I owe my life in the theater to a crush and Thornton Wilder.  More specifically, it was a series of crushes on the Class of 1988 and the odd confluence of those crushes and our high school’s production of “Our Town.”

Within the rank and file of the general population of the Class of 1988 were a group of friends whose presence in the school was enough to fill me with hope for the future due to the fact that they were complete nerds, but were somehow not crippled by this nerdiness....

Moreover, they seemed to thrive... These friends, despite their relative geekitude, were looked on as some sort of strange amalgamation of cool and weird.  The cheerleaders and jocks kind of held them in awe.  There was a sheen about them all, and it wasn’t because of overactive oil glands, either.  They were the Brahmins of New London-Spicer Junior-Senior High.  I followed them everywhere: onto the Knowledge Bowl Team, Academic Decathalon, Future Problem Solving and, eventually, school plays.

During the 1987-88 school year, I began having a succession of massive crushes on all of the boys in this circle of friends.  All save one, actually.  I never wanted to date this boy named Erik, and I’m not sure why.  Ironically, Erik and I are still good friends even though our conversations inevitably end with “Well, why NOT me?  You liked EVERYONE for chrissakes.”  It’s a pride wound, I realize, but he would have been pissed off at my puppyish advances at the time.  Everyone else was.

Nearly the entire Brahmin cadre (including my then-current crush, Bill Skluzacek)  was cast in “Our Town,” which would open during their last glorious May as high schoolers, but I couldn’t be in the play because of a (really f’in stupid, totally idiotic, goddamn WRONG HEADED) rule that said you had to be at least a sophomore to audition for plays.  They pulled in sixth graders to fill out the children’s roles, but they wouldn’t let ONE lousy freshman audition, so I did what I could to be part of the play.  That meant I was the makeup girl.

I bore my burden blithely, even when told by the director that I had to make the poor pale kid playing the Stage Manager appear tan and black haired.  Every night before the play, I’d empty a can of black hairspray on his head and paint his face mercilessly with a makeup shade I believe was just called “Swarthy.”  Consequently, this poor boy, who in his waking life looked like the Aryan Nation’s wet dream, went onstage every night looking vaguely, yet unplaceably, ethnic.  Every night, I rushed through my pre-show makeup tasks (Including the task of making up the children, one of whom approached me every night saying “I think I need more makeup.”  It should be known that this same individual, TO THIS VERY DAY, still asks me for more makeup when we run into each other.  Strange boy.)  so that I could spend precious seconds mooning around Bill.  One night, though, I had to sew a button on the shirt of Jeff Gilson who was the most attractive kid ever to walk the halls of New London-Spicer High School.  He didn’t even take his shirt off, which meant that I had to bite off the button thread dangerously close to his man-chest.  It took every fiber in my newly sexual being not to just LICK him at that moment, but I was not about to cheat on my unrequited love for Bill by engaging in shallow, meaningless unrequited lust for Jeff.  

Another part of my job as Cover Girl jockey and utility freshman crew-person was to be the prompter, offstage, when a character flubbed his or her lines.  Inevitably, it would happen during the Stage Manager’s last monologues, as the play was winding to a close and the stars were blinking on over Grover’s Corners, NH.  Todd, the poor Stage Manager, would go up on a line and would wait for me to prompt him on it, only to hear me blubbering like a baby from the wings.  Well, who the fuck could blame me?!  Thornton Wilder, in his genius, had crafted a third act that it was impossible for me NOT to weep through.  

“We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

I cried every goddamn time the third act rolled around.  And I didn’t cry like a lady, oh no, I cried like a bitch.  I bathed the theater in my snot and tears.  

During the last dress rehearsal, I got to sit in the house and watch the show, stem to stern.  It was a glorious May day, which is when Minnesota is at its most beautiful, and the doors of the Little Theater in New London, MN were wide open.  I don’t think I have ever witnessed a moment of more purely appreciated beauty.  Intermission approached, and the sunset, the incomprehensibly gorgeous Minnesota May sunset, was visible out of the side doors of the theater.  Act Two ended, and the formerly pale Stage Manager ended his monologue with a singular improvised moment:  “That’s the end of this part of the play.  Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em!”  I bet Wilder wished he would have thought of that.

I remember thinking how right and good it was to see this group of extraordinary people leave their high school in such a fashion.  We never know it at the time, but moments like these are seminal.  These are the times where our deepest love is born, fermented.

I write this all because I want to focus on Bill, in particular.  True to form, my crush on him was massive and hopeless and futile and designed to make me look like an idiot.  I coveted his class ring.  I wanted to twine embroidery floss around it and wear it on my hand, showing that I was the girlfriend of someone so smart, so elite, so magnetic, so a part of everything wonderful and hopeful at that school as he was.  I remember stringing together thirty or so soda can tabs (they symbolized something nascently romantic in our high school world, though I can’t pretend to know what as I had yet to be even KISSED at age 14) on a length of wire and giving them to him,   only to have him look at them in bewilderment and say “What, are these supposed to represent heads?”  Though he did not reciprocate my ardor, unlike many of his friends that I had also seriously crushed on, he seemed pleasantly flattered by it.

Bill played Simon Stimson in “Our Town”; the choir master who is constantly drunk throughout the play, when he is not actually dead.  Simon Stimson, who cuts off the choir during their practice to shout “What do you think you are…Methodists?!”  At the end of the play, this character, this wretchedly lonely man, says that life was nothing but ignorance and blindness.  How antithetical that seems to whom I understood Bill to be.  

Bill died last week of cancer at age 34.  When I found out, Erik, the boy I never once had a crush on, said that he thought Bill’s wife would appreciate it if I shared any memories I had with her for his son to enjoy when he’s old enough to hear more about his father.  What a task; to have to put into words your experience of another human being’s life.

So, to Bill’s son, whom I’ve never met, I’d like to say this…  Bill was never an empire builder, never a leader of nations and men, but he was a greatly good man.  Most often times the empire builders are not good people, though, so Bill was leagues ahead of them in that realm.  His sarcastic humor and his absolute loyalty to his friends made it nearly impossible for him to be other than a good person.  I sat next to him in Knowledge Bowl, I was part of his team in Academic Decathalon, I painted and powdered his face for the school play, but above all, I admired him.  Deeply and truly, I admired him.  The world would be a better place if we all knew a Bill Skluzacek.  That we all know someone as true and good as him.  So to his son, I would say that the thing you should know above all else is that your dad made a mark on people who loved him and that mark is something we are privileged to carry.  He was a good guy.  Yeah.  A real good guy.

 
--Amy Roeder is an improvisor, actor and producer based out of Chicago. She loves to hear other people's stories.