Drama High

by Michael Sokolove

  • • •

  I have not seen Marcy since high school, but when she greets me at the front door of her town house, I don’t feel the distance of all the years that have passed. She gives me a long hug. She wants to see pictures of my family and to hear about my friends, the other boys who had come to her house for dinners. “Is Bruce still as handsome as he was?” she asks. She pulls out pictures of her own, taken during my high school years, and we try to remember the names of the people in them. She tells me about her recent medical travails, including, as she says, “my two fake hips and my fake knee.”

  She is just as warm as I remembered her. As funny and direct. If Lou is part of the last group of men who felt like they must stay closeted, Marcy is part of the last generation of crackerjack and competent working-class women who were directed into business or secretarial courses rather than college. (In that way, she reminds me of my own mother, who was still working as a legal secretary in her eighties. She could type documents and, if need be, sharpen up the legal reasoning.)

  “I got my education through Lou,” Marcy says. “Through typing all his papers and everything else. I didn’t mind. I liked it. A dear friend of mine said, ‘He used you. You would sit next to the principals at the proms. You would make chatter. You could always talk to anybody. You were the perfect wife.’ I got angry when he said that, because it’s not the way I feel. It wasn’t playing a role to me. It’s what I wanted to do, and I enjoyed it. I loved being a teacher’s wife.”

  She made more money at first than he did—$6,500 as a secretary to a real estate attorney, compared to the $6,000 annual salary he made teaching. He went to graduate school two nights a week (the traditional way teachers increase their salaries is by getting advanced degrees) and taught adult education two other nights at a local college. On Saturday nights they went out to eat at one of the better local restaurants and felt rich and happy because they could order anything on the menu. On Sundays, he graded papers and watched football with Tommy while she went to T.J.Maxx and shopped for clothes. “It all just felt right,” she says. “We agreed on everything, and I’d say it remained that way pretty much through our marriage. He still says to me sometimes, ‘We were the best team ever.’ It’s just sad the way it turned out. It’s a very tragic love story.”

  When she and Lou divorced, they sold their home and each of them moved into a town house—in the same development, across a road and about a three-minute walk from each other. He said to the sales agent, “We want to buy two of them.”

  She cooks holiday dinners. Birthday dinners. Anniversary dinners for Tommy and his wife. Lou is always at the table. They are a family, a modern family outside the norm, but not so unusual that plenty of others wouldn’t recognize themselves in it. They make the best of imperfect love.

  Marcy does make it clear that her relationship with her former husband is on his terms. He is the director. They can go weeks, even months, without seeing each other. “He runs hot and cold,” she says. “You get an arm’s length, and then he pulls it back and you don’t hear from him for a long while.”

  Our conversation goes back and forth between past and present with an ease that is its own revelation to me. “Can I ask you something?” she says at one point. “Do you think Lou is swishy?”

  I think for a moment. No, I finally say. I would never consider him that, and not just because the term itself is dated. The word signifies unmanliness to me, and I don’t think of him that way. Just the opposite. He stands up for himself, for others.

  “But if you just met him, would you think he was gay?”

  Yes, I say, I would.

  She recalls that in his early years of teaching, he came home from school one day “down in the dumps.” She asked him what was wrong, and he answered that one of the kids suggested to him that he was “a fag.” It had something to do with the way he carried his books. She comforted him by saying, “They’re high school kids. What do they know?”

  In retrospect, you might imagine he was trying to tell her something. Another time, they went to a gay bar in Philadelphia with a friend who was gay. A man offered Lou a seat, and he declined but said his wife would like to sit down. Marcy has replayed this scene numerous times in her mind and now sees it differently. She thinks that the man who offered the chair expressed surprise that Lou had a wife. “Strangers could see it,” she says. “Kids could see it. I loved blindly. If I didn’t love him so much, would I have seen it?”

  We look at a picture of Lou with Tommy, who was about eighteen months at the time. Lou is twenty-five years old, dressed in a leather jacket, handsome, cradling Tommy in the crook of his arm in the bleachers at a high school football game. “Sometimes I don’t even see it now,” she says. “I know that to some people that makes me a fool.”

  Marcy and Lou are their own drama, a melancholy piece with its roots in the pre–sexual revolution 1950s. I can imagine it as something he would want to put onstage at Truman. Or that he would see Off-Broadway and then have to go down the street for a cocktail as soon as he exited the theater, like he told his kids was the case after he saw Edward Albee’s The Goat—the play about “certain things that can kill love even if you don’t want it to.”

  “We didn’t know anything, either of us,” Marcy says. She would listen as “the girls in the lunchroom” at work talked about their marriages. “Maybe it was bragging, but some of them were like, ‘He can’t keep his hands off me. He chases me around the kitchen.’ And all I could think was, Why don’t I have that?”

  When they told Tommy they were divorcing, he didn’t understand at first. He said to his mother, “But I never hear you fight.”

  “But we don’t touch, either,” she answered. “We never touch.”

  To this day, Marcy is fiercely protective of her ex-husband. She tells me about a friend of his who, in her mind, is not truly loyal. He makes caustic remarks about Lou. Never offers real praise. It angers her. In some ways, she thinks he usurps what should be her role. “Let’s be honest,” she says. “If anybody’s going to cut Lou down, it should be me. Because of my own things with him.”

  When her marriage ended, she had no guidebook to turn to, nothing that plotted a future course for a woman whose husband declared himself gay. He was still a teacher, a heralded one, but she was no longer a teacher’s wife. “He was trying to find out who he was, but in the meantime, I had to figure it out, too, because all of the sudden I was a single woman in my forties.”

  Not long after I visited with her, a storm in the area knocked out power for a night. Lou walked over and asked if she wanted to stay in his guest room. “It’s dark in my place, too,” he said, “but you won’t be by yourself.” She declined, but appreciated the kindness.

  They had a longer talk that night. Their time apart had just caught up to the time they had been married—twenty-one years. Neither of them has found anyone else. “Look at us,” he said to her. “The years floated by, and here we are. We’re both alone.”

  • • •

  How long did it take my mom to cry?” Tommy Volpe asks me when we get together at a tavern near his home.

  About five minutes, I say.

  “That long? You sure?”

  The mythology within the family is that Tommy is most like his mother in personality—straightforward, rarely diplomatic, occasionally quick to anger—but I found him a mix of both his parents. He certainly has his father’s gift for irony and occasional sarcasm. “My question is this,” he says. “If you’re gay, don’t you have to do something about it?” He is not questioning his father’s sexual identity, whether he really is gay—just commenting on his lonely life in the years since his marriage ended.

  Lou and Marcy are united in their belief that what happened in their marriage took a terrible toll on their son. Tommy was a “casualty of war,” his father says. He got off track and fell behind in his studies. He stopped playing baseball. Kn
ocked around for a while, tended bar, took the long route through college, got started late on a career. His first marriage ended quickly.

  Tommy could not agree less that any of this was his parents’ fault. “I never look at it that way,” he says. “I know how they feel, but I did what I did and I did it because I wanted to. The consequences may not have been great, but for some of that period, I was having a good time. People say it’s bad that I didn’t get started teaching until I was thirty-three. I lost out on money or whatever. But I don’t care about money. It’s what happened. I’m better for it.”

  He says his father was there to guide him and offer support, “but he didn’t intervene. There were no bailouts. My problems were mine to solve.” Of what occurred in his family, he says, “I’m not sorry about any of it. It’s what happened. I couldn’t have two better people as parents.”

  I hear an echo of his father’s worldview when I talk to Tommy, a measure of acceptance—knowledge that life cannot be meticulously plotted out through the acquisition of credentials and the avoidance of missteps. “He was meant to find the theater,” he says of his father. “Or the theater found him.”

  It’s a mind-set entirely different from the assumption that a steady glide forward is possible—perfect childhood, the best schools, straight ahead to marriage and career—or that it is even preferable. Only fools believe this. No one would want to watch a theater piece with that arc. It’s not real. The Volpe outlook is distinctly working-class. It is not pessimistic, but it is pragmatic. As a parent or an educator, you hope to create conditions for success. But there are no guarantees. Stuff happens along the way.

  Tommy teaches sixth grade, and has been at it long enough now that some of his students have become his father’s students. He has had kids in his classes who live in Red Cross shelters. He knows about Levittown’s boom times, but never experienced them. “What I learned from my dad is, set the expectations really high,” he says. “Convince your kids they can meet them and help them achieve it. What you don’t want for them to ever think is, I come from a shit town, so my life is going to be shit. That’s the attitude that he gets in the way of. He puts a stop to that thinking, and I try to do the same.”

  Tommy Volpe never dreamed he would become a teacher in his father’s district. “It just sort of happened, but it feels right,” he says. “Maybe it’s corny, but I feel like I’m giving back. I didn’t go to school in Bristol Township, but it gave me the life I’ve had.”

  • • •

  A new group of Theater 1 students walks into Volpe’s classroom. Most of them stop for a moment just inside the door and gaze at the couches, the mobiles, the posters, all the happy chaos of a space that looks nothing like any classroom they’ve known. They settle in, and he tells them, “I’m not here to make you a great actor. That’s not my job. The reasons you should be taking this class are far more important than learning to act. I want you to gain confidence, learn something about life, grow up a little bit. I want to help you see who you are.”

  They start with a game, an icebreaker designed for the many students Volpe gets every year who have rarely if ever spoken up in a class. He passes out potato chips, tells everyone they are at a party. They must tell the class about a guest they have brought. Among the guests on this day: Lady Gaga, 50 Cent, Jesus. The guests are introduced around, wander off, get into other conversations. Soon everyone is laughing, eating the chips, and trying to keep track of where their initial guest has gone.

  In a more advanced class several weeks later, Theater 3, students are studying Red Light Winter, a drama by the writer Adam Rapp. Volpe starts by regaling them about a documentary he watched the previous night about Joan Rivers (who ever knew there was continuous Joan Rivers fare on TV?) and a bit she did that he found hilarious. Something about Halloween and kids at her door who did not like that she was giving out apples instead of candy. So she told the children, “Then just eat the razor blades!” Volpe is cackling about this. Some of his students look at him like he is an insane old man.

  A boy near the front of the class seems to have gone to sleep. Maybe he worked late the previous night or he was at a party, but Volpe just ignores him. Another is stitching up his lacrosse stick, but he’s listening. “How’s your sister?” Volpe asks another student. He is talking about her twin, who is at home and within days of giving birth.

  These classes operate on Volpe time, which is different from the time a math teacher might keep. Here, interruptions and digressions are encouraged. They are an integral part of the program.

  The class is reading the play aloud. A moment after they begin, Volpe says, “Let me just stop for a moment and say that this is one of the best parts I can imagine for a young American actor. It’s breathtaking.” He is talking about one of the two male characters, Adam. “It’s a fine line the actor has to walk. His character can’t be sentimental. It has to be honest and truthful and yet heartbreaking.”

  When I listen to the students read, they stumble over certain words they have not come across before—like Copenhagen and Zurich. (Where I live now, at least one kid in each class would have been to those cities.) The word Aristotelian comes up. Volpe tells them how to pronounce it. “We’ll talk about its meaning tomorrow,” he says.

  His students do possess some advanced knowledge. There is a reference in the play to a lambskin condom. A girl in the class says that lambskin is not good at protecting against AIDs. It’s too porous. A couple of others in the class agree.

  They reach a scene where a character tells his whole sad life story to a prostitute. “Why would anyone ever do that?” Robby Edmondson, Truman theater’s technical whiz, asks. “She’s a complete stranger. Why wouldn’t you talk to a friend as opposed to someone you just met?”

  “That’s a very good point, Robby,” Volpe says. “But sometimes you might tell a stranger things you would never tell your best friend.”

  At the back of the room, a boy with a beard and hooded eyes raises his hand, and Volpe nods for him to go ahead. “Sometimes if you’re sad about something, depressed, you feel better after you tell someone about it,” he says. “It might not matter who they are.”

  The student is repeating twelfth grade and struggling with a chaotic home life and some legal issues of his own, but he is bright and tuned in to this class. Volpe is rooting hard for him to survive the year and get his diploma. He responds to the boy’s comment by doing something rare for him: He tells a deeply personal story of his own. He does so, it seems to me, to support this young man who just spoke up. “When I got divorced from my wife, it was a good thing,” he says. “I didn’t want to be married. But it was sad. I went to a therapist. I guess you could say that she was a stranger, in a way. But I needed someone to talk to, and she was helpful. But I only saw her once a week, just an hour out of the whole week, and I was feeling so bad that an hour wasn’t enough. So I wrote in a journal. I didn’t even care about spelling or punctuation; I just wrote. And that was also like talking to someone.”

  Seamlessly, they resume discussing the play. Mariela Castillo, who can have a bit of a prudish side, objects to some of the language. “I feel like this is porn,” she says.

  “I understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t agree,” Volpe says. “It would be easy to make it porn, just show it all, but that’s not what’s done here. The craft is making it theater. That’s where the interest is. You can go on the Internet and see porn, and it’s boring, or it very quickly gets boring. But this isn’t boring.”

  Several other students offer opinions. The bell rings. No one gets up. They’re still talking about the play. “You gotta go,” Volpe tells them. He adds that he will not be there for a couple of days, that he and Krause are off to a conference of theater teachers.

  “No!” somebody shouts.

  “When are you coming back?” a voice calls out.

  “When do we get to do the second act?” anot
her student asks.

  • • •

  One of Volpe’s students, a drama kid, had recently come to him privately and revealed he was gay. It is something that occurs probably at least once a year. Volpe is an obvious person to confide in—living proof that a person can be gay and also a respected and even revered member of the community. Volpe is always cautious in these situations. He first asks: Are you sure? Some of his students are still as young as fourteen. Not fully formed. He thinks some girls may find it “fashionable” to declare themselves gay, though he’s yet to encounter that in a boy.

  This particular student asks if he should tell his parents. Volpe does not automatically say yes. He does not always know the families well, so he can’t anticipate the response. He tells this boy to take his time, and also suggests he talk to his guidance counselor. “Maybe it’s a cop-out on my part,” he says, “but I don’t ever want to pretend I have every answer or that I have training in things I don’t. I’m a teacher. I’ve lived the life I’ve lived. That doesn’t make me an expert on every single one of these situations.”

  But he does always offer himself as a safe haven. He says to this student, “If someone is mean to you, if you get harassed or feel scared or uncomfortable, you come and see me right away. Don’t worry about what period it is, or what class it is. I’ll stop what I’m doing, whatever it is, and be there for you.”

  There is a GLAAD chapter at Truman—the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. Volpe considers it “an enormous step forward.” If someone had told him thirty years ago that such a thing would exist, he never would have believed it. “It’s still not easy,” he says. “I know there are students I teach who have a charade they play. They’re gay, I know that they are—my gaydar is pretty good—but they are not ready to reveal that, which is absolutely fine. They’re very young and they can’t yet make the switch over to that place. But they may have a sad life until they come to terms with who they are.”