"JOINERS"
A Recollection by Stephen A. Schrum
(With names changed just in case...)
I am a fairly social person. I enjoy hosting dinner parties and barbecues, and attending the same. I enjoy the company of others in many forms, and have several very good and close friends, though they are scattered all over the United States. At the same time, as part of my Gemini/Cancer cusp traits, and probably resulting from a childhood that often had me supplying my own entertainment, without others to play with, I can also be quite content on my own, reading, playing a computer games, doing solitary hiking, or watching a movie on TV.
Perhaps because of the latter, I find it hard to understand those who need the company of others: those who seek the noisy environments of small bars where everyone knows their names, or-worse yet, by my standards-those who join groups whose sole purpose is to provide society for those who are "joiners." From two experiences visiting such social occasions I, apparently, do not fit into this category.
The first of the two experiences transpired one summer in the early 1980's. Home from my large university, I volunteered to help with the summer theatre workshop at the small local college from which I had transferred. B.R., an adjunct instructor at the college, agreed to let me design the sets and direct two of the scenes. The show, Lovers and Other Strangers, by Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna, presented tales of people in various stages of courtship and relationships: a young man bringing a pick-up home; a fiancé having last-minute second thoughts; a couple undergoing marital problems; and a young man returning to live with his parents after the break-up of his marriage.
The casting of the show requires some elaboration. In the first scene, we cast my high school friend J., the very antithesis of the pick-up artist. In another scene, my close friend M. played the young fiancée. The rest of the cast included acquaintances from past shows, but the most noteworthy was a history professor at the college in the role of the father. In real life, his son had charmed a young woman-of whom I was very much in love-away to Texas, to live in a school bus, before her graduation.
The father was himself divorced, and attended a weekly singles group. I won't mention the name of the group, since I believe it still exists (or did at the time of this writing), and still meets on the grounds of a local private school. In any case, he decided it would be a good marketing idea, given the topic of the play, to bring members of the singles group to the show. The group would provide us with a built-in audience. Then we, members of the production group, would go to the Sunday evening meeting after the show closed, to lead a discussion about the play.
In an effort not to be just a place for singles to mingle as a prelude to sex, the club operated in this manner: people would arrive, register, pay the fee, and put on their nametags. That entitled one to drink non-alcoholic punch and sit at the picnic tables in the school's dining room. After the registration period, the members split up into small discussion groups of 8 to 10 people each. Some hard-hitting topic would be introduced, with conversation to follow. The intention, I assume, was to put the proceedings on a more intellectual level. Once the discussion ended, there would be dancing, so you could get closer with the person or persons who most closely matched your opinions during the discussion.
We, the traveling players, arrived en masse, and managed to get in free, since the history prof had arranged for us to be "guests." However, we still had to wear nametags. This occurred during my rebellious period when I found nametags tantamount to being branded. I often secured them in odd places (on a rear pocket, or over my belt buckle), but tonight I went along with the convention: left side of the chest. I even refrained from using variant spellings of my name ("Stiv," being a favorite).
As we sat sipping the Hawaiian Punch, with no unnatural preservatives added, and waited for the discussion portion of the program, I glanced around to see what the singles club had to offer. I immediately made a series of empirical observations:
1) At 22, I was one of the youngest people there.
2) The attendees sat divided by gender, men on one side, the women on the other, very much like a junior high school dance.
3) In spite of it being a weekly event, the attendees didn't seem to know each other, or didn't interact very much.
Finally, the announcement came-we would now split into discussion groups. For safety, we stuck together: the director, myself, and two of our actors huddled close to the history prof. We then collected some other people, grabbed some folding chairs, and found a place away from other groups to discuss the show.
We first established that all of the other people had seen the show, or else they would have been automatically left out of the discussion. The history prof decided to begin the discussion with a general question: "So, what would you like to talk about regarding the production?"
In the awkward silence that followed, I glanced around the circle at the others. As I recall, there were more than four strangers present, but I can only remember four vividly. And there are good reasons why each of these four stood out. Each had some trait particular (or perhaps peculiar) to that person that made him or her memorable to me, even to this day, many years later. For example, there was The Silent Man, whose mustache covered his mouth, and who said absolutely nothing during the entire discussion, although at one point he nodded almost vigorously to answer a question I asked. There was The Incredibly Tall Divorced Woman, who, even sitting down, seemed to tower over us. Then there was Disco Man, with half his shirt buttons open to reveal the two gold medallions nestled in a bed of chest hair and accompanying his gold bracelet and dueling pinky rings, which he took turns rotating on his fingers while talking. Finally, there was The Woman With Blue Feet. I do not know why she had blue feet; perhaps she was an amateur winemaker, or suffered from poor circulation. She seemed not to be self-conscious about it, since she wore sandals, and so the blueness proved quite obvious to all, yet she also remained as silent as The Silent Man.
In an attempt to break the awkward silence, the history prof asked a follow-up question. "Did you prefer any of the scenes that you saw to the others?"
Apparently this struck the right chord, and the conversation began. I won't bore you (and torture my memory further) with the details, but there came a flood of comments from Disco and Tall, who found the second half of the evening extremely relevant to their own divorce experiences. They then used the scenes as a pretext to attack their ex-spouses, denigrate the opposite gender, and explain how they had grown because of the experience. (This in spite of the fact that they both sounded as if they were chained in some Dantean circle of hell, condemned to relive their divorces through eternity-and, psychologically, they probably were.)
After being regaled at length and ad nauseum by Disco's "Further Adventures in the Land of Divorce," and hearing a welcome pause, I decided to ask a question to swerve us into talking about the scenes I had directed. I asked, "What did you think about the scenes in the first half?" After a brief pause, I added, "Before the intermission," already having learned to ask the follow-up clarifying part of the question to help out the discussants.
Disco shook his head rapidly. "I couldn't relate to those scenes." Tall agreed. They were both much more interested in the second half's scenes which were more relevant to their experiences and which allowed them to touch on their divorces. They dismissed the first half scenes as being uninteresting.
Go ahead. Tell the young theatre artist, passionate about his art, that his work is meaningless to you. And if you do, you had better be prepared to cool him down with a fire extinguisher.
As my blood pressure rose, I decided to pursue this. "So you're saying that you enjoyed the scenes about the married and divorced people more because it was more familiar? I wonder if those who are single related more to the first scenes?" A moment of silence as I had my first-ever Socratic teaching moment. "Is anyone here single?" I asked. Silent and Blue each hesitantly raised a timid hand. "And did you find the first scenes more relevant?" Blue, shyly, did not respond, and looked at the green grass in front of her azure-tinted toes. Silent nodded noticeably in assent. "Well, there you go!" I declared, piercing the air with a pointed finger. I had no idea what I had just proven, but my tactic had steered us away, if only for a brief moment, from Tall's man-bashing and Disco's tales of his woeful marriage to the hellbeast.
Fortunately, someone rang the handbell that called an end to the discussion portion. We stood, folded up our chairs, and began walking back to the main building. The history prof invited us all to stay and join in the dancing. Like any well-trained theatre person, B. improvised a convincing excuse, politely declining since we were all tired after the lengthy production process. Though somewhat tempted to pursue The Woman With Blue Feet who, blonde and petite, was not unattractive, I bowed to the will of the group, and we departed.
I am sure several ears caught fire prior to the dancing as we walked to our cars and hastened our way through a post-mortem of our experience. Someone pointed out that, "They didn't want to talk about the play, all they wanted to talk about were their divorces!" We all nodded in agreement, entered our cars, and drove away.
* * *
Years would pass before I would have another brush with such society. While at OSU, working on my master's degree (which eventually would prepare me for my temporary careers, as a seasonal employee at Toys 'R' Us and at a summer arts camp), I read about MENSA. They are, according to their website, "The international society that has one-and only one-qualification for membership: a score in the top 2% of the population on a standardized intelligence test."
Having always thought of myself as possessing above-average intelligence, I investigated how one joins MENSA. Rather than taking their IQ test, one may also submit other standardized test scores. Since the GRE (Graduate Record Exam, used for grad school admission) was one of the acceptable alternatives, I copied my results report from two years before and sent it in. As it turned out, that sufficed, and I became a member of American MENSA, the High IQ Society-after remitting the proper dues, of course.
While in Columbus, I did not attend any meetings, but on returning to York, PA, I decided that perhaps my social life could use some spice. And where better than a meeting of an organization that has, as one of its stated purposes, "To provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members"? One of the newsletters I read claimed that MENSA meetings and gatherings are always quite lively, and often it is hard to get a word in edgewise with so much intellectual discussion occurring!
So one night, in a suburb of York, a MENSA member held an open gathering in his house. I drove over, and arrived at a nondescript dwelling. Ringing the doorbell, I was ushered into a medium-sized living room/dining room area, with unmatched chairs sitting around the perimeter. The table held various snacks and beverages. And I was one of the first to arrive.
Also there was a quiet woman, who at first seemed rather reticent to speak, but when the silence grew too great, she decided to share her feelings with me. "I never got along with my mother until my father died," she said. "Now we are getting along much better, and are becoming close friends." I smiled and nodded at this seeming non-sequitur. As I would hear it at least twice more as an opening comment to others during the evening, I decided it was merely her way of saying "Hello."
More people arrived, and these, like the people at the singles club a few years earlier, also did not seem to know each other. Conversation was sporadic at best, until a fiftyish woman, in a red flannel shirt and a New York Yankees ballcap, entered. She decided that she was the interlocutor, and would ask provocative questions of everyone to get the lively discussion rolling. Her first question to the group: "Who is your favorite sports team, and when did they become your favorite team and how?"
We then went around-clockwise-and provided our answers. Unfortunately, during my adult life, I have not cared about sports, thinking that the money put into professional sports could be used so much better for education and getting kids involved in athletics, rather than providing spectacles by overpaid performers to be watched passively. I kept this opinion to myself, however, and merely admitted I didn't have a favorite team. "Well, favorite sport, then?" I decided to say soccer, just to confuse those who were die-hard Baltimore Oriole fans. We moved on to the Orioles fan to my left.
I did in fact have a couple of conversations with other people that evening. Although I don't remember the details of a single one, I seem to have commented that I was interested in getting a new theatre group going. This was met with nods and assents, and some question about where the money would come from. Ah, yes, can't get involved in art until we have the finances. Finally, I decided it was late, said so, thanked my host, and drove home.
The first postscript to the story is that I did not pay the dues the next time I received a statement, and let my membership lapse. So I left the ranks of those recognized in the top 2% of intelligence. And I never looked back.
The second postscript involves a friend of mine, who joined MENSA in California. A more active group, they got together for various outings. During one such outing, at a petting zoo, one of the members read a sign that said, "Beware of llama spit." "What does that mean?" he said, staring the llama right in the face, as if challenging the dumb animal to answer. The llama replied by dousing him with a great gob of saliva. Let's not forget that intelligence must not merely be measured, but must also be used.