By Scott Ross
I’ve been hesitant to post about this, although not primarily because public reminiscence can seem narcissistic; I would say that not only are all attempts at memoir self-serving but to assume you have anything to say in writing, on any topic, that would be of interest to anyone else is by definition an act of extreme self-regard. And it’s not because I am self-conscious, or regretful, that this reminiscence describes events in my life that occurred 50 years ago, as personally nauseating as that fact may be to me. The reason for my reticence is that theatre itself, once and for decades the abiding passion of my life, has become something about which I care almost nothing now, and the reasons are almost entirely personal. I have an ego, but if you think airing my private grievances here, especially when two of the principal actors involved have recently died, is something I would derive pleasure from, please stop reading this now and seek out the blog, should there be one, of a genuine narcissist like Alan Cumming or Taylor Lorenz.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation: I was taken completely aback a few months ago to realize that late July 2023 would mark the 50th anniversary of the Garner (NC) Children’s Theater production of the Off-Broadway musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in which I played Linus Van Pelt and my friends Laura Bare, Lene Ulrich and David Foster were, respectively, Snoopy, Patty and Schroeder. To paraphrase Mark Twain’s remark about being 70, while I recognize that it has been a half-century since I was 12, I don’t realize it. Yet the calendar doesn’t lie, and it seems to me that the best thing to do in a case like this is to not merely admit the fact but celebrate it. After all, whatever my feelings now about live theatre, being Linus for the six weeks of rehearsal and two nights of performances was, first, largely a joy. It was also of undeniable, even crucial, importance to my life both at the time and for some time later. I wasn’t bitten by the oft-invoked Theatre Bug that particular summer, but the infection I’d contracted earlier in the year definitely festered.
I was nipped at in October 1972, when our mother took my sister and me to the movie of 1776. I had seen musicals before — indeed, the first movie we were taken to was Mary Poppins, and I remember as well seeing The Sound of Music during its second year in the theaters (for younger readers, that picture was for several years the highest-grossing of all American movies, and it ran for months in some areas, the way Star Wars would later) — but had not seen a Broadway adaptation on a big screen in a long time, and had certainly never seen one remotely like this. I loved the show’s depiction of events leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, its wit, its slightly bawdy humor, its performances (particularly William Daniels’ as John Adams) and its songs. My ardor would deepen a couple of months later, when I was given the soundtrack LP for my birthday and, concurrently, purchased the Bantam paperback (minus the photo insert, damn it) through the Scholastic book service.
I was in sixth grade, and in an experiment as weird to relate as it was to live, some genius on the Wake County School Board had decided, the previous academic year, to bus all of the sixth graders in the county to a single school, miles away from where most of us lived, and to let hundreds of these hormone-maddened brats loose together. My initial foray into the theatrical had, like my exposure to 1776, also occurred in the autumn of 1972, when we were studying Pre-History and a couple of my friends thought it would be funny to put together a sketch about cavemen, roughly on the order of a Three Stooges short. (I didn’t know until fairly recently that there was such a Stooges comedy, which I now realize one or both of them must have seen on television.) What I most remember about that sketch is that we should have rehearsed it with our props before performing it; not knowing about stage fake-outs, when in front of our class we conked each other’s heads with (well-cleaned) leftover dinner bones, the pain we expressed was entirely real. The other aspect of the experience that made an impression was that we did it on the school’s auditorium stage, the first time I had ever “trod the boards.” It was only a silly skit about troglodytes performed by three young hams having fun, but the effect on me of doing it on that stage was magical. That was the gentle feel of The Bite.
My love for 1776 and my sudden new interest in theatre came together that spring, when I staged a couple of long excerpts from the script with several of my friends and classmates, all of us lip-syncing madly to cassette recordings from my soundtrack album. I can’t, in retrospect, imagine how any of our classmates watching these exercises could have heard anything at all, what with the music being reproduced on a Radio Shack portable tape recorder, nor can I understand why, when after the first installment I proposed a second, my classmates didn’t either roll their collective eyes or lynch me. But that’s what happens when one becomes infatuated with theatre; you’ll use any excuse to get on that stage again. Getting to play John Adams (or, more accurately, to play William Daniels playing John Adams), however briefly, was a thrill, and because of these sketches my old friend Laura asked me why I hadn’t done any of the children’s theatre summer shows in Garner. The simple answer was, I hadn’t really noticed they existed. (My mother enrolled me in summer activities sponsored by the town of Garner, largely I suspect to get me out of her hair, so I must have seen the Children’s Theater group listed but just didn’t opt to be a part of it.) Now that I was aware, I was determined to join Laura and David, both of whom had been in The Hobbit, the 1971 show, in whatever was going to be done that summer.
When we convened in June, the program’s director, Cathy Hawley (who was, I discovered, also the director of the senior high school shows, and with whom Laura and David had already worked, on Oliver!) announced her choice of play as The Wind in the Willows. Having read and fallen in love with Kenneth Grahame’s glorious book during my fifth grade year, I imagined David as Toad and myself (and as a novice, mind you) as Ratty. But as we played theatre games and were challenged by Cathy’s improvisations and assignments of dramatic readings — we did Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” I remember, and Thurber’s “The Unicorn in the Garden” in which I think I was the husband and Laura the wife, and a reading of the Munro Leaf story “Ferdinand the Bull” in which David memorably intoned the name Ferdinand — she was reassessing matters. At the end of that first week she announced that we were a much more mature group than she had anticipated, and that instead of a children’s show we would be doing You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
Now my fantasies went into overdrive. I had been, in common with most of America, in love with Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts since the mid-1960s when I first discovered it in the pages of the Canton (OH) Repository and, around the same time, the first airing of “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” entranced me on television. And although I loved Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Schroeder equally, it was Linus who spoke to me, and with whom I identified most closely. I’m not sure I can explain that, even now. I was certainly no intellectual, much less a philosopher or a theologian. It may, since I had been as a small boy an inveterate thumb-sucker, have started with the way Linus sucked his thumb, or the fact that I also had an overbearing older sister whom I half-loved, half-feared. Mostly, though, I suspect it was his essential aloneness, and the anxiety that caused him to cling to that blue blanket of his with the ferocity and devotion a heroin addict might envy. When, in February 1973, “The Hallmark Hall of Fame” sponsored a vest-pocket version of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown on television, with Barry Livingston (Ernie Douglas of “My Three Sons”) a perfect Linus, I was equally enchanted with it.* And because I was, and had subsequently purchased the television cast recording and a copy of the Fawcett paperback of the script, I was able to help Cathy get us started learning the script and the songs before the manuscripts arrived from Tams-Whitmark, the show’s licensing agent.
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. We haven’t had auditions yet, have we?
David was as set on being Snoopy as I was on nabbing the role of Linus. When casting was announced and David was assigned to Schroeder he was enraged, and violently disappointed. But he got the last laugh, in spite of himself: He was the only one of us (in the marvelous “Book Report” number) to get an ovation in the middle of a song.† And I can still hear him saying, in answer to one of Lucy Van Pelt’s romantic fantasies of domestic bliss, “Saucepans…? Sauce-pans?!?” Johnny Stephenson, at 14 our oldest contemporary, although Southern to the core (Laura loved teasing him about the way he inevitably pronounced “dog” as “dawg”) had the lost-everyman quality Charlie Brown demands; when he did the monologue about eating a peanut butter sandwich during school lunch he was, accent, longish hair and height aside, Schulz’s anti-hero. Laura, who didn’t seem to me at all right for Lucy, to the surprise of us all (a girl playing Snoopy? Yes: An inspired girl) got David’s dream-role. Lena had the show’s most thankless role, that of Patty, a character who had been, with Shermy, one of the leads in the strip but who by the late ’60s had disappeared into the woodwork. They wrote her out of the 1999 Broadway edition, replacing her with Sally Brown, a smart move all around, although the change required new songs by Andrew Lippa. I was, as I had hoped (and, oddly, had somehow and without conceit been sure I would be) Linus. Our Lucy was a girl none of us knew named Lana Liles. And if ever a role was perfectly cast, it was that one. Loud, braying, obnoxious, bullying, Lana was Lucy Van Pelt, onstage and off. The write-up of the show in the local paper praised Lana for her “believable performance” as Lucy. If that writer had only known.
Our musical audition, which terrified us all, was, to test our individual ranges, singing a single verse of that old childhood stand-by “Bingo.” We were all lined up, seated, on the apron of the stage, I remember, with nowhere to go after our embarrassing solo singing… all except Laura who, with perfect aplomb, hit her last line (“And Bingo was his name-O!”), immediately leapt up and fled into the wings. How I admired, and envied, her timing! That was something I learned working on that show — timing, as well as how to project from the diaphragm, how to move on a stage, how to put a song over, and how to both savor and present a good comic line so that it lands. (Linus and Snoopy have, I think, the majority of those in the show.) I also understood something instinctively that my would-be helpful mother did not: That a show like You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown is stylized, like the Schulz strip, and not realistic. I was the only one in the cast who, at her insistence, changed his costume, shirt and trousers, in the interval… and since we had no dressing room, only a communal greenroom upstairs, doing so moreover on the catwalk where I might have been observed by anyone on the stage crew. Just the thing for an anxious, self-conscious pubescent. Mom did this to me again, later that year, when I was cast as Michael Banks in a cheap, terrible Raleigh touring production of Mary Poppins directed by a couple of married lunatics, except this time she had me changing costumes between scenes when I was in every one of them, and getting me in Dutch with the stage manager for missing an entrance and causing the rest of the cast to ad-lib frantically. Why no one sat Mom down and explained to her the rudiments of stage reality, or gently instructed her to butt out of it I still don’t know.
I had done a bit of choral singing, as had several of us, but none of us was a singer per se, much less a dancer. Cathy kept the choreography simple, scaled to the production and to her young cast. It was more movement than dance, really, and only twice was one of us required to do more than a few simple steps: Once, for Laura, in her “Suppertime” routine, which included an energetic edition of “The Charleston,” and me, in Linus’ “My Blanket and Me” solo. For that number, my mother loaned the production my own baby blanket, blue with charming white squirrels on it. The steps were simple enough, carrying me around the set with its oversize geometric shapes, aside from Snoopy’s doghouse mostly cubes to sit on and a large staircase for me to dance up. When, later, a writer for the weekly Garner News reviewed the production, I was mortified by her praising me as “twinkle-toed.” What 12 year-old boy wants to be called that? (My father, naturally, teased me mercilessly.) I was actually less concerned with the dance, or even with being the first character to speak at the top of the show, than with the song. Most of Clark Gesner’s splendid Charlie Brown score is easy to sing, but there are some high notes at the beginning of “My Blanket and Me” (“It’s a cozy sanctuary/But it’s far from necessary…”) and five near the end (“It’s foolish/I know it/I’ll try to [those two were the killers]/Outgrow it…”) that daunted me, requiring me to go out of my chest-voice comfort zone and into a head-voice I had never used. I did get through the notes… but barely.
Speaking of music: Our musical director, a young man named Lamont Wade, was a blooming wonder at the piano but he played entirely by ear, necessitating two changes in the show: When Lucy sings “Schroeder,” to the tune of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” a tape recording had to be substituted for Lamont’s keyboard. And, because it wasn’t on either my TV cast recording or the original cast LP, the hilarious “Glee Club Rehearsal” had to be axed. Ah, well.
The course of community theatre never does run smooth, and during our two nights of performances (27 and 28 July) we did suffer a pair of minor mishaps. In the lesser event, I had just terrified Lucy and Patty by using my blanket as a cape to become Bela Lugosi (“I am Count Dracula… from Transylvania!”) and was walking off stage when the blackout cue came up too soon and landed me in darkness; I promptly tripped over Schroeder’s piano and went flying ass-over-tip off-stage. Much worse was when, on the second of our two evening shows, the curtain got stuck at the top of Act Two, leaving an open gap of approximately a third the width of the stage and in the center of which was Laura-as-Snoopy atop her doghouse waiting to do her World War I Flying Ace monologue. As Lamont and his drummer vamped an endless march, poor Laura sat there with her arms outstretched and her hands clenched on an imaginary set of controls and with, I imagine, flop-sweat leaking from every pore while the assistant director and the stage crew valiantly attempted to pull the two halves of that heavy, imitation-velvet cloth apart. Laura’s relief when they finally cut the cord and moved the damned curtain by hand must have been epic. (The audience gave her a big and well-deserved ovation for her resilience.)
A week or so before the performance my beloved paternal great-grandmother died, necessitating a fast trip for my family to Pennsylvania and Ohio which, among other things (we nearly got stranded by flood waters in Richmond, VA.) cost me being included in the Raleigh Times coverage, which featured photographs of Johnny, Lana and Laura. Little did I dream until the Garner News was delivered to our mailbox the week following the show, that I would be the sole cast member whose photo was in that paper… on Page One, no less… and above the fold. That alone assuages the pang I get when I remember the fun we had that summer, the deepening of my besotting with theatre and the, to me, incomprehensible fact that 1973 is fifty years in the rear-view mirror.
On the other hand, the memories I have of that show, and that summer, are not ones I would trade away, even in exchange for having a few decades magically knocked off my chronology. They’re mine, and they wouldn’t be if I wasn’t the age I am now.
Hoping that you will pardon both the rampant egotism and the dripping nostalgia, I reproduce below both the picture and the (unsigned) small-town paper review, for what they are worth. I also note that the name I went by for the first 15 years of my life (my first, “Tim”) I scratched out subsequently (and in pen!) and that I wish I had a nicer copy of that photograph. Mom asked the Garner News for the original, and someone assured her she could have it in a year’s time but when she called them back they’d already tossed it out.
To quote Charlie Brown (and, on occasion, Linus): “Aauugghh!”
Post-Script, 26 July 2023
I was reminded after posting the above, and looking at a photo my mother took with her Polaroid instant-camera during final dress rehearsal that was too poor to reproduce here, of how it felt to sing “Happiness” at the end of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown with the entire cast. After all the laughs of Schulz’s ingenious strips and Gesner’s perfect settings of them, the song is a moment of simplicity, a direct appeal to the senses and to the memories of those little things that make a good childhood. I can’t speak for the others in the cast but for me it was an annealing moment, if not transcendent than at least small form of benediction. I always felt lovely at the end of it — refreshed, and peaceful. That’s more than good song-writing, and good show-staging. It’s good living.
*Bob Balaban originated the role of Linus Off-Broadway. The original Charlie Brown was Gary Burghoff, three years before MASH.
†My memory betrayed me here. During Snoopy’s exuberant “Suppertime” dance, when Laura launched into the Charleston, she also got an ovation. Belated apologies to Laura for the inadvertent omission.
Text (except for the press clippings and Clark Gesner’s lyrics) copyright 2023 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 