Cracking

  When I was in 6th grade, it was a big deal.  Not just for me, but for all of the boys in our class.  We had arrived at a point, where we at the end of elementary school before going on to junior high.  I have already discussed the honor of being a school patrol officer in the story "The Fight", but needless to say we were macho.

 We didn't even know what "macho" meant, but we knew we were big guys on campus.  We demanded respect from the younger kids, and we got it.  If not, they were reported to the administration.  Nobody wanted to go to the principal's office.  We had the power.  One of the boys in our class discovered knuckle cracking.  It was a macho thing.  In order to pass the test, you had to crack your knuckles.  We had heard rumors from older kids that cracking your knuckles would make them bigger.  Even though our parents may not want us to have bigger knuckles, we thought that we could be better patrolmen with bigger knuckles.  The younger kids would fear us, because we had bigger knuckles.

 And so, the knuckle cracking began in earnest.  We first started learning how to maximize the cracking of our knuckles at recess.  One guy had perfected the art of cracking, and we all learned how to do it the loudest.  If you cracked your finger joints, they just made small noises.  The knuckles were the loudest.  We moved on to doing it in the classroom.  

 The girls were grossed out by the boys cracking their knuckles.  They were too lady-like to do such a thing.  One or two girls tried to crack a knuckle, but the other girls shunned them, so they stopped.  It was a boy thing.  On one occasion, the boys were cracking during class.  The girls had complained to the teacher that it was gross.  Our teacher had just about enough of the chorus of knuckle cracking, so she stopped her teaching and said in a mad voice that the next boy to crack his knuckles would have to stay after school.  I was a patrol officer.  I was macho.  I cracked my knuckle.  The teacher asked who did it.  All of the kids pointed at me.  I tried to tell the teacher that it was an accident.  I had to stay after school.

 I still crack my knuckles, although not as many as I could at the height of my ability.  I once counted up to 30 separate joints to crack.  Fingers, wrists, toes, ankles, knees, back, jaw.  They were all subject to cracking at one point or another.  My knuckles never grew bigger, although some arthritis has set into some of the areas.  It isn't so much being macho anymore.  It is kind of a stress reliever.  The Village People said it best, "Macho Macho Man.  I've got to be a Macho Man."  I was.

Ski

  I might have shared this fact about me before, but I can't water ski.  It isn't that I don't know how so much, as it is that I can't.  There are a lot of reasons why I can't water ski.  First and foremost:  I can't swim.  My father tried to teach me how to swim early on.  He would be in a motel pool and get me to jump in.  He said he would catch me.  When I did, he would move away and expect me to save myself from drowning.  I almost drowned a lot.  It got to the point that I didn't trust him, so I gave up.  Later on, I took swimming lessons.  That didn't work either.  Instead, I almost drowned.  So, I gave up.  Another reason I never learned to water ski was that I was afraid that the jerk from the boat would dislocate my shoulders.  It might not have, but I had that worry.  My brother was a great water skier.  He could do tricks on skis.  One of his tricks was skiing while having his swim trunks go down to his ankles.  He said the others laughed and cheered.  He didn't know why until he let go of the rope.  That could have been me.

 However, there is a kind of skiing that I figured I could do.  Snow skiing.  I was in high school, and the youth from Kilbourne Park Baptist Church went on a trip to the Appalachian Ski Resort in North Carolina.  We were on a bus and went through a small country town on the way.  We waved at the folks on the street by saying, "Hi, Grits".  They waved back, because they couldn't hear what we were saying.  We laughed a lot at their expense.  

 When we got to the resort, there was snow on the ground and a lot of ice.  After we got our boots and skis, we headed over to the beginner's slope.  It was kind of small with a rope to carry you up to the top.  I was glad I had on gloves, because the rope was moving upward and would have given me blisters otherwise.  They told us how to slow down and stop by pointing the skis inward.  I couldn't do that, so I just fell down to stop.  I fell down a lot.  Then, I would get to the rope and go back up the hill.  The rope took off all the leather on my gloves by constant scraping.  Not fun.

 There were two other slopes at this resort.  The intermediate and the experienced.  You had to take a chairlift up to those.  Since I had managed to "ski" down the beginner's slope, it was onto more adventure.  The intermediate slope.  It was hard to time getting onto the chairlift.  It was moving at a pace which was a bit faster than normal.  Eventually, I found that jumping onto the seat would work.  Not the safest way, but I held on.  I looked down from the top of the slope and saw obstacles that I knew I couldn't ski around.  I saw people skiing from side to side, but my goal was to get down the slope without breaking a bone.  The quickest way was a straight line, so I proceeded to ski down the mountain and almost running into people along the way.  I sat down to stop and slid on my butt to the bottom of the slope.  With one run, I had "mastered" the intermediate slope.  A friend dared me to go to the slope for experienced skiers.  It was straight down with no obstacles.  Mostly ice.  I could see my life pass before my eyes, so I declined.  It was probably a wise move.  I might have been young and stupid, but I had to draw the line somewhere.

 I went inside to dry off next to the fireplace.  Another wise decision.  We got back on the bus and headed home.  We said goodbye to the "grits" on the town's sidewalk.  They waved back.  That was my foray into skiing.  I haven't done it since then, but at least I didn't drown.

Samson

  Back in high school, I did a lot of writing.  It was an escape from all of the things I was dealing with in life.  I wrote poetry, short stories and plays.  I even tried to write a novel, but I never got past the second chapter.  The novel was called "Carson Falls", and it was about an idyllic town in West Virginia that didn't know what happened on the other side of the mountain.  One day, the village idiot walked up to the top of the mountain and looked down to the other side.  He found that the world had been destroyed by a nuclear holocaust.  When he came down to the village and told the people what he saw, they didn't believe him.  It would have made a good book.

 Most of the poetry I wrote was about my awful life.  Very few friends.  Being suicidal.  Extremely dark stuff.  Some were songs that were recorded later on.  One in particular was a song called "Albert Frankenstein".  I was about me with horrible acne.  I showed it to my father, and he asked if I had written it about me.  Of course, I lied.  I did a lot of lying to my parents.  I think they knew the truth.  

 The fun stuff in my repertoire were the plays.  My best friend in high school was a guy named Richard.  He and I would save our lunch money and spend the time in the Flora library writing or playing chess in the New York Times.  He would take the news magazines and write funny captions to the pictures.  I would write one-act plays.  One series was called "Uncle Don".  He was the host of a children's TV show.  He was also a little crazy.  He would have guests on his show that were either Communists or activists.  Uncle Don was arrested and put into prison, but he still did a show from there using other inmates as guests.  When I joined Kilbourne Park Baptist Church, there was a family named Wise who sort of adopted me into their family.  I spent a lot of time with them.  Mr. Wise was an attorney in Columbia, and his whole name was A. Birge Wise.  I wrote a short play about him called "Birge for the Defense".  The hook for the play was the line:  "What's a Birge?"  We sat around the breakfast table and read the play.  Everyone liked it, except Mr. Wise thought I was making fun of him.  Maybe I was.  I just loved that family.  I also wrote a very bizarre play called "The End of the Moon".  Somebody at school had written a play called "The Beginning of the Sun", so I took that one and made everything the opposite of the other one.  It was kind of science fiction about the moon crashing into the Earth and killing everyone.

 One of my favorites was a series of short stories called "Captain Soul".  He was a superhero crime-fighter who wasn't very successful.  He was more interested in being cool.  He had a sidekick named Samson who was a six-foot chicken.  Samson couldn't speak, but all criminals would faint seeing this chicken.  Then, Captain Soul would come in and take credit for capturing the bad people.  As long as he would feed Samson, the relationship was good.  And no, I was not on drugs while writing it.  Although, it probably would be better for the readers if they were on drugs.

Rituals

  I am a very shy person.  For those who know me, that statement doesn't come as a surprise.  As far as I can remember, I have always been shy.  It may be one reason why I have never married.  I am afraid of relationships getting serious.  I have learned to put on a front around people I don't know.  And if I seem aloof to a person, it isn't that I am.  It is because I'm shy.  I am more comfortable being around myself than to be around others.  

 So, when the drama bug bit me in 1971, I was shocked just like everyone else.  I found that I could be someone else on a stage and be pretty good at it.  If I was on that stage as me, it was a whole different ballgame.  I had started public speaking in high school.  I learned how to speak before an audience.  The words came out of my mouth, but I tried to not make eye contact with the audience.  I didn't want to see them seeing me.  By being an actor, I had to maneuver around that fear.  I also came to find out that many other actors shared my fear.  The fear manifested itself in different ways.  It was the fear of messing up.  I found that to be true in the 4th grade, when I messed up my lines in a Christmas play at school.  Or, when I messed up my lines in a Christmas play at church in 1970.  It was also the fear of the audience not liking my performance.  It was also the fear of being on a stage, and people looking at me.  

 In 1972, I was given the male lead of a play at the last minute.  The other actor had left school just a few days before opening night.  I knew the lines, but I also knew that the play depended on me doing a good job.  It was the first time I had gotten a lead in a play. I cut my classes and crammed for it.  On opening night, I was sitting backstage in terror.  The other actors were supportive, but I had to perform.  I found a dark corner and prayed.  I asked God, "Please let me do a good job.  Please take away my fears.  Give me clarity of mind and may someone in the audience like what I do."  I felt a calmness come over me.  I went out on stage and did what I had to do.  I didn't get a particularly good review from the theatre critic of the local newspaper, but the next night was better.

 After that, I prayed the same prayer before every performance I did.  Before every play.  Before every time I had to do public speaking as me.  Before every movie or TV role.  My acting and public speaking talents are God-given to me.  He knows how I can use my life experiences to be a better actor or public speaker.  Prayer works.

 Even though I pray before going out on stage, there is the human side of doubt and that brings me to stage fright.  I have always been afraid of going out there.  For example, I don't like to eat a full meal before going on stage, because I get sick to my stomach with fear.  I am a nervous wreck.  So, there are rituals I do before making an entrance.  These rituals have evolved over time, and I have added some along the way.  I use the same makeup towel.  It may or may not have ever been washed.  Let me just say that it can stand up on its own.  I do exercises before going on stage.  I do vocal exercises, where I make noises that make no sense.  I also recite the alphabet forwards and backwards.  I do physical exercises by tensing and relaxing muscles.  I try and get the stress out of my body by moving around my legs, fingers and shoulders.  To get energy going, I jump up and down.  A woman at a church thought I was being charismatic, but the director assured her that I was just warming up.  Then, I get in a place away from everyone else and run through the first couple of lines to myself and say my prayer.  When I go out on stage, all of that fear is channeled into energy.  My talents kick in.  After the play is over, I go backstage to take off my makeup.  I use the same remover--Merle Norman cold cream.  It is part of my ritual.  

 I will get praise from my acting work.  People will tell me how great I was.  If they saw me backstage before that performance, they would see this guy who is a mess.  My mother used to tell me how shocked she was to see me on stage that first time.  Who was this shy person?  I ask the same question.  I am an actor.  I know how to be an actor.  I know all of the mechanics on what to do on stage.  I am not me.  If one sees me out in public, I may be acting still.  That's what I do.