Last night Joyce and I had pizza (3 Palms!) with John and Kim Mlinek. I've known John longer than any of the others: He was among the first groups of students I taught my very first year, 1966-67, at the old Aurora Middle School; Aurora, Ohio. I was 21 years old that fall and was scared out of my mind.
Another teacher (Judy Thornton) and I split the seventh graders for what the school called "Core": American history, reading, and English. Partway through the year, though, Judy suggested we switch classes for a bit, and that's when I had John as a student.
But I also knew him another way. Very early in the year the principal called the teachers together for a meeting and told us that there was a "bus problem" at the end of the day: We needed to keep the kids a half-hour longer than we'd originally thought.
The idea came up--how about an Activity Period? There was universal approval (so I remember) of this idea, and very quickly the last half-hour of the day at the AMS became amazing. Clubs, activities (including, believe it or not, Riflery).
I got involved in the student newspaper, and I started a drama club, and one of our first activities was to begin writing a script for a spring production. We called it The Founding of Aurora; or, The Grapes of Wrath. I still have that script, and let's just say it's not exactly Shakespearean.
But we did perform it that spring. Two shows. A matinee for the student body, an evening performance for the parents and community. People seemed to like it.
John was among the stars of that show--he played the Rev. Ku Klux (see what I mean about non-Shakespearean?), leader of his ... Klan.
A few years later another teacher and I started the Aurora Youth Theater, which began as a summer program. Our idea was for kids, eventually, to do just about all of it--even the directing. We slowly evolved so that student-directing happened, and John was a mainstay of that operation. (Right now, in fact, he's organizing a 50th reunion of all who'd been involved.)
The AYT went on for a number of years, then fizzled out (don't really remember how or why).
Meanwhile, John and his great friend, the late Dave Prittie, became involved in making 8mm films, in writing plays together. They both went to Kent State, where, in one production, John was Hamlet; Dave, Laertes.*
John has stayed in touch all these years--often coming by to see us. We attended his marriage to Kim in 1999. And just a few years before he had appeared in the very last play I directed in Aurora (spring of 1996). He'd been a part of the first show I'd ever done--and the last. And now ... social media make communication even easier.
John is now getting ready for ... Medicare. (Thus the title of this post!) That's right: The first seventh graders I taught are now into Social Security and Medicare.
So that makes me ... never mind.
Anyway, last night was so much fun--remembering, laughing, cringing. He told me he's considering an offer to play Don Quixote in a Dayton production of Man of La Mancha--a part he's played before. He's done a lot of directing and acting since seventh grade. (Some years ago Joyce and I saw him as Macbeth in an outdoor production in Columbus.)
And he told me a funny story about that show. Macbeth (as I'm sure you all remember), uh, loses his head at the end of the play, and the director was looking for some appropriate sound effect. (The beheading occurs offstage.) They'd blocked the scene so John's legs were extending out onto the stage.
Anyway, they decided that hitting a watermelon with a sledgehammer was good. They apparently did not rehearse it.
And on the first night--splat! Curtain call was moments later, and John/Macbeth had to go out for his bow with watermelon juice and seeds on his costume.
Somewhere, Shakespeare was smiling ...
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*PS: Spell-check just advised me to change Laertes to lattes.
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