Men I've Never Been by Michael Sadowski

Men I've Never Been by Michael Sadowski

Author:Michael Sadowski [Sadowski, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780299330989
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press


During senior year, there were two opportunities to be cast in productions at the high school, the spring musical and the senior class play, which took place in the fall. For the musicals Ms. Greer, the theatre director, never quite knew what to do with me as a tall, awkward kid who could sing reasonably well but couldn’t dance a step. But I had paid my dues as a dedicated member of the drama club for three years, and in the spring of my junior year Ms. Greer said she was looking out for me. She’d chosen a senior class play with a great role for me in mind.

That September, I was cast as Captain Keller, Helen Keller’s father, in The Miracle Worker. As depicted in the play, Keller was a booming tyrant who fought the efforts of Annie Sullivan to teach Helen how to use language and dismissed them as a futile waste of time. He ran his household the way he had run his army battalion. He was forceful, in charge, accustomed to being obeyed. This did not come naturally to me, the kid who always apologized just for being in the room. About halfway through the rehearsal process, Ms. Greer seemed at a loss for how she could turn a sixteen-year-old whose body language said “I know, I know, I’m a fag” into Captain Keller. She had an entire cast and crew to worry about.

But my friend Amy, who was assistant director of the play and had all the bossiness required to be a good one, was not about to let me off easily. Every time I went backstage after a limply executed scene, thinking I would just gossip with the rest of the cast until my next entrance, Amy would drag me aside and tell me we were going to work on Keller.

“You’re the captain! You’re in charge! Stand up straight! Let me see you walk. No! Straighter! Take charge!”

But I didn’t feel like a captain, didn’t have a clue what that could possibly mean. I didn’t feel like a man, or even a boy—how could I feel like a captain? At this point I just wanted to quit the play and go home, sensing it was all headed for one big, embarrassing flop. Maybe Amy should play Captain Keller, I thought. She knew how to be a tyrant. But Amy wasn’t about to give up on me, and one day—just to shut her up—I gave her what she asked for: a straight spine, which led to a laser-focused gaze ahead, which could only be accompanied by a voice that issued commands instead of apologies. And in the wings of the Somerville High School auditorium, Captain Keller started to come to life.

From that afternoon on, when I strode up and down the platforms and walked through the door frames that the Somerville High set crew had made to depict the Keller home, it was my kingdom. Sitting at the head of the dining room table, I



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