By Dick Cummins
Dick Cummins is a frequent contributor to this blog. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is working on a memoir. He has been known to digress.
I re-read (actually listened to) Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the car. It held up wonderfully! Craft, theme, substance, comedy, tragedy and musical language—all still good. I read the book in ’65 maybe, and had seen the movie too of course. I even had my high school English students read sanitized Scholastic excerpts of the stage play—and numbingly so—in all five classes every day.
My Cuckoo’s Nest backstory involves a stint of teaching at Key West High, undertaken to avoid starvation in the ’70s after not getting rehired at Florida Keys Community College. This story involves being a faculty co-sponsor of the Ecology Club and marching with the students protesting a planned Hilton Hotel project in Key West. This caused the president a PR problem he told us (think Captain Qweeg) as he was also president of the Key West Developer’s Association. And of course when we did not try to get the student protest amended to “Save the Whales” as Qweeg demanded, I was not retained.
So that fall I caught on at Key West High when an English teacher failed to show, not an unusual occurrence given that my average class size was 44 kids, five times a day.
Imagine the fatigue of grading those weekly writing assignments I conscientiously demanded – for a while. A complicating factor was that in this southern most secondary asylum, students were grouped into sections by predicted achievement. A cephalic horsepower rating of 104 and up got students grouped as Academics; IQ’s ranging from103 to 93 became the Regulars while individuals testing 93 south were consigned a developmentally suspect heap, euphemistically labeled the Basics.
So when I found a sanitized stage play version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in a Scholastic Magazine I jumped on it. And because the film version had just won five Oscars, school administrators did not try to stop me. What they did try to do however, was get me to cancel the Junior Class Play.
My Academics had talked me into directing a script I found of an off-Broadway production of the Cuckoo’s Nest (1971). After watching a rehearsal, my principal told me that he did not appreciate the anti-authority nature of the material and if I artfully got the play canceled, I would be offered a nice raise the coming year. Try Arsenic and Old Lace he offered. This affront to academic freedom had no effect as I already had a job lined up at the U. of Montana.
So I held auditions of course, but already had most parts cast in my head due to having heard the kids read in class. The red-haired kid who got to be Randall McMurphy didn’t have to play him because he WAS Randall McMurphy. Nurse Ratched was nearly six feet tall, quiet and brilliant. But she was so mild that I had to make her carry a clipboard and every once in awhile touch it against McMurphy’s chest. This established her as the controlling authority in the asylum and from then on she was terrific.
Our Chief Bromden was a very shy lineman on the football team, six feet four and he had been in a motorcycle accident that left his face badly scared. He turned out to be a spectacular Chief Broom! In fact his mother told me at the cast party that being in the Cuckoo’s Nest was the best thing that had happened to her son since his terrible accident.
Our skinny little Billy Bibbit didn’t really stutter but he might as well have, a perfect “type cast”. In fact there was some sub-rosa drinking at the cast party and after awhile Billy and Candy disappeared. When they showed up again she was niggling his cheek and theatrically calling him ‘nummy’ as they were back in character, amusing everyone. Later, charity work done, Candy took off with a good looking linebacker and fellow Basic—in his convertible and the verities of high school social life were again aligned.
Billy told me the next Monday in class that he was sitting on his front porch at 5 am that night, happier than he had ever been in his life, when his mother came out and started. She believed he had been drinking, she said (the family was religious) or perhaps worse, and “wasn’t he ashamed?”
“Nah, nah, nah—NO I AM NOT!” he told me he said and we laughed til the tears came. (I realize this all sounds suspicious but it really happened, he told me so anyway.) Life and art.
Candy was a denizen of the Basics and got her part instantly auditioning in knee-high slut boots, a see-through blouse and mini skirt. She wore fishnet stockings too, the tops clipped to visible black garter belt snaps. And with her naturally falsetto voice, this kid could have played Candy on Broadway and gottten herself a Tony!
One of the cast member’s uncle was a retired Naval Commander who found a piece of surplus equipment at the naval base with little windows on one side. He strung blinking Christmas lights in it so our “patient control machine” twinkled ominously, stage center. Then he wired up a flash pan so when the Chief heaved up one end to break it free, it exploded with a sound effect bang, smoke pouring from the bottom.
Then our method acting Chief Broom clambered out a set window and that left the stage empty and quiet for a minute or so, no curtain, until the audience realized the play was over and the standing “O” broke out. Many friends and relatives of the cast came to all three performances.
The day after opening night I was called down to our Calvinist principal’s office and informed that if I did not get Candy to dress more conservatively, she could face suspension. That night, when I gave her the warning, she just stuck up her middle finger and put on more lipstick.
Anyway, I’ve never had another teaching experience as satisfying as this, except for summers at Lake McBride, teaching the Minnows how to swim out to the raft.
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The whole life imitating art thing amplifies Dick’s telling of this story. Have you read other examples of writing in which literary allusion enhanced your appreciation of the piece?
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