Fairy Tale: A Gay Adventure

FAIRY TALE

A Gay Adventure

Peter Pan. Eugene Festival of Musical Theatre, 1984, Directed by Ed Ragozzino. Set Design by Jerry Williams, Hooks Ship: 1/2 scale model built by assistant designer Dean Bourland.

Photography by Cliff Cole

Jerry Richard Williams

Copyright © 2019 Jerry Richard Williams.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-7983-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7982-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019908753

Archway Publishing rev. date: 07/10/2019

This book is

dedicated to Matthew Shepard of Wyoming who was a matyr to those of us who hear a different drumer. Matthew Wayne Shepard was a gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on the night of October 6, 1998.

Thank you to Robert Wacaser, Rick Hammond, Sheila Macomber Jack Jones, Margie Harris for your help in editing, proofreading. Thank you to my talented twin sister, Judith Alkhas, for her cover portrait of me.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1:    Childhood

Chapter 2:    School Days

Chapter 3:    Carnegie Mellon University

Chapter 4:    Mt. Tom Playhouse

Chapter 5:    University of Washington

Chapter 6:    Rutgers University. 1965

Chapter 7:    Purdue University 1967-69

Chapter 8:    The Alley Theatre

Chapter 9:    Oregon

Chapter 10:    Moonlighting

Chapter 11:    Fulbright

Chapter 12:    Kabuki

Chapter 13:    Bali

Chapter 14:    Conclusion

Appendix To Fairy Tale

1. Time of Your Life

2. K-2

3. On Golden Pond

4. Hadrian VII

5. My Fair Lady, Higgins Mayfair

6. Servant of Two Masters

7. Master Harold and The Boys

8. An Evening of Rodgers and Hart

9. The Boy Friend

10. A Tribute Lili LaMont

11. Camino Real

12. Candide

13. Peter Pan

14. Fiddler On The Roof

15. Guys and Dolls

16. The Constant Wife

17. Lady’s Not for Burning

18. Westside Story

19. 1776

20. Translations

21. I Hate Hamlet

22. When You Comming Back Red Rider

23. Uncle Vanya

24. Betrayal

25. Robber Bridegroom

26. Yeomen of The Guard

27. Time and Chance

28. OZ

29. LaBoheme

30. Ever The Dragon

31. Much Ado About Nothing

32. List of Productions Designed

33. List of Productions

Dorothy Williams and her son Jerry Richard Williams 1945

FOREWORD

T HE TOOTH FAIRY LEFT A silver dime under my pillow. Mother insisted that I put the dime in my plaster piggy bank, the one I had won at the Fairyland Amusement Park in a penny toss. The penny had bounced propitiously. It would take an eternity to fill that bank. I truly doubted I had the patience to go the course. Dimes were not that frequently found in 1947. What I would need was a bit of magic.

Money doesn’t grow on trees. Those were Mother’s exact words. She would read illustrated fairy tales to us every night from the Mount Washington school library, she didn’t subscribe to magic. I lay on mother’s right side. My twin, Judy, and my sister Janis lay on her left. My Father attended night school on a G. I. Bill. This was long before television had invaded our home. While Mother didn’t believe in fairy tales she did believe in miracles from Jesus. She also enjoyed stories about Prince Charming and falling in love. So did I.

In truth, falling in love is a kind of a miracle, a kind of enchantment, i.e., magic. I think all my sisters preferred illustrated books of fairy tales. Therefore, Mother read to us from both the miracles of Jesus and of the magic in fairy tales. I thought of them all as much the same thing, except there was no mention of Prince Charming in Jesus stories. Perhaps Jesus is the ultimate Prince Charming. But this biography is not a Jesus story. So relax.

This is a kind of fairy tale about a career in the theatre as a set and costume designer while looking for Prince Charming. If you want the longer version, read on.

Karolyn Williamson and Jerry Williams in a Kindergarten pageant on the Oregon Trail, in Bristol Elementary School in Independence Missouri 1947.

CHAPTER ONE

Childhood

A FTER MY ELDEST SISTER CLEO left for college I joined my three other sisters in the second bedroom. Four of us slept in a bunk bed. I often worried about the safety of my Tooth Fairy’s precious dime in the plaster piggy bank on the cluttered, dresser top. My piggy bank sat too close to my 2 nd eldest sister’s precious blue bottle of Evening In Paris perfume. So, one morning, I emptied her blue bottle of perfume on my head as I was going out the door to school. There wasn’t that much left in it. My logic was that my sister wouldn’t need it on the dresser anymore. This would make more space for my piggy bank.

Mother didn’t know the magic words to make money grow on trees. Luckily for everyone, I had memorized all of the magic words from the stories she’d read to us as we lay next to her in her bed. I knew each magic incantation that was ever divulged in the dog-eared illustrated Fairy Tale library books.

Alakazam was my first magic word. Abracadabra was my personal favorite. I rarely used Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo or Open Sesame. I decided to remove my new Tooth Fairy’s silver dime from the piggy bank with a knife. I would plant it in a sunny spot in the backyard very near my latest excavation, a tunnel to China.

I wished for my dime to grow into a giant tree of dimes. I used every magic word I knew to assure that the dime tree would sprout. I also said a little prayer to Jesus. You see, I was precocious in hedging my bets, even at five.

To test my magic words, I would try it out on my next attempt to fly. Flying had been my passion, my heart’s desire. I ran everywhere imagining that I was aloft. If I could fly after spouting my new collection of magic words with the prayer to Jesus, then the surely the dime would sprout into a tree of dimes. I brought along my father’s black umbrella to reduce my rate of descent, should this magic spell inconceivably fail.

I wasn’t an imbecile. I had fallen out of the sky before. The Superman cape had been no help in my earlier attempt to fly. The umbrella was a stroke of genius, my pre-opened parachute. I would none-the-less float to the ground unharmed. I started the litany of magic words with my first step up, on our neighbor’s 12-foot stepladder that leaned against his decrepit, detached garage. When I reached the tar paper roof, I opened the umbrella as I said my prayer to Jesus. Holding my breath, I jumped into the abyss. This was an action I would repeat throughout my life, with various results.

The big black umbrella jerked violently upward in resistance to the heavy summer air. The pain was excruciating. I was only able to hang on to the umbrella handle by using both of my hands. My right arm was violently dislocated from my shoulder as a gust of wind lifted me instantly several hundred feet over our backyard on South Hardy Avenue. Letting loose of the umbrella was no longer an option.

I had only expected the large umbrella to cushion my fall. I never expected the sudden rush upwards. The air was sucked from my lungs by the rapid vacuum of ascent as I soared up over my neighborhood. Drifting east in the humid heat, I could see the hazy outlines of the Kansas City skyscrapers to the West. Independence Square spread out below me like the patchwork quilt on Mother’s bed. The bronze flank of Andrew Jackson’s horse reflected the afternoon sun. My fingers were bloodless as I gripped the handle. Dad’s large umbrella became a kite. My 50-pound body was its counter-weighted tail. Entering a dark cloud with bolts of heat lightning, I lost sight of the ground. My numb fingers slipped off of the umbrella’s handle. I fell head-over-heels, endlessly spiraling down into dark oblivion.

I opened my eyes in a bright, white room with white, wingless angels and a white, wingless Prince Charming. He was the most handsome Prince I’d ever imagined. He noticed my eyes watching him cleaning off my table. The room smelled of antiseptic and ether.

Hey, our Peter Pan is awake, he cooed as he stroked my flaxen bangs out of my eyes.

This angel must not have known my name. I tried to tell him that my name was Jerry, not Peter. But I could not clear my throat. He handed me a hanky tied tightly with ten new dimes. As he said. Sorry kid, we ran out of all-day suckers. This is from all of us.

Wow!, one of the magic words had worked. My right arm was encased in wet plaster.

You smashed his umbrella when you landed, the Prince Charming whispered. He will be angry with you.

Who will be angry with me? I asked, in a froggy, little boy voice.

Your father, he answered.

Which one? I asked, Earthly or Heavenly?

He pinched my cheek as he gave me a dazzling, Pepsodent smile.

I never saw him again. Perhaps I’d imagined him. This had been my second broken arm that year. All the other angels knew me by name at the hospital.

Indeed, my father was so angry he chopped up a perfectly good stepladder, which actually belonged to our neighbor. No one mentioned exactly where I’d landed. I imagined that it had to have been that ten-foot forsythia bush on Willow Street, where I’d find Nadine Louise nursing her litter of puppies some time later.

Miss Edith Grassley was a geriatric who taught our high school history classes. She used to muse about her childhood walks through the cow pasture that had become the 1915 subdivision called Maywood Meadows. Miss Grassley lived in her family farmhouse near the junction of Sterling Avenue and the Missouri Pacific Railroad. When she died, I heard that they found years of payroll checks from the Kansas City Board of Education stuffed in an old buffet. She had been a community elder teaching several generations, including our parents, the history of the United States of America, as well as her own history.

Stately farmhouses, clad in field limestone from an earlier era, were scattered throughout the development of craftsman bungalows. My parents had purchased our two bedroom bungalow for $3,000 and the cost of a new roof during the great 1930 depression. South Hardy Avenue maintained its former rural texture without curbs or sidewalks. Most of those who lived on Hardy were newly minted blue-collar workers off the farms of northern Missouri. Their agrarian work ethic now extended to steel mills, auto assembly plants, and refineries. Families, much like our own, had migrated into the urban centers during the lean years looking for work.

Each spring, when the sky turned the color of pea soup, the neighborhood population would spend a night in the safety of their basement storm cellars. They all had sellers back then. This was Tornado Alley after all. The new Ruskin Heights High School was leveled in 1957 by a spring twister in a blitz of tornados that hit eastern Kansas and western Missouri. All that was left on the entry facade of that school were the letters R.U.I.N.

Though I was born and raised on the bluff of the wide Missouri River as it rolled east towards Saint Louis, I never got very close to it. The wide Missouri was riddled with quicksand islands, whirlpools, water moccasins, and trolls. The trolls were looking for little boys who could neither swim nor spell. So, I’d better learn to swim. I held my breath and gave the Big Muddy a jaundiced eye whenever my father drove over the high, suspension bridge on our way north to Iowa. I never saw sailboats or motor boats frolicking in the Great Muddy. The opaque, oily sheen of its vast boiling surface hid monster catfish with teeth. But I don’t recall seeing any fishermen. I would hold my breath while crossing the Missouri, for fear the high bridge might collapse before we could get to the far bank. Mother held that same fear of water. She was insistent that we all have swimming lessons, starting about ten years-old. Though we knew that it was impossible to swim across the wide Missouri.

The Kansas City crime syndicate liked to dispose of its wayward members along the Missouri River banks of silt and clay. I am told by a former police executive, that the criminal element still dumps victims in the river off Cliff Drive.

The Missouri River carried the topsoil of a 100-acre farm into the Mississippi every hour, or so we were told by the Boy Scout Troop leader of Pack 29. The river also brought typhoid and diphtheria with the spring floods. But our family survived these epidemics with vaccination.

Missouri folk are a stoic lot for the most part. They know when to leave well enough alone. Our drinking water also came from wells that tapped into the aquifer far below our feet. It was pure water left over from the ice age.

The world before the days of air-conditioning was a more audible world. You could hear a raised voice from a few houses away. You knew who was ensconced in a radio episode of Henry Aldrich or who was at piano practice on Saturday morning. Everyone was up early in the summer in order to do chores before the great heat of the day. Many slept out on their porches on army cots, escaping the stored house heat. Window fans helped export the heat as well as Victrola recordings of Dinah Shore, Kate Smith, and Bing Crosby.

When my eldest sister Cleo returned from college with her roommate Bunny, she brought out her accordion. My sister Betty played on the upright piano from stacks of sheet music stored in the piano bench. Neighbors would sit out on their porches to listen to our concerts. We caught fireflies or made clover chains. Car headlights caught my ropes made of fragile white clover strung across the road. Startled drivers could not stop in time, then could not find evidence of the chain. Mica in the gravel sparkled under the street lights like stardust.

Everyone lived on their front porch on those hot summer days in the first half of the twentieth century. You knew who walked to and from the bus stop. You knew when they missed a day of work. The porch was also a place for spooning teenagers after dark, unless they had a younger brother hiding in the honeysuckle bush. I was a torment to all my older sisters. I was just curious to find out if my sisters had found their perfect Prince Charming.

Our summer evenings were also filled with the sound of katydids and the whistles of freight trains that radiated in all directions from each hub of commerce. You could not walk or drive more than a mile without passing over or under a railroad track. Trains were our howling sentries that marked the hours of the night like the ghost in Hamlet. The freight trains instilled wanderlust as you waited for sleep. They whispered of faraway places with strange sounding names: like Topeka, Taos, and Yuma. We lived in the center of a giant web of train routes that spanned our great country.

My dad came to fetch me one summer evening when I was seven. Another cast had been recently removed from my arm. Leaping over hedges can be as dangerous as flying. He and my aunt were sitting on her porch swing talking about my mother’s cancer surgery of that very day. I listened to my dad explain to my aunt in vivid detail how they had to cut mother open stem to stern in order to remove her football-sized tumor. The doctor had also removed one kidney. Dad clearly reported, Then they drained all her blood and replaced it with six quarts of plasma. Even then, it is unlikely that she will survive five years.

My aunt looked furtively in my direction.

My dad was eager to be home with me. But I had left a half package of grape Kool-Aid on Aunt Beulah’s neighbor’s porch. The Shoemakers lived less than 15 feet from her house. My mouth was always a purple maw of purple Kool-Aid stain in those days. Halfway back, across the tiled drain that ran between the two houses, I heard a soul wrenching scream; a grotesque, guttural, scream of an adult male. The sound sliced through my heart like a scalpel. My blood froze. Instinctively, I fell onto the wet, tile drain, as if under sniper fire. I lay frozen, petrified, much like a fawn, who hopes to be passed over by a predator.

My Aunt Beulah heard my muffled whimper and saw my body directly below the porch railing. Alarmed, she called out my name. The sound of her voice, so near, gave me the courage to scramble back up her porch steps and into her waiting arms. She held me next to her heart. I could feel it beating. I tried to tell them both what I had heard. But my terror had made me mute. My mouth worked, but no sound would come out of it. Dad knew my shock was genuine. He was disquieted by his inability to comfort me. Dad insisted we leave for home. Later, my Aunt questioned neighbors up and down the block. Perhaps it was a radio show or a crazy neighbor.

I would hear that paralyzing scream again. I would learn to recognize that scream as my own. I