Pomade Facade
all good things…
2003
I am wearing black Express Men dress pants with a toffee colored Express shirt and striped tie. My hair, filled with product, is shiny black and the stifling heat of the classroom threatens to show what a high school teacher dreads…pit stains on their shirt, but I’m lucky today. I’ve just finished my student teaching and have been hired as the summer drama teacher at Loyola Academy where I’ve finished my student teaching just a few weeks before. The class files in; a sassy group of high schoolers there to get their arts credit for graduation and a few actually interested in the craft of theatre. It’s a blur as I lead them into the auditorium. “Grab a stool, circle up, and open to Act I, Scene 1 of Death of a Salesman.” I have big plans to expose them to one of our great playwrights–Arthur Miller. Perhaps a hint of cockiness in my voice (knowing I can’t show my human side for at least a few days or they’ll eat me alive because I look younger than some of them). I sit on my stool and find myself falling to the floor as the legs of the stool collapse beneath the weight of my newly svelte 180 lb 6’6” body, standing tall having lost 80 lbs that year. As I hit the floor, I don’t just say “ouch.” I say, “oh shit, I fell.” And it’s over. 18 teenagers raise the scripts in front of their faces, shoulders shaking, and I scramble for my dignity on the stage (19 years later and I still haven’t located it. I’m searching.). Being a secret goofball, I can’t help but laugh. They clap.
The pomade facade is broken.
The rest of this summer was smoother than butter (according to the way I’ve chosen to remember this) because what else could top that moment of immense vulnerability? I’d have had to literally have a bathroom accident in order to top that moment. They say time makes us forget. Memories fade. But in this case, I have to disagree, and am grateful for remembering my dignity is scattered around the Northshore somewhere in that theatre…watching me.
2022
Last week I used my walker for the first time in my current teaching position. The middle school students only know me as Mr. S, the teacher in a wheelchair (not from falling off the stool, but due to my neurological condition. That would be a different story). I rolled into my classroom last Monday and had my walker waiting. A moment before my kids entered the room, I stood up to my walker in my cranberry colored Polo pants, black button down, and product filled black hair now tinged with silver, and a “few” pounds heavier. The vulnerability was different this time. I didn’t care about looking fresh or stylish or young. I just wanted to feel my feet on the ground and be able to walk up to my kids and talk to them. They entered the room and they cheered. A few of them clapped. All of them said, we thought you were short–we didn’t know you were tall. This is a chatty group and they can be rough, but they were kind with this and a bit of that dignity scattered across the stage on the Northshore found its way back to my psyche after all these years. I wasn’t scarred by my fall all those years ago, but I was humbled and I find that after all these years, I’m still falling in and out of grace with unexpected adventures and a grateful heart each day. I’m nearing a career shift, because all good things…well you know the saying. But after all these years, I’m still falling in love with moments of clumsiness, grace, laughter, and the unexpected fall because sometimes, you can rise up stronger than any breakable pomade facade–even with hair tinged by newly minted silver.
