[From 1976-1983, I taught English and directed plays at Holland Hall
Upper School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was twenty-four and had negligible
experience. I didn't know up from down about teaching, but during those
years, a handful of students changed me irrevocably. Over three decades,
one way or the other, they've found me. I recently invited them to
become guest bloggers, reflecting on something about their high school
selves.
Tim Blake Nelson, Class of 1982, took me by storm. Every day. For four
years. Countless interactions with him in class and rehearsals reduced me to
giggles or tears, soul-searching tears. In morning meetings he often impersonated
faculty members. Several of them confronted me in the lounge and demanded to
know why he did that. Panicked, I knew I had to save him, so I said he’d either
become an actor or a writer and was practicing dialogue and characters. (Shocked silence. I sounded crazy, but I believed that was his destiny.) I
insisted he meant no harm. He probably did, but I knew better than to throw him
to the angry mob. Yet I repeatedly held his feet to the fire in other ways. When I refused
to give him an A on his sophomore research paper, the English Department revolted against me. “In twenty years it won’t
matter,” a colleague contended. “It will to Tim,” I said. “He’ll see it wasn't an A and be
embarrassed for himself and ashamed of me.” Tim called, almost on cue in twenty
years, and said, “You were right, Karen. It wasn’t an A.” This rowdy boy
changed the trajectory of my life. Even now, no one can push all my
unsuspecting buttons the way he still does.]
***
This is going to be boring, because it’s not a story of
struggle or duress. High school in many
ways mapped out my life.
During those
years (for me 1978-1982), I began to engage in aspects of every pursuit that
occupies me now. I wrote and acted in my
own scripts, took lots of photographs, read and wrote a great deal, and acted
in as many plays as would have me.
I
encountered extraordinary teachers, including the one hosting this blog, and I
learned how to take from them what they gave, while endeavoring to give back
some measure of myself by way of enthusiasm at the very least. Above all, I gathered that a great education
and a good deal of work and determination make anything possible. This is a simplistic cliché in which I still
believe, much to the frustration of my inculcated children.
Like most at my private school, I grew up in relative privilege. I had access to a family car, a bit of money
to spend on weekends, and a room of my own with a door I could close. I lived in a safe neighborhood, and there were
both the expectation and means for me to attend college. My best pals and I went off mostly to fancy
schools that provided extraordinary educations. Additionally, we got to do this from Tulsa, Oklahoma; what remains to me
a contrapuntally exotic place because it offered little allure to the
homogenizing corruptions of the outside world. Yes, it was middle America, but a middle America largely hidden from
view because folks didn’t go there to visit, but to live. There were few tourists, and therefore none of
the places that catered to them, allowing a kind of genuineness to
pervade. When I eventually moved East for college,
I got to come therefore from a place remote and specific; I was the only kid in
my class of twelve hundred from my state, and that felt special.
I was small, Jewish, not particularly athletic, and not
among the very smartest scholastically, so my currency came mostly from being
funny, a pursuit I pushed hard, and at which I often succeeded but also
occasionally faltered. My humor could be
cruel, disrespectful, and when it was I knew instantly. I learned through failure about laughter in
its more benign and even constructive forms, how when humor lacerated, it
needed to have a purpose. Somehow I got
a girlfriend who was smart and kind and very pretty. She drove a Jeep Renegade and was the star
pitcher on the softball team. When she would periodically break up with me,
being funny, let alone doing schoolwork, felt impossible. When we’d get back together, I felt invincible. My friends all loved her, a few of them a bit
too much for my liking.
My sophomore year, on the night my girlfriend and I had our
first real kiss, my father walked out on my mother, initiating what would be an
ugly and attenuated divorce over the next several years. My mother was in unbearable pain, and
selfishly I often couldn’t take it, so I hid in my schoolwork and social life,
throwing myself into every activity I could, and pursuing the most advanced
courses available (except for math, at which I was preternaturally
abysmal). I escaped from real life and
real pain, in other words, with a new enthusiasm for school. My best buddy JB and I edited the paper our junior year, driving my car onto the floor of the indoor commons to deliver the
April Fools edition. It helped us to
avoid punishment that he was the headmaster’s son. For my senior year, I was elected student
council president. With my friend James, I
did skits we would write and perform during morning meetings, often twice a
week, for every event or item that needed to be advertised. My grades improved steadily, and with a cadre
of enthusiasts I fell in love with Latin and the teacher who taught it. Our clan would study late into the night,
reading and translating Catullus and Horace and Virgil.
There was also a good deal of drinking…and driving. How none of us was maimed or even killed—how
we didn’t maim or kill others--remains a mystery to me. Every weekend night involved some form of
cat-and-mouse with the local constabulary who would search us out in their
prowlers in abandoned parking lots, behind churches, or on backroads and
overlooks where we’d guzzle Mickeys Big Mouths, Little Kings, or Cold Duck. Had our parents known, we would have been
slaughtered. There was plenty of pot
around too, but I liked the booze, and spent my last prom night in jail for
public intoxication. Ultimately I didn’t
care, as shameful and stupidly dangerous as it was. I was graduating, and high school had been
glorious.
In contrast, my first months at college were awful. I was lonely, unfulfilled, and lost. I missed my girlfriend, my still struggling
and extraordinary mother, my friends, my complete life and its sense of
purpose. Yet most of all, even in a
homesickness that would eventually abate, I felt lucky. Yes, I’d had ups and downs—breakups, a bad
grade here and there, my parents’ divorce, not being cast in a play, an arrest,
friends who betrayed me—but by and large high school was something I’d assayed
with a verve and enthusiasm that had rewarded me dearly. I had teachers who encouraged and truly cared
(again, topping the list the host of this blog), along with a smart and varied
group of friends, and a girl who taught me how to love. People laughed at me when I wanted them to, and
were interested in the stories I was beginning to tell. I was learning to control and focus that in a
way I sensed someday might have meaning.
I left Tulsa, in other words, with a burgeoning sense of what
my life could be, and because of that, I feel like I’ve been living it fully
ever since.
***
Tim Blake Nelson, a graduate of Brown University and Juilliard, is an actor, writer, and director. He lives in New York City with his wife and three sons.
You can say it's all about muscle and strategy.
