Category: Stories

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 4: Performing, Professing, Posterity

The last of four parts

[See Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here]

Broom Street Theatre reconnects with the University. Author again in the back row of photo.

Soon after our return to Madison, we began a series of performances there, along with a few around the state. In Madison we played three shows a weekend for three weeks in October, all of them in the large hall at the Eagles Club.  We also did a live, in-studio two-hour radio interview and demonstration for the Madison affiliate of NPR.  I thought the radio show was going well until the host asked which one of us had never acted before.  He knew damn well, and I hesitated to answer, instead preferring to avoid the subject.  My castmates interrupted the brief silence by whispering loudly and in unison, “Peter.”  I don’t recall the host’s follow-up questions or my answers.

But I did pass that doctoral qualifying exam despite all.

Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 4: Performing, Professing, Posterity”

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 3: Road Trip!

A Series in Four Parts

[See Part 1 here, Part 2 here]

We looked pretty much like this.

We left Madison August 28, 1976, nine people in a white van pulling a trailer with our props, costumes, clothing and camping gear.  We would average almost 500 miles a day over four days, and camp in tents three nights along the way at such locations as Billings, MT, and Coeur d’Alene, ID.  Our technical director, John Miller, did most of the driving.  In the rows of seats sat Joel and six of the actors: Kelly Henderson, Max(ine) Fleckner, Melanie Sax, Frank Furillo, Gary Aylesworth, and Adrienne Rabinowitz.  I resided mostly on the platform behind the seats, at the very back of the van.

I hadn’t been consigned to that space.  I had asked for it. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 3: Road Trip!”

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 2: Making a Play

A Series in Four Parts

[See Part 1 here]

Joel Gersmann addressing the audience before a show, and soliciting contributions to Broom Street Theater

In addition to our cast-in-waiting for a play to do, we had one of American experimental theater’s magicians.  Of course I had no sense of this as we gathered for those first meetings.  Truth be told, I knew very little about theater at all, let alone this new experimental form that had bloomed around the country as part of the cultural and political revolutions of the 1960s that had shaken many of our institutions, from art to politics to religion.  But given that we needed a finished play in a little over two months, I thought that we were dithering in those first meetings. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 2: Making a Play”

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 1: With Both Feet

In celebration of the passion of our younger family members who are currently pursuing their love of theater in venues ranging from high school and summer shows, through national tours, to Broadway: Ezra, Chloe, Lizzie, Allison, and Julie. And in fond memory of Joel.

The first of four parts.

Broom Street Theatre bought and converted an old radiator repair shop on Madison’s Williamson Street in 1977, where it has operated since.

One sun-filled day in June 1976, near the beach and sailboats of beautiful Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, I suggested to a friend that we walk over to watch auditions scheduled that day for the city’s prominent experimental theater group, Broom Street Theatre.  I had never seen one of its plays, but I had read and heard that it was a gonzo outfit producing plays ranging from wild adaptations of classical scripts to outrageous original satires of the human condition.  I was not aiming to audition myself.  Instead, I simply wanted an inside look at this operation during its audition process.  At age 26, I had just completed my third year of doctoral studies in sociology at the University and, after having colored for so long between the lines, I was hoping to have a look at some measure of creativity, even if only briefly. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 1: With Both Feet”

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How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part IV: Wonder

Until recent years I had never thought much about spirituality, let alone my own, whatever that might be.  Instead, I have spent more time thinking about organized religion, and about my flight from it that evolved over my early decades.  As I have described that journey in the earlier essays in this series, from my teen years onward I increasingly experienced the Catholicism that I had been taught to be a source of personal unhappiness rather than liberation from it.  This experience certainly did not seem in line with the Resurrection story.

But what would fill the space in my life created by my abandonment of the faith of my youth?  That I never thought to even consider this question is itself worth considering.  My exit from religious practice and my growing agnosticism could have left me alone in the existential sense.  What to believe in if not my Church and its creed?   What to think if the Church shamed members for sexual orientations and identities, condemned them for marrying outside of the faith, and forced females into second class status?  If the religious guidance that had been drilled into me since age five was no longer meaningful to me, what was to direct and even comfort me on life’s infirm road ahead?  Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part IV: Wonder”

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How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part III: Exit

The priest and I sat for an hour in his well-appointed office of the Catholic Chaplain at Yale University.  It was the Spring of 1981.  I was an assistant professor of sociology at Yale, and I was preparing to get married in August of that year.  I had asked for our meeting to see whether it would be possible for him to be the co-celebrant at the wedding.

Kathy and me at her Yale doctoral graduation, Spring 1980

I went into the meeting visualizing any number of barriers to his participation.  But I was doing due diligence on the possibility because I knew it would please my mother, a devoted Catholic.

The problems were several.  My fiancée was Jewish, as would be our co-celebrant.  I told the priest that I was no longer a practicing Catholic, and that I could not commit to bringing up any future children in the Catholic faith.  I kept waiting for him to draw the line against his participation at any one of these conditions, but he did not.  To my surprise, he kept indicating that he could work with them.  I was pleased because I knew my mother would be.

As I stood up, something off-script entered my mind, and, thinking it really irrelevant, I nonetheless thought I should double check.  Just in case.  I said, “Oh, Father, there’s one more thing–it’s probably unrelated.  My fiancée was married earlier and is now divorced.”  He was halfway out of his chair when my comment caused him to slump back into it.  “That’s a problem.” Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part III: Exit”

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How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part II: Discovery

The first preadolescent thought that I had about my received Catholic faith’s relationship to the outside world was this:  Gee, my friends–Jeff, David, Don, Mark, Tim–are all going to hell when they die.

My family was the only Catholic family in my wooded country neighborhood among the corn fields and pastures outside of town.  I had learned that all of the several other families there were Protestant.  According to what I was being taught in my religion classes at St. Margaret Mary elementary school, since my friends had not been saved by Catholic baptism as babies, they were all condemned to an eternal afterlife of hellfire.  I was pretty sure that they did not know this.  Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part II: Discovery”

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How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit: Part I

I was about as perfect a little Catholic boy as one could find anywhere.  I can say that now, in retrospect, although I had no awareness of this at the time.  I prayed fervently, took Communion on Sundays, and gave my coins to the Missions (in exchange for time off in Purgatory, I must confess).

In fifth grade I learned the Latin Mass by rote and became an altar boy.  Apparently even a star altar boy.  I say so because in that first year in this elite young male crew I was selected to be one of the four boys serving at the Easter Sunday Midnight Mass.  I was the only fifth grader on the altar with the older boys at one of the two most important and heavily attended masses of the year (the other being Christmas Midnight Mass).

I never felt closer to God than when serving on the altar in my altar boy garments: the black, floor-length cassock topped by the white surplice with the billowing sleeves.  They even had a distinctive smell redolent–to me at least–of the Holy.

I imagined becoming a priest, and even a pope.  The Church and its teachings had completely caught my imagination.

So much so that soon I experienced losing my mind.  Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit: Part I”

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In the Eye of Concrete Crime

Note to Readers:  The events described here occurred well before I knew I would spend my working career investigating and writing about white-collar crime.  Perhaps these events played a subconscious role in my career arc.  Personal names in this story have been changed to protect privacy.  The photos are stock photos, not from my time on the job.

I will not forget my last summer job during my college years.  Ever have to work a job that appeared to carry the risk of being thrown into the Mississippi River in a pair of concrete boots?

Worker smoothing new concrete on street

I was working for the City of Minneapolis as a “paving test aide.”  Not exactly an evocative title, nor a particularly illuminating one.  Still, it is a rather precise name for the role.  With several other young college men, I was a quality control inspector for materials being used to pave the city’s streets in concrete.  It was a civil service job that paid well.  Most of my young summer colleagues were engineering students at the University of Minnesota.  I was a journalism major, but I had studied enough science in college to pass the civil service examination in chemistry that was required for the job.

It was my third summer in the job at the City’s Paving Test Laboratory.  The first two summers I worked exclusively in the Lab, putting sample concrete cylinders from our various street construction sites under pressure to see how much they could take before they would crack (to ensure the concrete being poured at the jobs met strength standards), and testing samples of rocks and sand from the City’s stockpiles to see that they did not contain too much moisture before being added to the cement and water to make concrete.  Too much moisture in the concrete mix weakens the concrete.  The work was quiet, routine, and relaxed.

I started again in the Lab at the outset of my third year, but about a month in I was transferred to the other wing of the role:  supervising actual construction of streets in the field.  And this is where I ran into trouble. Continue reading “In the Eye of Concrete Crime”

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Affection Harvested in Autumn

He was the scion of one of the wealthiest mercantile families in a small industrial city in the Middle West.  She was the daughter of the descendants of the Irish and German immigrants who had populated the city in the 19th century.  Both received their grammar school educations at St. Benedict Catholic School, 13 years apart.  He went East for his high school education in private schools.  She graduated from the local public high school.

He went on to Yale, where he graduated in 1924 with a degree in engineering and where he was elected to the Torch Society, which honored the 10 outstanding juniors for their achievements.  He was also an exceptional athlete, especially excelling in track and field events, while also playing the offensive end position on two undefeated Yale football teams in 1923 and 1924.  In the latter year he was named to the nation’s All-America football team and voted Yale’s best all-around athlete.

She studied at the local state college for one semester, majoring in English, before dropping out during the Great Depression to work in order to help her large family.  She had wanted to be a writer, and in fact had written a novel during grammar school.

He was handsome and gifted and a sportsman.  She was beautiful and multi-talented and a sportswoman.  He was Anton Hulman, Jr.  She was my mother-to-be, Dorothy Cleary. Continue reading “Affection Harvested in Autumn”

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