It was the summer of 1973 and I was living at my folks house in Stockton.  I had quit my job as a roofer a couple of months before and wasn’t much interested in looking for another one as it would interfere with my current lifestyle of hanging out with my friends and drinking beer.  After this had gone on for a while my mom came to me one day with a proposal.  I could either get a job or go back to school.  So I decided to continue my higher education, which to that point consisted of a semester and a half at the local junior college during which I changed my major three times.  In keeping with my current lifestyle my priority in choosing a line of study was a complete and total lack of homework.  As I perused the catalog Drama 1A seemed to fit my criteria.  It happened that the drama depart was starting rehearsals for summer stock and so I and my sister, who I assume was given the same ultimatum, signed up and were assigned to the chorus of Brigadoon, a musical about a cursed Scottish village that reappears out the fog every hundred years.

I will point out here that singing and dancing were never going to be my ticket to stardom.  However as a former high school wrestler I could fall down with the best of them and once this talent was discovered I was cast in the actions scenes.  My big scene was at the end of Act 1, when in the middle of the wedding scene the antagonist assaults the bride.  At which point I step out of the crowd, pull him off of her and knock him to the ground.  He then comes up brandishing a knife and runs offstage.  There’s an art to a stage punch in the way you sell it.  In this case I would grab his right shoulder with my left hand and spin him around so his back was to the audience.  Then I would swing full force past his jaw and hit the back of my left hand, creating the flesh on flesh sound.  I practiced this over and over with Tony, the actor who played the antagonist until we felt had it down.

As fate would have it soon work came calling and I found myself back working for my old boss at the roofing company.  His name was Louie and his step-daughters were pals of mine from high school.  Louie was an old school Italian of the work hard/play hard school.  He would yell at you all day long but when the day was done the drinks were on him.  And drinking was a major theme around the crew.  Louie’s foreman, Big Gene, would polish off a six pack of Regal Select in the truck on the way to the job in the morning.  There was another sixer for morning break before heading to the bar for lunch.  Then after work we would head straight to the bar where we would stay until they turned the  air conditioning off.  Keep in mind that in Stockton in the summer it would be too hot to be on the roof by 2 pm so the work day started at 6 am.  To further complicate the situation the show was now deep into rehearsals and rehearsals were running deep into the night, sometimes until 2 am.  So my routine became go to work at the crack of dawn, work all day and then head for the bar until it was time to go to rehearsal, catch a quick shower then rehearse until well after midnight, catch a couple of hours of sleep then get up and do it again.  At some point I developed a cyst on my tailbone which made sitting on roofs extremely painful, so codeine was added to the mix.  I began nodding out riding in the truck to the job in the morning.  The boss started to think I had a drinking problem and I let him think that because drunks he understood…but actors?

Finally Opening Night arrived.  After work I cashed my paycheck at the bar and had a couple of drinks with the guys before heading off to get ready for the show.  I was tired from working all week and the pain in my ass was throbbing so in the dressing room I took a pain pill.  Then it was showtime.  You can rehearse a show for months but a live audience changes everything.  The lights are brighter, the music is louder, the energy more intense, the pace quicker.  My adrenaline surged as I focused on staying in harmony and remembering the blocking movements.  Finally the moment arrives as Act 1 comes to a crescendo.  Tony grabs the girl.  I grab Tony and spin him around.  I deliver my stage punch and Tony goes down as I hover over him with fists clenched.  And he’s not coming up.  He’s late on his cue and time is both frozen and racing at once as I wait for it, feeling the eyes of the entire audience upon me.  Finally after seconds that seemed like hours he rises brandishing the knife and runs offstage.  As the curtain drops I  find Tony backstage and ask him what happened. “You clipped me”,  he said.  Apparently the added adrenaline lengthened my swing just enough to catch the point of Tony’s jaw, causing the lights to flash much brighter for him in that instant before going out momentarily.  I sheepishly offered him a codeine.

Thus began my career in the theater, although it took a different path in the fall.  Because once the faculty discovered that I had a talent for pounding  nails I never saw the outside of the scene shop again, save for the occasional bit part where they needed someone to fall down or lift something heavy.  There was no fame or fortune down that path but I was getting paid a whole $15 a week, which usually went toward beer and smoke for the cast parties.  I made some great friends, some of them life long, and accrued 55 units of completely useless theater credits.  It led to jobs with ACT and the Renaissance Faire, where I rose to the head of the Design Department, as well as movie and event gigs over the next dozen years until left the field.  And while I never earned a degree, it helped me achieve my life long goal of getting out of Stockton.