Misfits

In seventh grade I was in a one-act play that was performed for the whole school. It’s title was “Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil.” (On the Samuel French Website, you can buy the acting edition for $6.50; it was first presented at the Christodora House in New York City in 1916, but your still have to pay French $45 per performance; how much could they be banking on “the Lentils” a century later?) I played the boy watching his mother boil lentils while a queen and a mime and a milkmaid and a blind man and a ballad singer pass by. The seventh grader who played the milkmaid in a bright-pink woman's dress was named Sheila, and she was almost a pariah, at school and in the neighborhood; her face was terribly scarred and hideously mis-formed. I’m not sure if the director, Mrs. Levy, Diane Levy, my English teacher, who was a hard, teased blond with thick black-framed glasses and leather-tanned skin, cast Sheila as a mean joke. The boy I played was probably nine years old and I wore Bermuda shorts, a dull white button-down shirt, and suspenders, with knee-high black socks and sandals. (I was the up-and-coming actor at Bethpage Junior High School, and would star in Arsenic and Old Lace the next year, playing Cary Grant; a boy named Roy, already an eighth-grader and the school star, who was tall and full-bodied in a middle-aged suit with middle-aged hair and eyes, played the blind man with words of wisdom and pats of affection for me as the young boy; he had white powder on his big eyebrows and lots of age make up, and made great eye contact, at least with me.) It was humiliating, exposing my naked knees to the entire auditorium crowd, and horrible having to kiss mis-formed Sheila as the milkmaid. At the curtain call, I heard only the jeers and the hoots and the whistles, holding Sheila’s sweaty palm in one hand and Roy’s big palm squeezing mine in the other as we stood together on the edge of the auditorium stage. My first time among a troupe of actors, us against them, me and Sheila and Roy and the others, and we showed ‘em, standing right up there and taking our bow.