Ridiculous Opinions #219
I have absolutely nothing to say this morning. I’m feeling a bit tired, have a bit of a headache, and have stared at this computer screen for the last fifteen minutes, trying to come up with something to write. So, instead, I thought I would give you a sneak peak at my memoir.
These are the opening pages of the book. It’s actually written (almost 150,000 words, which is much too long for a memoir) and half-edited, but I lost interest in it sometime last year. Maybe someday, I’ll go through and finish editing the damned thing. For a while, I thought about writing several memoirs, detailing different facets of my life, and that still might happen. But for now, this is the beginning of a book that may never see the light of day.
Some of you may very well have heard this story. Some of you might actually have been a part of it.
Enjoy your weekend…
MR. G: An Incomplete Account of Twenty-Five Years Teaching Around the World; 1995-2022
A Memoir
# LONDON
I am sitting in a darkened theater, just off the Thames River. Around me are the twenty students that I have taken to London, all of them ranging in ages from fourteen to seventeen. Also there is one of my fellow teachers, who has agreed to chaperone our trip. We are watching a production of La Soiree being put on at the National Theatre. The music is loud and bawdy. The crowd is going completely insane; cheering, hooting, hollering, roaring with laughter, and having the time of their lives. It is a show to end all shows.
But I’m not enjoying myself. I am looking at the stage, wide-eyed and fearful. I have a sick feeling in my stomach, while at the same time, I am strangely detached, as if I have left my corporeal form and am now hovering above the crowd, watching the events like I’m not there. I could be in a coma. I might be dead.
Why do I feel this way?
Because the naked woman on stage just pulled a red scarf out from inside her vagina and tossed it into the crowd.
I suppose I should give you a bit of context here. At this point in my career, I was a teacher at a school in Shanghai, China. I was teaching theater in what is referred to as an “International School.” When I say that I was teaching in China, most people would assume that I taught Chinese kids, but that wasn’t the case. International Schools mainly cater to the children of business people, diplomats, rich locals, and other expatriates of various shapes and sizes. In fact, when I taught in Shanghai, I never taught any actual Chinese kids. I taught kids from Korea, Australia, the U.S., Britain, Ghana, Thailand, Romania, Germany, Peru, and so on.
I had always been a bit of a journeyman when it came to teaching and Shanghai was the latest stop on a prolonged trip around the world. Because my wife was a band teacher, she was always that one who was the star attraction when we applied to schools, as band teachers were hard to come by in the world of international teaching. On top of that, she was a great teacher, full of life and energy, ready to give 100% to her students on a day-to-day basis. When we were hired to teach at schools overseas, she was the one that got hired. I was the added bonus.
Because of that, administrators loved me, because they could hire a good band teacher alongside a husband that could fit into any one of their needed roles. At that point in my career, I had taught every single grade level and a massive amount of subjects. I was adaptable and could work my way into any scenario. Thus, when the school in Shanghai needed a drama teacher, I was the perfect candidate. I had never taught drama, but I had been an actor in university and directed a few shows at various times in my life, so I was game to give it a shot and I went about it in my usual, unconventional way. The way I taught drama was not normal, because I was making everything up on the spot (and the administration didn’t seem to care). I didn’t know how to teach drama, so I just bought a book on drama games and learned them all. I didn’t know any theater history, so I just ignored it. I didn’t know which shows to do, so instead of doing research on the standard theater shows, I just wrote my own. I cast every kid under the sun, giving everyone a chance to shine as much as possible. I did theater in the round. I taught units on film. My class was fun, because drama classes should be fun, and in doing all of this, I ended up with a thriving program.
In the fourth year of my fledgling experiment, I decided to get ambitious. I don’t know why I consistently felt the need to challenge myself in such ridiculous ways. I guess I had a chip on my shoulder, especially in regard to other drama teachers, all of whom seemed to be Drama Teachers, with capital letters; teachers who were committed to directing shows for teenagers that involved actually wearing masks when doing Greek drama and perpetuating the long-dead art form of Commedia Dell’arte because drama history was important or something like that; they were teachers who would pay royalties for Into the Woods and then do the entire, three-hour show for an audience consisting of only the parents of the actors; they would cut nothing from the script, because everything was sacrosanct and cutting shows was illegal.
I wasn’t like that. I cut the crap out of the shows for which I paid royalties and I never told a soul. I tried to write shows that were audience-pleasers. I would take the actor that everyone thought was the best, the theater kid that had that affected stage presence and could belt out a perfect vibrato when singing a song, and I would put them in a nondescript part in the back. I would give the lead roles to oddballs and goof-nuggets and athletes and kids that would have never been in the theater had I not personally bullied them into auditioning. My theater department was a ragtag bunch of students who were united in a cause that was greater than them.
This was an approach that was very different than the drama teachers that I knew and when I would go to conferences or have discussions with them, they would look at me in a strange way, because my very existence was an anathema to them. My success in the world of theater, a success that stemmed from no training, no education, no norms, was an insult.
But being the jerk that I am, I thought that it was time for me to take my students and my training to a higher level, so I chose to take my students on a trip that year. There is an organization known as ISTA (The International Schools Theater Association) which organizes workshops for students who attend schools overseas, and that year, they were having a conference in London. Sure, there were conferences in other places that were closer to Shanghai, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to go to London. Why I wanted to take students was a mystery that my own brain was unable to solve, but nevertheless, I plowed forward with my idea.
I did all the research and planning myself (a mistake I would consistently make throughout my career, which you will learn about at some point). The conference buttressed a school holiday (Chinese New Year), which meant that we would only miss one day of school and then have a little less than a week in London. We would fly to the U.K., attend the three-day conference, and then have three days to ourselves to see the sights and sounds of one of the most dynamic cities in the world. I didn’t particularly care about the conference, which was to be a series of workshops where we were all cramped into the basement of a small church in the neighborhood of Fitzrovia, crawling across the floor or pretending to cry in an attempt to get in touch with our inner Marlon Brandos. No, I was more interested in having fun with my students.
The students that went with me on this trip were my favorites. They were the types of students that drank the Mr. G Kool-Aid; the ones that always auditioned for my shows and took my classes and enjoyed the general weirdness that was a part of my every day existence. There was a Korean girl who was breaking out her shell and ready to experience something more. There were the rebellious boys who were a lot like me at that age, ready to push the boundaries of what they should be doing. There were my artsy girls who were excited to see the shows and see London for themselves. There were a couple of Mormon kids. It was a real grab bag of students who were eager to do something interesting with their lives, and a trip to London would be perfect.
The trip was always framed as an ISTA trip. We were going there for a conference and to experience theater workshops that were interesting and fun. But we didn’t have much interest in the ISTA aspect of the trip. We were going so that we could see some shows in the West End. We were going so that we could see the Tower Bridge. We were going because we had booked a ghost tour through Covent Garden. We were going to ride the Tube and see the museums and visit the Globe theater. We were also going to go see a movie there (which was something that we couldn’t really do when we were in Shanghai). It was going to be a glorious affair.
Part of the package of booking an ISTA trip was that they would also arrange tickets for you to see some shows. They booked us to see the musical Billy Elliot, to watch a play based on a book that I had read called Vernon God Little, and a show called La Soiree, which I didn’t know much about. The first of the shows that we were to see was going to be La Soiree, and it took place in a tent that they had erected at the National Theatre just off the Thames.
That morning, we attended the first workshop, but I wasn’t able to attend with my students because one of them was sick back at the hotel. Something about the airline food had done her a disservice, so after taking the students to the small church where the workshop was to happen, I went back to the hotel to check up on her. At that point, she was fine, so she came back with me to the workshop, where we swooped in at the very end to hear the instructor for that day telling my students about La Soiree.
“It’s a little bit risqué,” she said, “but that’s not something that all of you aren’t mature enough to handle, and quite frankly, that’s what being in the theater is all about. You’re taking risks. You’re doing something extraordinary. Seeing a show like La Soiree is something that everyone should see, because it’s not a normal theater event.”
I was jetlagged by this point and barely functioning. Sometimes I put myself in situations where I haven’t really thought through the consequences of my actions. I wasn’t a young man any more and I should have known better than to think that I could teach all week and then, on my last day of teaching, jump on an overnight flight to London with a group of kids and get started with another day full of activities. And this was ignoring the fact that I had a seven and nine-year old at home, taking a great deal of my energy. What seemed like a good idea on paper, something I could have done without even thinking about it just ten years earlier, was suddenly not the smartest move. I was now so tired that I felt drunk.
But the kids powered me through. They were all hyped about London. We even decided that we weren’t going to go back to a hotel for a rest between the workshops and La Soiree. We were just going to power our way through London, seeing the sights, walking the streets, and having a grand time as a group. I looked at my teaching colleague and could see him flagging as well, but we both shrugged our shoulders and decided to carry-on.
As the late-January setting sun began to turn the buildings an orange and gray color throughout the city, we walked across the Westminster Bridge toward the National Theatre, where I could see that La Soiree was something special. The show wasn’t in an actual theater, but a tent. They had set up a circus-style tent for the show and the crowd was milling about, waiting to go inside. I pulled the tickets from my backpack and gave them to the hostess, and she led us all into the theater.
The interior of the tent was very much like a circus. I remember striped walls and a platform in the very center, giving the audience the opportunity to be very close to the stage. There were lots of well-heeled people in the crowd, all of them ready for a night on the town, and I took note of the fact that several members of the audience had glasses of wine and bottles of beer in their hands. It’s going to be one of those shows, I thought.
“Can I get a beer, Mr. G?” one of the boys asked. I gave my Ha-Ha-Very-Funny look, but I was sure he was serious. I also noticed that one of my Northern European girls was paying close attention to the exchange because she was from Europe and we all know that the social mores of Europe are much different than those of the United States.
The seating for the show surrounded the stage and consisted of about five rows at ground level in front of the stage and five rows in a type of stadium seating on all sides. The students were on the front two rows of the stadium seating. My teaching colleague, Mr. Finch, sat at one end and I sat on the other, next to the aisle. The kids were chatty beforehand, as the jetlag didn’t really affect them all that much, but their two chaperones were really feeling it. As the lights dimmed, I noticed that Mr. Finch didn’t hesitate and was out like a light mere seconds after the first act came up on stage.
La Soiree was a modern vaudeville act, one step away from being burlesque. It consisted of strange and unusual acts that one might find at a circus, but all of it with that bawdy, theater-twist that gave it a little bit more of an edge. The first act that I remember was a rather large woman on roller skates zipping into the theater with what appeared to be thirty hula-hoops whipping around her. If one’s idea of a modern circus was an acrobatic troupe, a lion tamer, and a flying trapeze, then they weren’t getting it. If they were expecting disco-hula-hoop woman, they were in the right place. There were other acts as well. One man’s act consisted of contorting his body through the open mouth of a tennis racket. Yet another was a woman who swallowed swords. Two men stripped down to their Speedos and got in a bunch of acrobatic poses together. With each passing act, the wink-wink, nudge-nudge factor of what the performers were really doing was glaringly obvious. The ISTA people were not wrong that it was risqué, and I was constantly doing the mental math in my head. Can I explain this to parents if word gets out that two nearly-naked men had their faces in each others’ ass as they posed on only one leg? Sure. I can explain that. It was all risky stuff for the age level of the kids on the tour, but they were theater kids, so it wasn’t like any of this was new to them. I’m sure they watched worse things at home when they were on their own.
So that was where we were. The show was loud, bawdy, and toed the line of being inappropriate for teenagers, but never quite went over that line. After all, ISTA had recommended it. And truthfully, some of it was funny and fun. The music was loud. My students were getting into the show just as much as the crowd (they encouraged audience participation) and everyone seemed to be having a good time. I remember, very specifically, looking over at Mr. Finch and seeing that, despite the noise and the chaos that was happening inside the tent, his head was flopped over onto his chest as he slept the sleep of angels. I also remember thinking to myself, This is going well. This is a good first day in London. It’s going to be a good week.
As I checked my watch, I realized that we were approaching the end of the first act. Then, the lights went down in the theater for the last performance before intermission. Two spotlights came on from the far side of the stage and what can only be described as a burlesque number roared over the loudspeakers. At the far end of the tent, in an aisle between two rows, a woman appeared in the spotlight.
Unlike the rest of the performers, she was not dressed in neon spandex or silver sequins. She was dressed in a dark grey business suit and she was dancing like she was Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, where Marilyn would flirt with the men around her. Only this woman was dancing back and forth, flirting with people in the audience.
But not only was she doing that, she was also doing a bit of magic. She would remove a colorful scarf from her sleeve and then stuff the scarf into her fist, making it disappear; the oldest of magic tricks. It wasn’t anything great, just as nothing in La Soiree was anything to write home about. Most of the acts were one-step away from amateur hour, and though it was fun, I was confused as to why this particular show was considered worthy enough to be in the National Theatre. This last woman was the coup de grace, the big number before intermission, and this was her act? She was making the scarf disappear and dancing around like an idiot? It was lame.
But the crowd knew something that I didn’t know, and they were enjoying themselves. There was yelling and screaming and incredibly loud, burlesque music. I would soon discover the reason for the musical choice.
The woman continued dancing around in the audience. She would sit on the laps of men on the edge of the rows. The drunken revelry of the night had people going crazy. She took off her blazer to reveal a silky top, so that she could move about more freely. It was at that point that the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Oh, crap, I thought. She’s a stripper.
I might have gone into shock at that moment, because that’s where the detachment set in. Oh, my God, I thought to myself, this woman is going to strip. Like a caged animal, I shifted into survival mode, doing a million mental equations and playing out an infinite amount of scenarios in my head to try to figure out how my professional career would survive this.
The stripper took off her top. She was now in a black, lacy bra as she twirled her scarf around her head before making the scarf disappear in her hand, then reappear from her pants pocket.
I could explain this if she went no further. If all this woman did was take off her top, everything would be fine. Yes, I would say to the superintendent at my school, she did take off her top and reveal her bra. But that was it. I could see the boys in the row in front of me. Their heads were whipping back and forth as they looked each other. The wide-eyed, joyful look on their faces had that, Can you believe this? vibe that only a fifteen-year old in a strip club could have. They wanted to confer with each other, to celebrate the incredible awesomeness that was happening in front of them, but they couldn’t talk to each other because that would have meant that they would have had to have looked away from the stripper, and they were not going to look away from that stripper. I doubt most of them even blinked. I looked over at Mr. Finch. He was still asleep.
The audience was incredibly loud and they were demanding more. The stripper obliged, and with a flourish, she ripped off her grey bottoms. They must have been attached with little more than velcro. Trick pants. She was wearing a black g-string.
At this point, I had choices. One of those choices would be to round up my students, clearly visible to the entirety of the crowd, and walk out of the theater. It would have been so obvious that the puritan teacher was removing his students from the room. In fact, it seemed like the crowd would have been hostile to such a thing happening, because they were drunk. And I never could have gotten them all out of the room in time. The act would have been over by that point and it wouldn’t have mattered. I looked over at the far end of the row of students and my Korean student was wide-eyed. She’d probably never seen anything like this in her life.
The stripper in the g-string was now dancing through the audience. Any man she saw was fair game. She would go up to them and sit on their laps. She would waggle her breasts close to their faces. She would take the scarf and wrap it around their necks, then make the scarf disappear again. It was an old magic trick.
This produced a new fear in me. I was on the edge of the row. She was dancing through the aisles of the theater. There was a very real possibility that she would head my direction, and because I was male and on the edge of the row and looking mortified, she could have waltzed right over and danced on my lap, just like she was for that guy across the theater from me. She was taking full advantage of the crowd. I said a quiet prayer to a God that I could not name for it not to happen.
And through all of this, I could still justify everything. Yes, I would say to my superintendent. She was in a bra and g-string. But it was art. It was theater. It was part of the performance. But my excuse only worked if she removed no other items of clothing.
That was when her bra came off.
The stripper was now prancing through the crowd, her breasts bouncing this way and that, dancing to the bawdy music. And I saw my career evaporating before my very eyes. At least Mr. Finch had an excuse. He was still asleep. My Korean student was now yelling at the top of her lungs, just like the rest of the crowd. But she wasn’t encouraging anything. She was yelling, “NOOOOOOO!” as loud as she could
The stripper finally made it to the center stage and was dancing around seductively, still making the scarf disappear and reappear. Everyone in the theater was mad with joy. The music was loud. The alcohol was flowing. My students were in stupefied shock.
That was when the g-string came off.
Now, the stripper was completely naked on stage and the place was coming apart at the seams. With the lights shining brightly, and the elevated stage, and the way that she danced back and forth, there was not an inch of this woman that held any mystery for the audience, and they loved every bit of it. And I drifted above it all, my spirit form exiting my body to observe from above. There was my Korean student, still pleading with the stripper to stop. There were the artsy-girls, each of them lost in their own minds, perhaps wondering whether they would ever have the guts to sacrifice for their art in such a way. There were my Mormon students; their eyes drinking up the sin taking place on stage in front of them. There were my boys, slowly becoming men with each piece of clothing removed. Even Mr. Finch had awoken to the sight of a completely naked woman on stage, and I could only imagine what he thought was actually happening. And then the stripper did one, last magic trick.
She made the scarf disappear.
But each time she had done it before, she had made the scarf reappear. When she had the coat on, it appeared from her pocket. When she had the pants on, it appeared from one of the seams. When she was just in a bra, it was removed from the cup of that bra. When she was wearing only the g-string, it emerged from the front.
Now she was wearing nothing.
She then leaned over backward, bridging her body with one hand. With the other hand, she reached down between her legs, and then she made the scarf reappear.
From her vagina.
The crowd went insane.
The lights went out.
And I took my students back to the hotel at intermission.
Needless to say, I was firmly convinced that I was going to be fired. I mean, I had taken a group of students, some as young as fourteen, to a show where a woman pulled a scarf out of her vagina. I gathered my shell-shocked kids around me once we exited the theater and we all huddled in the glow of the lights lining the Thames River behind us, London standing majestically across the water. “Look,” I said to them, “I just want you all to know that I had absolutely no idea that that was going to happen.”
“So, we aren’t going back to the show?” one of the girls asked. I wanted to get mad at her for making a joke at such an inappropriate time, but then I realized that she was from Europe and had a completely unfazed look on her face. This was no big deal. She was being serious.
“No, we’re not going back to the show,” I said.
“Good,” someone else said.
“Here’s what I need you guys to know,” I said, speaking intently. “A situation like this can cost someone their job. Unless you have it out for me or Mr. Finch, I think it’s important that, before you send a text to your mom and dad, telling them your teachers took you to a strip show on a school trip, give me just a little bit of time to find a solution to all of this. I need to talk to some people before word gets out that this is what happened. I’m not trying to cover things up, and I’ll gladly tell anybody who asks what really went down, but before the rumors start, I’m asking that you simply give me until morning to figure out what to do.”
These were my kids. They were on my team. They knew that I could get in trouble for what we just watched and none of them wanted that to happen. And they did as I asked. After we walked back to our hotel, I spent half the night talking to our superintendent about what happened, expecting him to ask me to bring the students home immediately. But that didn’t happen, because it wasn’t my fault. The only thing that was decided was that we weren’t going to participate in any more of the ISTA events, including the two other shows that were scheduled for us to see. We would simply find something else to do for those two days. That wasn’t going to be a problem in London.
Once word got out that we weren’t going back to the conference, I started to receive phone calls. Some of those calls were from ISTA. “Why would you choose to do this?” they asked. “We saw the show and there was no stripper in it! You should come to the conference so we can talk about it.”
Then I got calls from some of the more conservative parents. “I can’t believe that you would take these children to such an event!” one said.
“Thank you for removing out daughter from that den of sin,” said another.
Then, I got a call from some of the European parents. “Why would you not go back to the performance?” they asked. “We paid good money for that show!”
Clearly, I wasn’t going to win in this situation.
The truth of the matter was that ISTA did, indeed, screen La Soiree to see if it was appropriate. And the show that they saw was appropriate. It contained many of the same acts; the ones where I kept thinking, I can justify this. But what ISTA failed to consider was the fact that La Soiree had a series of rotating acts. And the woman that performed that night only performed on Fridays. So, to a certain extent, it wasn’t their fault.
We didn’t go back to the conference. We probably didn’t miss much by not going back. Instead, we tooled around London as a group, taking the Tube this way and that. Eating at restaurants, watching movies, and generally having a good time. For some of the students, it was the trip of a lifetime. For others, it was a window into a world that they had never seen before. For me, it was a chance for me to age ten years in three days.
And it would not be the last trip for me where things went wrong.
