I either don’t remember or I don’t care. Not remembering can be forgiven, not being remembered cannot be. Not caring can be freeing, but it can also be unforgiving.
I found my middle and high school yearbooks in my Mother’s closet stacked up six high on a tower of old VHS tapes I had collected from age five to age eighteen. At one point, there were easily two hundred videocassettes in there, including all the old clamshell Disney classics (though I've opened them all, so I remain poor). On the cover of the seventh grade yearbook is a picture of large childrens’ alphabet blocks spelling out “P-U-T-T-I-N-G I-T T-O-G-E-T-H-E-R.” Only at a performing arts high school would a yearbook theme have been taken from a Stephen Sondheim lyric. Throughout what we used to call an “annual” are bits and pieces of the song that a contemporary artist sings in the second act of Sunday in the Park with George.
“Bit by bit,/Putting it together.../Piece by piece-- /Only way to make a work of art./Every moment makes a contribution,/Every little detail plays a part./Having just a vision’s no solution,/Everything depends on execution:/Putting it together--/That’s what counts!”
I can remember the first time I heard a song by Sondheim. My only experience of musicals had been Easter/Christmas plays at Church and maybe the worst of Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber. At fourteen, I thought Sondheim’s music sounded like the amplification of a thousand breaking down Erector Sets harmonized with a chorale keening in unison. By freshman year of college, Sondheim was my Shakespeare. Whenever I need bolstering or bracing, I go to a Sondheim lyric instead of an Elizabethan soliloquy.
I took one look at the yearbook picture by my name. That confident little turd at eleven who thought he was brilliant and destined for greatness. I closed it quickly resolving to re-shelf it. But, it had given me an idea. Sunday was in my video collection.
It was horrifying how terrible the picture quality was. It’s hard to believe we ever watched pan-and-scan, full screen movies that had been widescreen Cinemascope masterpieces on a VCR. After an FBI/Interpol warning and some preliminary credits, the stage of the Edwin Booth Theatre on Broadway goes dark. The darkness right before a play begins is a darkness that sets your emotions to “Percolate.”
The lights fade up on a young Mandy Patkinin playing Georges Seurat, the painter of Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte. The audience applauds. Good Lord, what do you have to do to get applause before you’ve even done anything? I never made an audience do that when I was an actor.
The opening line of the play, written by librettist James Lapine, describes a work of art at the moment of its inception. “White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge: bring order to the whole. Through design. Composition. Balance. Light. And harmony.” I knew somehow the coincidence of taking a look at that yearbook and hearing these words was a calling of some kind. The idea that I should go back and put down a little of what I can remember now before it goes the way of so many other memories.
In my twelfth grade yearbook from the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA), there is a section predicting seniors' futures. Under my name, it says all you might think you need to know about me at that age. “Ryan writes an autobiographical play about the pains of being Ryan C. Tittle. He directs, designs, stages and stars in the…” As funny as the joke might have been, the computer formatting was apparently off because the yearbook editor's dig at me ends there, an eye-sore in what otherwise is a very good annual indeed.
I don’t blame her for the joke-- the yearbook editor and I were not friends. That being said, the joke says quite a few things in such few words. I’m not sure anyone knew I seriously entertained the idea of writing and directing an autobiographical play about my experience at ASFA for my senior project. At first, the thing you think is “What arrogance!” and arrogant I certainly was, but the idea that I had been at ASFA in a prime period of time where I witnessed something quite remarkable and I desired to express this even as I was about to leave...If I had written it, it would have been more about the Theatre Arts department than my own story.
Then, there’s the crack about the “pains.” I did experience terrible pain occasionally in high school, but I magnified it twice as large as anything should have been. I had the emotions of one of le piccole donne di Puccini either while I was onstage, in life, or on the page.
Then, there’s the C. Yes, I wish I had never requested it on the first theatre program printed with my name. Pretentious to most, a middle initial wasn’t as bad as having the last name Tittle.
The final cut (“directs, designs”) is about my desire at the time to be multifaceted in my proposed career. I couldn’t design a rectangle. I couldn’t direct a flea circus. But, I did have this dream to beat Eugene O’Neill and win four Pulitzer Prizes while alive and also be an actor of my generation and the author of books and a singer and percussionist and a...
The broken journey that lead me here will hopefully reverberate in the telling and, in this way, an interaction will take place across chasms of time, memory, and anything else that separates us.
When you first begin to look back, you see film loops of the black-and-white past, even if yours were in color. The detritus of your mind is being sifted quickly like sand particles tipping their hats to the gold in the pan on their way down into nothingness.
No, the word film is wrong. This was the VHS era. So, perhaps the same image-- that of a group of six of us in seventh grade who made it all the way to graduation without killing each other-- is beginning to fade and wrinkle. “Tracking” is needed badly as the magnetic distortion ripples and twists the faces into signposts that point in multiple other directions.
Arrive at the front glass door, you look up and you thought you saw three boats sailing into the sky. But, no-- that would come later. Pull the door, heavy with the weight of authority, and arrive in a lobby of a grey, marble tower. What is this? The brightly colored air-vents in the ceiling were showing. Did they simply not finish and decided it would be très chic to paint the vents purple and red and yellow to, I don't know, inspire these crazy children?
Pass Ms. Lillian at the reception desk. She always has a smile with one gold tooth and one black one holding each other like ivy clinging to the…
What am I doing? This is not the Ivy League. It’s seventh grade at the school built for the nerds who would have been beaten up any place else.
Drum roll.
Rumbling, rattling, cheap metal clanging against the metallic rails leading to the lobby, thundering down the stairwell (perfect for clandestine liaisons between rehearsals). More metal from the chains holding wallets, outrageous costume jewelry, and crescent wrenches in their pants pockets badly needing replaced. The double-doors from the lobby open and a ragged group straight out of The Warriors was bringing the Theatre department a little slice of Heaven.
The advanced students had moved the old lockers from the academic hallway to the Theatre hallway. We would now have personal lockers of our own. We didn’t have to fool with dragging those scoliosis-inducing textbooks everywhere we went. Theatre people know how to hunt and how to get the job done. These techies had given us our own sanctum of safe-deposit boxes far from administrators’ eyes. We had just been made Kings and Queens of another junkyard raided by Drama terrorists. The hall might as well have been a blank muslin canvas stretched over a flat. We hadn’t been in this building long and we had to build it together. Best of all, this set of lockers was shaped like a giant, bland, beige “m” giving two hideaway spots where we could curl up and do homework, run lines, etc. Eventually Mr. Baines had us build shelves in the place of the cubby-holes. Too bad. I always had a fondness for them. While I would wait on my brother to pick me up from school in his terrifying, goose turd-green ‘71 Chevrolet pickup, I would stay in my cubby and get to watch Yvette Royal, a freshman ballet dancer, walk down the Theatre hall toward the cafeteria and the exit. Just to see her walk down the hall was worth the price of matriculation.
When I was eleven, I was already so backwards in my ways (a drama kid from a rural Southern county) that I thought the ultimate cool personified on television was David Hyde Pierce as Niles Crane, the brother of psychiatrist Dr. Frasier Crane on the Cheers spin-off Frasier. I don’t know what it was. Perhaps I was a withering kid with too much pent-up sexuality bursting through I thought it could come across as charming if I took on his style of dress, his mannerisms. I was already studying to play Restoration comedy-of-manners and I didn’t know it.
One day, Yvette came down the hall (the Theatre and ballet dressing rooms were connected giving her easy access closer to the exit doors). Well, I thought, I’m going to get up the nerve to speak to her if it’s the last thing I would in a month of Sundays.
The only problem with this is I had no idea how wimpish the character of Niles really was. I thought he was stylish, learned, and skinny and that seemed about as sexy as anything else I knew about. I was still at this point sneaking down to the den and watching the squiggly channel seventy-six. I knew it all excited me, but I had no idea what, you know, to do about it. Dad and I never had the talk-- or talked much about anything at that point. I was told about the birds and the bees by a redneck at the lake who used Batman and Catwoman action figures for visual aids.
I have no idea what I said to Yvette when I popped out from my cubby-hole in a buttoned-down shirt, slacks, wearing my school name-tag on my shirt pocket, and pretending to knock my head against the bottom of the arched lockers. I guess I had worked out in my head some sort of comedy routine where I would do the charmingly befuddled Hugh Grant character and walk away with Julia Roberts. What did I expect? Was she going to laugh and I was going to reveal I was just pretending? Was she going to come up and check on me? I don’t know.
By this point (it was December), Yvette had probably seen me out of the corner of her eye trying to sneak a peek at her every day when she would leave. Exhausted, she sighed a deflating sigh as I pretended to recover from the blow of the lockers on my head.
I looked down the corridor and watched her walk away for the fiftieth time or whatever it was. Because she was coming from showering (if I had only really thought about that at the time!), she always had a haggard, lackadaisical stroll and the attitude she exuded was like Sheryl Crow kicking dust down a ghost town if she were given the body of one of Degas’ jeune filles en fleur. She, on the way to whatever life she had, I swung my black Jansen backpack over both shoulders and walked the awful dead-man-walking funeral march I had to do when I walked toward that God-awful, embarrassing truck.
I was a speck on Yvette’s radar. She looked like all of us performing arts kids. Tired, frazzled, intense, on the way toward what she hoped would be a brilliant career. After all, we were there because we wanted to be famous. Who needed time for a personal life when you’ve got a three-act leviathan of a play to rehearse?
Here, on the backside of thirty, I get so angry thinking about what in hell I was doing playing a spastic slapstick routine in the middle of the hallway that I want to erase the tape and emerge from the lockers with my own personality being rent away and bursting forth from the shackles like John Cena and emerge as Matt Damon or Robert Redford or, Hell, anyone else! Anyone but me would’ve had played it so cool. I look at him and I ask why did you pick being in plays instead of being with girls? What’s wrong with you?
If the dust doesn’t sweep us off a ravine, we might try to come to what, in fact, really was wrong with me. But, that load of dust-- falling from gargantuan theatre curtains to the stardust in my eyes to the simply morose task of crawling backwards in time, sliding over every regret again. This is why I the idea of having children worries me so. I do not want to live teenagehood again, even vicariously. Whatever progeny would result would be as neurotic as I was then and am now. I just don't think I could do that to another person.
Mr. McMurtry, the school’s only master of discipline, peeked in the hallway, flicked the lights on-and-off twice, and I waved, acknowledging. A hopeless romantic (and a nut) who didn’t even realize David Hyde Pierce was gay and, therefore, making my plan, at the very least, counterproductive.
My brother James was in the truck casually spitting tobacco juice in an empty soda bottle. This added to the feeling that I came from hillbilly stock but, in point of fact, my family was fairly normal really. It just seemed like I was a budding Kenneth Branagh starring in an episode of Hee-Haw.
I opened the door and hopped in. Where was I going to go but home?
Comments