Gordone...

I learned how to make love in college. Professor Charles Gordone said it in the plainest language possible, and it suddenly made sense. He said making love to a woman is not something you do in the bedroom; it is something you do all day every day. It is how you look at her, how you talk to her, how you breathe around her. Wow. That’s what I call teaching.

I never set out to be a college theatre major. I was involved in theatre in high school: I took it as a fine arts credit 2 years in a row, studying its history and structure, and was cast as an actor in a number of plays as a member of the extracurricular club. I even participated in a couple of local theatre productions as a bit player, doing mostly character work, playing several roles in a single play or basically any role that involved heavy makeup, difficult costume changes or funny accents. I found the whole process great fun. Theatre productions become micro-realities with all the folks involved sharing story arcs literally behind the scenes that begin, peak, and end, usually in parallel with the production. It is a safe world for creative types, where acting out is the expected, rather than the punishable, behaviour and where the short and transient friendships can feel as deep and as plausible while much less threatening as the ones on the outside. My high school theatre teacher, Dr. Doug Street, was a hero to me, as a student of all things 1960s, his pedigree was impeccable. He had lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the right set of years and had even played drums for some psychedelic rock outfit. He was the real deal; where other high school theatre groups were learning Shakespeare and Broadway musicals, we were studying Mamet, Beckett and Ionesco. I, however, was probably not his favorite student. These days, I would have been quickly diagnosed as ADD and doped up with some exotic cocktail to keep me on the straight and narrow, but back then I was just what folks liked to call a “problem child.”

Three times, Dr. Street gave me a chance to play a large role in a student production and for both the second and third of those times I let him down by failing a class (not his) and becoming “academically ineligible” to perform. I didn’t get any more chances. He liked me though, and enjoyed my writing. He even gave me a gift of a book of Leonard Cohen’s poetry; in fact, I only found out years later that this talented poet was a musician (and a Canadian!) as well. In remembering Dr. Street now, I am surprised to realize how much he may have affected and influenced my life (San Francisco, Theatre, Cohen, Canada...a handlebar mustache...). Teachers are like that.

As a burgeoning rock star in those years I also followed Jim Morrison’s lead and read pretentious literature such as Nietzsche, Sartre and Carl Jung of which, I can now admit, I understood only a fraction. When I (finally) graduated high school and, after a break, decided I should probably go to college (you know, just in case the rock star thing didn’t work out) my inexplicable commitment to my pretentious reading list made me think I should pursue the discipline of psychology...after all, who could be better equipped to tackle the academic problems of the intricate workings of the human mind than a troubled, creative, angst-ridden, Jim Morrison wannabe with a short attention span?

So anyway, I guess just to have something else to do while failing my Introduction to Psychology course, I took a theatre class as a fine arts credit.

Dr. Charles Gordone was not a typical professor. I can say that with some authority as I spent the next two years of my life trying to soak up everything I could from the great man. I still know that walking into that class on a whim was one of the best things that ever happened to me. He was not Dr. Street, who, for his pedigree should have been the more flamboyant of the two, where Dr. Street had been studious and careful, Gordone was a bundle of energy and a character through and through. He was a flashy dresser on a conservative campus (Texas A&M), a proud black man with a white wife who had sought out a small town, probably BECAUSE he wanted to raise eyebrows. He was a courageous quick thinker, a fast talking street smart mixed race superman from Cleveland who had MADE IT in New York (as America’s first Pulitzer Prize winning black playwright) then spent the next 30 years telling his story. I am one of the lucky ones who got to hear it. And be taught.

The class that caught me was a method acting class. As a ‘veteran actor’ I figured the class would be a breeze. Fat chance. Gordone ran us through the paces and no-one got to sit down until we had given him something real. There was crying, real anger, and real exhilaration. A duet scene I performed for a final grade in that class is still marked in my mind as probably my only great performance, all done under the driving constant rapprochement of a dedicated teacher. I followed his first class with another and another, scoring well enough in each that it became logical for me to switch my major to theatre to take advantage of my finally well positioned GPA. But by the third semester I was busily failing Introduction to Theatre as well.

Gordone was a fierce mentor. He spoke of nurturing the creative spirit as a duty. He would not let the small group of us who followed him from class to class get away with anything less than our best creative effort. And he kept talking along the whole way. He talked about fearlessness and love of beauty; he talked about racism and stupidity; he talked about the great people he’d known and his pride. And he talked about love. He gave me the little nugget above that has carried me for all these years as a grateful student.

I never got that Theatre degree. I’m pretty sure that not everyone is suited for college life or is meant to have a diploma that says we learned what we supposed to (or jumped through the hoops we were supposed to.) But neither did Dr. Gordone. According to what he told us, his degree was awarded for achievement. And trust me, he earned it. To my knowledge, he never published another play after his Pulitzer Prize winner “No Place to be Somebody”, but his art lived on, lives on, in those of us he taught.

He once told us a story about how he, a savvy urbanite, had ended up in Texas; he said that he and his wife drove south until they saw cows, then parked and started looking for work. I’m sure it was a bit of an exaggeration, but it was obvious that he had intentionally chosen a challenging environment in which to settle so he could feel like he was making a difference. I can’t help but identify with that decision sometimes as I look around our small town, and think of the challenge we have taken on.

Teaching is a noble profession. I’ve got two teaching parents, a sister and a grandmother that taught. We are all lucky to have people who are willing to share the gift of knowledge with us and who affect us in ways we may take years to understand. I never did get that theatre degree, but I was lucky to have met and learned from Dr. Street and Dr. Gordone, both of them, as theatre teachers made me a better chef, a better artist and better man.

Dr. Gordone died in 1995. When he taught me, jumping around the classroom with an energy I envy now, he was already nearly 70 years old. He only gave the audiences of the world a small part of his great work, but to those of us who had the honor of being his students, he gave the rest.