Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography Read Online Free Page B

platform and make my scheduled entrance as Coroner of Munchkin City. I’m way too young to appreciate the timing of my opening line: “As coroner, I must aver, I thoroughly examined her…”
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    A few weeks earlier my mom and her new husband, Bill, had taken me to see a friend of theirs in a production of Oliver! It was a transformational experience. I watched kids my own age playing the orphans and was knocked cold. It would’ve made a great scene in a terrible Disney movie: A young boy sits in a darkened theater and is thunderstruck with a vision of his life, of his destiny, and in an instant, he discovers his passion. Some kids hear the Beatles for the first time and are set on the road to rock stardom; my trip to Hollywood began with a (probably bad) local production of Oliver!
    I was still flush with excitement, giddy, as we walked through the lobby afterward. On the wall I saw a sign-up sheet for The Wizard of Oz , and I asked my mom to sign me up. She and Bill looked at each other. “Why not?” They had no way of knowing how deeply affected I’d been, how electrified I was by the age-old connection of actors, material, and audience. The control, the power the actors seemed to possess while illuminated in the spotlight. And when they reached out to the people in the seats, they were heard, they were understood, and the alchemy of the theater experience transported all bystanders out of various pressures of their daily lives. Next time I would be up there; that was a club I wanted to belong to.
    My parents’ divorce finalized, my mother had married Bill, and my dad was around for weekends of movies, pizza, and adventures exploring the woods. Our lives seemed to be stabilizing into a new, pretty good routine. But then Bill’s job required that we move into Dayton city limits proper, out of the leafy, bucolic suburbs. Bill was a profoundly principled, decent man with a deep interest in social justice and politics. He was the guy driving the VW bug and listening to left-leaning talk radio, as far back as 1970. He believed strongly in diversity, had an inveterate suspicion of the status quo and suburbia in general. As a result, he moved us to North Dayton, then an area of tough economic circumstances populated by proud, rough, gigantic Irish families, who were always on guard for any encroachment of the African American community that surrounded them. The racial tensions were thick in my new neighborhood, and things were getting worse every year.
    It was a culture shock. Until I enrolled in Van Cleve Elementary School for the second grade, I had never met kids who had no parents at home, had never heard the term “food stamps,” or seen people beaten to a pulp on the playground for a quarter. Black or white, everyone was completely unlike anyone I had ever encountered. This exposure was all part of Bill’s design for equality and enlightenment. I might have been more interested in these ideas if I hadn’t been so busy avoiding getting my ass kicked on a daily basis.
    My newfound passion for acting wasn’t helping matters. This was Dayton, Ohio, 1972. Not Beverly Hills 1982. There was no People magazine yet. No US Weekly . No Entertainment Tonight , no MTV, no Disney Channel, no Nickelodeon or E! channel. In Hollywood there was zero premium placed on youthful actors other than one-offs like Tatum O’Neal or David Cassidy. With the exception of forerunners like The Brady Bunch , movies and television were the exclusive domain of stories about adults, acted by adults. Kid actors played the children of the stars, passing in and out of a few scenes, if they were lucky. In other words: the modern entertainment industry, in which that scenario would be forever inverted, had yet to be created.
    The notion that some kid from Ohio could become a succesful child actor was ridiculous on its face, particularly to the kids of North Dayton. It was another reason I was different, another reason I felt alone, not