Brendan had clearly decided to make this party his debut, and he wandered through the crowd, performing his one-man show in various locations.
Bored, I tried making out with Victor Anthony, a straight kid who was cute but kind of a wang.He was the Cream of Wheat of making out. I would try it every now and then, thinking maybe I'd like it, but every time: no. He really was a stunningly bad kisser. It was as if he took a running start at your mouth. Brendan's stage kiss was way more skilled.
I went back inside and parked it with Karen and Sharon in the theater living room, where Brendan was deep into Act II of "coming out." The Monsignor Bonner football team was peering in from the dining area, hearing all of this. "Here's a toast to being free of other people's expectations," Brendan monologued, "and loving whomever you choose." In the background, scone-face Patty was quietly giving people coasters. Jesus, she was really not getting it.
This evening was actually turning out to be quite boring. But then it happened.
One of the drunk girls from the Archbishop Prendergast side of the party wandered into the Showtime room and started making out with Alexis Catalano. Everyone froze. Patty looked on, scone-faced. This was unprecedented. Brendan talked a good game, but these two were going at it-in public! This was years before every pop singer in the world started fake lezzing out at the VMAs. It simply was not done. What would happen next? Karen and Sharon went into protective adult mode and pulled the two wasted girls apart and took them upstairs to a more private location.
Just then Brendan's mom-who was totally unaware of the proceedings-started screaming and throwing everyone's coats down the stairs, which shall henceforth be known as An Irish Goodnight.
Brendan's mom may have perfected my "party shutdown" move, but it didn't stop me from working it at the amateur level. I followed the four women upstairs, ducking the flying parkas, because it was almost two A.M.: my special expanded New Year's Eve curfew. Karen was my ride and we needed to get a move on. Alexis and jock girl were so drunk they could barely function. Karen and Sharon tried to convince them it was time to call it a night. They would give them a ride home. "Noooo, I loooooove herrrr," jock girl sobbed as Karen helped her get her coat on. I said I'd be waiting in the car and they needed to hurry up.
Meanwhile, Brendan stormed out of the house and drove away, furious-probably because he had "lost the room" when two girls started going to town on each other.
After I'd been waiting in the car twenty minutes and missed my curfew, I couldn't control my temper anymore. "Get the dykes in the car!" I screamed down Childs Avenue, banging my shoe on Karen's dashboard and leaving a slight crack. My husband could tell you that I still get this wound up when I'm trying to leave the house on a Saturday morning and nobody in my family has their shoes on.It's not a great quality.
(And just in case you were wondering, yes-when he returned later that night, Brendan tried to run Patty and his mother over with the car. I believe it earned him a Regional Theater Tony nomination.)The Second Summer
My second year at Summer Showtime, I was promoted to be one of the Children's Theater directors. I directed shows with a cast of sixty twelve-year-olds and, I'll toot my own horn, I made some interesting directing choices. Such as pushing the Little Mermaid around on a rolling office chair papier-mached to look like a large shell. Her hair only got caught in the wheels twice.
I knew everyone. I was fully immersed. "Immersed," Brendan would say. "You're so smart. Why don't I know more people who use words like 'immersed'?" And then he'd disappear for two days. He may have been a drunk.
Sharon's brother Sean was our "visiting director" for the Mainstage musical. Everyone referred to him as Equity Actor Sean Kenny. He was a member of the stage actors union! He was living the dream in a basement-level studio apartment in Hell's Kitchen with a rat problem. We were all in awe.
Sean was and is a skilled and confident director. I was excited to be his assistant director on a murder mystery musical called Something's Afoot.
My first job as assistant director was to make sure he didn't cast the talented blond dancer who had so easily stolen my boyfriend the summer before. I accomplished this with the persistent and skilled manipulation of a grade A bitch. I made articulate arguments as to why the other blond girl would be better. The Dancer Girl was "too overused." It would be more exciting to "use someone unexpected,"and the other girl's "look" was "more British." A fat load of nonsense, but it worked. Dancer Girl was relegated to playing the title role in a Children's Theater show called Guess Again. Yes, her character and the show were both called Guess Again. A harsh punishment.
Obviously, as an adult I realize this girl-on-girl sabotage is the third worst kind of female behavior, right behind saying "like" all the time and leaving your baby in a dumpster. I'm proud to say I would never sabotage a fellow female like that now. Not even if Christina Applegate and I were both up for the same part as Vince Vaughn's mother in a big-budget comedy called Beer Guys.
Sean and I were Mentor and Mentee that summer. I was eighteen, he was twenty-seven. Sean taught me a lot about professional dignity. For example, this was when "call waiting" was new, and if you left Sean on the other line for more than ten seconds, he would hang up. And our show was a hit!On both nights! The cast party was in a backyard with paper lanterns. The cast and crew mingled. It was very glamorous.
Summer Showtime alum Richard D'Attelis was there. My friend Vanessa had gone to her eighth-grade dance with Richard D'Attelis, and he had picked her up wearing a baseball shirt customized with an iron-on photo of Olivia Newton-John. It said "Olivia Newton-John" in puffy letters on the front and "Totally Hot!" on the back. Richard had been the first of the Showtime boys to quietly come out after his stint at the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts, an exclusive state-run arts intensive that might as well have been called the Pennsylvania Governor's Blow Job Academy. Imagine a bunch of seventeen-year-old theater boys away from home for the first time for six weeks. They were living in empty college dorms, for the love of Mike! Literally! Think of the joy and freedom they must have felt, like being on an all-gay space station. (I'm sure there were one or two straight boys there, too, and I imagine they did incredibly well with the one or two straight girls.) Sean was flirting with Richard. We were seated at a picnic table at the party, and I realized they were playing footsie under the table. I could not contain my judgment. "What are you doing?" I demanded, trying to be funny and controlling at the same time. They ignored me. Richard got up to get a soda. I turned to Sean. "He's so cheesy and gross!" My power-of-suggestion technique had worked so well when I was screwing over that blond girl. I used any ammunition I could muster. "He smokes, you know." As the night wore on, I didn't get the hint. I stayed at the table with two people who were clearly going to hook up. I tried some sarcastic eye contact as Richard told Sean about his dream to turn Xanadu into a stage play. Like that would ever work.
In my mind, I was doing Sean a favor by trying to stop him from hooking up with someone regrettable. "Oh, my God. You know he's only, like, twenty." Sabotage and saying "like." I was really in a bad place.
Sean shot me a look. I was out of bounds. It's one thing to be a wisecracking precocious teen hanging out with twenty-seven year olds. It's another thing to get in the way of a grown man trying to get laid.
I don't know what happened between Richard and Sean that night, but the next day Sharon called me to say that Sean was very annoyed with the way I'd behaved. She said she had talked him down because "they all realized" that I had a crush on Sean. "It's natural." They all realized? They were all talking about what a baby I was and how I must have a crush on Sean? "I don't." I wept from sheer embarrassment. "I really don't." But the more I protested, the guiltier I seemed. And here, after twenty years, is the truth. I really didn't have a crush on Sean. I had reacted that way because I viscerally felt that what they were about to do was icky. The stomachache I felt had nothing to do with a crush. I had to face the fact that I had been using my gay friends as props. They were always supposed to be funny and entertain me and praise me and listen to my problems, and their life was supposed to be a secret that no one wanted to hear about. I wanted them to stay in the "half closet."
Equity Actor Sean Kenny did not live in the half closet. He had moved away to New York and was just back for a visit. He was a grown man. My reaction to his hooking up with Richard D'Attelis made me feel like Coach Garth. I stroked my thick blond mustache and thunk about what I had dawn.
It was a major and deeply embarrassing teenage revelation. It must be how straight teenage boys feel when they realize those boobs they like have heads attached to them.
I thought I knew everything after that first summer. "Being gay is not a choice. Gay people were made that way by God," I'd lectured Mr. Garth proudly. But it took me another whole year to figure out the second part: "Gay people were made that way by God, but not solely for my entertainment." We can't expect our gay friends to always be single, celibate, and arriving early with the nacho fixin's. And we really need to let these people get married, already.
Before the final performance of every summer, all the kids were invited onstage and together we sang "Fill the World with Love" from Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Everyone would cry their heads off. It felt like the end of camp, and I imagine some of those kids had more to dread about going back to school than just boredom and health class.
With his dream of a theater program for young people, Larry Wentzler had inadvertently done an amazing thing for all these squirrels. They had a place where they belonged, and, even if it was because he didn't want to deal with their being different, he didn't treat them any differently. Which I think is a pretty successful implementation of Christianity.
We should strive to make our society more like Summer Showtime: Mostly a meritocracy, despite some vicious backstabbing. Everyone gets a spot in the chorus. Bring white shorts from home.
That's Don Fey
Let's review the cost-free techniques that we've learned so far for raising an achievement-oriented, obedient, drug-free, virgin adult: Calamity, Praise, Local Theater, and flat feet.
Another key element is "Strong Father Figure / Fear Thereof."
My dad looks like Clint Eastwood. His half-Scottish, half-German face in repose is handsome but terrifying. I searched the audience for him during the sixth-grade chorus concert and, seeing his stern expression, was convinced that he had seen me messing up the words to the Happy Days theme and that I was in big trouble. I spent the rest of the concert suppressing terror burps, only to be given a big hug and a kiss afterward. It took me years to realize, Oh, that's just his face.
It's my face, too, it turns out. The cheekbones later discovered there by a team of gay excavators are courtesy of my dad.
Don Fey dresses well. He has an artist's eye for mixing colors and prints. He wears tweedy jackets over sweater vests in the winter and seersucker suits in the summer. His garnet college ring shows off his well-groomed hands. He can still rock a hat.
My dad looks like he's "somebody." One day when I was visiting him on his lunch hour he ran into a couple of old high school buddies in downtown Philadelphia. "Hey, Don Fey!" one of the guys
called from across the street. "Oh my God, Don Fey," the other guy said excitedly. The two African American secretaries waiting at the light with my dad whispered knowingly to each other, "That's Don Fey."
Before I was born, my mother took my brother to Greece for the whole summer to visit family.When they were finally coming back, my dad washed and waxed his Chevy convertible, put on his best sharkskin suit, and drove all the way from Philadelphia to New York International Airport to pick them up. (In those days, international travel meant dressing up, smoking on planes, wearing Pan Am slippers, and flying into New York.)
Their flight was due to arrive early in the morning, so Don Fey, who is never late for anything, got to the airport just before dawn. As he popped on his sweet lid and walked across the deserted parking lot toward the terminal, he saw two black gentlemen approaching from far away. He played it cool to hide his apprehension. He was in New York, after all, one of the world's most dangerous cities if you're from any other city, and from far away in the dark he couldn't tell if the guys were airport employees or loiterers.
As they got closer, he noticed they were staring him down. He continued to play it cool. Don Fey had grown up in West Philly, where he lived comfortably as a Caucasian minority. Of course these guys couldn't know that. His heart was beating a little faster as they came within ten feet of each other.
The guys looked at him intently, then one turned to the other and said, "That is one boss, bold, bladed motherfucker."
That's Don Fey. He's just a badass. He was a code breaker in Korea. He was a fireman in Philadelphia. He's a skilled watercolorist. He's written two mystery novels. He taught himself Greek so well that when he went to buy tickets to the Acropolis once, the docent told him, "." (It's free for Greek citizens.)
Neighborhood kids would gather on our porch just to listen to him swear at the Phillies game.(Andy Musser talked too goddamn much. Games were often "over" by the sixth inning. "This goddamn game is over. The sons of bitches choked.")
When watching the Flyers, he would change the channel during commercials and he always knew exactly when to turn it back to catch the start of play. When my cousin marveled at this ability, my dad was matter-of-fact: "You just wait ninety seconds." Isn't everyone's brain a Swiss watch?
Don Fey is a Goldwater Republican, which is his only option. If you're Don Fey, you can't look at Joe Biden and be like, yes, I want to be led by this gentleman with the capped teeth. You're not going to listen to John Kerry pretending to empathize with you about the rising cost of your medications. You certainly aren't interested in the "unresolved father issues" that rendered Bill Clinton unable to keep his fly closed. Don Fey is not going to put up with that. Don Fey is a grown-ass man! Black people find him stylish!
Don Fey has what I would describe as preNorman Lear racial attitudes. Once the Bunker family met the Jeffersons, every interaction between blacks and whites was somehow supposed to be a life-changing lesson, especially for the white people. My generation carries that with us, only to be constantly disappointed by Kanye West and Taylor Swift.
The twin house I grew up in was across the street from the border of West Philadelphia where Don Fey grew up. Don Fey certainly had friends of other races and religions. He has told me a couple times about the night he kissed Lionel Hampton. He was at a jazz concert as a teenager with an all-white audience. At one point in the show, Lionel Hampton would invite a woman from the audience to dance with him, but the white girls were all too scared to be seen dancing with a black man. To ease the tension, Don Fey jumped up and fast-danced with Mr. Hampton, at the end of which Lionel Hampton kissed him on the forehead to a round of applause.
Conversely, he would tell us things like "If you see two black kids riding around on one bike, put your bike in the garage." This wasn't racism; it was experience. Those kids were coming from West Philly to steal bikes. The social factors that caused their behavior were irrelevant to a Depression baby. When you grow up getting an orange for Christmas, you're going to make sure the twenty-five-dollar bike you bought your kid doesn't get ripped off.
Norman Lear might want us to take time to understand that those kids went to poorly funded schools and that their parents, while loving and dignified, were unable to supervise their children's behavior because they were both at work doing minimum-wage jobs, but by then our bikes would be gone.
The late seventies were a dark time of "family meetings" about "tightening our belts." The embarrassment of Watergate led right to the Iran hostage crisis. Three Mile Island was in our state. It was always "Day 27" of something in Beirut. There was an infestation of gypsy moths killing the trees in our neighborhood.