Monday, February 11, 2008
Rick Janvier and the Three Penny Opera
All through high school, George McKittrick and Steve Apadoca and I had a small drama troupe. We persuaded our afterschool drama coach to set it up and we went around to the local elementary schools and put on comedy shows involving many shaving cream pies and ripoffs of A Thurber Carnival. The slap happy antics kept the third graders involved but baffled the seventh graders.
I perfected the ability to project my voice to be heard at the back of the multipurpose room. I perfected the ability to squash my queasy jittery stomach and carry on with the first lines of our script. I perfected the ability to slowly and purposely turn my head and address all sides of the room. I did not shamble, I did not curl my back and slump my shoulders, I gained valuable confidence at a safe distance.
Up on the stage, my ambling left eye was invisible and makeup covered my hormonal teenage zits. After the shows, George and Steve and I would get into George's Oldsmobile and take the long way back to our school schedule by stopping at hamberger drive-in and eating french fries and ketchup. We would rehash our performance, pick it apart line by line and movement by movement. We would bemoan our blunders, chuckle at gags that worked and recarve at our wrinkled and worn scripts.
The three of us were a tribe of our own during our junior and senior high school years. If the male pecking order rituals insisted on trying to place George or Steve at the bottom, their success theatrically buoyed them up and wrapped a protective layer around them. I was so far out of the main stream with my broad athleticism and science maven aura I was just left alone.
I had learned to knit and had made myself a long-sleeved black pullover sweater. I had a black skirt and that became my daily school uniform. I suppose it would have been considered 'goth' nowadays, but it was a sort of beatnik outfit in those days ('61 and '62).
Every year on the weekend before the first week of school, my mother would cut our hair and give us a home permanent. She did this to all four of us girls. We then spend the rest of the year growing out the tight kinks. Usually by Christmas our fine hair was relaxed enough that we looked less like bozo the clown and more like curly-headed waifs. I still associate the smell of ammonia to Toni, Bobbi or Lilt brand home permanents.
http://www.loti.com/fifties_home_perms.htm
So, I was a sort of beatnik, but couldn't quite pull off the total 'cool' look with my kinky short hair. The black uniform kept me out of the cashmire sweater wars going on among the girls who were constantly bragging about the various colors they owned. These sweaters were set off with a matching gauze scarf and by wearing a gold circle broach with a pearl at the five o'clock position on your left chest above your heart. The tradition was that a girl would only wear the pin if they were going steady with a boy and if they 'went all the way', the girl would subtly advertise it to her girl friends by breaking the pearl off her pin. Thus it was, I made my fashion statement in black among all the fluffy pink and yellow and blue pastel sweaters.
Another subtle fashion signal used during my high school years was the red sweater. A girl would wear a red sweater if she was on her period. And she would never wear it on any other day.
Boys dressed in leather jackets or letterman jackets and white tee-shirts, jeans, white socks and penny loafers. They sported pompadour hair cuts, a la Elvis Presley with much mirror checking and combing to curl up and over each side and to make the lazy eight hair fall over their center foreheads. They all looked like Henry Winkler, The Fonz. But in those days, it was Kookie Burns on Seventy Seven Sunset Strip they were emulating.
Car racing on country roads was a Saturday night amusement as was cruising slowly down 14th Street from Mel's drive-in down to the Balboa movie theater. When I first saw the movie American Graffiti I thought it was based on my high school experiences. Later, I found that it was based on George Lucas' experiences 50 miles to the east of us in Modesto. In 1995, American Graffiti was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, being put for preservation in the National Film Registry. The clothing, cars, and cruising scenes were so typical of my high school weekends in '61 and '62 in San Leandro, California.
Steve and I were lucky to have George around. His car took us so many places. On Sunday afternoon George took us over to his uncle's business in a large, almost empty warehouse. There was a large open space and an unfenced open loft about 10 feet off the main floor.
We found the forklift keys and played around driving the forklift and raising and lowering ourselves from the loft by the tines on the forklift, singing and posturing as we were lowered to the main floor. We wore the battery out playing "fallen angels" and "deus ex machina". We finished our rehersal and blythly left the forklift in the middle of the floor. I have often wondered what George's uncle thought happened in that warehouse that weekend.
Graduation rolled around and George and Steve and I went our separate ways. I went off to junior college and that winter hung around with a guy named Rick Janvier. Rick lived up in the Oakland Hills and somehow knew a lot of theatrical-type people, I think through his mother who did amateur theater.
One Saturday, Rick took me up into the Berkeley Hills and pulled up in front of an oak-shadowed ivy-covered brick two story. He told me that many of the UC Berkeley professors had houses in the neighborhood and I was suitably impressed. He took me up to the etched glass front door and knocked politely. I was mystified by why we were there and who we would be meeting. The door was answered by a dapper short grey-haired man with round cherry colored cheeks. He greeted Rick warmly with a hug and with a wide sweep of his hand invited me to enter the house.
We were lead into an old fashioned front palour with ferns and dollied sofas. However, the walls of the room were covered with large framed, glass covered german theater posters, all for the Die Dreigroschenoper. Having taken three years of german by then, I easily decoded the title as The Three Penny Opera. I was fastenated.
Rick steered the conversation around and I sat mutely listening to this man recount his time in Berlin for the first theater production of Weill's light opera. I can never remember this man's name or what character he played in the cast. But I remember listening to him speak in an accent in a mixture of Yiddish and broken English. He asked us if we wanted to see his collection and he pulled a large well worn trunk over and opened it.
The aroma of mothballs blasted us. The trunk was filled with boxes, rolled tubes and tied stacks of paper. The papers were song sheets, scribbled with cryptic pencilled notes in the margins. Several of the boxes contained toupees and hair wigs and false beards. One hat box had a black derby hat in a velvety felt cloth.
We drank hot tea in glasses served from a samovar. We talked for hours that afternoon, going over the tickets, songs, posters, and newspaper clippings from his trunk. I felt awed and privileged.
Recently, I came across a reference to the Erdos-Bacon number. It seems it is an esoteric statusing metric scale which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between an individual and the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one's Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from actor Kevin Bacon. Hank Aaron, Richard Feynman, Danica McKellar and Natalie Portman all have low Erdos-Bacon numbers and thus very enviable theatrical-mathematical status.
Somehow, I think I have a more enviable status by having spent time with this old german actor from the original production of the The Three Penny Opera than all the math scholars combined.
After thought: Curious, I googled Rick Janvier and found what I think is one relevant item -- Rick Janvier is listed as a 2006-7 $75 donor to the Berkeley Rep Theater in their on-line magazine. Got to be the same guy, don't you think?
I perfected the ability to project my voice to be heard at the back of the multipurpose room. I perfected the ability to squash my queasy jittery stomach and carry on with the first lines of our script. I perfected the ability to slowly and purposely turn my head and address all sides of the room. I did not shamble, I did not curl my back and slump my shoulders, I gained valuable confidence at a safe distance.
Up on the stage, my ambling left eye was invisible and makeup covered my hormonal teenage zits. After the shows, George and Steve and I would get into George's Oldsmobile and take the long way back to our school schedule by stopping at hamberger drive-in and eating french fries and ketchup. We would rehash our performance, pick it apart line by line and movement by movement. We would bemoan our blunders, chuckle at gags that worked and recarve at our wrinkled and worn scripts.
The three of us were a tribe of our own during our junior and senior high school years. If the male pecking order rituals insisted on trying to place George or Steve at the bottom, their success theatrically buoyed them up and wrapped a protective layer around them. I was so far out of the main stream with my broad athleticism and science maven aura I was just left alone.
I had learned to knit and had made myself a long-sleeved black pullover sweater. I had a black skirt and that became my daily school uniform. I suppose it would have been considered 'goth' nowadays, but it was a sort of beatnik outfit in those days ('61 and '62).
Every year on the weekend before the first week of school, my mother would cut our hair and give us a home permanent. She did this to all four of us girls. We then spend the rest of the year growing out the tight kinks. Usually by Christmas our fine hair was relaxed enough that we looked less like bozo the clown and more like curly-headed waifs. I still associate the smell of ammonia to Toni, Bobbi or Lilt brand home permanents.
http://www.loti.com/fifties_home_perms.htm
So, I was a sort of beatnik, but couldn't quite pull off the total 'cool' look with my kinky short hair. The black uniform kept me out of the cashmire sweater wars going on among the girls who were constantly bragging about the various colors they owned. These sweaters were set off with a matching gauze scarf and by wearing a gold circle broach with a pearl at the five o'clock position on your left chest above your heart. The tradition was that a girl would only wear the pin if they were going steady with a boy and if they 'went all the way', the girl would subtly advertise it to her girl friends by breaking the pearl off her pin. Thus it was, I made my fashion statement in black among all the fluffy pink and yellow and blue pastel sweaters.
Another subtle fashion signal used during my high school years was the red sweater. A girl would wear a red sweater if she was on her period. And she would never wear it on any other day.
Boys dressed in leather jackets or letterman jackets and white tee-shirts, jeans, white socks and penny loafers. They sported pompadour hair cuts, a la Elvis Presley with much mirror checking and combing to curl up and over each side and to make the lazy eight hair fall over their center foreheads. They all looked like Henry Winkler, The Fonz. But in those days, it was Kookie Burns on Seventy Seven Sunset Strip they were emulating.
Car racing on country roads was a Saturday night amusement as was cruising slowly down 14th Street from Mel's drive-in down to the Balboa movie theater. When I first saw the movie American Graffiti I thought it was based on my high school experiences. Later, I found that it was based on George Lucas' experiences 50 miles to the east of us in Modesto. In 1995, American Graffiti was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, being put for preservation in the National Film Registry. The clothing, cars, and cruising scenes were so typical of my high school weekends in '61 and '62 in San Leandro, California.
Steve and I were lucky to have George around. His car took us so many places. On Sunday afternoon George took us over to his uncle's business in a large, almost empty warehouse. There was a large open space and an unfenced open loft about 10 feet off the main floor.
We found the forklift keys and played around driving the forklift and raising and lowering ourselves from the loft by the tines on the forklift, singing and posturing as we were lowered to the main floor. We wore the battery out playing "fallen angels" and "deus ex machina". We finished our rehersal and blythly left the forklift in the middle of the floor. I have often wondered what George's uncle thought happened in that warehouse that weekend.
Graduation rolled around and George and Steve and I went our separate ways. I went off to junior college and that winter hung around with a guy named Rick Janvier. Rick lived up in the Oakland Hills and somehow knew a lot of theatrical-type people, I think through his mother who did amateur theater.
One Saturday, Rick took me up into the Berkeley Hills and pulled up in front of an oak-shadowed ivy-covered brick two story. He told me that many of the UC Berkeley professors had houses in the neighborhood and I was suitably impressed. He took me up to the etched glass front door and knocked politely. I was mystified by why we were there and who we would be meeting. The door was answered by a dapper short grey-haired man with round cherry colored cheeks. He greeted Rick warmly with a hug and with a wide sweep of his hand invited me to enter the house.
We were lead into an old fashioned front palour with ferns and dollied sofas. However, the walls of the room were covered with large framed, glass covered german theater posters, all for the Die Dreigroschenoper. Having taken three years of german by then, I easily decoded the title as The Three Penny Opera. I was fastenated.
Rick steered the conversation around and I sat mutely listening to this man recount his time in Berlin for the first theater production of Weill's light opera. I can never remember this man's name or what character he played in the cast. But I remember listening to him speak in an accent in a mixture of Yiddish and broken English. He asked us if we wanted to see his collection and he pulled a large well worn trunk over and opened it.
The aroma of mothballs blasted us. The trunk was filled with boxes, rolled tubes and tied stacks of paper. The papers were song sheets, scribbled with cryptic pencilled notes in the margins. Several of the boxes contained toupees and hair wigs and false beards. One hat box had a black derby hat in a velvety felt cloth.
We drank hot tea in glasses served from a samovar. We talked for hours that afternoon, going over the tickets, songs, posters, and newspaper clippings from his trunk. I felt awed and privileged.
Recently, I came across a reference to the Erdos-Bacon number. It seems it is an esoteric statusing metric scale which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between an individual and the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one's Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from actor Kevin Bacon. Hank Aaron, Richard Feynman, Danica McKellar and Natalie Portman all have low Erdos-Bacon numbers and thus very enviable theatrical-mathematical status.
Somehow, I think I have a more enviable status by having spent time with this old german actor from the original production of the The Three Penny Opera than all the math scholars combined.
After thought: Curious, I googled Rick Janvier and found what I think is one relevant item -- Rick Janvier is listed as a 2006-7 $75 donor to the Berkeley Rep Theater in their on-line magazine. Got to be the same guy, don't you think?
