October/November 1995
by William Chapin
LAST LAUGH
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All the world's a stage...sort of.
My stage career was a downhill slide all the way—right into the orchestra pit. From the very beginning, it was apparent that I'd never tread the boards with Katharine Hepburn even though we're roughly the same age, and even though we're both from New England. But I kept trying, which was plain dumb.
When I was eight, living in Bushwillie Farm in Southern Vermont, my parents gave me a magic set—a big box full of devious and delightful gadgets. I was mad for magic. I practiced for hours, in between farm chores. I got so I could make things vanish. I'd start with three shiny red balls between the fingers of my right hand and PRESTO! They'd be gone in a flash! I was convinced the next Houdini had arrived.
One Saturday morning, I put on a show. It was in our living room. I had a white sheet for a curtain, and my parents and four of their closest, most interesting friends for an audience. Sellout crowd. My older brother rolled up the curtain and the first trick went well. So did the second. The third trick went nowhere. I was supposed to pull a rope of bright, tied-together handkerchiefs out of my left sleeve. Instead, nothing came out. They were stuck, probably near the small of my back. My brother rolled down the curtain. There was perfunctory applause: the eerie sound of 12 hands clapping.
After that, my interest in magic dwindled quite a bit, but not—regrettably—my interest in the stage. It took several more appearances to cure me.
That winter at Cheney Hill School, the second of the two one-room schoolhouses I attended, my teacher decided that for Parent's Night we kids would do a dramatization of the classic story Heidi. You know. Lots of yodeling and climbing up and down the Swiss Alps. I volunteered to play Peter the Goat Boy, Heidi's friend, and by ginger I got the part... because no one else volunteered to play Peter the Goat Boy. Heidi and I were the principals, the stars; all the others, I seem to recall, were just yodelers except they didn't yodel as much as gurgle and gargle. Heidi was played brilliantly by one of the Pulling girls, dressed in a peasant costume with her hair in a pigtail. The teacher had me in overalls, wearing a grungy old farmer's hat. Both of us were barefoot, which seemed foolish if we were going to climb up and down the Swiss Alps.
