I Loved To Teach

Once when I was serving on a North Central evaluating team,
I showed the portion of the video of Hello, Dolly! that presented
the title song. The audience had interrupted the song sixteen
times and stood at the point where the waiters were just about
to back up the ramp and do an encore. “Well, what I want to know
is where did you get that audience. We did Li’l Abner last season
and the audience didn’t applaud for a single song.”

“I guess that’s where we’re different, because I would never have
allowed my audience to get by with that. After the second number
with no applause, I would have been out there in a spotlight,
explaining to the audience that applause is immediate feedback
that tells student actors whether they have been successful or not.
A sparse applause tells them the song was not too good. No applause
tells them nothing and leaves them inert. These are your kids as
much as they are mine. I have trained them for six weeks or so as
well as I know how. Now it’s your turn.”

I had recently seen Carol Channing in Dolly and realized that the
audience was waiting for her to appear.  She rode in on a horse car,
as did our Andrea Clark, and I just wished that when Andrea lowered
the newspaper to show her face, she too would hear applause.  So a half
hour before curtain, I went out to talk to the audience.  “You who are
here this early are the backbone of this organization,” I said.  And I asked
them to watch for that wonderful senior girl who was in her last show and
surprise her with applause.  And they did, as well as other actors/
actresses who were giving their last performance that closing night.
And for the waiters gallop, they stood and cheered.  What a hoot!

After one really fine show during my early days at Greenfield when there had not been a single missed line, a single pause, a single prop missing, nor a light or sound cue flubbed, the audience didn’t stand. Now, I never hoped they would do this habitually for just any mediocre performance, but when they witnessed excellence, I felt that they should reward it. I felt that they would have jumped up for their children but refrained because I had failed to win their hearts. How much this audience had loved Doc Barrett, who preceded me. I had put up the most beautiful, professional set possible with its sliding doors, circular stairway and beautiful bay window.  They had entered to the smell of frying bacon.  We served three meals in that show  and a kitchen area with cookware and dish washing supplies.  What a crew!  Larry Andrick, Lori Corbin and David Arland were in that show, and they had worked so hard. “Folks,” I said, “these kids went far beyond my expectations tonight. This very difficult show was flawless. Do you realize how much it lifts their spirits when the audience acknowledges that excellence—that it makes them work even harder the next time? Awards and trophies cost money and go to a few leaders. Standing costs you nothing and leaves no one out. Now, let’s go back and do the bows again so we can get it right.”

Do you think they thought I was arrogant and egocentric? Maybe some did, but I believe most people in the audience felt a thrill as the lights dimmed and area spots began to pick up a few cast members in frozen poses, fading and rising on another spot as if photos were being taken by an old fashioned camera. It is in the script of Life with Father to do the curtain call just this way. Sometimes an audience resists standing because everyone is just waiting to see what others will do. This was the only show of mine that my brother Dan was to see.  He was home from California for my father’s funeral, and brother Chuck had said, “Jack has a show this weekend, and we are going to see it!”  Dan told me afterward that he taught at a college where the ad building of two universities faced each other two blocks apart, and that he felt neither of those schools could have equaled that performance.  High praise from him meant more that a standing ovation.

My very first standing ovation was in the gym at Eastern Hancock when Jerry Davis and Darlene Speers performed in Oliver.  A handsome wrestler named Steve Harding died so beautifully as police shot him on the top row of bleachers and he propelled himself down to the gym floor.  A boy named Stan Willen played Mr. Bumble and his huge tenor voice and rotund height added wonderfully to the role.  Stan died in the worst crash in the nation on July 4th the next summer.  A car came across the median on the divided highway and the head-on collision killed everyone in both vehicles.  As senior sponsor I was to take the whole class to the funeral home, and as I had worked in the funeral home at Carthage with my dear friend Frank Hampton, I was appalled to see open caskets, Stan with black stitches descending from his red hairline and his face swollen badly.  I insisted that the caskets be closed.  As the whole family had gone together to their rewards, and as his father was also the minister who had objected to his son’s participation in theater, there was no one to take charge of that room with four caskets—mother, father, sister, and Stan.  A grandparent (maybe two) had died there as well, but they weren’t at this funeral home.

When a few relatives arrived, they wouldn’t let them see into the caskets, and they came to me.  One of the women was very pregnant.  I told the undertaker that, of course they should have a private viewing where no one could observe their grieving and the caskets could be opened one at a time.  When I had seen them, there was loud weeping and wailing as is considered normal in their religious persuasion, but it had torn me apart.  But I digress….

The show, Oliver, was good enough for that huge audience (the cars had spilled past the parking lot into every nearby street for several blocks in the little town of Charlottesville) to have stood to show their pleasure at such hard work from so many.  But they didn’t stand.  I was sitting near the front in the audience, as was always my practice, and I clearly heard a woman say, after the moment of possibility had, I thought, passed, “This is ridiculous!  At our school we would stand up.”  And when she stood,  that large body of parents and friends leaped instantly to their feet, as if they had been just waiting for a signal.  What a thrill that moment was.  It was a first for me, I think.

Every audience is a different crowd, and all our crowds at Greenfield began to show the kids the kind of respect they deserved after a job well-done. And I’d say we got what the kids called “standing ovations” about half the time. But never did I see a crowd so excited that they would stand in the middle of a show—except this once for that high-stepping chorus line of twenty-four athletic males portraying the waiters in Hello, Dolly! on that red-carpeted runway with its flashing running lights. I was certain that there were few schools (in Indiana, anyway) that could get that many men who would get up there in the first place, let alone work so many extra hours before school and late at night to get Gail’s superb choreography precisely right.

I had, early on, subscribed to the “noble failure” theory in selecting plays that perhaps seemed impossible to do in the present circumstance, so it is consistent with my practices at small schools to allow waitresses in that line if boys are not available. I remember being surprised when one first-string basketball player had told me at auditions, “Mr. Rhoades, I don’t want a part. What I really want to do is be one of those waiters!” And Aaron Smith led in that kick line that brought the audience to its feet. Jon Gabrielsen, our Cornelius, played college basketball at Taylor University. He was six-three at tryouts and growing so fast we had to redo costumes twice. Barnaby was a six-three tennis stand-out, Rich Wood, who went to Notre Dame.

I apologize to readers who don’t know us for using names, but the pleasure that comes from remembering these folks, just makes it necessary.  I apologize to the great co-workers whose names I forget to mention because I feel it becomes cumbersome to fill pages with names people don’t know.  Perhaps if a show recalls to a reader someone they felt should be named, they could comment to me.

I don’t think the athletes came because of me—I know they loved and admired Gail Powell, our superb young chorus teacher, but I also know they would not have come had they not known there would be excellence and a large audience that would appreciate that excellence—a great combination.  There have always been in my life supporting colleagues who blessed and inspired me.  None more so than Gail.  One year we had the same prep period and we always saw each other briefly in the office, and I looked forward to it.  One day she didn’t speak, and I was certain something I had done had offended her.  I was in my classroom mulling this over when she bubbled in.  “I missed seeing you in the office today,” she offered.  I said that I had been there and admitted that I thought she was mad at me.  She came to the stage end of the room where I was, and as she hugged me, she was saying, “Mr. Rhoades, how could I ever be angry with you?”  She was for all of us a brilliant star.

Andrew Kelley from children’s theater (Linda Quick found him and worked with him as Captain Hook, his first role in the first Children’s Theater production) was in that line of men. He was a freshman with so much drive that it was not in his mind to stand out by overacting, he just did everything “full out,” as dancers say. Seniors came to me to say, “Mr. Rhoades, (this in a whiney voice) would you please say something to Andrew? He doesn’t listen to us.”

“Kids,” I would say, “when you get this learned perfectly and get a feeling for the farce, you will all look just like Andrew Kelley—and they did!” What a powerhouse onstage that young man turned out to be. But he comes later.

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