Editor's Note: This story happened an impossibly long time ago – more than half a century, in fact. It would stretch 21st-century credibility to insist that anyone now alive could conceivably remember such a time. For this reason, the story will be told in third-person narration. As usual, the names are changed in case anyone went into the Witness Protection Program.

It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. The sun might still have been shining outside, but none of the people in the auditorium could see it. Auditoriums don't usually have windows, and this one was no exception. It was a large auditorium that could seat about 800. It needed to be: the entire student body of 1600 had to fit into two assemblies, and this well-equipped venue did that exactly. It also housed evening performances of school plays and musicals, talent shows, band and choir concerts, and the occasional visiting lecturer. That stage had even been graced by the Pittsburgh Symphony and Walt Harper's jazz band (not at the same time).

Right now, though, the stage was occupied by a dozen teenagers. A dozen tired and slightly quarrelsome teenagers. They'd been trying to get this dance routine down for days, it seemed, and it wouldn't come right. Choreography wasn't the long suit of the students at Sutter's Spring High School.

Editor's Note: Apologies to the rest of the world, but in the US, young folk attending junior high and high school are referred to as 'students', not 'pupils'. In fact, even the primary grades can be called 'students'. The word just doesn't convey that sense of entitlement it has elsewhere on the planet. You might be interested in knowing that in Iceland, the word 'Student' is an honorific meaning that the Icelander in question has been graduated from gymnasium. My Icelandic professor, who did her doctoral studies in Reykjavik, said that when her mom complained about how long that PhD was taking, she sent back a photo of a headstone saying only, 'Sigguður Storlusson, Student'. Now back to the story.

Around the auditorium, groups of students were huddled, practising lines from the school's upcoming musical. Heidi Kovacs was going around as she did every afternoon, collecting money and orders for snack food from the little strip mall next door to the school. They wouldn't kick about one student, but a gaggle would draw complaints about 'loitering' from the management, so Heidi had appointed herself Snack Fetcher. She was nice like that. They'd made her assistant manager.

Over at the Steinway, Jim G. was banging away, trying to find a tune, while two students laboured over a duet. The music had never been properly printed. It consisted of a bound set of photocopy pages of hand-scrawled scores from the original off-off-Broadway production. Personally, Jim had trouble believing that Our Miss Brooks had ever been presented on a legitimate stage. In his musical opinion – he'd been playing for people to sing for a good seven years now – the play was dumb and the music dumber. I mean, who wants to watch a bunch of 16-year-olds singing about a high school, anyway? Worse, it was a high school musical about high school students putting on a high school musical. Talk about unnecessary.

Also, the songs were too hard for this cast. A lot of them weren't in the school choir, and for a reason. Jim privately thought tone-deafness was probably genetic, and definitely shouldn't be mocked, but it made learning songs difficult, especially those with dubious (read nonexistent) melodic development. The students knew this. Which was why Jim never got a break during rehearsals. Every spare moment was taken up by some anxious actor wanting to 'go over that song again'. If Heidi hadn't put his Coke and candy bar on the piano for him, Jim didn't know if he'd have made it until dinnertime.

Editor's Note: Why were all these kids of minimal talent in a musical? In a word, Lookism. The teachers who cast school plays weren't the ones who taught, say, drama or singing. Those teachers would be looking for talent and a willingness to learn. The teachers who sponsored performance as their (paid) after-school activity had very specific requirements: the students involved should be physically attractive, 'popular', and hopefully possessed of well-connected parents. Which, of course, explains Jim. None of the 'popular' kids did anything boring like playing the piano. Jim was always being kidnapped by these teachers to accompany their latest after-hours triumph. He'd played the Home Economics fashion show on two hours' notice. He was used to it. Back to the story.

The anxiety and noise levels were high this afternoon: two weeks to go, and they didn't have a play yet. The main reason, though nobody wanted to say so, was the director, Miss Rosen. She obviously hadn't done anything like this before, and she hadn't a clue. Also, the chaos was getting to her. She wasn't used to this level of emotion in a school setting. After all, she taught psychology.

Editor's Note: She really did teach psychology, although none of us was ever sure what possessed the school system to offer this course at high school level. Her classroom was in the same wing of the same floor as the language classes, which led to funny business when she ran films about Hitler to 'explain' mass psychology. You could hear Der Führer ranting halfway down the hall, and our German class could actually understand what was being said. We retaliated by singing what our teacher called 'dumme Volkslieder' at the top of our lungs. This was too much for the French teacher, who invariably slammed her door in a particularly Gallic fashion. The Spanish teacher remained neutral, which was at least a historically correct position. Back to the story.

Just as the babbling and warbling and piano-pounding reached a crescendo, there was an almighty CRASH! An ear-splitting THUD, if you prefer. Followed by a piercing shriek. We all stopped dead in our tracks.

The thud was occasioned by the fall of a particularly heavy lectern that had been moved off the stage and was (had been, now wasn't) standing between the piano and the organ on floor level. The fall wasn't accidental: it, and the scream, were the doing of Miss Rosen, who now became the cynosure of all eyes. She stood there, in her attractive school-teaching suit and tasteful pumps (teachers dressed nicely in those days), her blonde bouffant mussed and her countenance expressive of desperation.

The kids were surprised, shocked, and a little awed. They hadn't heard this much noise from a teacher since seventh grade, when Coach Hickenloper had responded to the prolonged autumn rains by drawing on his professional experience as a Marine Drill Instructor. The resulting six weeks of co-educational marching instruction, held in the gym, had left some of them scarred for life. Jim had regarded episodes of 'Gomer Pyle USMC' as therapy.

Miss Rosen had definitively Lost It. 'I've had enough!' she shouted. 'You people are impossible to work with! I quit! No play this year!' And, sobbing, she ran up the aisle and out one of the multitudinous back doors that were required by health and safety laws.

The students looked at each other in dismay. 'What happened? Did anybody say anything to her? Walt, did you tell her one of your dumb jokes?'

'No!' protested Walt Weidemann. 'I only asked her if she wanted help moving the prop furniture around.'

'I even said hello in a nice way,' put in Josh Gilligan. Everyone else nodded. Nobody remembered saying or doing anything that would have provoked this kind of outburst.

Editor's note: This was the 1960s. Contrary to what you may have thought based on admittedly sparse tv footage of a documentary nature (as opposed to sitcoms), most high school kids in the 60s were a well-behaved lot. They sympathised with their overworked teachers. They tried not to be a nuisance. Of course, what they weren't good at was assessing the ages (and maturity levels) of adults. The junior high had been full of middle-aged and elderly teachers because only mature teachers were deemed suitably seasoned and ready to take on the nightmare years between 13 and 15. The high school, on the other hand, was more likely to be staffed by twenty-somethings, just out of college with the ink barely dry on their education licences: inexperienced but enthusiastic. To a 16-year-old, they were adults, expected to be equal to all challenges posed by mere kids. To us, looking back, they were fresh-faced cannon fodder. Back to the story.

The murmuring stopped as one of the back doors flew open. Mr Fosse came storming in. Mr Fosse was short and balding and full of self-importance. Mr Fosse fancied himself quite the impresario and ran the annual talent show. Jim had had dealings with him before. Mr Fosse usually called Jim in at the last minute to play accompaniment for the talent show. Three choruses of 'Let the Sunshine In' sprang unbidden to mind. It wasn't all bad: Mr Fosse had paid Jim ten bucks to spend a Saturday afternoon banging out 'I Ain't Down Yet' for Colleen O'Donovan's tryout for Miss Teenage Pittsburgh. (She didn't win but made a respectable showing.) Colleen was playing Miss Brooks in this awful farce of a musical. She was the loveliest girl in the school, but she still couldn't sing a note.

'You people are in a lot of trouble!' Mr Fosse fumed. 'Miss Rosen has quit! She's not feeling well at all, and it's all your fault! Pack up your things and call your parents. This musical is history!' And he stormed out again, obviously pleased with the drama of his announcement – which, let's face it, was more drama than the auditorium had seen all year.

Jim started to pack up music, secretly relieved, but also sorry for the teenage actors. The others, however, weren't ready to give up so easily.

Walt went first. 'Just who does Mr Fosse think he is, talking to us like that? We behaved just fine.' Walt might have been worried about what his father, a Lutheran pastor, was going to say.

There were murmurs of agreement. 'Yeah, and now everybody will blame us. They don't, er, know Miss Rosen like we do,' Heidi said tactfully. What nobody wanted to say aloud was that they suspected the name for Miss Rosen's problem was probably somewhere in the Intro to Psychology book.

There was discussion. Unlike the teachers, the students knew each other well. Many had been in school together since the age of six. They valued one another's strengths and knew how to work around weaknesses. Also, they had more experience in producing musical plays than Miss Rosen.

It was her first: it was not theirs. They had done operettas with Mr Schumacher in junior high. They had even gone on strike before, refusing to perform Victor Herbert. The astonished music teacher had agreed to let the class do Gilbert and Sullivan if Jim would serve as director. Jim agreed. The experiment had been a success: for once, parents had stopped making excuses not to attend. Word had got around that HMS Pinafore was actually funny and contained no painful tenor solos of the type 'Slumber On, My Little Gypsy Sweetheart.' Experiences like that give kids confidence – the confidence they needed to confront the Establishment in the form of Educational Authority.

The next teacher through the door was a social studies teacher, Mr McGinty, a sensible man in his thirties with more hair and less attitude than Mr Fosse.

'What's going on?' he wanted to know. 'I have some upset teachers in the lounge.'

The students explained. They protested their innocence. Mr McGinty, who probably had more background information than the students, listened thoughtfully.

'Mr McGinty,' said Heidi, their spokeswoman, 'We don't think it's fair to cancel the play. What we'd like to do is to do it ourselves. Jim here's got the music covered, the AV Club takes care of the stage stuff, and since I'm the assistant manager anyway, I'll direct – if everybody will help me?' She looked around for confirmation. Every head nodded, and Jim held thumbs up.

Mr McGinty squinted. 'You do need a faculty sponsor. I don't know anything about plays, but if you promise me that I won't have to do anything but sit here. . .'

'Oh, yes! Promise! Pleasepleaseplease. . . we love you!' The enthusiastic cast won him over, and it was agreed.

Two more weeks of hard work followed. Jim's mom got extremely tired of making a five-mile round trip every evening just at suppertime to pick him up. He explained that he couldn't back out on this one. Just to fill out the sound, he roped in a drummer and Cynthia, the only other pianist around. Cynthia could play by ear, which was good, since she was blind. The Braille enthusiasts in the school (there were several) hadn't mastered music scores yet. Cynthia, a genius, doped out the Hammond organ, and by opening night they sounded like a genuine combo.

The first performance went well – for a certain definition of 'well'. Colleen, the only actor with a costume change, got locked out of the stage area due to an overzealous maintenance man. While she traversed the length of a rather large school building, trying doors, mad adlibbing took place on stage. Jim and Cynthia had just struck up an improvised musical interlude when Colleen made it back onstage to delighted applause. The place was packed: word had got around.

The real highlight of the evening was Heidi's solo. In addition to managing all this madness, Heidi had worked very hard with Jim on her number, called 'Down with the Rock.' Her character was a bossy teacher who objected to rock music and lamented the heyday of opera. The solo, possibly the only song with actual music in it, consisted of a pastiche of opera arias with subversive plot summaries for lyrics. La Traviata 'died of a very bad cold in the chest', and the students were exhorted to sing 'something warm, like Brunhilda riding her horse into the fire, ho-yo-to-ho.' Heidi belted all this out, and it was a show-stopper.

The curtain call contained another surprise: the sudden reappearance of Miss Rosen. To the cast's secret bemusement, she blushed and bowed as Mr Fosse ceremoniously (obsequiously, they thought) proffered her a bouquet of roses. He off-handedly gave a smaller bouquet to Heidi.

The students chalked it up to experience: another milestone on the rocky road to adulthood. It wasn't as if they were really surprised. After all, it was the 1960s.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

15.01.24 Front Page

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