Stage

  My first taste of working in a play was in kindergarten, where I played a wise man in a Christmas pageant.  I was very shy and really didn't like being in front of people.  As I got older, I learned to love the stage.  The applause was like taking a drug.  It made me feel incredibly high.  If I got a standing ovation, I was over the moon.  I have already written about my God-given talent for acting, so I wanted to write about the stage.

 I was trained to be an actor without a microphone.  I could project my voice to the last row of a theatre without seeming like I was shouting.  It was a lot easier in a more intimate setting like having the audience surround you and a theater with only a hundred seats, but the basic skills were the same.  When I started acting with a microphone, I found it to be a lot more difficult.  I had been using my voice in a broader way, and now it could be more subtle.  That was hard to get used to.

 One thing I was good at was developing a character.  You are given a script and some lines, but the rest of the development is up to you.  Who is the person you are portraying?  What are his likes and dislikes?  Where did he grow up?  Who were his parents?  Where did he go to school, if he went?  What part of the world did he grow up?  Is he married?  If so, to whom?  There are a lot of questions about a character that are not written in a script.  The job of the actor is to make the character believable to the audience.  Maybe that character is someone that the audience can identify with.  The main thing you have to do in character development is to find something in that person that the actor can identify with.  A memory or emotion from your past that can give depth to the character.  

 One thing I was not so good at was memorizing lines in the script.  If the character has been fleshed out, the words can come a little easier.  I found the best way for me to memorize lines was to repeat them over and over again until they came more natural for my character.  If I flubbed a line on stage, I learned to cover it.  I used to tell students not to freeze up, because then the audience would know you made a mistake.  Stay focused on the character and say something the character would say in the moment, until you found your way back to the script.  The key here is that the audience probably does not have a copy of the script in front of them, so the lines could briefly be your own.

 Now we come to nerves.  I admit that I have terrible stage fright.  I always have.  The anticipation of going on stage is incredibly scary for me.  It is all about my shyness.  Some people say that you are only as good as your last role.  What if the audience doesn't like me?  What if I forget my lines?  What if I hear crickets in the audience?  What if I have to throw up (which I have done) before going on stage? There are couple of things I have done before going on stage.  The first is to get the nervousness out of my body by doing exercises.  It could be yoga or jumping around or muscle relaxation. Whatever is needed at the time to get my energy in the right place.  The second thing I do is meditation.  I would find an empty room offstage and make it as dark as possible.  I would think about my first line that I needed to present.  I would clear my head of negative thoughts and say a prayer.  "Lord, give me the strength to do a good job.  Give me courage to go out onto the stage.  Give me clarity of thought and mind. Thank you for giving me this talent that I am about to use, and may someone receive a blessing from my work. Amen".  After saying that prayer, I know that I will do my best.  When I get out on stage, and say my first line, all of the nerves go away.  I turn nervousness into energy.

 Here are a couple tricks of the trade.  If you have a mirror onstage, put hair spray on the glass.  The spotlights won't reflect in the glass and blind the actors or the audience.  Another is to put a fine layer of water in an ashtray.  If someone is putting out a cigarette onstage, the water will keep it from having residual smoke rising from the ashtray and be distracting to the audience. 

 Stage work can be very hard.  You are in front of an audience without a net.  No second takes.  Not all actors can be good on the stage.  Just like not all stage actors can be good in other mediums like film or TV.  It just takes practice.  I have had a lot of practice.

Newberry

  In my effort to find a teaching position after graduating from seminary, I was sending out a lot of letters to colleges asking to teach Speech or Drama.  I had a master's degree, and a lot of experience in both subjects.  I would get the same letter back from the colleges.  It would say:  "Thank you for your interest. We don't have any openings right now, but we will keep your letter on file for six months in case something opens up."

 After the fiasco with Blue Mountain College in Mississippi, which you can read about in a previous story, I was getting the idea that no one wanted me.  I had found out that the seminary wouldn't recommend me for a job, so I had moved on to other things.  One day, I got a phone call from Newberry College in Newberry, SC.  I had sent them one of my letters but had forgotten all about it.  They wanted me to come to Newberry to teach a night class on Public Speaking.  They told me I would be an adjunct professor.  

 I was flattered by their offer.  It would be a good way to get my feet in the door, and maybe they would give me a full-time position at some point.  There was a problem, though.  Newberry was 45 miles from Columbia, and I would be going and coming in the dark to that college.  I thought about wildlife maybe hitting my car, and the cost of gas, so I thanked them and declined.  Surely, there would be another college that would ask me to come teach, which would be closer to where I lived.  No one else called.  Outside of the work I did at Columbia College judging high school speech and drama students, I haven't taught in a college.  It is what I was trained to do, and why I got my M.A. degree.  

 In looking at it in the moment, I failed at my objective to teach in a college or university.  However, I realized later on that could have been a stagnant place for me to be.  My experiences in life of doing theatre, movies, television, retail, and other jobs gave me more variety without the boredom of doing the same thing every day.  They say that variety is the spice of life.  I guess that's true.

Parking

  This story is not about my failure to achieve parallel parking.  I wrote about that earlier regarding getting my driver's license.  This is about a humid Sunday night, when I was in high school.

 My friends at Kilbourne Park Baptist Church were my world.  I had never experienced acceptance from my peers.  These people embraced me in a way I really can't describe fully.  Just to say we were a very close Youth Group.

 One night, I was driving my Mother's Plymouth Valiant.  Two of my friends were with me--Pam and Craig.  The car had a bench front seat, so we were all on the front seat together.  I really wasn't a fan driving at night, but I made the best of it.  We were just having fun riding around the neighborhoods.  

 Pam suggested that we go down a street near to where she lived.  I wasn't familiar with the street, but we proceeded down the road which turned out to be very narrow.  Because of our talking and laughing, the windows started to fog up.  I couldn't see where I was going, so I stopped the car to clean off the glass.  It turned out that we had stopped in the middle of the road. Rather than clearing the foggy glass, I got distracted by us talking.  

 A few minutes later, a police car pulled up behind us.  The officer got out and saw the windows fogged up.  He asked us what we were doing in the middle of the road, and we said just talking.  I don't think he believed us, but it was the truth.  No hanky panky was going on inside the car, unfortunately.  The officer said that someone in a house had called the police about a car in the middle of the road.  He asked if we were having car trouble.  No sir.  He suggested rather forcibly that we needed to move along.  

 We cleared off the windows, and I drove us back to the church laughing all the way.  As for the policeman, he just had a dirty mind, and he was probably laughing too.

Horse

  I loved watching westerns on TV.  Almost all of them involved riding horses.  The actors looked like they knew how to ride.  One secret about actors is that if the director asks you if you can ride a horse, you tell them that you can, even if you have never seen a horse before.  I expect that some of the actors in the westerns had no clue how to ride a horse before getting on one.

 When I was in high school, our church's youth group went to a horse farm outside of Columbia.  I don't think anybody in our group had ever ridden a horse.  The closest I had come was riding a mule down the Grand Canyon, when I was five.  Mules and horses are not the same thing.  Each of us was assigned a horse to ride.  There was a path that the owners said the horses would follow.  They had done this before.  We were given a quick lesson on how to ride a horse.  If you wanted the horse to slow down, you pulled back on the reins.  If you wanted the horse to go, you hit its sides with your feet.  If you wanted the horse to turn, you pulled the reins in the direction you wanted to go.  It seemed fairly simple.

 I got on my horse and off we went.  At first, everything went according to plan.  My horse sauntered along the path.  Then, it happened.  For some reason, my horse decided to walk a little faster.  He also decided to get off of the path and into some woods.  I was pulling back on the reins, but he didn't seem fazed by what I wanted him to do.  He was trying to knock me off by running under some limbs really fast.  It was getting a little dark, and I was having trouble ducking under the limbs.  He also enjoyed running through bushes.  I didn't share his enjoyment.  

 Eventually, one of the trainers saw my predicament and rode out to get my horse back on the trail.  He accused me of getting off of the trail on purpose.  I'm sure I heard my horse laugh under his breath.  When we got to the end of the trail, I dismounted and gave the horse a dirty look.  My butt was sore.  My legs were sore.  My head was sore.  I haven't ridden a horse since.  Years later, I had a girlfriend who loved horses.  She taught me a lot about them and what to look for in a horse.  If only she had been there the day I rode the horse with no name.

Telegram

  When I was a senior at A. C. Flora High School, I wrote a letter to the editor for our school newspaper questioning if there was such a thing as one's permanent record.  They had used those two words to threaten us from first grade.  Anything that we did wrong would go on our "permanent record".  I wanted to see mine.  My guidance counselor called me into her office and briefly showed me that there was such a thing.  My letter caused a stir at the school.

 When I got to college, I wrote some letters to the editor of our school newspaper concerning issues on campus.  I also wrote one to the local Anderson newspaper regarding water pollution at a park.  At PC, my letter writing got more intense.  In fact, it was like having a weekly column in our school's newspaper.  I caused a lot of trouble with some of my letters, especially with the administration and the football team.  The latter threatened to kill me, because of what I said, and I had to leave campus for a week or so.  Consequently, I failed two classes for missing the mid-term exams.

 As I was leaving to go to seminary, my father told me not to write anymore letters to the editor. I told him I would just concentrate on school and not write any letters.  I broke my promise to him after an incident in the news.  There was a story about a man who was holding some people hostage in his home.  He had a shotgun.  The police had negotiated with the man to let the hostages go.  They told him that he wouldn't be harmed.  He did what they said.  He gave up and came outside to be immediately arrested.  He was manhandled by the police and thrown in jail.  When I heard that story, I was appalled.  The police had broken their word to the man.  They had lied to him to get him to give up.  I had to write a letter.

 I wrote a letter to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper.  It was primarily about trusting the police.  It was about honesty and fairness.  Those are two things that I have tried to live my life by.  I was disgusted at what had happened to the man.  Today, he would have been treated as mentally ill.  In the 1970's, he was just a criminal.  The newspaper printed my letter.

 A few days later, I got an angry call from my father.  He was mad, because I had written a letter to the editor.  One of his friends in Fort Worth had seen my letter and had told him about it.  Despite the fact that my father was well-known by professors at the seminary, I was naive to think that 1000 miles between my father and me would keep the letter from being discovered by him.  No more letters.  Okay, no more letters, I said.  I kept my word, while I lived in Fort Worth.  Even with all of the persecution I suffered during my last semester at seminary, the only letters I wrote were to my parents.  Probably a good thing. 

Subscriptions

  When I was in 8th grade, my homeroom teacher was Mrs. Brown.  She taught chorus.  I remember that she was short and had very frizzy hair.  Our class competed with other classes on how many magazine subscriptions a student could sell.  The students with the most subscriptions could win prizes.  The class that sold the most won a big prize and the bragging rights that our class was better than the rest.

 Mrs. Brown selected me as the keeper of the records.  I had everyone's name on a tally sheet, and I had to notate the subscriptions sold.  It seemed like an easy task, but I just couldn't get it right.  Kids were screaming at me, saying that I cheated them out of prizes.  Mrs. Brown scolded me for doing a bad job.  I was very embarrassed.  

 During this time, I was getting beat up every day by the boys in our school.  This screw-up by me just made things worse.  Most of the girls in our class stopped speaking to me.  They had been the only support for me, as the boys beat me up.  Now, everyone hated me.  I had been a standout in chorus, but Mrs. Brown didn't seem to like me anymore.  It was a huge scandal.  I tried to rectify the tallies, but the assignment was just too overwhelming.  I realized that I would never grow up to be an accountant.  

 There was one girl who stood up for me, when all of my world was crumbling around me.  Her name was Gayle Anderson.  She recognized that I had talents in other areas besides accounting.  She suggested I go into English and the Arts.  Writing was my escape from all of this trouble.  It still is.

Lenny

  I had a suitemate at Anderson College named Lenny Farmer. His real first name was "Walter", which may be why we became friends originally.  He was a year older than me, but we were in the same Freshman class.  He was into music, as I was, so we would compare songs that we liked.  I played "The Pusher" by Steppenwolf for him.  He liked the message of the song but not the profanity.  He told me he wouldn't listen to it in the car.  He gave me an album by The Mothers of Invention called "Absolutely Free", and I fell in love with it.  I had never heard Frank Zappa before, but I really got into it.

 As I wrote about earlier, Lenny was in the school choir.  He asked me one afternoon if I would help him move a piano onto the stage of the auditorium for chapel the next morning.  When we got there, a play rehearsal was going on.  We sat in the back of the auditorium to wait until they got finished.  A student came up to us and asked if we wanted to be in the play.  Lenny said no, but I said yes.  Even though I had done some acting before I got to college, I was planning to major in English and become the next great writer.  My life changed that day, and I changed my major to Speech and Drama.  

 Lenny and I were nominated for Who's Who in American Junior Colleges our sophomore year.  They took our pictures to be in the college's yearbook.  Everyone knew he and I were best friends, so they positioned the single pictures so that we were next to one another.  By now, Lenny was the president of the choir, and I was "Joe College" in Theatre.  He had an apartment off campus, and I spent a lot of time there.  When we graduated from Anderson, we were both named to the prestigious "Denmark Society", and we stood next to one another for that group picture.

 After graduation, we sort of split up due to our change in venues, but we kept in touch.  As I was planning to be a famous actor, he went into the ministry.  Lenny graduated from Southern Seminary and later Southwestern Seminary, where I went.  As time went on, he was pastoring a church in Saluda, SC.  I was working at Belk in Columbia Mall, and he came by to take me to lunch.  He told me that he wanted to start a television ministry in Saluda, and he wanted me to help him.  I told him that I really wasn't qualified, as I had taken only one course in Radio and Televison at Southwestern.  I did give him some suggestions on people he could contact.  I don't think that ministry ever happened in Saluda.

 He served several churches ending up in Tennessee with his wife and family. He became a die-hard sports fan of the University of Tennessee, and he would rib me about liking the University of South Carolina.  If one team won over the other, we would send each other emails laughing about the game.  He had a great sense of humor.  Lenny was like a brother to me.  He died on June 1st, 2025 of heart problems.  I couldn't believe it, when I heard the news.   He had tried to retire from the ministry, but you can really never retire.  I will miss our laughs.  He loved the Lord and served Him to his last breath.  

 God puts people in our paths all the time.  Some change the course of your life.  Lenny was that person for me.