tattoo too

TATTOO
THEATER 12
-spring 1986
The final show of my high school career. Lou and i had done in it the fall, and Mr. Roche offered it to me again, for a drama festival at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope. He asked whether i wanted to take a stab at being Charley, the tattoo artist. Of course i did. But who's going to be the businessman, i asked? Pick someone, he said, and he also had faith that we could direct it ourselves. I chose my Youth Club buddy Ken Hartman. In contrast to Lou's New-Yorky Charley, i made mine a southerner. The festival was fantastic. The playhouse had lots of history. There was a poster of Tim Conway and Tom Poston on the wall. It was a stormy day, and wandering around the grimy backstage areas felt perfect. The building leaked, there were buckets scattered about, one of them even onstage. Thunder rolled, and the metal roof amplified the rain. Our show about a stormy day was was the one show for which this was perfect. Several of our lines got extra laughs, as the storm became a third character. We came in second in festival ranking. Sometime that spring, Mr. Roche and i were chatting, and the subject of Lou came up. In class that year, Mr. Roche had occasionally knocked Lou down a peg when he was attacking me. After suggesting that Lou's problem stemmed from jealousy, he told me something i'll never forget. He said that in all the years he had been with the school, there were two actors whose talent stood out head and shoulders above the rest. The first was a student from many years back, and the second one was me. I was humbled, but ready to hear it, and ready to be worthy of it.