by Tom Shillue
We got to the park with the sense that we knew what we had to offer, and as card-carrying members of SPEBSQSA, that we didn’t have to change to accommodate anyone else’s idea of what a barbershop quartet show was supposed to look like. Then we ran headfirst into the park’s entertainment director, Mr. G.
Dave Girton was a commanding figure. He was six foot four with shoulder-length bleached blond hair and a copper tan, and had the striking magnetism of a circus lion tamer. He spoke in a deep baritone that commanded attention, and always gestured theatrically. His personality was reminiscent of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka—he was able to shift from smiling and playful to dark and abusive on a dime. He drove a Porsche with an Indiana vanity plate that read “SHOWBIZ.”
From what I could see, Show Biz Inc. was a two-man operation: Mr. G, as everyone called him, and his short, bespectacled assistant, Kenny, the guy we had auditioned for in the hotel ballroom. Because we gave nicknames to everybody, Kenny, owing to his large waist size, became known as Roly Poly-Idioly. It was a dismissive nickname for sure—the man was a professional who was just doing his job—but we looked on him as a toadie to the boss, and we didn’t have the same respect for the chain of command that the theater people had. It was Kenny’s job to keep us in line while Mr. G concentrated his outsize personality on striking fear into the hearts of his merry band of theatrical players.
All the park entertainers were housed at the out-of-service Pine Valley Motel about twenty-five minutes north of Salem in Hookset, New Hampshire. We were told the motel was used as surplus student housing for the University of New Hampshire, though I found that hard to believe based on the condition of the place. It was a 1960s-style motor lodge—a strip of rooms with doors that opened up to the parking lot. In the middle was a big Swiss chalet–style A-frame building that housed the former office, and an upstairs guest lounge, but the A-frame had been locked up long ago.
We were housed two to a room, and I roomed with Sponsel, our baritone. Jim roomed with his church buddy Brad, and our tenor, Squimbo-Pie was put in with one of the talent supervisors, who ended up functioning as a kind of chaperone for him since he was two years younger than us, and really unprepared to live away from home.
Our salary was $195 a week per singer and because I had done all the talking at the audition, I was considered to be the quartet “spokesman,” so would get $210. For that extra money I would be expected to be the point man for the quartet and report to Show Biz Inc. in the event that any one of us had any problems fulfilling our contractual duties.
So there we were, the musical theater folks, Tab Halley the park magician, and the Boys Next Door all crammed together in a run-down, closed motel. Tab was well traveled; he’d performed at theme parks all over the country, and he had developed some strange road-warrior diet habits. One of Tab’s specialties was pepperoni pizza with Tums tablets. He would place one Tums atop each pepperoni on the slice, and wolf the whole thing. He claimed to love it. He’d say, “You get used to the taste fairly quickly, and it absolutely kills the heartburn.” Tab was in his thirties, which seemed ancient to us, and he wasn’t in the best shape, but we had great respect for him because he had tons of experience. He was the real deal, a full-on theatrical magician—the kind of guy I had dreamed of being when I had played around with my magic set as a kid. Tab had a mini-trailer full of amazing illusions that he towed around behind his IROC sports car. He had all the classics: the Interconnecting Rings, the Magic Botania (the trick that has a huge bouquets of flowers appear out of nowhere), the Levitating Woman, the Woman Sawed in Half, and many other things that involved forcing a woman into unnatural positions.
Which is why Tab needed a female assistant. Tab didn’t travel with one, as that would have been too costly. He needed a lovely lady supplied by Show Biz Inc. Judy had auditioned for a role in a show, just like all the other New York theater people, but instead was assigned the role of magician’s assistant. She wasn’t one bit happy about it, and she let it be known. Shortly after we checked in to our motel, she came to our room and introduced herself to us.
“Hi, I’m Judy,” she said.
“Hi Judy, we’re the Boys Next Door.” We stood in our doorway and babbled for a while until she strutted right past us in her NYPD athletic shorts and Adidas running shoes and into our room, sitting down on the corner of one of our beds. Seemingly at home, she told us that the whole reason she had taken the job in the park was so she could do musical theater, and that she never really liked magic. She wanted to sing and dance, not be gawked at while a hula hoop was drawn across her levitating body. She found magic creepy. We nodded our heads sympathetically and said, “I know what you mean,” even though we didn’t know what she meant at all. We loved magic. But we bonded at our first meeting with Judy, and by bonded I mean we listened to her talk and behaved in a charming manner, never once jumping up and down and high-fiving each other over the fact that there was a girl in our hotel room being nice to us.
Later on, when she received her wardrobe, she stormed over, furious. She came to our dressing room to show us the tiny sparkling bikini.
“Can you believe I have to wear this?”
“I can’t. That’s terrible,” I said, “you should probably let them know you don’t like it.”
Meanwhile I thought it was the greatest costume I had ever seen and I couldn’t wait to see her in the live magic show. She was a dancer with amazing legs and I had been barely able to contain myself when she introduced herself in those athletic shorts, never mind this Vegas Showgirl costume.
We told her she should speak up about her concerns, but she assured us it was of no use.
“Mr. G runs this place with an iron fist. You can’t challenge him.”
“You should think about it,” I said. “You have a right to feel comfortable at work.”
We all consoled and supported Judy like gentlemen, while we lusted after her in our hearts.
Then it came time for us to go to the costume trailer to pick up our uniforms. We felt Judy’s pain right away. The costumes were tuxedo shirts with red ties and cummerbunds and black stretch pants with no pockets—the kind dancers wear. To add insult to injury, we were then given silver vests, with shimmering “eyelash material,” which looks like tinsel from a Christmas tree. They were the gayest things I’d ever seen. And I say that in the 1980s-gay way.
“No way.”
“There is no way I’m wearing that.”
“Uh, uh. No.”
“Forget about it.”
We were united, and we hadn’t even needed to call a quartet conference. All four of us refused to even touch the outfits.
“I’m sorry, Kenny, we’re not going to wear those uniforms,” I told Idioly.
“Sorry guys, these are the outfits that Mr. G picked out himself. Mr. G doesn’t suffer fools gladly. If you want to perform for Show Biz Incorporated, you’re gonna have to wear what he picks out for you.”
“Then we’ll head home right now,” I replied.
From his incredulous expression, I could tell that he was not used to performers being willing to walk away from a gig over a costume.
We stood there with dour expressions staring him down in our mismatched tweed vests, probably looking like the Bowery Boys in Angels with Dirty Faces, which, to my dad’s great disappointment, I’ve still never seen.
Idioly was shocked. It was clear that he was in over his head. He was dealing with four teenagers who were willing to walk away from a sweet theme park gig because of shiny vests. This didn’t happen at Show Business Incorporated! Performers did what they were told!
“Well, we’re just gonna have to talk to Mr. G. about this. He’s not going to be happy, I’ll tell you that.”
We walked out of that trailer like Marlon Brando and his buddies in the Wild Ones, and went back to our dressing room and made a plan. Late in the afternoon we were summoned to Mr. G’s office. He was sitting in a suit and tie in the sparse, refrigerated trailer. Next to him on the wall
was a cork board with index cards pinned to it, listing all the shows on a grid organized by locations and times.
He didn’t get up. He didn’t even look at us. After a dramatic silence he took in a deep breath quickly through his nose and looked up as if he were about to let out an operatic yell, but instead spoke softly: “I understand you boys are refusing to wear the uniforms assigned to you.”
I stepped up to speak. I was going to work for that extra fifteen dollars a week. “We can’t wear them. They’re not appropriate for our style of music.” I was hedging because I didn’t want to say what I really thought of his outfits.
“They are highly appropriate. Have you heard of vaudeville? I had these designed by the best people in the business. I’ve been doing shows at parks like this for twenty years.”
“We won’t wear them. They are not the right style.”
“You think you know more than I do about what style is appropriate for this genre? Tell me one thing that is inappropriate about those outfits!”
“They’re just not . . . they’re not masculine.”
Mr. G was taken aback. He looked around at each of us. He knew what I meant. It hadn’t occurred to him before, but all of a sudden it made sense. He was from Indiana, after all, a land of farming, jeans, and guys working on tractors. He didn’t live in a complete bubble. Perhaps after doing so much musical theater, he had forgotten how the world looked to non-showbiz people. His demeanor quickly changed.
“Okay. All right,” he said, nodding his head. “But you’re going to have to match. I can’t have a quartet walking around in mismatched outfits! It doesn’t look professional.”
“Understood. We will purchase matching outfits at our own expense,” I said, which wasn’t a bargaining tactic. I was more than willing to pay so we could wear something we were comfortable with.
“No. No, I’ll get them for you. They will be subdued, but genre appropriate. Can you wear these until the new ones arrive?”
“No.”
He threw his hands up as if to say, Who are these dissident harmonizers?
We hammered out an agreement. We would wear khaki pants with white shirts and matching straight ties in the interim since he had plenty of those in the costume trailer. In two days we would have new uniforms delivered to us via Federal Express—regular black pants with white tuxedo shirts, red bow ties and suspenders, and straw boater hats. To us, it was a classic look—tidy but manly.
When we left Mr. G’s trailer we each shook hands with him, and as I was leaving he leaned in to me and spoke softly, “If anyone asks, this was my decision. Tell them I changed my mind on the uniforms after I watched you perform.”
“Of course,” I said. Mr. G. didn’t want the word getting out that he bowed to the will of a performer in any aspect of his shows. He had to maintain his reputation as the director with an iron fist, the all-controlling impresario of premiere theme park entertainment. But I respected him even more, because he knew which battles were worth fighting. Sometimes it’s best to leave a headstrong quartet alone.
*
Squimbo-Pie was the Pete Best of the Boys Next Door. (And yes, I’m aware that’s the second time I compared my barbershop quartet to the Beatles.) He certainly sang tenor very well, but he never really clicked with the group socially, because of his age. Two years difference seems bigger than it is at that age, and as a result we always treated him like a kid, and it probably led him to behave more like one.
But the night at the park when Squimbo got into the Bartles & Jaymes pretty heavily and threw up all over everybody, he made the decision easy for us. We decided it was time for him to leave. Without consulting anyone at the park we called his mom, and four hours later she was there with the station wagon.
After Squimbo’s untimely departure we had to figure out how to proceed. We walked out to our first location in the park and sang a few songs without him—the barbershop trio was a pretty sad-sounding unit, to us anyway, even though it was impressive to hear Sponsel jump effortlessly between baritone and tenor parts throughout the song in order to ring the most chords. To most anyone else listening I’m sure it sounded like classic American songs in perfect harmony, but to us it was just an abomination. We had to do something. We knew if we went to the office, they would probably put us in touch with one of the young show managers. (Mr. G was already gone; he would show up just once more during the summer to “check in” but once the shows were up and running, he left the show in the hands of his young middle-managers.) Their solution would be to find one of the actors from the shows to learn little Squimbo’s tenor parts and join our quartet. We didn’t want that to happen, though, since we needed to remain an autonomous group. We decided to flee.
Not wanting to be spotted walking out the employee entrance in the middle of the day, we climbed the high fence next to the parking lot in our costumes. Our bosses didn’t see us, but we were right out in the open, so some patrons surely did. It may be the only time in history this question was asked aloud: “Honey, is that barbershop trio escaping from an amusement park?”
We piled into Harmony Car and drove off. We got back to Norwood and began our search for a new tenor. We went through anyone who had sung with us in the past. But most of these guys were unable to just uproot themselves in the middle of the summer and join a theme park quartet. Our top choice, Matt Sullivan, from the Norwood High jazz ensemble, was a great musician and loved to sing with us; he was ready to jump at the chance, but his dad wouldn’t let him, saying he didn’t want his son “horsing around and getting into trouble.” Little did he know, other than the occasional Pabst Blue Ribbon, we were as clean living as Mormon missionaries! I’m sure Matt’s internship at a Boston PR firm exposed him to far more debauchery than we had to offer him.
We settled on a wild card choice, my old buddy Grover. John Grover was actually Squimbo’s cousin. He had never sung in a quartet, but he had a pretty good ear, a fairly pure-sounding falsetto voice, and, most important, he was a lot of fun to be around. The very next morning we were all in the car on our way back to Canobie Lake Park. We showed up for work and expected to be greeted with some type of discipline for walking off the job and missing a day of work, but no one in the office seemed to have even noticed.
The transition from Squimbo to Grover was easy enough: we simply had the name on his checks changed from Jimmy to John, and that was that. The managers were just relieved that we had corrected the problem ourselves so they didn’t have to worry about it. We’d kept Squimbo’s straw hat, and I lent Grover my spare outfit, which fit him well enough. Grover learned the six easiest songs in our repertoire and never bothered to learn another note. For the rest of the summer he was the happiest and least committed member of the group. In between sets he’d move about the park and socialize. It became obvious pretty quickly that Grover was the Harry Styles of our group—with his longish hair and his boater hat tipped inappropriately back on his head . . . and of course the ladies loved him. He was always going on mini-dates with girls who would separate themselves from their families for the afternoon to take a walk with Grover down by the lake and share a lime rickey. Grover would show up unapologetically late for a set, explaining that he “met a lady.” It was amazing to observe.
*
We’d get back from the park at around 8 p.m. At night the culture of the Pine Valley Motel could be described as “off-Broadway in the woods.” There was always a full-on party in progress—doors on the musty old motel kept wide open, music drowning out the sound of the crickets and bullfrogs, and a bucket of wine coolers on ice outside. It’s hard to fathom, but for about five years in the 1980s wine coolers (containing 0 percent wine and 0 percent cool) were very popular with young people, owing to the durable commercial campaign featuring two old men pretending to be Bartles & Jaymes spouting folksy nonsense, and always ending with “and thank you for your support.”
We didn’t drink them, though; we preferred Pabst Blue Ribbon, which was not yet a hipster beer, but
still the cheapest thing in the store, so it suited us perfectly. None of the guys in the quartet were old enough to buy alcohol, so Tab had to pick up the beer for us, and we’d pick up the pizza. We’d huddle at our end of the motel eating pizza, drinking a couple of PBRs, and singing. No, we were not tired of barbershop singing at the end of the day; we would always be trying out new songs and singing tags.
Tab never tired of our singing, either, so he was the perfect companion. He’d also entertain us with close-up magic while he regaled us with stories of his life in show business. He talked a lot about his glory days at Kings Island, a “real” theme park in Ohio, where they appreciated the kind of classic magic act he provided. Apparently Tab wasn’t thrilled with his current gig, although we didn’t know why—we couldn’t imagine a better summer job. He had complaints about Mr. G, his unappreciative assistant, Judy, and his current pay. He mostly saved his complaints for when he’d had a few too many beers. I think he was glad to have us as buddies for the summer.
Because our barbershop shows were separate from the singing and dancing entertainment, we were often in our own orbit at work. But back at Pine Valley, everyone would mingle together, and, let me tell you, I’d never been around so many gorgeous women. And as far as I could tell, the male actors and dancers didn’t seem too interested in them romantically. I thought this might be a bountiful summer for pitching some woo since the odds were clearly in our favor. How could these ladies resist us—four clean-cut, talented guys who were all but bursting with libidinous energy?
It seems that they had an easy time of it. We were, perhaps, too “primed.” The girls could sense it. Like shaken-up cans of Pabst, they knew if they opened us, we’d overflow. So, most of the girls stayed clear of us, all except Judy, who would talk to us whenever Tab wasn’t around. But even with her we were all deep in the friend-zone. She used her time with us to confide in us about her unhappiness as a magician’s assistant. And we always listened.
