(Note: This book review is part one of two installments. The second part should be online by next weekend. I’m tuning it up on my new Mac. Anything is possible:-)
"You know why they call a stage `boards,´ Tommy?" he asked. "Because of the wooden boards it’s made out of. Well, you earned every single one the boards on this stage. You belong here because of what you can do. Don’t let them take that away from you." Sammy Davis Jr. to Tom Dreesen, onstage during rehearsal at Caesar’s Palace.
On most mornings when President Obama casually strolls to his desk in the oval office of Chocolate City’s White House, he moves as a liberated person, unencumbered by imaginary burdens of race or caste, the offspring of an intercultural relationship in which his African father, not being a descendant of American chattel slavery, did not infect him with a consciousness of second-classness, and a white mother, who did not stigmatize him with mental manacles of half-castness: he is the eugenicist’s nightmare in person, that terroristic, unimaginable offspring which continues to haunt and taunt the sociocultural psychosis of the American mind.
To see it another way, Barack Obama is free in his mind to „own the boards“ (show-biz slang for having paid your dues, having mastered your craft and selling your routine convincingly by inhabiting a performance space utilizing a high-context projection of authority).
Obama was elected, in part, because he developed his public speaking skills and demonstrated that those skills were superior to those of the competition.
Fact: in order to compete on a global stage, one must master rhetorical skills to beat a competitor’s hind-parts in public. This is as true on the back seats of public school buses as it is in courtrooms, in job interviews or sometimes as an performer on stage.
Remember this Virginia: if you would succeed, you must own the boards.
Don’t believe me?
Compare and contrast two of his speeches: the first in Selma Alabama on March 4, 2007 and later, on Oct. 27, 2008 in Canton Ohio.
Did you notice how his 2007 speech was a tad bit shaky? Kinda like a neophyte black preacher giving a trial sermon to an Apollo audience? His voice is pitched way too high and he’s doing that bobble-head move like he's not sure where he is?
And in Canton? Steely eyed with vocal placement originating from the lower register, producing deeper resonance and vocal variety because he’s projecting from the diaphragm.
As any toastmaster or opera singer could tell you, he practiced.
Case closed.
And like Sidney Poiter, Harry Belafonte, Geoffrey Holder and Colin Powell before him, he moves and grooves unencumbered without veil or mask, a liberated person speaking his mind.
A question for you dear reader: how free are you in your mind today?
Do you feel free enough to say what’s on your mind?
To walk the way you wish to walk and talk the way you wish to talk? Anywhere and everywhere in the world you happen to be?
For if you do not have this consciousness, this basic human right, you are not free at all: you will continue to be enslaved by the opinions and whims of others, always looking around for somebody to approve of you and it matters not if you are black or white, rich or poor, or anything else.
35 years ago, Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen were liberated people. As the first and only black and white comedy team in the history of the Divided States, they spoke their minds in front of American audiences, black and white, rich and poor, and everyone else.
In their book, “Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White“ by Tim Reid, Tom Dreesen and Ron Rapoport (University of Chicago Press, ISBN -10: 0226709000, ISBN-13: 978-0226709000), they reveal the price they paid for owning the boards together in the late 60’s/early 70’s, a time when American media was clueless in it’s response to intercultural discourse or inter-racial comedy.
Born two American children of post-WW2 working class culture, one Italian in south Chicago suburbs, the other black in segregated Virginia, both experienced early childhoods defined by poverty culture: family dysfunction, substance abuse, youth gangs and adult-content lifestyles. In his narrative, Ron Rapoport weaves colorful stories told through the eyes of children, the excitement of street life in bars, pool halls, bowling alleys and whorehouses. In reality, both children craved family nurture and struggled to keep fear of abandonment at bay.
„We were raggedy ass poor,“ recounts Dreesen as his parents, both alcoholics, often left him and his siblings to take care of one another, to learn the meaning of hunger and steal coal from a nearby rail yard for heat during bitter winters. Reid, whose existential needs were not as severe, grew up being passed around among relatives, questioning his identity, fearing rejection in segregated Norfolk Virginia.
Ironically, both grew up separately in America living similar lives, surviving dreary existences as street youth, living by their wits, sensing early that possibility means taking risk, putting creativity to use, being careful about money, being leaders rather than joiners – all essential entrepreneurial qualities: we see Dreesen, organizing his fellow pin-boys union style, caddying at a golf course while studying his clients; Reid working at his father’s short-lived nightclub and later, as a waiter at a whites-only restaurant, making good money by playing a role and fooling an audience. Competitive by nature and craving respect, they were smart enough to use their knowledge of a hidden rule of poverty culture: one of the main values of an individual to the group is the ability to entertain.
Unknowingly, it was in early adulthood that they both began their journey as interculturalists. Dreesen, growing up around blacks, became a cultural deviant, making friends with blacks, forming deep relationships based on trust. Reid struggled through college during the civil rights movement as a student leader and was recruited as the first black graduate of a historically black college to work for DuPont in Chicago.
It was after Dreesen’s return home from a horizon-broadening hitch in the Navy, and finding his niche in marketing, that they discovered each other in Chicago through the local Jaycees chapter; they started a drug-prevention educational program for public schools which the Jaycees adopted nationwide.
They also discovered two things: that they were very funny yet clueless about how to create comedy for the stage. Reid admits, „We approached it as salesmen, as if we were selling a product. We did what salesmen do: gather information, decide who your audience is, try to give your customers what they want.“
Establishing a relationship based on mutual respect, they became interculturalists by proxy, painstakingly crafting comedy routines based on the irony of race as social construct, making little money and sometimes paying severely for their efforts. Rapoport says, “Back then, you couldn’t have a black man and a white man onstage without going through all these stages—physical violence to racial heckling to liberals being uncomfortable. It was too weird. Black comedians were beginning to make their mark then. Cosby and Pryor—they weren’t on television much then but they were starting to perform in clubs. But somehow, a black man and a white man added a new element that was very threatening.“
After being physically attacked at their fourth show, they developed a partnership based on deep trust for survival on the road and in the process, non-violent communication tools for facilitating intercultural dialogue between blacks and whites. They were clearly way ahead of their time; as Dreesen explained in a recent CNN interview, „"Not everything we did was racial…but the mere fact that one was black and one was white, it was, to [audiences], a discourse. ... When Tim and I did it in 1969 and '70, blacks were not talking to whites about what you think about this, whites were not talking to blacks about that, so Tim and I were that discourse.“
It would be this pioneering work that eventually led to paying gigs at Chicago clubs like Punchinello’s, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy franchise and Chicago’s 1969 Black Expo, in front of 10,000 people. Reid describes the euphoria they experienced after perfecting their routine and finally tasting their first success: „We were used to working in rooms with twenty people in them…You know those science fiction movies where the force of the surrounding field enters your body and you’re possessed by it? That’s the way it felt, like we were taking the energy from the stage off with us. We went home thinking we would have our own television show within a year.“
(to be continued)
Links
official site
http://www.timandtomcomedy.com/
book excerpt
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/709000.html
interviews
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/10/02/tim.and.tom/index.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94850365
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-xOCtTqjpA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQb-dV9jghc&NR=1
47 & Drexel comedy routine
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