ONSTAGE, 2

The next onstage venue was very different than the first, even though both were churches. The Lakeside Community Church, so modest it didn't even have a denominational connection, stood as the sole site of public religion in the small village of Lakeside, New Jersey. It served perhaps fifty middle-of-the-road, middle-class Protestants. Lakeside Catholics took the bus into Trenton to one of their many splendid, mysterious edifices; our few Episcopalians car-pooled south to a handsome stone building settled on the green rim of the country club. Lakeside Church was definitely on a bottom rung of the architectural ladder.

Unlike the Myrtle Street Methodist Church, the small frame building had no organ, no stained glass windows nor any carpet to its warped floors. It didn't even have a minister. Periodically, a Protestant churchman, superintendent of a distant Sunday School, visited us to hand out certificates of attendance and little pocket-sized New Testaments to faithful kids. If ever a man fit his name, that man was Clarence J. Fogg: tall, white-haired with a weary mustache, a gray double-breasted suit and all the personality of a soda cracker. The real leader of the LCC was George Goldy, affectionately tagged "Uncle George" --chubby, relaxed, fond of children, and unimpressed with himself. He was also unpaid and, to my knowledge, had no official title. He was simply the man in charge.

Something else that LCC didn't have--and the reason I'm in this story at all--was a sound system. (Of course it didn't have air conditioning, but in 1945 no place else did either, not even huge department stores or dazzling movie theaters.) Our country-mouse church lacked a microphone. Well, most of the time that didn't matter. Clarence J. Fogg didn't need a mike for his occasional few moments before us, and Uncle George's strong, cheerful voice carried well. His wife and her sister occasionally sang duets as part of the service; their ardent, tremolo renditions of "I Come to the Garden Alone" needed no amplification.

But LCC did have a stage, complete with heavy, musty curtains that set my asthmatic mother wheezing. And about twice a year, the congregation put on "pageants," even hauling up a painted canvas backdrop (showing a generic desert scene) from the basement. These pageants were, of course, just short tableaux of the Christmas and Easter stories, taken from scripture. The action was mostly pantomimed, with only one significant speaking part in each. But who would perform that part?

Protestant boys generally flew the ecclesiastical coop as soon as puberty reared its head, so to speak. (Jewish boys had the big event of bar mitzvah to hang around for; Catholics could audition to be altar boys, and, as I later found out, Mormon boys had the high drama of the priesthood and missions to anticipate.) But we had no older boys for the key role. The pre-puberty LCC boys muttered into their narrow little chests and would not project. Apparently, there was only one child who could boom out the message clearly and confidently over the splintery pews to the waiting faithful. She was just ten and a girl, but she was definitely audible.

Thus it came to pass that, standing halfway up a stepladder, in a flimsy unisex muslin robe that didn't quite cover my scabbed knees, I looked at the silent shepherds below me in their fathers' trailing bathrobes, and assured them: "Fear not, for I bring you good tidings of great joy." Three months later, when early spring had come to Lakeside, I stood on a box beside the hokiest stage boulder you've ever seen. Towards me shuffled Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James. While they made a good job of peering around in puzzlement, I gazed out the open church doors, across the road to the O'Hagen's front porch, where Mr. O'Hagen sat taking his Sunday ease in work pants and an undershirt.

Then I looked sternly at my three Sunday School classmates and proclaimed unto them, "Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen."

Across the road, the screen door banged shut behind Burtis O'Hagen.

ONSTAGE

Aesthetically, my first onstage appearance was certainly the best of my life so far. Four years old, wearing a buttercup yellow dotted-swiss dress handmade by Nanny, sporting white shoes, golden hair hanging in fat curls set off by a bow the size of a kitten--smiles broke out in every pew in the Myrtle Street Methodist Church at the sight.

It was all downhill from there.

The imposing, staid church was at least as handsomely adorned as I was, with its powerful pipe organ on one side of the plaform and its partner opposite, a grand piano gleaming like a dream of black licorice. Eight huge stained glass windows preached silent sermons from the walls.

As for my sermon, I haven't a clue why I was up there alone before the long-suffering Methodists. The only other known witness (my brother Gerry, age 8) was
otherwise occupied, pulling faces at Mrs. Pfaff, who sat hunched on the organ bench, her plain looks and poor, deformed spine making her a target for cruel sinners like Gerry. I've never even bothered to ask him what I was doing onstage.

In any case, in the middle of my public debut, whatever the heck it was about, I dropped the shiny penny I had been given to put in the collection plate later in the service. I looked at the audience and said loudly, "You'll hafta wait a minute." Then I got down on all fours, fanny to the front, displaying the ruffled panties Nanny had made to match the yellow dress. Although Mother had surely supervised my preparation for the performance, Dad was definitely and always in charge of family finances, and I understood that finding the penny was Priority Number One.

After I located it and again faced the congregation, the glare from Mother's cold blue eyes would have stopped any engine the DL&W Railroad could mount. (Gramps was an engineer on the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Wyoming, a lovely poem of a name, much more fun to say than its rival, the Erie.) Looking at Mother's livid face, I got the idea that I would be safer on the stage than back in our pew.

Perhaps that was my innoculation against stage fright. If so, it apparently worked.

I've been on a book-buying binge lately (doing my best to buy only used books--small nod towards Living Green). Several wonderful books have turned up. But none has got me going as much as Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog.

Before you decide you don't want to hear one more word from me about DOGS (and who could blame you?), I hasten to give the subtitle: "The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences." Worse than dog-talk, I hear you moan. Well, to quote the lyrics of a steamy, under-appreciated Bernadette Peters song, "You'd Be Surprised."

(So far, I've just browsed Barking Dog , by Kitty Burns Florey, but already plucked a footnote that's worth the entire price of the book. Florey, writing about Marcel Proust's major work, Time Recaptured, tosses in this delicious tidbit: In a Monty Python skit titled "All-England Summarize Proust Competition," each contestant endeavored to present a brief summary of Proust's massive work, "once in a swimsuit and once in evening dress." )

Florey fills her small book with sentences by all sorts of famous writers, including the Python crazies, Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, Gertrude Stein, Faulkner, and most of all, with her own loving remembrances of the little nun who taught her to diagram them. The pure pleasure of the book reassures me once more of the wisdom of John Ciardi's assertion: "Anything significantly looked at is significant."

I have no memory of diagramming before college. We were probably exposed to it, just as (my former classmates swear) we were exposed to Walt Disney movies about menstruation. But I was so deeply into repression in my teen years it's a wonder I ever remembered the way to school day after day. In any case, my mentor into the sexy mysteries of diagramming was Mrs. Alsie Shulman at the University of Arizona.

When you first encountered Mrs. Shulman, she struck you as a strayed grandmother,out out of place on the palm-studded campus of the UA, then considered a playboy school, proud possessor of a polo team right up until last Tuesday. But if you misjudged Alsie Shulman, the joke was on you: before long, you were the one feeling weary and wobbly and perhaps in need of a walker.

Mrs. Shulman on first encounter seemed so ordinary as to be a caricature. Medium height, medium weight, formless dress, no-nonsense shoes, dark hair turning grey and pulled back in a severe bun. And always, always, winter or summer, a loose grey cardigan. It occurs to me now that perhaps, like so many Arizona faculty, she was an Eastern transplant come West for relief from asthma. The UA in the Fifties had a roster of brilliant professors who,in the normal course of things, would not have considered a position there for all the pipe tobacco in Dixie, but who had decided that breathing trumped prestige and the richer intellectual life of Ivy-dom.

Mrs. Shulman had one rather disconcerting physical trait. Her skin seemed about a size too large for her body. When she was considering your diagramming handiwork on the blackboard, she would grasp her jaws in a large, knobby hand, gather up many folds of flesh, and stare balefully. If it took her a while to figure out what on earth you had done to the sentence in question, she might place a palm on either side of her face and push all the loose skin up towards her dark, pessimistic eyes while she mulled. In those days, no one knew a Shar-Pei from a shampoo, or we might have delivered ourselves of a witless nickname.

The course she taught was as unadorned as her appearance. We diagrammed sentences. Period. No cartoons to aid our memories, no clever quips (I never saw the woman smile), no competing teams, no slides, even of the major types of sentences. As a matter of fact, no books of instruction or theory. We had three dittoed sheets listing the sentence options (Type I, Type II, etc.) And we had a small paperbound novel, The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. Henry James! We began on page 1 and diagrammed every sentence in the book, as far as we, the class, could go in a semester, classes meeting three times a week.

We began drawing our diagrams on standard 8 1/2 x 11 plain typing paper. Soon we turned the paper sideways. Next we taped two sheets together. Finally four. (You do remember how long James' sentences are, yes?) One day, rummaging in my father's tool shed, I found discarded partial rolls of wallpaper, leftover from one of his rare fix-up projects. I was the envy of the diagramming class when I showed up on Monday with my homework stretching out comfortably on the back of a long scroll of Sears Flocked Floral Fantasy.

One of James' sentences, I recall, was 234 words long. (I counted, out of sheer disbelief.) And each word had to be corraled, branded (identified as to part of speech), herded into its appropriate stall on the right kind of line (right-angle, slanting, dotted, raised on a pedestal). Moreover, I had to be ready to explain clearly every move I'd made. If I could not, bam! "Fuzzy thinking, Miss Bell! Fuzzy thinking!" I hear her voice now, fifty years later. (This was before university legal counsel, rigid with anxiety about lawsuits, outlawed slander of students. Of course, coaches were always exempt from such rulings. I must ask Nancy why.)

On we went through the semester, green cowhands doggedly trying to lasso the great snorting, long-horned bulls of James' sentences. No matter how many we finally tied down, there were always more roaring through the chute. On the last day of class, with the final exam yet to come, the boy sitting behind me said, "I am praying for a D in this class." Greg was a PE major, minoring in English so that, in theory, he could teach high school seniors Beowulf in his spare moments away from the ball teams. All English majors and minors were required to take English grammar, which meant Mrs. Shulman's course. In the Fifties, professors gave D's and E's, believe it or not. But D was a passing grade.

Then Greg said, "Here's the kicker, though: even if I get a D, I know this is the best class I've ever taken in my life."

Me too.

Winston Churchill attributed his skill with the language to the fact that he had failed Latin and was required to take extra English courses instead. He had ended up, he claimed, with the English sentence in his blood and bones. Under Mrs. Shulman's skeptical brown eye, I had writhed and wrestled and winced, erased and reread, examined and explored the English sentence as written by one of the most exact if not the juiciest of American writers. I had learned that fuzzy thinking was a disgrace. I never attained the level of a Churchill, for sure. But I think that diagramming helped me read him with ease and pleasure. Here's what Florey says in her conclusion: "I think the important thing was not what we learned from diagramming in Sister Bernadette's class, but simply the fun we had doing it. Diagramming made language seem friendly, like a dog who doesn't bark, but, instead, trots over to greet you, wagging its tail." I'd go one step further: diagramming helped me put a leash on the dog and go exploring the world with it.

TAKING PEN IN HAND, Act II

Third grade was WAY better than second. First, we moved to a house with plumbing.
Second, we lived three skips and a jump from a very nice lake--small, but with a sandy beach and a cafe of sorts that offered pop and juke box music for a nickel each. And third, Mrs. Drugan, the 3rd grade teacher, apparently told my parents that despite poor-to-rotten penmanship, I had considerably more brains than they had assumed.

(There was a downside to that information: my parents, married weeks before the Crash ushered in the Depression, feared unpaid bills above all else, but second to debt, they feared the specter of a Proud Child. They routed out any whiff of Pride as though it were ringworm. The neighborhood boys, the Degnans, shoplifted, broke windows, tormented smaller kids, and smoked by age ten--all laughed at as boyish pranks. But brilliant Chester Hess, who as an adult worked on the Manhattan Project, was considered Proud, and never a smile went his way. Mrs. Drugan's assessment put my parents on red alert.)

Mrs. Drugan never favored me, of course; in my experience, if a teacher ever did favor a student, it would be a pretty little girl whose dresses and fingernails stayed clean, whose Shirley Temple ringlets remained calm, and who did not TALK ALL THE TIME. On my report cards, Mrs. D. reported only that my tongue "ran away with me" and that the below-the-line loops on my "y's" were sloppy. Otherwise,I was "c-o-n-s-c-i-e-n-t-i-o-u-s." I looked the word up, learned to spell it, and apparently took it as a datum of birth, like blood type. I was in my thirties before I ever found out that Mrs. Drugan had hazarded an opinion on brains: my parents certainly were not about to say any such thing in my hearing.

Mother spent some evenings thereafter overseeing my penmanship, with special attention to crisp, sharp "y's". You could have used my "y's" for letter-openers after that. And from third grade on, I had something almost as permanent as a tattoo.

I don't remember the advent of fountain pens for kids, but I know we didn't use dip pens after second grade. Mother had a lady-sized white fountain pen, designed to look like mother-of-pearl but actually sister-of-plastic. My older brother Dave got a handsome Shaeffer pen upon entering high school. And somewhere along the line, I received the first of many fountain pens. Which always, always leaked a little. The result was an slight, permanent indentation, faintly blue despite scrubbing with Lava soap, at the first knuckle of my middle finger.

My father, who had a decent, if somewhat flamboyant, handwriting himself, would occasionally give me a mini-lecture on penmanship. It consisted of the words, "Relax the hand! Relax the hand!" accompanied by loose, floppy motions of his hand, then the command, "Practice!" as he walked away. His own hand was perfectly relaxed, since he hardly ever wrote anything except receipts in pencil in his order book at Montogomery Ward, and never used a pen from one year to the next. Mother paid the bills, signed our report cards, scribbled notes to the milk man, and wrote Christmas and birthday cards. I believe that in that era, penmanship (theory aside) was considered a feminine art, along with tatting and playing the autoharp.

But my hand did not relax. I clung tightly to pen or pencil as to the surviving slab of a life-raft, clutched it and bore down. I broke pencil points, splayed the tips of pens, gouged paper, and of course, splattered ink everywhere. The pens probably leaked because I cracked their barrels in my grip. I was like a miner muscling with pick and shovel: I knew there was treasure in words--there was gold in the stories my father had told me, in the words of the books I was finally learning to read, and somehow, maybe there could be gold in the words one wrote on paper. But at age eight, there was not one single glitter in evidence of that hope in my grubby, blotted papers. So how come I owned more pens than the school principal?

A VOICE LIKE NO OTHER

NPR has a regular segment called "Vocal Impressions," in which listeners are invited to describe specific famous voices. Most recently, subjects included Eartha Kitt, Joni Mitchell, and Mike Tyson. One reader said," Eartha Kitt sounds like a panther wearing a leopard coat in the back seat of a Jaguar." Joni Mitchell's voice made another reader think of "a radiant kite with no one holding the string." And Mike Tyson brought to another mind, "A cranky kid on his first day with braces."

When my friend Nancy and I first met online a dozen years ago, we bonded over favorite movie stars, particularly lesser-known character actors from the 40's and 50's. We especially shared keen pleasure in certain distinctive speaking voices, of actors and non-actors.

Here are a few "vocal impressions" (unless NPR has copyrighted that phrase) of some of our much-loved Great Voices.

Maria Ouspenskaya was a tiny Russian actor (b. 1876), a respected drama coach on the East Coast but best known for playing sooth-saying gypsy women in Hollywood monster movies like "The Wolfman." Her accent was so thick she might as well have been saying sooths in the Klingon tongue. But once you heard her, you never forgot her. My vocal impression: "Maria Ouspenskaya's voice was a rare small orchid ensnared in a thicket of thorn-sharp brambles."

Kathleen Turner made some great movies: "Body Heat," "Romancing the Stone," "Prizzi's Honor," and others; and though severe arthritis has limited her recent film work, she is much in demand for voice-overs of all kinds. Her sensuous voice is a match for her beauty and talent. Impression: "Kathleen Turner's voice makes you feel as if you should go to confession just for hearing it."

Colleen Dewhurst lit up Broadway for years, most famously for Eugene O'Neill's "Moon for the Misbegotten." She also made 25 or more movies, most of them forgettable, except for her glowing presence. Many of us remember her most fondly for the role of Merilly in the Anne of Green Gables TV series. Nancy tells me younger readers will best recall Dewhurst as "Avery," Murphy Brown's colorful mother on the television series. Dewhurst's rich, warm voice had just a bit of an edge, and her laugh--well, having heard her acted laugh, I was forever envious of those who knew her unscripted laugh. One can only imagine. Vocal impression: "Colleen Dewhurst sounds like rich sausage gravy over warm biscuits on a lonesome morning."

Lauren Bacall. Oh my! "Lauren Bacall's voice makes one want to take up smoking. Or whistling. Or anything else she does."

For decades, New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug made her voice count for justice and human rights. Not a pretty voice, Bella's. Not sexy. But in Houston at the International Women's Year Conference in the late seventies, Bella opened the historic occasion by rasping out, "We're all here!" She meant old and young, housewives and employed women, assorted colors, all available political and sexual persuasions. I was there, and I got goosebumps hearing her. My impression: "Bella Abzug's voice was like a ton of anthracite coal roaring down the chute into my grandfather's coal bin, ensuring that there would be fire and warmth during the worst weather."

I never heard a greater, more wondrous voice than that of Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan,and I never expect to hear its equal again. Many of us harbored the (then) almost impossible dream that Jordan would one day be President of the United States. Comparisons are pointless, but truth be told, I grieved her early death more than Kennedy's, more than Dr. King's. As to a vocal impression, I wouldn't attempt to match the impulsive response of my friend Elliott, who first heard her while driving alone across the plains. To stay awake, he turned on his radio and caught the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the question of Nixon's impeachment. Suddenly, Barbara Jordan's somber, mighty voice rolled into the car. Startled, Elliott exclaimed, "My God! It's God!"

TAKING PEN IN HAND, Act 1

Second grade was scary. We had moved from the only home I had ever known to a cramped rented house in a strange city in a distant state. We had running water in a kitchen sink, but no bathroom, only an ancient outhouse. World War II roared in full swing, and housing was at a premium. Funds for updated school buildings had been frozen "for the duration." Energetic young teachers threw over their jobs by the battalions to take good-paying defense work. Decou School was left in the palsied hands of a few tired, old warriors.

Mrs. Church, doughy and slow-moving, knew nothing of my stellar skills in reading. We must have had some reading instruction, but I remember none of it. My unfamiliar classmates and I never sat at Mrs. Church knees reading the thrilling adventures of my old friends, Dick and Jane. ("See Dick run. See Jane watch Dick.") No academic limelight came my way in second grade.

We must have had instruction in various subjects, but I recall none of them. I have no images of any particular book, any specific body of knowledge. But we did encounter yet another skill to be learned. Gone were the Crayolas, the scissors, the construction paper, the paper chains. Welcome to PENMANSHIP.

The subject was new to me, and we seven-year olds were new to almost everything, but the rest of the setting was old and weary. The walls of the classroom had faded to an anonymous color. The floorboards were warped and splintered. Our small desks were furrowed and scarred. In the upper right-hand corner of each desk (no accommodation made for the sinister-handed)was a squat inkwell sunk into a round hole. Most days, the inkwells were dry. Mrs. Church might be ancient, but she was not foolish: you did not give second-graders unsupervised access to INK!

Twice a week, Mrs. Church would walk slowly up one aisle and down the other, carrying a quart bottle of Schaffer's blue ink. Down the long corridor of memory, the image of that bounteous ink-bottle is as shiny as an uncirculated copper penny, even to the details of the scripted name on the label. With a seasoned if shaky hand, our teacher poured a dram of ink into each well. Ready on our desks were the wood and cork straight pens, often sporting teeth-marks but their steel nibs bright.

(Yes, of course fountain pens had been invented by this time, but they were not generally used by children. Often, your first fountain pen came as a graduation present. Ballpoint pens would be put on the market a year later, in 1943.)

Mrs. Church then lumbered to a glass-paned and locked cabinet at the back of the room. From the shelves, she took twenty sheets of paper. This was not the usual grey newsprint, on which we labored over our pathetic arithmetic or printed our lists of
-at words: bat cat fat hat mat pat rat sat. This penmanship paper was satiny smooth and pure white, with faint blue horizontal lines to help us on our way across the page, and a single vertical red line to the left. Even the class hellion, Buster O'Brian, would never dare to make a mark beyond that warning boundary.

I loved that smooth white paper with a pure and sensuous love that has never dimmed.

Mrs. Church would place one sheet of paper on each desk. We would dip our pens in the ink well, look up at the blackboard at the example of elegant Spencerian handwriting, and practice the loops and swoops, the straight under-the-line downs and the tall, above-the-line ups.

For my part, I was all eagerness. I loved the paper, I loved the pen, and I loved the idea that I could not only read words, but write them. I would take up the pen, place my forearm steadily on the desk as instructed, try to keep my fingers relaxed, launch out, and SPLAT! Also streak, smirch, scratch and smear. And above all, spoil. Any promise the white sheet of paper might have held drowned beneath the blots.

When my report card came out in December and again in June, the D's in "Penmanship" did not bother me. I did not yet care about symbolism or the generalized, third-person judgment a D might convey. All I knew was that, having mangled scissors, crayons, and rhythmic wood blocks, my stubby hands likewise had not mastered the pen.

Yet.

TAKING PEN IN HAND: The Prologue

I came very close to flunking out of kindergarten at Muhlenberg #5 grade school.
Luckily, my Gramps (with whom our family lived)was a regular customer at Emil Muller's Butcher Shop, a cash customer, rare in those Depression days. Mrs. Muller taught our class, so I squeaked by. But the kindergarten curriculum nearly sank me.

Coloring inside the lines,
cutting neat strips of construction paper and pasting them into long frivolous chains,
lying quietly on a mat on the floor, listening to the pipes in the school basement and pretending to nap,
standing quietly beside my little wooden chair and pretending to sing "God Bless America" ("stand beside her and guide her/ through the night with a light from a bulb"),
holding the thick green Ticonderoga #1 pencil and drawing something, anything, on soft grey paper--
it was all beyond my talents.

I used the blunt scissors to see how many tiny pieces I could make out of one big Crayola. (Nanny called little pieces of stuff like these "snibblings," a word I've always loved.) I ate the white library paste because it smelled interesting. Lying on the mat, I passed the time by kicking my heels vigorously on the planks of the floor, driving Mrs. Muller to pull my curls and hiss. I held the green pencil as if it were an ice pick. And when Bobby Fridley tried to kiss me one day in the middle of "God Bless America," I grasped my little chair by its curved back and smashed him.

First grade was more of the same, or so it seemed at the start. Mrs. Howell formed us into a little band, some of us with kazoos, one lucky fellow with a lovely silver triangle, some kids with big wooden rattles. After experimentation, Mrs. Howell gave me two rectangular blocks of wood, about the size of blackboard erasers. My job was to bang them together rhythmically. I actually got the banging part down pretty well, but counting and banging was something of a challenge. Before I really got the counting and banging synchronized, Mrs. Howell started having headaches, and the band's Halloween concert had to be cancelled.

But right about that time, we were issued the Dick and Jane books, and launched into Reading, our wooden chairs drawn into a semi-circle around Mrs. Howell's knees as she sat before us, hopeful and tense with responsibility. Now there were no scissors, no crayons, no blocks of wood. Instead, there were words, and I was home free. Suddenly I began to notice what a pretty smile Mrs. Howell had, and how differently she now said my name. She would call on Bobby, who stumbled over two or three sentences; then it was Myrna's turn, pretty, quiet Myrna who made such long, neatly pasted paper chains, and who now ended her stints with Dick and Jane by crying quietly but moistly into the sash of her flouncy dress. Finally Mrs. H would nod at me, and I would read, sentence after sentence, on and on, while she gazed out the window and watched the leaves flitter gently to earth until the bell rang.