Avoiding Bruised Ego Builds Regret: Step 79

When I arrived at John Marshall Junior-Senior High School I had every intention of improving my life as a student. Not only did I plan to devote more time to studying in order to learn and achieve better grades, but to become a full participant in the various extracurricular activities which round out an individual and contribute to school spirit. In the academic realm this meant actually opening and reading English and social studies texts, writing themes and essays, and learning the meaning of terms, such as medulla oblongata, in Mrs. Suggs’s biology class.

Fortunately, Steve M, who would eventually become known to me simply as M, and who I’ll refer to as M from this point forward, helped me in the lab portions of the class. While I still had the notion I would one day be a fine surgeon it was actually M who had the steady hand and ran the scalpel the length of the frog. I was however able to pin back the skin exposing the sack of eggs in its abdomen and helping us both to answer the question of the animal’s sex correctly.

It may not have been during this dissection, but somewhere around this time we realized we were connected in multiple ways. Not only had I attended his bar mitzvah as the result of his being paired with Kerry who invited me, but also one of his mother’s cousins was married to one of my mother’s cousins making us something in Yiddish called machtaunim. Or, in the more standard Hebrew vernacular we were mishpacha, part of the extended family. If that was not enough, it turned out M’s father, a real estate developer, built the houses on Lancaster Avenue. It was his final endeavor in single home residential construction, and M noted his father’s efforts to satisfy customers like my mother regarding such things as plumbing was one of the main reasons he stuck to building apartments and commercial structures.

It would have been nice to have M at my side when a few weeks into the semester I went to Mr. Bielenberg’s classroom after school for the first casting call for the spring play. Walking into the room I found the popular Mr. Bielenberg surrounded by many students, some of whom I recognized from having mutual acquaintances. There were no familiar faces. No Cookie, no Lolly, no Gary, and Mike had moved back to Detroit.

Still, looking back there was no reason for me, the actor honored with a Sammy for his earlier performances and selected by yet another adult drama director at Samuel Morse Junior High to play the villain in the most recent production, not to feel confident my audition would earn me a role and a chance to act on the high school stage. But, that was not the case. All I saw was an impenetrable clique of friends who having performed in the Marshall spring musical were certain to land parts in the upcoming play. Fear and apprehension, even though totally unwarranted has a way of overcoming sound judgment, especially when an adolescent ego is involved. Without ever giving Mr. Bielenberg the opportunity to discover my talent I did the unthinkable I left never to return.