
There is no sign of Tuesday's breakfast.
The kitset monk
Exacerbates the anger of the penguin.

I am a vulnerable vertical
On an immensity of envelopes.
The armchair assassin
Knows my weakness
And plots.

The tourists in my nose descend,
Assailant voices
Reminding me of my choice:
I have mainlined mortality.
Nothing is certain
Therefore all things are possible.
In a wobbly universe
The tilting horizons of mayonnaise
Promise no insurance.

A comet shoves through,
Hot, purple, flaring,
Dispersing the forgetfulness of ravens.
The aftermath of friction
Revealing the locusts in my mind.

It is ten o'clock.
The chocolate is condensing.
Flaring sugars. Crystalized fish.
My eyebrows have invaded my brain.
I look through the window.
The octopus is rising.
The stone has split to fracture up tomatoes.

Beyond the event horizon
The yellow rain falls,
Illuminating
Vibrating plastics,
Soaking
The cells of a dead dog's ears.
My elbows slowly get warmer
And the knitting needle purrs.


This poem HALLUCINATIONS was first published together with the accompanying notes when posted online by Hugh Cook on 2005 May 7 Saturday. Poem and accompanying notes Copyright © 2005 Hugh Cook.

Cryptic Poems found by Googling "Cryptic Poems," Part II

Another "cryptic poem" my students found by, uh, Googling "cryptic poems":

originally published at:
http://crypticpoems.blogspot.com/

The Tigress Of The Mist

Sedated are his senses, by her fragrance entranced,
Lingering in his memory, his senses she commands,
Intoxicated by the scent of her persona, he wanders
Vagabond his spirit, through the mist meanders.
Emerging from the haze then, into the night,
Revealing himself to the Huntress’s sight.
Slowly the clouds engulf her in that moment,

Obscuring, as if a dream her presence, in an instant.
Frozen, a crystal, in his mind that glimpse embeds,

To enrich his thoughts eternally, her memory never fades.
Higher he ascends into the ether she perfumed,
Enamoured he remains, by her charisma, consumed.

Seeking her, he ventures forth, into the forest of dreams,
Allured into its milieu, by these unending streams.
Flowing perennial through this realm illusive,
Flowering in it, such blossoms, exclusive.
Rewarded by the adventures this journey has presented,
Offering him those experiences, that fantasy has created.
Never losing sense, of the passion he pursues,

Surrendering to the huntress alone, he continues.
Under the foliage of imagination, that is the forest,
Nurtured by the aspirations of each measure purest.

Onwards the forest, into the mist dissolves,
Near yet far, he stares as the summit evolves

Solitary he roams, no destination in sight,
Invisible to his eyes, she leads him to light,
Leaving the wonders, in which his senses delight.
He hears in the distance, sounds of the spray splash,
Onto the coast as those, tumultuous waves crash.
Underneath those waves, lies the sea’s tranquility,
Entering into this world, he imbibes its oceanic quality.
The immensity of that silence disperses thought,
The nothingness, the void, the presence, that is naught.
Evaporating into the air the ocean transforms,
Suddenly, into a fog, that transcends through the storms.

Observing in nature such eccentricity,
Fathoming in the depth, its, simplicity.

Through this cloud, again he perceives her,
Her scent, her voice, her spirit; so near.
Elation resurfaces from within his soul,

Surging through him, once again he feels whole.
His passions were but, the duties of his desire,
An insight, she gifted, as a magical souvenir.
Duty and passion complete each other,
One shall drive while, the other deliver.
Wisps of the mist now caress his face,
Softly it surrounds him in an icy embrace.

Sublimely the vapour transforms and blends,
Into the mist he merges, a new dimension transcends.
Lost in an abstraction, the huntress, he has sought, in
Every realm sensed, by his perception and thought.
Now enveloped in the ether, the truth to him dawns
The huntress accompanies as his soul companion.

© Jwalant Dave, 2007.

Cryptic Poems found by Googling "Cryptic Poems," Part I

from:
http://www.gotpoetry.com/Poems/l_op=viewpoems/lid=54439.html

Cryptic Seed

by rondo

CRYPTIC SEED


PLEASE DON’T READ !!!!
This is cryptic seed
Solely designed
To invade your mind
If you persist
In reading this
Your thoughts will be affected
you’ll feel changes in your perspective
By then its too late
Nothing to do but wait
Curiosity killed the cat
If you read further
You cannot go back
Have you got a death wish or what
You think this is a game its not
Your brain synapse
Are deploying lapses
An imbedded covert syntax
Is charting your brain wave maps
Once in place
They can’t be erased
HEAD THIS LAST WARNING I IMPLORE
I WON’T TRY TO WARN YOU ANY MORE
Well
Hell
Too late now you should have waited
The damadge is done your contaminated
There’s nothing I can do
I tried to stop you
Told you so
Gotta go
rondo



I've asked my students to bring me cryptic poems. Interestingly, they go to their oracle, Google, to do this. "Google," they implore, "find me this." They type it clearly: "cryptic poem." And I get things like this in class. Thanks, Google. The random equations and logarithms of this "universe 2.0" frustrates the crap out of some of my honors students. I can tell that some (not all, not even a majority) of my students are muttering under their breath, wondering what this zeitgeist approach teaches them about things the "academy" believes they ought to know. From a curriculum standpoint, we are addressing our "unit questions" and "learning maps," so I feel like we're on track. Those of us who can hold things a bit more loosely can enjoy the ride.

Curtains Up, Curtains Down

Through an odd set of circumstances, my first job after Penn State was at a Christian theatre in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Sight & Sound was a huge place, with a stage twice the size of Broadway houses and seating for 2,000. They had state of the art light and sound and scenic equipment and had made their way to a 500-person strong corporate theatre company as a for-profit Christian ministry in less than 20 years. In many ways, Sight & Sound represented a lot of ways I wanted to go a different path. They were unlike most theatre companies (which are nonprofit, non-religious, small) and the money I made there was pretty decent for a young married man just out of college.

It was an incredibly diverse Christian environment, working there. We had all stripes of Christians on staff, and healthy debate flourished there, I felt. I got a broader picture of Christianity there than even my years at WVCS could give me. I began to feel more and more okay about the kind of Christian I was – seeking, open-minded, church-averse but socially fearless, kind, and wholly committed to Jesus’ teachings.

Things with Teresa seemed okay at first... I knew her well enough to know that I made a commitment and was going to stand by and see her through. I thought it was only a matter of time.

I left Sight & Sound after almost two years. The corporate culture seemed to be somewhat in conflict with Jesus the man, I felt. Most people I worked with understood exactly how I felt, but they had faith in what they were doing there and stayed. I was sad to leave the people there, but eager to do other things. I played my first professional leads that summer at a summer stock north of Lancaster in Mount Gretna, Pennsylvania, the commonwealth’s only surviving chatauqua village. I played Mozart in Amadeus. I threw myself into the role, and got reviews that said I was “more appealing than Tom Hulce” in the Oscar-winning film. Reviews aren’t everything -- a month later, in a different role, I was critiqued as being unlikable in an unlikable role. What does a sensitive young actor do with that? It's a chicken and egg conundrum... was it my fault or the role's fault? I tried to shrug that one off. But, if you ignore a negative review, logic sort of indicates that you should probably ignore the positive ones, too. I suppose I absorbed both of them. And, frankly, the good notice made me feel better than the bad one.

Midway through that summer, though, Terri and I were floundering. I wasn’t home nearly as much as I’d been, and it seemed that when i was home we were wholly disconnected... One friend recommended a marriage counselor to us. I thought it was a good idea.

Counseling saved our marriage in the short run, and changed my life. I realized through counseling how the edgy extremity of my theatre life, practically a requirement of the field as far as I felt, spilled over into my marriage. I had always been a kind and sweet person, and gentle, but the persona I felt I needed to be a successful actor seemed aggressive to Teresa. I also was advised by the counselor to stop trying so hard to fix everything with Teresa, and to let her either come to me with her needs or to let her slip away. This was hard for me to do, but I did it.

I wound up working for a small company in Harrisburg, Gamut Theatre Group. Gamut was devoted to classic stories and classic plays in a tradition owing at least in part to the ideas of Joseph Campbell, the famous Classics scholar. It was operated by a husband and wife team who valued relationships and family. I thought Gamut could be a home for Terri and I. Everyone I met there was warm and understanding, but they also seemed grounded. The extreme edge was a bit less sharp here, and the idea of normalcy was present. That’s unusual for a theatre, believe me.

Terri came along. Then she got some tough news.

In January of 2006, her dad was assigned to leave in July for an 18-month stint in Kosovo with the National Guard. As America’s troops were shuttled to Iraq, Guardsmen were being called to fill their posts in places like Germany, Korea, and Kosovo.

Teresa’s relationships with her father and with me were kind of all she had to go on. The idea of her father going away when we were in such a rocky place was more than she could bear.

She stopped going to counseling... With me, though, she was able to talk a bit. I didn’t get angry with her, like I had so many misguided times before our counseling sessions. I was, finally, there for her when she needed me in a healthy way, not needing to fix things and not judging her for things that were not her fault. I tried to be as positive and encouraging as I could. And I knew that ultimately, this fight was hers, and not mine.

She decided to go home to be with her dad for a month before he left. She told me she had been dependent on male figures her whole life (her dad, then me) and needed to break the cycle. She told me she didn’t know if she was coming back.

Two weeks after she left, she called to tell me she wasn’t coming back. It was over.

We signed divorce papers in August of 2006 and the marriage ended legally in November.

I was hurt. I was upset. But I wasn’t angry, so much. We’d gambled and lost. I felt I pulled her into something she wasn’t ready for. And now we both were paying the price. We had no children, so that made it easier. I had a chance to try again, to live a less extreme life.

I stayed at Gamut for another year. My colleagues there were like a good little family for me. They supported me quietly and helped see me through. The realities of life alone became clear, though. I needed to get off this roller coaster. I needed to leave the theatre as my full-time occupation. I’d met a handful of people in the business who could balance the demands of it healthfully, but I felt I was not one of those people. For me, theatrical success only seemed to happen when I was in an emotionally difficult place. At Gamut, we all acted in shows, had an administrative job with the company, and taught theatre classes to kids. I found the teaching to be as enjoyable as anything I’d ever done.

I applied to a graduate program at Penn State, a one-year teaching certification and Master’s program where I would student teach at State High. I was home again.

I still grieve losing Teresa. But it is hard to see it as her fault, or mine, or anyone's. We both tried, and we both failed each other at too many points in the journey. She remains a beautiful, lovely person, and I believe in her still. I think she can become the person she knows she wants to be, and I have reached the point where I can see that she made, in spite of my protests, the best decision for us both.

The extreme lifestyle is not for me. I can’t go back, and I don’t want to. I want a normal life. I want a normal job. I want weekends. I want a little house somewhere and a retirement fund. I want kids. I’ve told people that after my divorce I looked at the goals for my life, and a career in theatre was the only thing I could check off of the list. And I think, so long as I had stayed in it full time, it was all I would have been able to do. I've worked at several other theatres over the years, and played roles (Mozart, Hamlet, Henry V) that I never expected to play. I've taken Asylum 11 to fringe festivals and colleges and other companies, and I continue to tinker with it from time to time. I'm proud of what I was able to accomplish, but I am ready to go in a new direction.

I am still optimistic. But I am redefining. I want tranquility. I want peace. I want quiet. I want comfort. I want my job to be about helping other people, not showing what I can do. The theatre was about connections for me – with fellow actors, directors, and audiences. It wasn’t a selfish pursuit, it was a passionate one. But often, people not engaged in making it their living misunderstand. People make assumptions that actors need glory, attention, recognition, fame. What if actors just like being in plays? What if not being themselves for a few hours is more fun? What if nobody comes to the show and actors still have a good experience? What if $200 a week salary is enough for a while because an actor is doing what he loves? It got to me after a while, constantly trying to defend my career choice as something giving and truthful to others who stereotyped it as something selfish and lying. I knew they were wrong, but their accusations made me self-conscious. And I wasn't in acting to feel self-conscious. If anything, I was in acting to feel the opposite of self-conscious. I wanted to lose myself in those moments of being the "other."

I hope to teach theatre, though. I want to be able to show young people some of the magic of the field that captivated me. I also want to present to them my own story honestly, so that they are fully aware of the double-edged nature of the field. But ultimately I really believe my theatre experiences did me much more good than harm.

Joseph Campbell’s theories of classic stories point to the remarkable similarities across world cultures in the way we tell stories and the things we point towards in hope and the lessons we choose to teach each other. I am interested in learning more about culture, world religion, philosophy, and the arts. I am hopeful that a career in teaching will afford me the chance to continue my own education, to get a broad knowledge of the humanistic disciplines. I want to continue to learn and grow. I no longer want to do so with an edgy aggressiveness. I want to work towards dealing with my life with an adult poise and a sense of calm. I am hopeful that, by pacifying the waters, I might see myself more clearly.

Wounds heal, scars remind me of lessons learned, and stage lights illuminate something inside of me. Now I hope to help others find their own story.

"He leads me beside still waters / He restoreth my soul." - Psalm 23

Risk Versus Reward

I also had time to devote to relationships. I met Teresa in the spring of my sophomore year at her audition for Penn State. Teresa was a year younger than me and had just finished a year at her local community college in Maryland. I knew she would come to Penn State, I knew she would get into the school, and I knew we were going to be close.

Terri and I started dating that fall. We had a similar taste for eclectic rock music. We shared a love of Radiohead, and she introduced me to Sunny Day Real Estate and the Eels. I introduced her to Jeff Buckley. She’d grown up in Boalsburg, it turned out. She went to elementary school with people I then graduated high school alongside. There was a kismet connection between us, and neither of us could fully explain it.

There was also a history there I couldn’t penetrate...

... In spite of dysfunction in our relationship, I could not help but fall in love with her deeply. She was lovely, sensitive, tender, kind, and in many ways wise beyond her years. She just happened to be closed off because of a difficult past. I’d seen my father’s personal triumphs over tragedy, and I felt strongly that she would sort this out. I kept at it.

We broke up 3 times over a two-year period... I was on edge, sleeping less than I should, trying desperately to maintain the focus that had gotten me where I wanted to be as a student of the impossible art of the theatre. I was not as patient with her as she needed me to be. We each broke up with the other, and we reconciled fairly soon after each time.

I was feeling torn in many directions. Terri pulled at me, so did my studies and all the shows that never stopped coming. I was not going to church much. It was as though the theatre began to take the place of faith in my life. Not sleeping enough added to that stew. I was still me – friendly, uplifting, dedicated – but internally I was angry, restless and confused. I was 21 years old but felt like I was gripped in the kind of crisis I’d missed out on at 16.

All of these factors came unexpectedly to a unique catharsis in a creative work I made for my honor’s thesis. I stayed for a fifth year to make the show, which my friends thought was a little (ok, a lot) crazy of me. The show I made, with the help of my film major friend Marty and his wife Kelly (good friends of Teresa’s and mine), was Asylum 11, a multimedia show where I played ten different characters across five television screens and acted live as well. The story of the show was a comic book premise – the audience was seeing the final issue of a comic book series unfold. The characters onscreen were all the major players in the Asylum comic series, a comic storyline that I made up just for the show. The live actor was the series’ creator, who’d been kidnapped by the characters in an effort to force him to finish the story.

The show was about identity as much as anything. Each character in Asylum 11 represented a piece of my own self that I felt was at war with the rest of me. The show allowed me to metaphorically resolve a mess of internal conflicts that college life had stirred up within me. And in a weird way, it worked. I came to grips with faith issues and embraced my spiritual sense of self and the Christian foundations of my spiritual life. I also forgave myself for not going to church as much and realized that my spiritual journey was headed in a broader direction. I realized that I valued my own health and sanity over any satisfactions the theatre could give me. I realized that I valued relationships and happiness more than theatre. I recognized some of the darker parts of my persona, and in personifying them in the show, I felt I was able to purge some of their mystery and have a bit of personal catharsis. My Asylum year was a definite moratorium experience, and afterward I honestly felt comfortable with who I was for the first time in five years. It wasn’t all the shows or the grades or all the accolades that did it. It was a carefully structured, intensely personal art therapy experience. The art I had studied, the art I had trained for, the art so wrapped up in presentation of self to others, had allowed me a better understanding of myself. That outward-focused art allowed me a moment of genuine personal intimacy and understanding. When I began the project, I'd dreamed of creating a unique work of theatre that might catch on and maybe even become popular. Ironically, what it became was a deeply personal piece, and its popularity -- the number of people who actually saw it -- was immaterial (though, for the record, not too many folks saw it... and that's okay).

Asylum was my last Outlaw gasp at Penn State, one last effort to pull off the truly impossible. We pulled it off. And, we didn’t. The final performance at Penn State (the last Outlaws show of the year) was incomplete, and so we made sure we called it a workshop performance. I was devastated and exhausted, but the audiences were encouraging.

Terri’d gone home to Maryland that year. She was running out of financial options for Penn State. She and her dad were mending fences and developing their relationship, but her dad also got laid off and had to take a job with significantly less pay. She was going to go home, work and save money for school. We broke up (mutual agreement this time) for the summer she left and we decided to focus on our friendship, but by the fall we were talking about a whole other level of commitment. The friendship focus worked, briefly, almost too well--we became closer than ever.

I was pushing envelopes with my theatre studies and somehow it felt ok to push the envelope on this relationship. I was incredibly (naively) optimistic – my parents had married young, and look how wonderful our home life had been! In spite of all my family’s obstacles, we’d persevered. I believed Terri could do it, too, and I thought once she was a part of my family she would learn how from seeing it firsthand. I think my enthusiasm convinced her, too. We got engaged in September of 2001, three weeks after the shock of 9/11.

We married on June 29, 2002. We wed in Eisenhower Chapel on the Penn State campus, the same place my parents had married some thirty years before.

Outlaw Midnights

College was an extreme reality check in the opposite direction.

As I said before, I was physically a bit of a late bloomer. I think one thing I experienced with that was a delayed onset of adolescent angst. I was moody and artistic in high school to some degree, but I was also a great deal more upbeat than most of my peers. My parents were kind and supportive, and we had little to no crises in the home or conflict. We were still close – in fact, after my sister left for college, we became closer than we’d been before.

Jeff Buckley drowned mysteriously in the Wolf River in Memphis, Tennessee. That was a sad note. My dad, who’d lost Hendrix at a young age, understood exactly what that sadness was like.

Emotionally speaking, college to me felt like the roller coaster of ups and downs that high school was supposed to have been. Courtney and I broke up the fall of my freshman year. She was my first real taste of genuine heartbreak. I was convinced we would be young newlyweds, like my parents had been. College had presented us with the possibility of going in different directions, but we’d both chosen Penn State. We’d even been assigned to the same dorm. I was going to live one floor away from my girlfriend. I even got cast in a decent role in a mainstage production of the PSU School of Theatre (unusual for freshmen), playing Malcolm in Macbeth. Fate had been kind.

Rehearsals for Macbeth took up my nights, and Courtney caught the eye of a fifth-year senior in Geography. I came home from rehearsal and found them hanging out. I knew it was trouble, but it took another two months of painful and awkward conflict between us before she finally broke it off. I was hurt, angry, heartbroken. For the first time in my life, I became depressed.

I kept making strides forward theatrically, but my teachers were demanding and not very encouraging. If we were majoring in theatre, then by God, they were going to give us a grounding in the brutal realities of the profession. We were told of the cutthroat scene in New York City, of 2% actor employment rates, of meager paychecks that don’t even cover the rent. Those of us who stayed and didn’t let the scare tactics shake us off found ourselves in grueling, emotion-laden acting and movement classes. It wasn’t uncommon to see a classmate lose control emotionally. We trained in the art of riding an emotional rollercoaster for the purpose of fictitiously entertaining or providing catharsis for an audience of observers. We learned to be raw and open. It was tremendously exhilarating and tremendously frightening at once. This wasn’t the acting I’d done in high school. That had been hard work, but a ton of fun. This was like a kind of monastic discipline. The work was the only reward, and the work was wholly ephemeral.

After my breakup, I bonded with a small group of classmates who took pity on me and let me into their little circle. They let me vent and they talked me through things. We lamented our “low people on the totem pole” status within the School of Theatre, where the hierarchy went from faculty to grad students, then BFA Musical theatre majors, and lastly us, the lowly undergrad BAs... From the beginning of my senior year of high school to the end of my freshman year of college, I went through some of the highest highs and lowest lows of my life.

Toward the end of my sophomore year at Penn State, the director of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival came to Penn State to look at grad students for summer roles in his company. A professor of ours had directed for him the summer before, and my best friend Bob and I, who shared a keen ambition to become actors, talked our way into auditioning as well. We ended up being the only two hired, as “acting interns.” We were paid nothing. We were housed, we played small roles (in Shakespeare they are sometimes called “spear carrier” roles, and sure enough, Bob and I stood stark still and held spears for a long scene in Richard III) and we understudied larger roles that we almost never performed. It sounds rough, but it was, along with my Governor’s School experience, the best summer of my life.

At Illinois I began to realize that because of the impossible nature of theatre as a profession and the inherent extremity of the life of the dramatic artist, a certain superhuman quality possessed those who really shone on the stage. I began to realize that no amount of hard work or discipline would make me a better actor if I wasn’t willing to be intensely, even insanely, courageous.

Back at Penn State, I played three completely different roles in the fall of my junior year. Each one was an extreme performance, and an extremely different one, and I began hearing some positive feedback from my once-cold teachers. I was starting to “get it.” I also no longer cared what the people watching thought. I was doing this for myself. The selfish nature of the actor began to take hold of me. The Christian school kid was at odds with this persona, and so I often felt like several distinctly different people. The person I was in class was quite different than the person I was onstage, and the person I was around friends was another, altogether different character.

The BA Theatre majors had one outlet that was mostly “theirs.” It was an unofficial club (not University sanctioned) called the Outlaws Playwright’s Workshop. Every week, Outlaws put up a student-written one-act play with a full cast and production. The actors memorized their lines in a matter of days, like Shakespeare’s actors once did in the Elizabethan era. Every week, Outlaws did the impossible. They performed at 11:15 pm on Thursday nights in a cramped black box rehearsal room, and crowds came out in surprising numbers. The energy was electric, the shows were uncensored and the vibe was rock ‘n roll all the way.

My last two and a half years at Penn State were spent producing Outlaws. The student producer team (usually three or four) made sure everything happened. It took up a lot of my time, but I still managed to get good grades, see people socially and be involved in more mainstage productions with the School of Theatre. It was routine for my friends and I to be juggling roles in two, three, four productions at once.

Embarrassment of Good Fortune

By 15, I was doing alright at State High. I’d made friends with my drawings (I was constantly giving them away whenever anyone said anything remotely complimentary about them) and through involvement with Thespians. I was being pushed by teachers in ways I hadn’t before. The school was vibrant and alive to me. Compared to Lehman, there was just so much to do. In summers and after school I could walk downtown and buy comics and cds and books. I got my favorite album around this time, too: Grace, by Jeff Buckley. I was a tenor, and Buckley was a tenor virtuoso. His songs, to me, sounded like what angels must sing to pass the time in their quiet moments. They were spiritual, theatrical, technically masterful and emotionally whalloping all at once.

I was headed off to Governor’s School myself the following summer, to study theatre. My sister (at this point a sophomore art major at Penn State) and I were headed in artistic directions. Our parents, both professional educators (Mom was still teaching English, now at State High, her alma mater), were incredibly supportive, in spite of the statistical improbabilities of either of us having financially sound careers in these disciplines. They believed in us, incredibly, and with their support we both flew with confidence.

My high school experience ended with an embarrassment of riches. I could never have guessed that everything that happened would happen. I was National Merit and won writing awards at the school and national level. I nailed a 5 on my AP English test without taking AP English (my foray into academic experimentation continued in my 12^th grade year as I took an interdisciplinary course periods 1-5 that was team taught to include English, Social Studies, Science, Art and Vocational experiences). I played Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the monologue from that show got me first runner-up at the National Shakespeare Competition in New York City, where we performed onstage at Lincoln Center. I played Nicely-Nicely Johnson in Guys & Dolls and stopped the show with “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat.” I won the highest performance scholarship award at the annual Pennsylvania State Thespian Conference. I made state chorus as a Tenor 1. I got into Penn State’s Schreyer Honors College, which provided me with a four-year scholarship that, combined with the tuition break I got from my dad working there, made my college experience a virtually free one. I dated a former cheerleader named Courtney who’d shifted her focus onto poetry and art. I thought we made quite the pair. My parents, who’d insisted up until the day before my 16^th birthday that I was not getting a car, found a safe old Volvo for sale in my neighbor’s backyard the morning of my 16^th birthday. He gave them a great deal on it, and I paid my dad back for the car bit by bit.

My collection obsession shifted from comics to cds. I now had something like 500 cds. I think nearly every penny of my allowance went into buying music. I was so busy with theatre that I had less and less time to draw, so my personal outlet shifted from drawing to listening to music. I made mix tapes for my friends all the time, and was quite proud of how much my friends seemed to like them.

I was a definite “liaison” figure, a cliqueless butterfly in a class that had a lot of them, it seemed to me. We were 600 strong headed into graduation, and it seemed to me that I liked nearly all of my classmates fairly well. Some I knew well, others I knew tangentially. But I was the kid who always said hi, who always smiled, who always tried to have an uplifting thing to say or a sympathetic ear. I rarely sat with groups at lunch. I’d eat alone, and when I got food I’d stop and talk to most of the tables I walked past, or at least wave hi to somebody. I almost never took study halls – I was always off doing this or that for Thespians or some other artistic or academic adventure.

College was an extreme reality check in the opposite direction.

Matthew Defies Expectations with Bulletproof Faith and Cool Nonchalance

Matt came to State High too. He was almost too old for high school, but he was able to stay longer because of his situation. His particular level of retardation put him squarely in between higher and lower functioning groups, and State High had a class for both groups, so he spent half his day in State High’s South Building and the other half in the North Building. He crossed the street between fourth and fifth period every day with an aide. Usually, the aide let Matt walk ahead a bit. He was a confident kid, in spite of his circumstances.

Matt had learned to read. He couldn’t tie his shoes, but that was due to his long fingers. Matt was tall and skinny – 6’2” and 130 pounds soaking wet. He’d had terrible scoliosis and a clubbed foot as a kid, but back braces and surgeries had fairly well resolved those conditions. He has a system of metal hooks and rods in his back that straighten his spine, the results of an exploratory scoliotic surgery procedure pioneered by doctors at Penn State’s Hershey Medical Center. The good folks at Hershey Med took a gamble on Matt that the surgery would take with him, and it did. Off came his back brace, a hideous contraption he’d been stuck with for nearly ten years. He was so proud not to have it anymore.

On November 11^th of 1993, the fall of my freshman year at State High and just after our June move, Matt was hit by a car being driven by a young man named Jeremy. Jeremy was trying to skip school for lunch. The security guard had stopped him, so he’d thrown his car into reverse and backed up, going the wrong way in a one-way zone at about 25 miles an hour (parking lot speed limit – 10). Matt crumpled up onto the back hood of his car and rolled off onto the blacktop.

A girl came into my art class crying. When my teacher asked her why she was so upset, she said “One of the special ed. kids just got hit by a car.” She’d seen it happen. I tried to tell my teacher about Matt, because I knew he crossed the street then. When he realized just what it was that I was stammering, he said, “Go. Just go.” I ran outside and saw my brother on the ground, with paramedics rushing over to him. I held his hand, and through hyperventilated breaths and tears streaming, I told him over and over again that he was fine, that he was going to be fine, that these people were her to take care of him and he was going to be allright. “Okay? You hear me, Matt?” I said, over and over again. He held my hand tightly, nodded and said “Yeah.” It was about all he could do.

Matt was life-flighted to Hershey Med with a blood clot on his brain that required emergency interventionary neurosurgery. The doctors were grim, as they’d been when he was two. They prepared us for the worst – death, a vegetative condition, a severe worsening of his already reduced skill sets.

The day after Matt woke up (not long after the neurosurgery, mind you--Matthew's stout Scots-Irish, English and German background manifests themselves in a physical strength that goes well beyond anything Barb or I possess) we went into Matt's hospital room. My father, who can't do anything on a given day until he eats something with protein for breakfast, stopped in at a McDonald's for some breakfast.

Side note: Say what you will about Mickey D's. Yes, the food is terrible, carcinogenic, and the source of much of America's obesity problem, but they also fund the Ronald McDonald House, where terrified families spend the night for free when their sons and daughters are fihgting death in the hospital. Because of this, no matter how much of their corporate chicanery disgusts me, I'll always allow them a little bit of leniency. Plus, their fries are awesome.

So we stopped in at McDonald's, and I asked if I could get a Happy Meal toy, because it was Batman. I was a comic book geek, but Matthew was a Batfan extraordinaire. I knew I had to bring this Batman toy--I just had a gut feeling. We walked into the room and tried to talk to Matt. He was pretty out of it. We had no idea how he would be. Would he remember us? Would he walk or talk again? After a few minutes, we were a little worried. I walked up to Matt (hoses, wires, headwrap, beeping machines, the aluminum taste of panic at the back of my tongue) and put the Batman toy in his hand. "Matt, I got you a Batman toy," I said, and it took a great deal of effort to say it evenly, to not start crying. Matt's arm shot up in the air. He looked at that damn Batman toy like he was checking out a cool new present on Christmas morning (Matthew on Christmas morning, by the way, is a sight to behold). He turned it side to side, turned toward me, and handed it back to me. I knew at that moment he would be fine. Christian Bale can pack on 35 pounds of pure muscle. He can embody Bruce Wayne, learn tae kwon do and do a whole mess of his own stunts (although he oddly can't seem to drop that weird lisp he's got). Forget Christian Bale. My brother is Batman.

Three weeks after surgery, Matt sat with us at the Thanksgiving table. His only side effects from the whole incident are blindness in one eye (caused by blood pressure from the clot on his optic nerve) and a trauma-related reduction in his hairline. His life has been defined by exceeding others’ expectations, and this was a miraculous example of precisely that.

Oddly, the accident opened up a new world for Matt and I in State College and at State High. Suddenly everyone knew who my brother was. He was flooded with cards and well wishes and was awash in good cheer and support from kids who never knew him when he came back to school. When high school students overcome things like that, it gives everybody a certain measure of hope, I found. As the brother of my now-famous (locally, anyway) sibling, I got a little of the leftover sympathy and good cheer. I met a lot of people all at once.

The accident happened about a week before we were to open Our Town with State High Thespians. I’d auditioned and been cast as a freshman in the role of Joe Crowell, Grover’s Corners’ cheery paperboy. It was a small role, but I was devoted to it. I got back to school in just enough time to be in the show, and that experience was transformative. I watched every second of that play where I wasn’t onstage unfold from the wings. I was riveted. At the climactic moment of Our Town, Emily Webb watches the world from the other side. She is recently deceased. It is as though she is seeing life as we live it for the very first time. She asks, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?" The Stage Manager, who has shepherded the audience through the play and now shepherds Emily into the afterlife, says "No." Wilder inserts a pause. Then the Stage manager says, "The saints and poets, maybe--they do some." I wanted to be both saint and poet. I wanted every, every minute.

Ghostlight on a Dark New Stage

In between 8^th and 9^th grade I went through a big change – we moved to State College, Pennsylvania. My grandparents lived in State College, and my parents had grown up here, so State College was a place I knew well. I knew there was more here for me to do, and I knew from my parents that State College Area High School had a good reputation. I also knew before we moved that State College had a number of theatre opportunities available to me, if I chose to pursue them. And that intrigued and excited me the most.

I’d done my first real play in fifth grade. Before that I had clowned around in church skits and sung in youth choirs, but that experience in 5^th grade altered my outlook on that whole scene. I played an old German psychiatrist who was also a bear, Dr. Bearjamin Schlock. Schlock was in one scene, where he convinced forest creature parents that their adolescent forest creature kids threatening to forgo the traditional winter hibernation are just having a phase. “They’re at that contradictory kind of age / Known as the drive your parents crazy stage,” I sang in a German accent to a reggae-tinged beat. Yeah, I am not kidding. That show was pretty weird. And I, to borrow from the comedian’s parlance, killed. I made those 5^th grade parents lose their minds laughing. And it felt really good to be so skillful in such a public forum. I felt like I’d found something I was good at, unlike baseball. On the way home after that play, I asked my parents if anyone made a living doing that kind of thing. They were nervous – who wants their 10-year-old to say, “Hey guys, I want to be an actor,” right? My mom said “Yes… some people do, but it is very hard to make a living doing that.” I smiled. “I think I would like to do that.”

The Back Mountain offered very little in the way of arts and culture. My sister took art lessons from a gifted studio artist, Sue Hand, who made her living painting and teaching while her husband Joe ran a frame shop in their cozy little art studio. She had an outlet. I did one community theatre play my 8^th grade year. I was Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web – pink tights, red shorts, corkscrew tail. It was humiliating and exhilarating at the same time. Some pig.

Leaving the Back Mountain, the only home I’d known, was hard for me. I had to leave Amber, for one thing. We went about three months long distance (pretty good for 8^th graders) before things fizzled out. I also had to leave a group of friends I really cared for very deeply, and had only just begun to feel I knew. I spent a surly summer there before school started. I drew a lot. Drawing was my way to escape. Drawing and music…

I got my own room in State College. I started postering my walls with Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and darker comic book characters like The Crow and Grendel: War Child. I drew for hours every day, and I started to get pretty good at comic book drawing. “Maybe this is what I’ll do with my life,” I thought.

School started awkwardly. I was a new kid in a class of almost 600. I slowly met some kindhearted folks, mostly other new students.

Then Matthew was hit by a car.

Expansion

I grew six inches between 7^th and 8^th grade, and stopped at 5’9”. I have never grown again, oddly. I had my first decent girlfriend experience. Her name was Amber Posatko. Amber’s dad was a lawyer, and they were pretty well off. Her mom was, near as I could tell, an eccentric housewife. Amber was quirky, bright, eccentric and, compared to most of her Back Mountain peers, a bit exotic. Amber and I bonded over our love of music.

I’d shared a bedroom with Matt my whole life, but the summer before 8^th grade, my sister Barbara went to Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts. She had a magical creative summer with a group of promising young artists from across the state. And I got to take over her room for a summer. I dove into Barb’s tapes (she was 17) and discovered U2, Tori Amos, R.E.M., Suzanne Vega and a host of other independently-minded musicians. That music began to expand my world, in a creative sense.

That summer I also got contacts. Years of day-old greasy sweat grime formulating on the backside of plastic nosepads digging into my face, a cesspool for zits and a red badge of nerdity, was gone, gone, finally gone. I could be something else. While my shins ached I would lay out on the antique double bed in Barb's room and draw my own made up comic book characters while Bono and the Edge rattled and hummed in my ears.

Graphic Novelties

In sixth grade, I had a fairly stable crew of friends. About half of them were in the “gifted” program, like I was. I had trekked up to sixth grade reading classes in fifth grade, and now in sixth grade I had my first taste of an “independent study” experience, an hour in the library every day to read on my own. Instead of reading, though, I drew comic book characters.

I was becoming more and more obsessed with comics. They had everything I liked in them. They were action-packed (appealed to the sports fan in me), art-driven (appealed to my budding artistic temperament), literary (whole dense mythologies with symbolic hero quests were created), creative and cartoony. The comic book world was an extreme place, full of basic good vs. evil structures, wildly weird visuals, passions, violence, and perfectly etched human figures doing impossible tasks in bizarre costumes. I’d been taking art classes for years, and now I wanted to draw more than ever.

I was in many ways, looking back on it, a fairly straightforward comic book nerd at that point. I was obsessed with girls and comics. With the former I was socially graceful (I had a lot of friends who were girls, which I attribute to healthy relationships with my mom and sister) and with the latter I could escape any secret inner awkwardness the former made me feel. I was friends with a lot of girls, but not at all the debonair leading man Marc Ronczka was. I was quite the opposite, a late bloomer who watched my elementary school classmates shoot up past me in height long before the process began for me.

Junior high was hellish. Lehman-Jackson merged with Lake Noxen Elementary to form Lake Lehman Junior High. Kids from Harvey’s Lake, a small resort lake northwest of Dallas, were well-off and sophisticated. Kids from Noxen, the amalgam of trailer parks and grunt workers from the lake’s menial labor force, were an altogether different breed – a tobacco-chewing, boot-wearing group that proudly called themselves hicks. Noxen kids were not to be trifled with. And the Lake kids and Noxen kids began, in junior high, to create a weird social strata in our school, with the Lehman-Jackson kids falling squarely in between them. I began to learn about the differences that socioeconomic status can have in the politics of human relationships. The Christian kid from WVCS cried out at the lack of compassion in such behaviors. Most of junior high, for me, was a time to lay low. I spent my study hall time drawing to avoid entering into the conflicts around me.

Mrs. Glogowski

In fifth grade, I finally returned to public school, after two years of asking my parents to let me do so. I was restless and wanted a “normal” school experience. Public schooling gave me the perspective I needed to appreciate my WVCS experience. I felt a bit alien, though, coming from my self-directed education and lone classmates to a class of twenty in a grade of 105. Lehman-Jackson Elementary School was one of two elementary schools in the Lake Lehman School District. The kids at L-J came from the vast farmlands of western Luzerne County. We were a fairly homogeneous bunch, from a similar SES background ranging from rural poor to middle class kids. No one appeared to be too high in the SES bracket there. I learned what curse words were there.

I remember the early bloomer in our grade, Marc Ronczka. Marc had become quite tall in the summer between fourth and fifth grade, and he had longish hair, and his voice had prematurely lowered, and all the girls thought he was dreamy. I, on the other hand, was definitely firmly entrenched in an awkward chubby phase. I was experimenting with fashion (not a good idea for a 10-year old) and wasted many hours of my life fixated on my hair. At the time I thought my hair was fashion-forward. Looking back, it was kind of a cross between a pompadour and a waterfall. I'd post photos if I were less embarrassed.

My fifth grade teacher was a dynamite elementary school teacher with just the right blend of experience, enthusiasm, and platinum blonde hair. Marilyn Glogowski stood out, even at that young age. I remember thinking, "Man, this lady is good at teaching." I'd had plenty of good teachers before. My mom was, is and remains the finest teacher I've had. Yvonne Marshall was a family friend who'd been my vacation Bible school teacher, Sunday school teacher and teacher-mentor at WVCS. Dad was my coach in more ways than one, and Yvonne's husband Fred was also a Little League coach of mine who'd had a real impact. These people were great, but I think with Mrs. Glogowski I was finally just barely old enough to start to notice and appreciate good teaching while it was happening. Marilyn is now the Principal of Lehman-Jackson Elementary, I'm proud to say, and she would probably still recognize all of us 5th graders to this day, even as we're shaking her hand at the age of 30. That's how sharp she is.

Collections, Obsessions, Ceilings, Warmth

I was a collector as a kid. I collected baseball cards, then GI Joes, then Transformers, then Voltron, Thundercats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Writing those things makes me realize how ridiculous they are, but I was a sucker for a colorful story and the opportunity to let my imagination run amok. By nine I was beginning to leave the action figures alone and had started collecting comic books.

I apprenticed myself athletically to baseball. I played two years of soccer and felt it wasn’t for me, partly because my dad was such a huge baseball fan. When the chance came to be a part of the Back Mountain Little League, we jumped at it. Dad was so excited he volunteered to head up a team, and he became my coach. When he was a kid, Dad had been really good at baseball. After things fell apart in his home life, though, he had faded away from baseball altogether by high school. I think it was one of his few regrets.

At nine, I was old enough to be quite proud of my father. We were by no means well-off – I wore hand-me-down clothes from my brother, and we shopped for groceries as cheaply as we could. I knew we weren’t “rich,” but we were provided for and our house was big, old, and fun. We had big rooms, high ceilings, a grand old staircase and a vast scary attic that was a haven for neighborhood bats. Dad was a loving father. His family was without question the most important thing to him, and our happiness was paramount to his own. He worked a little harder than most fathers, I think, because he’d seen a dark alternative and was determined not to have it repeat itself.

Mom helped teach me to read at the age of three. By six, I was ahead of most first-graders, but after talking about it, we decided I would be better suited to not skipping a grade and I stayed with my age-assigned class in school. In retrospect, it might have been better for me to have skipped the grade. I would have been expected to behave like a first grader, which might have led to less kindergarten tomfoolery. Or it might have been worse for all I know.

Barbie (what we called my sister then) and I were Mom’s first English students. She started teaching English soon after graduating college. As she moved along in teaching seniority, Dad went through a series of promotions at work, and eventually we were doing alright, a solid middle class family. Barb (what I still call my sister) and I were voracious readers and music listeners and student visual artists. Matt and I were action figure and cartoon junkies and competitive eaters (I still eat too quickly, a leftover from racing with my brother to clean our plates the fastest). Sports was the one thing I could share with my dad that was just ours.

And I quite stunk at it. Baseball came to me easily in an intellectual sense – the rules, the rhythms, the strategy of the game were clear. The statistics and the mountains of minutiae were great fun to track and follow. Unfortunately, like a great many stat junkies and poets of the game, I could not play it to save myself. I struck out countless times in those childhood years and made more errant throws from second to first than I care to remember. Baseball – playing baseball – brought me positive experiences in the form of being humbled, gave me realistic perspectives on failure and limitations, and (on a brighter note) entry into the worlds of team unity and fair play and sportsmanship.

I knew that I liked rock ‘n roll music. – Matt and I had bonded over Beatles records and Elvis tapes as well as action figures. I was beginning to enjoy Jimi Hendrix, who my dad cautiously introduced me to. “This is the best stuff you’ve ever heard yet, Rob,” he said. He was right.

So at nine, I was a bright, imaginative kid at an eccentric, small Christian school in a rural backwater. I lived in a capacious old country house in a secluded, tree-lined nook. Down the street from our house was a beautiful old reservoir, the Huntsville dam. When I went to work with my Dad I knew he worked in an enchanted old mansion with a bunch of nice people, and that in the summer I went to sports camps and science camps and other camps there. I knew that my parents loved me, and that we were closer than most families. And I knew Matthew was the reason, and I knew that soon I would no longer be the youngest. Someday soon I was going to become Matthew’s older brother. Hearing Hendrix was like the soundtrack to the beginnings of a darker and more complex world that would soon be upon me.

A Liberal Christian Education

At seven I was in the first grade, and I attended Wyoming Valley Christian School. In kindergarten I had gotten into a few fights. I came home with a black eye one day, and the other day I sent a kid home with one. Also I had come home with some new words. One of them was “fart.” This worried my parents (my Mom moreso than my Dad) so I was off to Christian school to learn how to behave like a proper Christian boy.

WVCS was a unique school experience. There were two other kids in my grade. By nine, I was acculturated to the Christian ethos of WVCS. I’d memorized scads of Bible verses and had long and candid talks with my teachers about Jesus and his revolutionary idea of a love-centered view of the world. My faith was strong, and quite well-educated for that young age. I knew the histories of the travels of the tribes of Israel, I knew the geography of the Holy Land, I knew the stories and the messages and the meanings. But this school was also unique in the way it operated as a Christian academy in that Christ’s teachings were of utmost imperative. My teachers were open-minded, loving people. They never prescribed the ideas of the Bible to us. We talked about parables and lessons and discussed as a class what we all thought. We were encouraged to see the Bible’s message as broad, and open to question, scholarship and interpretation. I loved it, because it felt true to me, and not dogmatic. Even at nine, I had a tendency to be a bit repulsed by narrow dogma. I lacked the perspective to realize how lucky I was to be in a Christian school that did not inundate me with dogma, however. I took it for granted that this open-minded, compassionate approach was in fact what Christianity was all about.

We are Family

Matthew James Campbell’s impending arrival took my mother out of college. She was a very bright student, and quite popular at State College Area High School, a young woman who was nice to everyone and had more friends than she probably knew she had. Dad described himself as “a bit of a hoodlum.” He’d gotten into a bit of trouble, but foster family life had taken that wild streak out of him. Mom’s 45 records include Jan and Dean and Pat Boone, while Dad had Iron Butterfly and Jimi Hendrix. If Matthew’s appearance took my mom out of school, his condition (first diagnosed nearly two years later) kept her out of it. By the time they knew what they had on their hands with Matt, Mom was pregnant with my sister. Pregnant with another child, she listened to the doctor drolly inform her that Matthew would “never read, never be able to dress himself, never tie his shoes,” and by the way did she want to consider termination of the impending pregnancy? In tears, she emphatically told him no.

Barbara Ellen Campbell was born in 1975. By 1978, it was clear she had none of the same condition Matthew struggled with. Somewhat by surprise, somewhat by plan, I was conceived and born in April of 1979. I was something of a good luck charm for my father. A lifelong Pittsburgh sports fan, the “Steel Curtain” Steelers won the Super Bowl for the fourth time and the “We are Family” Pirates won the World Series the year I was born. By the time I arrived, Mom had successfully officiated a reconciliation between my dad and his father. James Howard Campbell, my grandfather, passed away when I was 2. I don't remember him, but he apparently got a kick out of me. In the years before he died, my grandfather turned his life around through AA and became heavily involved in counseling other alcoholics. Hundreds of people showed up at his funeral that no one in the family knew - they were his friends from AA.

I am Robert Burke Campbell. My first name is an homage to my Uncle Rob and my mother’s Uncle Bobby. Uncle Bobby was also a sensitive soul, artistic and soft-spoken. He was my grandmother’s only brother. She had a good many half-siblings, but she and Bobby were the youngest, and the son and daughter of her father’s new wife. As this was uncommon in America in those days, those siblings were never so close with each other as they were with their natural full siblings. Lydia Hueston, my grandmother, was closest to Robert, her natural brother. Tragically, Uncle Bobby died young in an automobile accident. The Huestons were full-blooded English people, and in spite of her natural reserve, I could see the hurt and love in my grandmother’s smiling English eyes every time she spoke of him. My middle name, Burke, comes from my mother’s father. Eugene Burke Herman was the son of Burke Herman. Their family was German through and through. Gene and brother Charlie served proudly as Americans in World War II, though. My middle name is also a nod to my uncle’s name, which is itself a nod to Robert Burns, the famous Scottish poet quite popular with Scots immigrant families like the Frizzells and Campbells. Lastly, my dad insists I am partly named for Roberto Clemente, the Puerto Rican Pirates rightfielder and posthumous Hall of Famer. Clemente pioneered the idea of the famous athlete as humanitarian. He died in the 1970s in an airplane crash while taking supplies to Nicarauguan earthquake victims.

I knew all of these stories intimately by the age of nine. We were a caring and sharing family. My mom was a talker and a nurturer. She still is. When I was seven, she finished her Bachelor’s in English at Wilkes University. At the graduation ceremony it was very hot, and the sun melted paint on the bleachers, and I got grey paint on my favorite navy dress pants. But I was proud of my Mom more than I was concerned about the pants.

The Frizzell Legacy

My parents married quite young. There’s a reason, and there’s a story.

My father’s mother (my grandmother Barbara Frizzell Campbell) hung herself when my father was 12. She was, so near as I can know, a sensitive Scot from a family of proud, sensitive, literary, artistic Scots. John Henry Frizzell, her father, founded the Speech department at Penn State and was for many years the University chaplain as well. His “prayer of the day” is still featured in the local State College paper, the Centre Daily Times. Barbara, his daughter, would in all likelihood have been given ample chances at intervention in today’s world to deal with and treat the depression or otherwise undiagnosed mental disorder which caused her the internal strife that led to her fateful and tragic decision. Alas, this was the 1960s, and in America in that time the treatments available to such sufferers as her were in many ways in their infancy of heading in the right direction.

Barbara was a bit of Penn State royalty in a town that to this day has the university as its core, its spine, its blood, its heart, and its life. She married James Howard Campbell, not her social equal in State College by any measure, but a fellow Scots Irish American nonetheless, so the families called it a match. She bore him three children, Robert Burns, James Fraser and Marjorie. When she died Rob was 16, Jim was 12 and Margie was 7.

James Howard Campbell, my grandfather, served his country in the Navy. His wife’s death dealt him quite a blow. He turned to drink, remarried too soon, and watched his family dissolve as young Rob argued with his stepmother and then was kicked out of the house by her. Jim and Margie were quietly taken in by friends of the family, neighbors who wanted to help. They became foster kids. Their dad continued drinking.

Rob, Jim and Margie were all forced to grow up sooner than most. They all finished college, though, and today my dad and namesake uncle are retired career Penn Staters enjoying the fruits of a dependable state retirement system that is one reward for their years of service to the commonwealth’s largest educational entity.

Dad met Mom, Ellen Lynne Herman, while they washed dishes in the HUB (Hetzel Union Building) eatery kitchen. He hadn’t had a family of his own for nearly ten years, and his heart ached for it. They married when he was 21 and she 19. One month later, they were pregnant.

Third Grade Reflection

I turn back from the age of nine.

I am in third grade, and I look back on a childhood I know I am blessed to have had. When I was two years old, my parents moved from York, Pennsylvania (where I was born) to a rural pocket of Pennsylvania called simply “The Back Mountain.” My memories begin here. The Back Mountain was a rural enclave, a hidey hole of Americana that featured only one real town to speak of, Dallas, Pennsylvania. It lay on the backside of a small Pocono mountain to the west of the dying twin coal cities of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The Back Mountain proper lay west of Wilkes-Barre, southwest of Scranton. It was here, at least a twenty-five minute drive from center city Wilkes-Barre, that Penn State has what it calls its Wilkes-Barre campus. It lies on an old family mansion and grounds that were donated to the university. It is lovely ground, a healthy walk from end to end over rolling green meadows, dotted with stonelaid houses from the 1700s. My father began his career with Penn State at its York campus, working in the then-brand-new field of Continuing Education. Wilkes-Barre had what was considered the branch campus system’s least productive CE Program in the Penn State campus system, which by then had grown to quite an impressive array of statewide offerings, nearly all within an easy commute of most of Pennsylvania’s residents. My father, a confident young area rep for York at the time, was offered Wilkes-Barre’s Director of CE position. “Don’t go there, Jim, that whole northeastern part of the state is a hole,” people told him. My dad saw the gorgeous old manse of the campus, and the rock bottom housing market of the quaint Back Mountain country hideaway, and he decided to go for it.

I grew up living in a historic home. There were dozens of them in the rural boroughs of Huntsville, south of Dallas, where we lived. The good country folk living there didn’t really embrace the whole civic unity thing so much back then (the early 1980s), so no one had yet organized a group to propose consideration for historic designations, although there was talk among old church friends at the grocery stores that someone was planning to do so someday soon.

Our house dated back to the American Revolution era. It was a bluish grey, with white trim and black window shutters. Trees sprawled all over our property’s edge, obscuring the house somewhat from the roadside view. A large backyard opened up behind the house, a yard ringed with near-century-old pine trees. The pine trees stretched high, almost thirty feet in some places, and their branches grew fat and thick towards the lower half of the tree, which closed off our back yard from view. A thin trail at the back of the yard led up a steep, short hill into the woods behind our house. In that woods there were trails, but they were hard to find and harder still to keep. As a child I got lost in that woods, turned around with no sense of where I had come from or where I was going, more times than I’d care to count. And nearly every time I got scared. We’d seen our share of beautiful deer in our yard, but we’d also seen bears, and hunters aplenty. The housewives liked to tell quiet stories about children who’d gotten lost in the woods and been shot by hunters. Like the Grimm Brothers ' had before them, those scary stories kept the kids out of the woods for the most part, unless they too were apprentice hunters, or Boy Scouts, or teenagers up to no good.

The week we moved in I was two years old. I don’t remember it. But I mention it because our house ran along a thin country road. Our mail was delivered to RR 4 Box 195, or “Rural route 4.” Country folk are often proud of their cars and like to test their prowess on the less-populated roads of the country. It wasn’t unusual to occasionally see an old Camaro rip down the hill in front of our house and tear around the corner at 55 miles an hour or more. The limit on that road was 25. The week we moved in my older brother Matthew, who was nine, was playing out by the road and was hurt. A drainage ditch ran next to the road, and Matthew fell into it. He hurt his head fairly badly, and had no idea what had happened.

When I was nine, I never played down by that road. I’d heard that story about Matthew more times than I had cared to hear it, and I was determined to be more responsible with myself. In fairness to my brother, Matthew is mentally retarded. His condition is nameless. He does not have Downs Syndrome or autism. His retardation, though, has been a definitive component of my identity my whole life, as long as I can remember. The theatre I discovered along the way, but Matthew I have always had.

The Inconceivable Nature of Nature

Friends on Television Part 1

My roommate from PSU and one of my best friends, Bob McClure, starring in this classic Staples ad:

Weather the Weather

Whether the weather be cold
or whether the weather be hot
We'll be together whatever the weather
Whether we like it or not.

Whether the weather be hot
or whether the weather be cold
We'll be together whatever the weather
Whether we're young or old.

An Incredible Story... Right in our Backyard

http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2009/10/harrisburg-area_nurses_aide_re.html

Harrisburg-area nurse's aide to be crowned a king in Uganda

"During the nine years that Mumbere made his living in Harrisburg — bathing and dressing the sick and elderly, helping them eat, pushing their wheelchairs — he kept his background a secret."

Get Used to It

My Mom taught English at Lake Lehman High School for a while back in the 80s and early 90s, before we moved to State College. She used to regularly plan trips to New York City to see museums and Broadway shows. I was lucky enough to get to tag along on a number of those trips. Because of her, I saw / was introduced to Into the Woods (with Bernadette Peters), Sweeney Todd, Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, The Heidi Chronicles (with David Hyde Pierce, pre-Frasier) and more. I went to the Met and the MoMA. I got to do all of these things before I was 13. That was so lucky!

The one story I tell a lot from those trips involves one of the few Lehman grads who became famous.

Some of the others are Ricky and Rocky Bonomo, All-American wrestlers. Another local legend is Zap from American Gladiators. Zap had a gym in Dallas (called "The Gym"), and one time when my Mom was on the treadmill there, some meathead dude was lifting and groaning loudly. A six-months-pregnant Zap stormed out of her office, grabbed his barbells and proceeded to aggressively, yet quietly bang out a 10-rep set. She handed them back and loudly said, "I can do that and I'm six months pregnant! You don't need to make that much noise!"

The Back Mountain's less testosterone-fueled celebrity is Jay McCarroll, familiar to followers of Project Runway as the winner of Season One. Jay and my sister Barbara were good buddies in high school, as they were two of the only artsy-fartsy folks in their class. Jay, for the record, is really quite true to himself as a celebrity persona. He was every bit as outlandish, creative and hilarious in high school. I can vouch from being a witness.

On one of our New York trips, our bus drove past a group of gay protesters who'd been excluded from performing in the Saint Patrick's Day parade (anyone remember that old chestnut from newsreels gone by?). Jay, upon seeing the picket signs, lept to the side of the bus and began shouting at the top of his lungs, "We're queer! We're here! We're Irish! Get used to it!" over and over and over again.

This story would be less remarkable if not for the following factor. Jay was on a bus with fellow students from Lehman. An extremely rural location, the Back Mountain was (I don't know if it still is, really, but it was) the kind of place where, if one wasn't dressed for a day of hunting, construction work or farming, one felt a bit ostracized. It wasn't so much that people worked actively to make one feel left out (people there were always very nice, I thought), it just happened naturally. Needless to say, Lehman (like pretty much 99.9% of rural America) wasn't the most gay-friendly place.

The fallout from Jay's outburst? Everyone laughed good-naturedly. A few jockish dudes sitting behind him threw him the ol' high five. No one was the least bit bothered. It was just Jay being Jay.

Maybe that's how America needs to deal with her (other people's words, not mine) "homosexual crisis." Maybe she just needs to accept all the diverse peoples within her borders, make them all one of the gang, high five them after they do something funny, and move on.