A few weeks ago, Dr. Marian Monta, former chair of the Communications Department at Pan American University (later University of Texas Pan American, then UTRGV) passed away at the age of 88. Without even having to jot notes and think about it too much, I'd put her in the top five most influential people in my life. And I say that having only seen her twice in the last 33 years. This requires some explanation and much digging in the past. Here we go.
I began college in January of 1980 in Edinburg, Texas, having moved to the Rio Grande Valley with my mother some time after graduating from high school. Originally, I had planned to attend University of Houston, next door to Pearland, where I'd spent my high school years. Mom, in the meantime, had taken a job in McAllen, and rather than be broke all the time, I thought I'd give Pan Am a try, save some dough, and go from there. So, I moved south with her. Once down there I met a few people who were musicians, made some friends, had some fun, etc. I still wanted to be in a band, but there weren't a lot of opportunities there. The RGV at the time was fairly barren musically, unless you wanted to get some dudes together and bang out AC/DC tunes....not unfun by any means, but that's pretty much all you had in the Valley. If you had any other ambitions, well, get prepared to not be able to fulfill them easily. At the time, there were two groups of friends I had, and they were two bands themselves: Masque, who were a progressive rock band, and The Steroids, who were the Valley's only punk/new wave band. Due to my musical upbringing, I identified with both of them. But both drum seats were taken, and frankly, I wasn't very good then anyway. Still new to drumming, in a sense.
But, back to school. I started out in 1980 as a math major, with a computer science minor, so I began by placing into Analytic Geometry on the math side (test scores could move you up in the ranks), and took some computer programming classes - Basic, Fortran, and Cobol, as I recall. Once in the Analytic Geometry class, I quickly realized I didn't care about it. Weird, as I'd been a "math guy" my whole life. But college was different. And looking around at the other people in this class and my computer programming classes as well, I knew I didn't belong there. I quickly lost interest in AG and squeaked by without failing the class. And I mean, squeaked. I took a couple of math classes later in my college career to effectively erase that bad grade. But all this was telling me something. A major change was coming.
I took a couple of basics during the first summer session, just to knock them out of the way. One day I was talking with my mother about how this math thing might not ultimately be for me. She, and to this day I don't know if she was joking or not, suggested Communications. Why not? I think she even said that was Earl Campbell's major at UT. Skoal, brother - I'll give it a shot.
I signed up for Introduction to Communications in the fall and really had no idea what this might entail, other than knowing Radio, TV and Film came under that heading. Maybe this would be fun after all. Anyway, Intro to Communications was taught by Dr. Marian Monta, the department chair. Sounds like she took it seriously; I will, too. Upon first seeing her, I thought this woman is no-nonsense, and yet there was some underlying thing about her that I don't believe I ever really put my finger on, something that had me knowing she had all of our best interests at heart. So, the first thing I did was challenge her. That's right.
Early on in the semester, and before I think I'd even spoken a word to her, she gave us a spelling test, apparently the official Associated Press spelling test. It wasn't long, maybe 25 words or so. When I received the paper back, one of the words was marked as "incorrect." The word was "judgment," which her marking said should be spelled "judgement." I should mention that I've always been a very good speller, and this did not set well with ol' "I'm Right!" here. In those pre-internet days, I went home that night, got out our trusty Webster's and saw that "judgment" was the American spelling, and that "judgement" was the British spelling. Kind of like "recognize" and "recognise." So the next class day, I marched to her desk to register my complaint. "Pardon me, Dr. Monta, but I spelled this word as an American would. Last time I checked, my citizenship still had 'States' following 'United,' not 'Kingdom.'" I'm sure I didn't say those words, but I probably showed some of the indignance implied in the sentence. After a minute of looking it up herself, she admitted I was right and quickly corrected my submission to reflect a grade of 100%. And from that day forward, she looked at me differently, and not at all in a negative way. What's weird to me is that she must have given that test countless times. Nobody questioned that spelling?? Or maybe it speaks to how commanding a presence she had. Let's move on.
One of the requirements we had in the Intro to Comm class was lab hours. And you could complete lab hours in a number of ways, such as working in the speech lab or journalism offices, or working crew on one of the university's theatre productions. One day, another department faculty member and play director, Doug Cummins, walked in to recruit crew members for the production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." It sounded like fun, and I thought that would take care of my lab hour requirement. So I volunteered for sound crew. Doug asked me what experience I had, and I answered that I was familiar with tape recorders and tape editing, etc., and he said "great!" and made me crew chief right there. Uh oh.
I took the job seriously and was in charge of cutting the pre-show and intermission music tapes (a job I kept for pretty much the rest of my Pan Am career) and performing offstage sound effects: telephones, door slams, etc. I had a blast and really enjoyed the cast and other crew members. I thought maybe I'd found a new home. We even took the play to some sort of festival at Sam Houston State in Huntsville and were there for a few days. This was good.
After getting back from Huntsville, it was only a few days later when Dr. Monta asked me if I would be her assistant director for the next production which she was directing. I said yes. The play was "Volpone," written by a contemporary of Shakespeare's named Ben Jonson. AD is one of those jobs that sounds a lot more prestigious than it really is. You get to wrangle everyone for the director, and most importantly for me, as it turned out, you hold book during early read-throughs and fill in for anybody absent. And one of the major character actors was absent for the first couple of read-throughs. The character's name was Corbaccio, and as this was somewhat of a comedy, he was mostly a befuddled old man, a fool. The play was about a lot of people after the inheritance of Volpone, who pretends to be on his deathbed. Corbaccio is one of them after the loot. Even in these early read-throughs, and not really knowing all the context of the piece, I played it up a bit. I guess I was making everybody laugh, and after the cast actor had to bow out of the show, Dr. Monta asked if I wanted to try the role. I said "yes" without even thinking about it. Big turning point here.
I should mention here that I was quite a shy boy. I'd spent a lot of my youth being shuttled between parents, and as an only child, I had become pretty withdrawn. I never really had a problem making friends, but when you're moved around a lot, it's hard to keep any. To this day, there are still several friends I had when I was young that I wonder whatever happened to. My generation doesn't like Facebook a whole lot, it seems. The fall of 1980 changed everything. I was plopped on a stage in an outrageous costume and told "dance, boy!" I did. And I still am, to some extent.
I was off to the races. The show was a success, although Mark Servis, who was playing the lead character, had broken his leg in a caving accident. A special set was built, so he could lie or sit for the majority of the performance, some references being added to his having gout. I played it up, as I really didn't know a whole lot about what I was doing. I Tim Conwayed a lot of it, bumping into the sets, getting immediately confused about where I was going, etc. But whatever I did seemed to work and to please Dr. Monta. The best thing I learned in that first production was the concept of focus, how to pull it, how to give it, etc. To this day, I use that in drumming. Drum fills and general showing off are for when the singer isn't singing and no one else has some sort of featured solo. Sounds simple enough, but a lot of musicians don't think about it. Thanks, Dr. Monta!
Most of the productions at this time were held in the 1000-plus seat Fine Arts Auditorium, a mammoth cave where you really had to project (across an orchestra pit!) and have exaggerated movements. I was good at that sort of stuff, in a way I never could be for the camera.
I rather quickly became omnipresent in Pan Am productions, in one way or another. Mostly on the stage, but sometimes as crew only. In the spring of 1981, I was in the general chorus of "The Mikado," I created the sound tapes for an original show called "Saturday Serial" (don't remember if I auditioned or not), and then it was time for the first Summer Stock session. The biggest change, though, for this time period, was the arrival of one Mark Watson. He would become the closest I had to a constant acting partner during this time....but not yet.
Also, in March of 1981, I had the opportunity to visit NYC for the first time. Each year, theatre patrons would sponsor several students to take in a bunch of Broadway shows - you know, "broad"ening us. That meant we still had some expense, but it cut the costs a lot. So, I got to go to New York for ten days or so. We stayed near Broadway around 45th or 46th street, not far from Times Square. Movies like "Basket Case" show this time period in midtown Manhattan perfectly. Lots o' sleaze. This sheltered boy dug it. I got to go to the record store on Bleecker Street that I'd heard of forever, and I ended up having to ship a whole box of records home (the Valley wasn't the best place for record shopping). We also saw all the hot Broadway hits of that time, like "Barnum," "The Pirates of Penzance," and "A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine." We saw an off-Broadway play I cannot remember the name of now, in some small theatre, starring Frances Sternhagen and Ralph Waite (The Waltons' pop!). And, best of all, we saw two performances (some of us had to go back) of "Amadeus," which was brand new then and is still probably the best performance of any play I've ever seen. This starred Ian McKellen, Tim Curry, and Jane Seymour. If you've seen the movie, and that is a good film, sorry, the play blows it away, just in terms of sheer effect - the way it's presented. I saw it one more time when working a touring company performance in 1982 or so, and that was almost as good. It's just a freaking good play. I suppose I should mention some of us also saw "Caligula" (the movie), which was only in release in LA and New York at the time. That was the first and maybe only time someone's passed me a joint in a movie theater. I still remember after we returned to the hotel, a couple of our friends who hadn't gone asked how it was. Tina Atkins said "it sucked. Literally!"
Moving on a few months - Pan American Summer Stock (or PASS) had been running for quite a few years before I did one, and was one solid month of nothing but theatre (maybe a meal occasionally) - and you got six hours of college credit for it. I did three during my theatre days, the first in 2001. The four shows were "The Fourposter" (I cut the sound tapes), "Two By Five," which was a musical revue (I think I cut pre-show music, but this one I don't remember much about), "The Prisoner of Second Avenue," a Neil Simon play directed by Dr. Monta (sound crew for this one again), and "Pippin," directed by Doug Cummins (I was a "player," or chorus member). Despite not being on stage too much, I look at this as one of the happiest summers of my life. It was a frigging blast. One solid month of in-house classes, rehearsals, shows, partying, etc. The finale of this first PASS was the annual parody, which I had some part in writing, and I had the lead part of....whatever we changed Pippin's name to. It was fairly filthy, largely due to Holly Zimmerman, who I was dating at the time and was one of the funniest people I've ever known. As I recall, we showed Pippin's birth by me sliding down the "Pippin" set's slide from way below some poor actress' open legs. I remember a lot of laughter, so it couldn't have been all bad. Plus, frankly, I treated it as another audition, as everyone was there.
The fall of 1981 saw me moving on up, as they say. The first show was "Not By Bed Alone," a French farce where I played the character of Bouzin. Second-billed, not bad. The play was fairly hilarious, with lots of running around, slamming of doors, etc. by the end. Doug Cummins directed it. And now I have a confession to make. When the show was about to be cast, and all of us wanna-be's were reading the script, all I heard about was the character of General Irrigua, a Latin American general who was an obnoxious blowhard and probably the focal point of a lot of the comedy in the show. We all suspected that Rafael Torres, a naturally funny guy from NYC, would get the part, and he did. I liked Rafael a lot; we had fun times and acted in a few other things together. But hearing the constant ha-ha'ing about the General (largely from the director) lit a fire under me. I was determined to make my character even funnier. And I think I did. Art is not a competition; I'll be the first to say that. But at that time, in my life, I constantly felt like I had something to prove. I worked hard.
I did pay for some of this "enthusiasm," though. In the last couple of acts of the show, I had to run around backstage a lot, running to make cues from one side of offstage to the other side, etc. It was an energetic show, in general, and I was just trying to keep up. One night, toward the end of the second of three acts, I got my foot caught under a piece of scenery, up on wheels, when I was trying to get from one side of the darkened offstage to the other, and I heard a crack, followed by screaming pain. During intermission, one of our theatre patrons, a doctor, came back to look at me. He makeshift-wrapped my ankle, and I toughed out the third act. I remember being carried a few times from one offstage side to the other. But I made it through the rest. And went directly to the ER afterward. I was on crutches for about a week after that. It got me out of strike (the dismantling of the set, following the last performance). I have ankle issues to this day - irritating for a drummer.
Following a bit of healing, I did something none too bright. I accepted two roles, one for the Music Department and one for our department, performances happening on the same days. Weirdly, though, the Music Department's show was "A Christmas Carol," and I was cast as Scrooge, a non-singing role in an otherwise opera. For some reason, the MD cast me as Scrooge for the matinee performances and another actor as Scrooge for the evening performances. Weird, but fun, too. I was doing a show in the evenings called "El Grande de Coca Cola," one of the most fun times I've had. The show is a cabaret act happening somewhere in Mexico, and I played the emcee and troupe leader, Don Pepe Hernandez (I think, might have to get the program out). The great thing about this one is - the show was all in Spanish (I knew fifty words, maybe), and largely improvised for the emcee. I had a ball. Jack Strawn directed it, and as he was always wont to do, he let me run wild....whether that was a good thing or not, I don't know. But I'm eternally grateful to Jack (RIP) for his constant encouragement to be as entertaining as I could be. The show, as I mentioned, was a cabaret put on by a family, so every performer was related to Don Pepe in some way. Ridiculous, non-impressive magic acts, terrible humor, it had it all. I would usually pick on a couple of people in the audience for particular barbs. I'm missing it just typing about it. So, in a nutshell, I was performing as Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol" during the afternoon, then washing all the gray out of my hair, etc. to get ready for the evening performances. The "El Grande" performances were held in the cafeteria, for some reason. I guess to get enough people in, but close enough to be able to interact with.
This post is already incredibly long, so I think I'll break the remaining years up....
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