big brother. I was her go-to babysitter and frequent schlepper, but I never begrudged either job. Mainly I was her primary source of fun, and she mine. I read her books, sang her songs, and littered the house with all kinds of crafts projects. Our big housing complex bordered a large woodsy tract of land on the edge of town. This became an exotic playground for us and the site of endless adventures. In the winter I taught her to skate on the vast expanse of ice covering Carnegie Lake. Together, we turned even mundane household chores into giddy drama. The layout of our building required a fifty-yard trek to its garbage bin. Dolly and I invented the characters of two undercover agents, named “Big” and “Little,” and turned the garbage run into an hour-long espionage mission, packed with suspense and hilarity. In spite of our cover names, at such moments we were no longer a big brother and a little sister. We were playmates, pure and simple, uncannily attuned to each other’s sense of adventure and fun.
Although the thought never occurred to me at the time, those idle hours with Dolly provided me with an unwitting primer on parenthood. Years later, when I became a father, I put all our projects, adventures, and games back to work. As a parent I was far from perfect (ask any of my children), but as a gonzo entertainer I was way ahead of the game.
As a matter of fact, gonzo entertainment was to become a major sideline to my professional career. Anticipating parenthood in my mid-twenties, I began to teach myself guitar, intending to sing and play songs for my first child. My playing never advanced beyond grinding mediocrity, but it was good enough for “She’ll Be Comin’ round the Mountain” and “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie.” Within a few years I was singing in my son Ian’s classrooms and school assemblies. I started making up my own daffy songs. I fashioned a fifty-minute concert for kids and perfected the demanding skill of unleashing and harnessing their wild enthusiasm without ever losing their attention. As the years passed, the concert venues got bigger. I performed with major orchestras. The concerts spawned CDs and bestselling books. I clowned around for two thousand children on the stage of Carnegie Hall. But if the scale of these escapades grew exponentially, their spirit remained the same. I never lost the sense of goofy fun that I discovered entertaining my little sister.
My own children outgrew my kids’ concerts years ago, but I’ve never stopped doing them. The more I perform for children, the more I love it. They are a sensational audience for a stage performer and an exhilarating change of pace from adults. The goal of theater is a suspension of disbelief. With grown-ups, you never completely achieve it. Adults never entirely forget that they are watching actors pretend. You can certainly have an impact on them. You can surprise them, move them, shock them, and make them laugh. But you’re not fooling them for a moment. Adults always sit in a theater with the unwavering knowledge that they are watching a calculated piece of fiction.
Not so children. They barely know what a theater is. For them, there is little difference between artifice and reality. Irony means nothing to them. Their disbelief is in a constant state of suspension. Over time I’ve invented all sorts of tricks to take advantage of their innocence. My concerts are full of them. For example, I always stride onstage for my first song wearing a jaunty bowler hat. I finish the song and begin to greet the kids. One of the musicians tugs at my sleeve, whispers to me, and points to my hat. I reach up, feel the hat, and shout out, with shock and dismay:
“Oh, no! I’ve done it again! I do it all the time! I put on my hat, I sing the song,
In the next hour I wear about six hats. Each one is more ridiculous than the last. There’s a top hat, a pith helmet, a beanie with a little propeller, a pair of kangaroo ears, and so on. Every time, I forget to take off my hat for the next song. Try to imagine what the kids do when this happens. The sound reaches the decibel level of a Beatles concert at Shea Stadium.
Then there is “Guess the Animal.” On the concert stage, I place a huge easel at stage left. Using the easel, I play a game with the children: I tell them I’m going to draw an animal on a big piece of poster board and they must guess what it is before the drawing is completed. In bold felt pen, I begin a large drawing of, say, a hippo. Soon it is a clearly recognizable hippo. The children have begun shouting “It’s a hippo!” I turn to them and say, “It’s a what? It’s a
I repeat the game six or seven times in the course of the concert, but they never tire of it. They play the game passionately, over and over again, blithely unaware that I’m doing anything to manipulate them. They absolutely love to be tricked in this way. And in their response you can see the first stirrings of a grown-up’s appetite for entertainment. Deep down, adults long to be tricked as well.
And when did I invent Guess the Animal? On a rainy Princeton afternoon with Dolly when there was nothing else to do. She taught me to connect with children, to understand them, and to entertain them. And somewhere along the line, she must have picked up some of these skills herself. For years she has been a superb teacher in Ithaca, New York. She has directed spectacular school musicals and student productions of Shakespeare. And she has raised four marvelously talented and creative sons. Whenever we see each other, we revert to an adult version of our long-ago childhood selves, giggling and teasing like Big and Little. But she is Sarah Jane now. Nowadays there are only a handful of us left who remember that she was ever known as Dolly.
[9] Curtains
I was a curtain puller for Marcel Marceau. For decades, the immortal French mime was a yearly one-night-only fixture at McCarter Theatre, presenting his delicate art in hypnotic silence for wildly appreciative full houses. On one of his visits, I was pressed into service. I was assigned the job of raising and lowering McCarter’s massive red-velour curtain for Marceau’s single performance. It was one of many backstage jobs that I undertook at the theater, for piddling wages but mostly for fun, during my two high school years in Princeton. At various times I had run lights, painted sets, fashioned lobby displays, and operated the fly lines that hoisted flats and set pieces up and down. But pulling the curtain for the great Marcel Marceau was the best gig of all. I was humbled by the honor.
In those days Marceau was a one-of-a-kind Gallic superstar, his slight frame and unique persona recognizable everywhere. In performance, his face was painted stark white, with his mouth, eyes, and eyebrows delicately outlined in red and black. He wore white pants cut to halfway down his calves, a striped shirt, a tight, short jacket, ballet slippers, and a little blue hat with a flower sprouting out of it. In this emblematic costume, he performed a show that was simplicity itself. He would present about a dozen short mime pieces, most of them in the character of Bip, his alter ego. Marceau would chase butterflies, struggle against the wind, grow drunk at a cocktail party or seasick on board a cruise ship, all in pantomime. The entire performance took place on an empty stage, without props, sets, or supporting players. Or rather, all of these things were there but invisible, created by the magic of Marceau’s physical gifts, by the eloquent lighting, and by the imagination of the audience. Clearly, the rise and the fall of the curtain was also pretty damned important.
On the day of Marceau’s performance, I watched worshipfully from backstage all through his afternoon technical rehearsal. Although he had been through the drill a thousand times over the years, his preparation was exhaustive and precise. When it came time to rehearse the curtain call, his stage manager instructed me in broken English to raise and lower the curtain in a steady rhythm as Marceau took several bows. This was known as “bouncing the curtain,” and it required that I quickly master a complex new skill. In the wings, I stood in front of two thick ropes. I would pull on one of the ropes to ring down the curtain while the other rope shot up in the opposite direction. When the curtain was almost down, I would grab the second rope and allow it to lift me four feet off the ground. At this point, my counterbalancing weight would reverse the direction of the two ropes, I would drop back down to the floor, then pull on the second rope with all my might. The curtain would “bounce,” barely touching the stage, then gracefully rise up again. For Marcel Marceau I was to repeat this maneuver ten times: five times up and five times down. It was a tricky business, demanding enormous effort and split-second timing, but by the end of the tech rehearsal, I had mastered it.
