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The Racist Elephant In the Room
In the late 1970s, I didn’t live the cliché that “some of my best friends are black.” There was a point where my only friend was black. In seventh grade, my neighborhood underwent a transformation due to “white flight.” The complexion of the surrounding area and the school system changed over the summer [I’ve previously written about how that affected another family who were friends with mine–JC].
As a skinny white boy who wore glasses, I became a target for some of my more daring minority classmates. Two Black girls repeatedly blocked a doorway several days in a row, one of them keeping an eye on the teacher as the other kicked and cursed and kept me in the hallway until the bell rang. Then they sprinted to their seats and yelled to the teacher, “Jeff is late, you should punish him!”
One of those girls was also in my drama class, held in the auditorium. While we ran scenes, the instructor was big on improvisation and comedy. I’d been introduced to the Marx Brothers that year and read every book I could find about them. It was a revelation to learn that they toured and performed selected scenes, which were crafted before live audiences before being filmed.
A comedy geek, I fully embraced any setting to crack up classmates. Getting on an actual stage could have led to bigger opportunities down the road. One morning, three other students…
