THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
When I was 16 years old my mother informed me that we were leaving NYC for Connecticut.I had just completed my freshman year at the High School Of Performing Arts. I told her I was not leaving Performing Arts because I was training to be an actor and she replied: “you have to come with us because we can’t leave you in NYC alone”. My drama classmate Polly McLean who was from Trinidad told me she had an extra room in her apartment and she offered to have me stay with her family. She lived in a West Indian Calypso loving community on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.She lived with her mother, a practical nurse. I gave my mother the news and she agreed to let me stay with them. I became a Calypso music aficionado. I joined Polly’s family on many church outings and was included in everything they did. At school Polly and I had to attend summer school at Erasmus Hall high school because we had failed some academic classes at Performing Arts.The following years were no picnic either. I still didn’t have a permanent home. I bounced back and forth living with my sisters Carmen and Lydia who were married with children. I had to survive on the $15 my mother sent me weekly. My sisters let me sleep on their sofa while I continued at PA.Before starting my senior year at PA I had already attended summer school twice and failed them twice.PA had a policy that you must keep up your academics in order to remain at school. They tolerated my academic shortcomings because I was a strong drama student. I did however had to attend night school in my senior year while going to day school. I couldn’t believe my good fortune because I passed my night school class with high marks. My night school teacher told me: “you’re so smart you’d’ be crazy not to go to college.”! I chose the theater over college. When graduation time came around and since I knew I would not be graduating or going to the prom, I went on the road instead with Raul Julia in a production of Bye Bye Birdie. When I got back from that tour eight weeks later,I found out that they were looking for an actor to play an Inca Indian in the Broadway production of The Royal Hunt Of The Sun. I auditioned for it and was hired. A lucky break I badly needed. Christopher Plummer, David Carradine and George Rose were the stars. I got my Actors Equity card and was happy because I was doing what I had been taught at the High School Of Performing Arts.I was learning on the job. I counted my lucky stars. However, I felt inadequate without a high school diploma. One day I walked in and took the GED test. My thinking was that I would take the test, discover my weaknesses, then work on them and then retake the GED test. The”Gods” smiled on me because I passed the test on my first try. I got the GED in the mail. I can finally go to college If I wanted to. But why go? Since I was already in the best college of all, the Theater.Today, Polly is a tenured associate professor of media studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a published author and I am an actor.
In the second row right photo is me as Napoleon Bonaparte in George Bernard Shaw’s Man Of Destiny.
