HOLLYWOOD—Jason’s obsessive devotion to acting had caused him to neglect Suzanne and robbed her of the affection she craved. It destroyed their marriage. Now, his growing fondness for an activity he openly despised, teaching, jeopardized his special relationship with his daughter. Time was so objectified, quantified, relentlessly linear, compartmentalized and fetishsized by teaching’s rigorous demands and by a civilization that had deemed there to be two kinds of time—quality time and non-quality—Kit was getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop.
Luckily, Jason had the balm of Cupid and applause to nurse him through the heart’s treacherous phases and keep his soul kindled. Rehearsals at the ESL theater were when the clock stopped and Jason recovered his gentleness.
The rehearsals, held in the creaky upstairs classroom at San Anselmo Church, were a petri dish for humanity. There Jason awoke fully. Whereas he nodded off on the freeway, and even in front of a class he’d slip into trance mode, a kind of hypnotic state known to veteran teachers and veteran students, here he was wildly, nakedly awake, among people discovering the raw power of their voices and bodies.
Miguel Angel grew into the rough edges of the role of Abel. He stopped slouching and started to walk with nascent swagger. Jasmine was branching out into choreography, which she had studied at an academy in Mexico. Thanks to her growing English confidence, she went in for a job interview for housekeeper and was hired for a supervisory position at the Saugus Ramada Inn.
Jason and Napoleon, the kid with acne and sideburns, began to collaborate on a new song, the “Immigrant Blues”:
We got no papers, no I.D.
Still got to drive around the Valley,
and make a buck. Tough luck!
The light flashes red, we’re dead in the water,
and kids got no Father.
Neither the students nor Jason could wait for the next rehearsal and anticipated each Friday night with the gotta-pee anticipation of children the day before Christmas. The already exhilarating atmosphere was heightened by Jules Kaminsky’s discovery that Eraclito’s camera, the size of a deck of playing cards, could make videos. And he started capturing verité moments of the ESL theater, moments both embarrassing and dramatic.
“This is amazing,” a childlike gleam shone in Kaminsky’s agate eyes. “Do you know how many unions and front-office suits I would have had to deal with in the past to do what I am doing today? I’ve got a whole movie studio in my palm.”
Miguel Angel’s talent for editing on-line allowed Kaminsky to post the filming and document the show’s development for all the world to see. Mr. Leonard, for example, had an onscreen meltdown when he realized that his vision for the play “Cold Tamales” was being supplanted, finally and irrevocably, by a zany musical.
“You’re missing the whole point of the thing,” he bellowed, sending students scrambling from spit missiles. “It leads up to this great moment where the beleaguered husband cries, ‘She served me cold tamales! If I’d gotten some sleep, warm tamales and a warm shower, I’d never have knifed my wife, my stepson and the family dog.’ It’s tragedy, it’s Hamlet. The stage is littered by bodies. It’s an indictment of a sick society that privileges work over family love, money over creativity,” Mr. Leonard cried in an expletive-laden tirade. “You can’t have a bodies litter the stage in a musical.”
That video got 20,000 hits and Jules Kaminsky, after twenty years lost in the wilderness, had found an audience again. Joey Leonard got a call from his old agent… who he promptly hung up on.
Mr. Leonard was still sufficiently wounded because his vision for the play was Melba toast. The play was no longer a play. It was a musical, and musicals were for sissies. All that remained of his storyline was the angry wife who gets down on hubby for too much work, not enough hugs, meanwhile Abel is secretly going to Night School. The wife, Marta, accuses him of carrying on an adulterous affair. Abel is too embarrassed to admit that he has been studying ESL. Doesn’t even know how to write the alphabet, much less hold a pencil.
From “Cold Tamales,” the play in progress got redubbed “Night School Musical”…
