When I was in kindergarten, my teacher wanted the class to dance around the room pretending to be flowers. We were to sing while twirling colorful scarves. Extremely shy, very serious, and somewhat repressed, I refused. It seemed silly, and I didn’t intend to make a spectacle of myself, not even when the teacher threatened me by saying that if I wouldn’t dance with the others (I was the only refusenik), I wouldn’t be allowed to take part in the visit to the pet snake kept by the kids in the next classroom. I was adamant, and so I ended up sitting stubbornly alone while everybody else got to play with that snake.<\/p>\n
Flash forward a decade or two, and my personality was quite different. I spontaneously hurled myself at Steve Gerber’s feet in Times Square in a kind of improvised guerilla theater, begging him, while tourists watched wide-eyed, to return to the family he’d supposedly abandoned. I’ve acted in plays, done hundreds of panels and readings, was toastmaster at a Nebula Awards banquet, and will pretty much do anything in public, as long as it is good and kind, that seems as if it would be entertaining to me or to others.<\/p>\n
How did the kid who wouldn’t dance become the adult who doesn’t worry much about what other people think?<\/p>\n
A happy accident. And a very special teacher.<\/p>\n
I attended Brooklyn’s Isaac Bildersee Junior High School\u2014Junior High School 68\u2014and one day when I was in the 8th grade, as I was eating lunch in the crowded cafeteria, a signup sheet came around for anyone who wanted to be part of the school’s drama class the following year. My friend Scott Friedman and I made a big joke of it … and then both signed our names, thinking we were being funny.<\/p>\n
And promptly forgot about it.<\/p>\n
Until the following year, when I showed up to begin the 9th grade and was distressed to discover I was now enrolled in that class. But not my friend, however, because strangely, in order for the school to make the scheduling work, only students who’d been enrolled in Spanish class made it through, and my friend was taking French.<\/p>\n
I was horrified. Here I was, the kind of person who did not want to be noticed, who would never do anything to deliberately bring attention to himself, and I was suddenly trapped in a class where the whole point seemed to be, “Hey, look at me!” But the very weakness that made it seem so horrible to me is the same one that kept me there. I wasn’t the sort to make waves. I did what was expected of me.<\/p>\n
The earliest memory I have from the first of two terms is of being on stage alone while the entire drama class looked at me and I had to pretend to be a chicken hatching from an egg. I hated every moment of it. And yet, without it, I would have grown up to be invisible. I was the kind of person who would probably have ended up like John C. Reilly’s character in Chicago<\/em>, who sang “Mister Cellophane”\u2014”You can look right through me, walk right by me, and never know I’m there.”<\/p>\n