MELBA DAY SPARKS AT JEFFERSON HIGH SCHOOL

After opening night: Melba Day Sparks and myself

Melba Day Sparks was the teacher who created my new family and made a bridge to college.  I wasn’t the only one.  Six feet tall, glamorously dressed, married to the gallant older Victor Sparks, she had no children.  Just before I started high school in 1953, Jefferson HS had built a wing for the arts with a professional-level auditorium theatre that Sparks helped to design.  

There was also an orchestra room and a chorus room with high quality sound design. The three teachers regularly collaborated to present plays, concerts, assemblies of all sorts and high quality.  The classroom for dramatics was equipped to present plays in the intimate circle way, the audience sitting in chairs that could be rearranged, so close to the actors that they had to keep their feet out of the way.  I was a duck finally discovering water and reaching for swandom.  This was as good as books.

"Mrs. McThing"

"Alice in Wonderland."

I was the sheep.  It was NOT type-casting.

Melba Day Sparks (we always used all three names) was a Northwestern University School of Speech graduate in the Thirties -- I’m working backwards to guess the year.  During the war years she was with her parents in Portland and worked at the shipyards, I think.  At some point she taught in cold “portables” and the decrepit auditorium had a light board that occasionally burst into flames.  They kept a fire extinguisher nearby and the play continued.

One boy went up to the catwalks above the ceiling to set lights and accidentally stepped off the plank, so that Sparks heard screams and got to the auditorium in time to see his legs sticking through the ceiling, bicycling desperately.  There were lots of stories and she told them -- well -- dramatically.  Her stagecrew often included guys who were a little rough, maybe a little too experienced for high school, but so devoted that once she intervened just in time to rescue one who had been missing rehearsals/  His co-crew were trying to hang him from the fly gallery.  The rope went under his arms, but still!  Another time a batten (long pipe to hang scenery) fell right on her, knocking her cold, terrifying everyone.  In those days people didn't know to do mouth-to-mouth, but I'm not sure anyone would have dared.

I should have formally interviewed her at some point.  She was very “connected. ” The standard high school text, “The Stage and the School” by Katharine Anne Ommanney (1960 version published by McGraw-Hill.  1932) is illustrated in part by photos taken at Jefferson.  I’m not in any of them.  Just chance.)  Ommanney was the same generation as Alvina Krause but taught in Denver.  The text is outdated now, mostly because of electronics, but none has been more comprehensive and reliable.

We were self-governing, working as a "Theatre Board."

This was a sort of Oscar night.

I cleaned up, won everything.  "Persona" for acting and "Stage Crew" for the backstage stuff.

The ethos was a benign version of war mixed with Brit gentry tropes, meaning that it was a group effort with a goal in common to which we committed without ego and star turns.  At least that was the ideal.  We were organized, serious, presenting Broadway plays.  My first part was Marge, the overweight but cheerful co-ed in “Time Out for Ginger” about a high-school girl determined to be a football player, which everyone considered to be an impossible and hilarious idea.  By the time we got to the Senior Class Play, which was “Anastasia,” I played the Dowager Empress.  I was double-cast so I didn’t get all superior about it, but in the climax scene someone in the audience sobbed.  Wow.

My fans.

I was supposed to be a role model.

My family treated being in a play as a big deal and I soon had a little claque of relatives who attended everything except the assemblies, which were for students.  Sparks’ year was always climaxed with the Rose Festival Princess choice, part of the time’s obsession with female competitions -- it has never gone away.  Her challenge was to present the winner dramatically.  One year they came down a series of ramps and another they penetrated a curtain at the top of a flight of stairs.  A certain amount of rehearsal was required.  One of the best was a labyrinth of scrims, each swept back at the edge by a cluster of crepe paper roses.  I can still make a decent crepe paper rose.  Another winner was the girls on swings like a Fragonard painting.  The ropes were twined with roses.

But the skill I learned that has served me well ever since then was the ability to be funny.  A little exaggeration, surprise displacement, tweaking the context, looking stunned by what I just said, holding still while the laughter built, this was not a matter of pratfalls and silliness, which is what some think.  Rather it was a bit of Irish bitterness and facing facts no one wanted to admit existed.  Later it fit well with Native American self-deprecating irony and cowboy tall tales.  But that wasn’t a Thespian matter.

Neither were my other classes.  "A" level girls were shunted into “Enriched English” and "A" level boys were guided to science and math.  None of my English teachers were that astute though several were clever.  The best, Katharine Tyler, had major health issues and was absent a lot.  She taught American lit.  When we got to Walt Whitman, the sub was supposed to read  out loud the marked places ONLY, but got confused and read us the wrong verses.  Sudden scramble to find the right place in our copies. The other good English teacher, Martha Shull, was gone a lot, too, because she was the president of the National Education Association that year.

But the Social Studies teacher (and those years we really addressed the nature of democracy, the machinery of governance, but very little economics) Carlie Gilstrap was an independent old maid who was rumored to be a crack shot with a revolver.  This was 1956 and Hungary was trying to escape the Big Bear Russia.  We were totally involved.  When I got up at 5AM to do homework, I was also listening for the Hungarian news.  Sometimes everything was too much and I had a screaming meltdown.

My favorite poem at the time was by e e cummings.  It has remained relevant. 

We were SO optimistic.  Then it all fell so far.

Thanksgiving (1956) by e.e. Cummings

This is e.e. Cummings' famous poem on American cravenness during the Cold War, when after encouraging Hungarians to rise up against Soviet oppression, the United States abandoned them to be crushed by Moscow…

a monstering horror swallows

this unworld me by you

as the god of our fathers' father bows

to a which that walks like a who

but the voice-with-a-smile of democracy

announces night & day

"all poor little peoples that want to be free

just trust in the u s a"

suddenly uprose hungary

and she gave a terrible cry

"no slave's unlife shall murder me

for i will freely die"

she cried so high thermopylae

heard her and marathon

and all prehuman history

and finally The UN

"be quiet little hungary

and do as you are bid

a good kind bear is angary

we fear for the quo pro quid"

uncle sam shrugs his pretty

pink shoulders you know how

and he twitches a liberal titty

and lisps "i'm busy right now"

so rah-rah-rah democracy

let's all be as thankful as hell

and bury the statue of liberty

(because it begins to smell)

So when I got to reading-up on Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna in order to portray her in “Anastasia,” I had a bit of subtext.  “Don’t delude yourself,” says the Empress.  “The ants are in power, the red ants!  Some day ants of a different color may take their place but they will still be ants!”  I wasn’t sure I could remember the speech, but I did.  I have the script and checked it. 

For me, dramatics was no frill.  Poetry was no romantic escape.  It was life, then and there.  When the Vanport flood displaced Kaiser’s Black population into the Jefferson district and student body, the dramatics program transformed into an outstanding stage dancing troupe called “The Jefferson Dancers.”  The company was founded by Mary Vinton Folberg (her brother is Will Vinton) in the early 1980s. Folberg served as artistic director of the dance company from its founding until the mid-1990s.  This is what social action can look like.

A SHEET OF CHILLED GLASS

In was in my first “dramatics” textbook that I read about the shared origins of drama and religion.  “The Stage and the School” by Katharine Anne Ommanney.  Copyright 1932, 1939,1950 and 1960.  Some of the illustrations were photos taken by Louise Phillips at Jefferson High School, where I was so involved as a student.  I’m not in any of the photos; however, my drama teacher, Melba Day Sparks, was in several of them.  She had a shirt striped like an umpire’s shirt and she was very tall, once a Powers model, so glamorous for a high school teacher.  She made it clear that she had a union card for backstage work, which enabled her to legally paper her office with black wallpaper imprinted with bright masks of tragedy and comedy.

In the Fifties Portland, Oregon, was sort of gray, but not in the new performance wing of Jefferson High school.  (There was an outstanding orchestra and several choirs.)  The stage, designed by Sparks, met professional standards. I was convinced that it was at the center of the universe.  It came as a shock to understand that when you graduated, you had to leave.  “Where are you going to college?” they all wanted to know.  

I went to Mrs. Sparks and asked her.  Melba Day attended Northwestern University in the days when the scene shop was down at the beach in an old shed.  I picked up a brick from there and slipcovered it with felt to give her as a memento doorstop.  She didn’t like AK -- too harsh.  (She hadn’t picked up on AK’s “thing” about height. She didn’t understand that harsh was a good sign.)  I don’t know who Melba Day's mentors actually were, but they were effective.  She became the head of the National Thespian Society and was always active in that high school context.  When I asked where I should go, she said Northwestern.  So I did.

We were close.  Everyone always wants me to housesit (they have never seen my notion of housekeeping), especially if animals are involved.  So I stayed in her chartreuse house with black and purple and dark turquoise walls, taking care of a huge cage of finches, another walk-in cage of birds in the yard, and the doberman, named Charcoal.  Victor Sparks had created “Charco-salt,” a condiment with a lot of smoke in it, which was very popular.  They were not poor.  There were stacks of high-end interior decorating mags that seemed an extension of theatre.   On the mantel was a delicate porcelain nude, running alongside a racing leopard.

They moved out to a little farm on a hilltop and wanted me to come live with them, take care of them, and then I could write.  I knew I would never write there.  But I took refuge a few times.  Then they moved again to a gated community with nursing and hospital facilities on the premises.  The years went by.  Vic Sparks died.  When Melba went to remarry, I did the wedding.  When she died (of alcoholism and esophageal cancer), I did the memorial.  Being brilliant, hard-working, and glamourous will not prevent anyone from suffering and dying.  But it can make a lot of people glad you were alive.

Tim’s experience was totally different.  He began to act as a child in a relative’s theatre troupe.  Little blonde eight-year-old man, he didn’t play Peter Pan -- he played Captain Hook!  In high school he was Huckleberry Finn -- he never stopped.  One of the things we both know is that theatre is dangerous; acting will change who you are.  The edges of your life, the verge of the stage, can be knocked out so the sky is the kuppelhorizont and the planet takes a seat to watch.  It won’t keep you from dying.

According to Benedetti’s acting book (“The Actor in You: Sixteen Simple Steps to Understanding the Art of Acting,”  which I just brought home from the post office an hour ago)  people watch tragedies in order to discover the truth.  For those of us who mix theatre and life, poetry and life, the pain of life itself is excruciating enough -- why not wring the truth out of it?  Once we break the illusions of being in control, of being able to decide whether or not we are “worthy,” of deciding what in our life we should try to preserve and hand on  -- what then?

That’s where religion mingles with theatre.  Not that religion has any more answers than a masked actor on platform shoes, but that it holds up a mirror.  I read a description of a “performance” --  or you might call it a liturgy.  It is between theatre and religious service.

Go into a closed room with an oscillating fan.  Sit with a big sheet of chilled glass in front of you.  Lean forward and breathe on it.  Observe the cloud that is your breath, your life, as it forms on the glass.  Lean back and see that the cloud quickly evaporates.

Do this again but this time with a partner who breathes on the other side of the chilled glass.  You lean forward, you lean back, he leans forward, he leans back.  Observe the life force of each other.  Reflect on how you feel.

What is not included in the description is the idea of the chilled glass shattering.  In the Scriver Studio we saved the biggest pieces of plate glass we could find because we held them against the bottom of plaster-cast molds to make sure the base was flat.  If we saw someone had thrown a rock through a store window, we were there, asking for the broken glass.  Someone gave us the glass out of the fronts of television sets but they had a peculiar trick.  They would be leaning against the wall with other pieces when suddenly -- for no cause -- they would shatter.  Not just crack, but shatter like windshield safety glass.  They must have been cast (glass is cast molten and rolled into sheets) in some way that put them under tension.

Theatre is a safe way to look at life transparently and yet with tension. 

This is Corinthians 13:   

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.  For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

That’s just breath.  Now lean back.  Prepare for nothing.