After two years working with Mrs. Haggerty and having received the Sammy for my acting, I returned to school the fall of my final semester at Samuel Morse Junior High expecting to be cast in the lead of the next school play. To my surprise Mrs. Haggerty would no longer be directing. While I cannot recall for certain, my assumption is she left the school for another position, and given what I remember learning years later about her career it was probably in administration. So, there was a new sheriff in town. His name was Mr. Reiser, and as fortune would have it my cousin Natalie was a student in his homeroom. Cousin Natalie had a larger than life personality whose exuberance led her to come up to me in the hallway the previous year, tell me we were cousins and proceed to explain how her maternal grandfather was somehow connected to my maternal grandfather, or something like that. Even though she was a full year behind me in school, her confidence meter ran off the chart. My first meeting with her parents helped explain this phenomenon to my as yet undeveloped psychoanalytic mind. Her father was a quiet man who taught at the university, while her mother, a highly trained professional, spoke at length of the many accomplishments her organization had achieved. Of course, when Natalie told me Mr. Reiser was a “super guy,” and she was certain he would bring a new element of excitement to our production I had to wonder whether it was just her natural enthusiasm or was there credibility to her assertions. When I arrived at her homeroom for the auditions he was sitting behind his desk with a number of students, mostly girls, laughing and giggling at whatever he was saying. Natalie came over to me as I sat down in one of the desks. She started to talk, but before she finished Mr. Reiser came over, extended his hand, which I automatically shook, and introduced himself injecting his first name before Reiser. He proceeded to tell me how Mrs. Haggerty had spoken highly of me, and he had taken the liberty of assigning me the role of Tedious J. Impossible, the villain in the melodrama we were going to do. Since an audition wasn’t necessary he told me I did not need to stay. I stayed long enough to learn he planned to use a strobe light to create the affect of an old time silent era movie. Natalie finished her audition and we walked home together talking about the play. Rehearsals went smoothly with everyone learning their lines with time to spare. Mr. Reiser came up on stage to walk through the steps in the short but critical fight scene between the hero and me. We knew the strobe would make it difficult to detect how we pulled our punches, but he wanted to make sure when I fell on my backside I landed properly. Dress rehearsal was my first opportunity to work with the top hat, cape, and paste on mustache. Keeping the hat in place and pulling the cape to cover my face proved easy enough, but twirling the mustache without yanking it off my face took extra practice. It proved critical because during the play I had several asides where the strobe would stop, everyone would freeze, and I’d step downstage under a single spotlight, twirl my mustache, and tell the audience, “Eh-eh-eh, little do they know, but I, Tedious J. Impossible…” The day of the play the strobe worked perfectly, my mustache stayed on my face, and the small bruise I received for landing a little too much on my side only lasted a week. My final chance to perform at Samuel Morse was a rousing success, but the best part came a few weeks later when I was in an argument with my sister. In frustration she declared, “You are just impossible.” “That’s right,” I said, “Tedious J.”
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