The Mime Chews Gum

I was young and it wasn’t clear to me that my mother, sister, and I lived in apartments.  And to have understood that the apartments were mostly full of college students was a leap my brain was as yet unprepared to make.  To me, the rows of four-unit, two bedroom apartments was simply where we lived.  There were probably six or seven buildings on each side of the road.  Each building has 75 yards of space between.  And the further down the road one went, the more sheltered by trees the buildings became until the road ended in a cul-de-sac beyond which was a steep hill of rocky terrain, thick woods, and a babbling creek.

Our unit was 18C.  18C Carriage House Apartments, Hunting Lodge Rd, second building on the right, second unit from the right.  The apartments were never, nor would they ever be carriage houses.  There was not a hunting lodge anywhere, not even a plaque to commemorate one that once stood.  The only marker of any sort were two natural stone obelisks between our building and the one down the street, leftover from some ice age, the same one likely that left all the stones that colonial farmers piled along the edges of their farms.

Less than a mile from the house was my school, Northwest Elementary.  Each morning, fall through spring, I walked the couple hundred yards down the hill to the bus stop at the bottom of the road.  I clasped my books under my arm, my glasses - already bent out of shape - loosely affixed to large ears.  I know this look from the pictures that my grandfather took of me one sunny spring morning.  I remember that day, crisp with the scent of morning dew on wet grass.  I remember that my dog, Heather, was allowed to come with us since grandpa would be able to bring her home.  And from the pictures, my memory of sun dappled light filtering through the not-as-yet-caterpillar-ravaged-maples is confirmed.  I am sporting a blue ‘baseball jacket,’ but not one licensed by Major League Baseball so the baseballs don’t say “Red Sox” or “Yankees,” but generically refer to cites, “Philly” and “Frisco.”

From riding the bus I knew that a lot of other kids didn’t live in apartment buildings.  The bus might stop at the top of a neighborhood entry road and beyond that point, I knew that they had their own house, and likely their own room.  I had neither, but it was then only a comparison, not a divide.  And there were several other children who lived in the apartments.  Children of graduate students from Europe; children of divorced parents, like us; and children whose parents simply didn’t make enough money to buy a house of their own.

My tenure at Northwest Elementary School is a foggy collection of images and sound bites.  It’s hard to fathom that five years - 900 school days! - now amount to a dozen memories, but then, as now, I think that I rarely was paying close attention.  Here are the highlights:

Kindergarten:  The ONLY thing I remember is that my teacher’s name was Mrs. Rosenberg who had curly blond/brown hair.
First grade:  Mrs. Rogers had some kind of handicap that required her to use a motorized chair.  She would give us rides from her classroom to the cafeteria.  She also played the ukulele and, at least as far as my recollection, she only played Frere Jacques.
Second Grade:  I think I must have been napping this entire year as I only recall the name of my teacher, Mrs. Marlin who was nice enough, had short straight brown hair, but wasn’t especially warm.
Third/Fourth Grade.  This is where things started to really come alive.  The class was a double classroom of 3rd and 4th graders co-taught by Mrs. Grant and Mrs. Dinan, who resembled two of the three original Charlie’s Angels (not Kate Jackson).  And I am pretty sure they also had their own television theme song.

I remember a girl named Catherine who brought in her cat to school.  There was the time I punched a boy named David in the glasses.  In a truly cruel moment the entire class of 40 plus kids started frantically waving their hands up and down to make fun of the way the excitable boy flung his own hands when, say, he’d built a fort just the way he wanted.  A boy named CJ who would sit on his hamburgers before he ate them because he liked them flat (which didn’t prevent me from asking to have his pickles). This was the same CJ who would urinate in the tea cups of tea set in the play area.  I remember how I figured out that if at recess I let all the many yards of string out on my kite and only began to reel it in when they called us in, I could get an extra ten minutes outside.  I remember the time playing soccer (on a field that sloped noticeably toward one goal) a ball kicked squarely into my chest knocked the wind out of me for the first time in my life. That’s an experience you don’t forget.

And in the longest and most vivid memory, Mrs. Anthony, our principal and a woman barely taller than the first graders, squirts us with water guns as we enter the gymnasium for a presentation for the entire school.  (I am pretty sure that principals are not allowed to shoot their students in school anymore, but at the time, they were just squirt guns and we couldn’t spell ‘appropriate’ anyway.)  For a liberal community the school trained us in military efficiency.  If we were practicing fire drills, we’d form a line quickly, always knowing our position and who was in front of you (Carol Riesen) and who was behind you (Mary Royal) and thus we, as a class could evacuate or indeed enter our gymnasium with marching band like precision.  As each class filed in we took our dedicated position on the floor, sitting in straight rows before the raised wooden stage.

This room was our gym, our playhouse, our musical auditorium and the venue for  award and ‘graduation’ ceremonies.  Today, however, Northwest Elementary School of Hunting Lodge Road was featuring a mime.  I had never seen a mime - or at least one that I remembered as anything other than a really quiet person.  I was struck at how he could not make a sound and still keep a gymnasium full of rambunctious kids as quiet as he.  It was the stillness of that afternoon that carves its way into my memory.  The rest of childhood was noisy so this, being so different, stands out.  The mime (why always in tights?) did the obligatory man trapped in a box and pulling a rope in an imaginary tug of war (with who and for what prize?).  And then he pretended that he was unfolding wrappers of sticks of chewing gum and one by one stuffing them into his mouth.  The more gum he put in the wider is mouth was stretched until at long last he couldn’t fit another stick.  His mouth, stuck wide open, mute, and obviously near choking.  He mimed that he was taking this ball of gum out of his mouth agape and looking for a place to store it, but there was no garbage, no container and as he spun in circles we children were spellbound by the fix he’d gotten himself into. What to do with this big wad of gum?  This was a big problem that we all identified with.  We’d want that gum later and so would the mime.  He then bolted upright as if struck with divine inspiration and made a great flamboyant show of his personal genius, placing the giant wad of gum behind his right ear.

I was thrilled to be both watching this and chewing a big wad of real gum myself.  What good fortune.  We had a kinship that few of the other kids picking their noses or wetting their pants could know.  As he’d put in another stick so had I until finally I also had a ball of gum the size of Delaware in my mouth.  The sugary juices were sucked out my gum and I was left only with malleable plastic.  And I, too, didn’t have a trash can nearby, not even a desk under which to stick it for later.  Imagine my relief when I saw that I could temporarily stash my gum behind my ear.

The main difference between mime gum and real gum must be its inherent stickiness.  It was the mid 1970s and I had the long hair that came with the times.  My hair wasn’t straight, but I imagine it to have been the general shape of Nicholas (played by the inimitable Adam Rich), the youngest boy on Eight is Enough. (I learned a lot of good lessons from that show and from one of my many television fathers, Dick Van Patten).  The gum quickly became entangled in my thick and wavy hair.  I’d like to believe it wasn’t long after that I understood, viscerally, the difference between what a mime does and what happens in real life.  I also knew I couldn’t go home with a big wad of gum in my hair.  I wasn’t very old, but I was pretty sure that I was old enough to not to have made this major blunder.

The teachers and kids were still rapt in the show and I snuck out of the gym and made my way along the long and eerily empty corridor back to my classroom.  I went directly to Mrs. Dinan’s desk, opened the drawer and took out her finest rubber handled, snub nose scissors.  I felt the hair and gum nest behind my right ear, estimated the scope of the infestation and then calmly removed most of the hair on the right side of my head, neatly dropping the clump in the trash.  Voilà! No more gum in my hair.  Feeling quite proud to have been my own problem solver I sauntered proudly and unabashedly back to the gymnasium where the show was wrapping up.  I was immediately spotted by Mrs. Dinan, but luckily she approached from my left and plunked me down between Riesen and Royal.  The show was at the end of the day and as soon as it was over we marched, Riesen, Ring, Royal, to our bus pick up spot (numbers 1 though 10) and I was home before General Hospital was even halfway through.

When my mom got home from work, it didn’t take her long to notice that there was a lot more ear exposed than when I’d left for school that morning.
“What did you do to you hair, David?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I lied.
“Are you sure, David, because it looks to me like you cut your hair,” she calmly replied.
God, she was sharp!  How could she have possibly noticed? I hadn’t thought through how I might even begin to address any questions.  From my point of view there was no gum in my hair so why would anyone say anything about it.  I hadn’t even considered being asked about it. With no story to explain, I panicked and did the only sensible thing.  I cried.  I told the saddest version of how the mean mime had made me put my gum behind my ear and that I was forced to cut my own hair.

My mom was disappointed with me, she said, not because I had cut my hair - though I should never do that again - but because I had lied to her and it was for the lie that I would be punished.  But given that it was the 70s, and Nancy Reagan hadn’t yet taught us how raise children, I was able to choose my own punishment.  The parameters were made clear to me.  I was to choose a punishment that was equal in degree to the offense I had committed.  I pondered my options until I finally settled on something that would be a genuine sacrifice for me.  That night, I would forego watching Welcome Back Kotter.  No Barbarino, Horseshack, Epstein, or Washington - to say nothing of the Kotters or Mr. Woodman.  My mother agreed that this was a fitting punishment.

It was only years later that I confessed to stowing myself in a closet with wood slat blinds and peering between them to watch the show anyway.  I mean if I could figure out how to cut gum out of my hair, how could she not know I’d engineer a way to watch my favorite TV show?