The Emperor's New Duds

      Sixth grade year was a very stressful period in the life of young Danny Wilson. In the same year, President Kennedy was assassinated, and at the end of school year, in fact the day after school had ended, his best buddy, Billy Christian drowned in a irrigation canal south of town. It was probable too, that his upcoming matriculation from the sixth grade, made Danny anxiously aware that in the following year, he would be leaving behind the safe confines of Mark Twain Elementary located in the Southside neighborhood where he grown up and traveling all the way across town to a junior high in more affluent north side of town.

     The Beatles also came in that year and washed over the North American continent, which included the small, dusty farming community of Concord, California,  like a tidal wave pregnant with meaning. For some unexplained reason, the admixture of the young, handsome president getting his head blowed off in Dallas, followed closely afterwards by the often televised insanity of hundreds of thousands of young females screaming for the mop top quartet, produced a fertile surge of creativity in America, but more importantly, for this particular story, at Mark Twain Elementary School.

        It might have just been the arrival of Miss. Elenor Franklin, the new fourth grade teacher and drama coach. It was Miss Franklin who introduced the lunchtime Chubby Checker Twist-off where  a hundred students or so gathered at the basketball courts at lunch time and would "twist again like we did last summer" knowing full well that none of us had actually twisted last summer. Then sometime in February, after the Ed Sullivan show introduced the Beatles to America, Miss Franklin unceremoniously threw out all her Chubby Checker records onto the dustheap of history and replaced them with the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand", and suddenly us lunchtime kids went from swinging our arms and hips back and forth in a relatively controlled fashion,  and started gyrating like a bunch monkeys having a seizure, while totally oblivious to the fact that nobody was actually holding anybody's hand.

       Miss Franklin in her effort to introduce a little bit of culture into the life's of the children of farmworkers who inhabited the Southside neighborhood that surrounded the school, decided to put on a play based on Hans Christian Anderson's classic fairytale The Emperor's New Clothes. If you are familiar with the story, you know that it was about a very vain Emperor obsessed with his clothing and who was swindled by a couple of conmen who pretended to weave him a suit made out of a fabric that was invisible to foolish people or persons who were unqualified for the jobs they were hired to do, naturally there was no such fabric, and gullibility of everyone around the emperor, including his subjects, help to sustain the hoax.

      Nobody knows if Miss Franklin chose that play in order to take a snide jab at the McCarthy era shenanigans, like so many of her erstwhile peers liked to do back in the day, but if she did, she would have had to write it out and rent  billboard space because the people on the Southside of Concord back in the day were too busy working for a living to put much stock in the use of ordinary allegorical interpretations much less ones used to make political points. Nobody had ever thought to ask her if those were her intentions before she packed up her classroom and moved along to another school in a bigger city where presumably she could stage a production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible without all the 'splaining.

      Danny badly wanted the role of the Emperor because it would have allowed him to walk around in the parade scene in his long john underwear, but Miss Franklin's pet Ronnie Rexroth got that role. Then he tried out for one of the two swindlers and failed again because Miss Franklin, in his opinion, had it in for him. He had to settle for the small role of the child who points out that the emperor was out there walking around in public in his underwear. During the pre-production meeting, Danny suggested that the play might actually be more successful if the emperor played the role au natural. All Danny got for his effort was a very stern look from Miss Franklin, who sat at the head of the table silently mouthing, "I'll tell your mother," some giggles from the girls, and the pleasure of seeing butt kisser Ronnie blushing. Oh yeah, and Billy falling out of his chair laughing.

      Danny had some problems with his lines which was a little strange considering he only had to say five words in the whole dang play, "He's not wearing any clothes!" It probably had more to do with stage fright and maybe a little to do with the timing, considering those words came at the climactic moment. Him and Billy also giggled a lot during rehearsals, particularly when Ronnie would walk around in his long john underwear with a slightly embarrassing protuberance; Ronnie was only eleven at the time, so it wasn't nearly as embarrassing as it might have been say he was in high school, but more like something that most people, being completely honest, would find amusing even today, sixty years later in these infinitely more sophisticated times. But Miss Franklin wasn't having any of it, and often made poor Danny wish he hadn't got involved with these dang theater people at all. 

       One day, after rehearsals, Danny and Billy went outside for a smoke and were met, at this large enamel sink where ten kids could wash their hands at once, by these two fifth grade sisters named Charlotte and Darla Mathews. Billy knew both girls very well and a conversation quickly arose about the use of the F word, yeah, that one. Danny was totally amazed and way over his head because at the point in his life the extent of his knowledge of cursing was limited to the phrase "Damn it all to hell!" that his dad would occasionally mutter when he hit his finger with the hammer, and for which his mom would quickly admonish him.

     Danny was also spending a lot of time in Church activities back then. Admittedly, he was having some problems adjusting to their views about how a person should behave in public. Sometimes, for instance, when Bertha Bohanan, his Sunday School teacher, would be droning on  and on about the fishes and the loaves for the hundredth time, he would go to the restroom, lock the door, climb out the window, run across the alley to the Food Mart and steal a couple pockets full of penny candy. Then he would surreptitiously pass the candy around to his classmates mistakenly thinking that he was kind of allegorically reenacting what Jesus was doing with the fishes. Mrs. Bohanan not only did not see things the same way, she took it upon herself to tell the whole class that Danny was more than likely going to be spending eternity in a vat of boiling oil. Danny often used the incident, and the unfairness of the penalty involved, to explain why he was so put off by organized religion and church goers in general, saying, "I don't need to be associating with people who believe in boiling kids in oil for sucking on a jawbreaker."

      Charlotte and Darla were pretty cute girls, and them explaining the many different ways that the F word could be used, made them look a little bit sexy which was another concept Danny hadn't previously given much thought. Thinking it over, he didn't feel like any of the girls in his class had much potential for sex appeal, then he stopped in mid thought and said to himself, "Well, maybe they do, but I just don't know it yet."

    Billy, on the other hand, seemed very knowledgeable about the word and comfortable in its use, reeling off whole sentences marvelous in their use of alliteration, and illustrating how to use the word as a noun, an adjective, a verb, an exclamation and even as a preposition. Danny's head was whirling, and he was soaking it all in like a sponge, nervously glancing over his shoulder, instinctively understanding that by merely listening to the exchange,  he was participating in something equally, dark, forbidden and mysterious.

    Later that same night, Danny's mother let him watch the famous scene from The Streetcar Named Desire where Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski started screaming "Stella! Stella!" in the middle of the street. It was probably not one of her better decisions, but she was only  trying to encourage his fledging interest in theater, telling him, "See that, Danny? That's how real actor's do it."

      The last run through for the play took place during school hours, and Danny had a lot of stuff on his mind, and Danny missed his cue making Miss Franklin blow her top.

          "You can't do that tonight, Danny! You only have five words, but they are the most important words of the whole play. They contain the whole meaning of life in a nutshell, people just cannot go along with the crowd just because they are afraid of looking different! It's like Prometheus bringing fire down from the mountains, stolen from the very  Gods themselves to hand down to the people below." At this point, she threw her hands up in frustration and finished her comments, "I don't know what I was thinking putting you in that role!"

      Danny, by that time,  had finally heard enough and brazenly replied, "You put me in the role because you thought I was so stupid I would screw things up if you didn't keep things simple." Then he pointed his right index finger at her face, "Well, I got news for you.You don't have to worry bout me, Miss Franklin. I ain't stupid. Remember, I'm the only one in this play who notices that Ronnie over there ain't got no stinking clothes on.  I got this." And just like that, he stormed out of the final rehearsal leaving Miss Franklin to explain herself to the other cast members and the angry glare of Billy Christian who was seriously thinking of following Danny's lead with an outburst of his own.  Danny, who lived around the corner, went home and asked his mother who was Prometheus was. She told him, but she left out the punishment part.

    Of course, that night Miss Franklin gave Danny a perfunctory apology but turned it into a teaching moment where she reminded the whole cast, but particularly Danny, about the need to project their voices and to put some fire and emotion into their performances. There was a small hallway just off to the north side of the stage in cafeteria where the play was being performed. The hall way was being used as a staging area that night, and just before Billy went out, he noticed Danny's nervousness and came and put his arm around his friend and said, "The whole school thinks that me and you are a couple of screw-ups, Danny, but tonight!" he assumed a Shakespearean pose, "Tonight we are kings!" Then after a moment, he added, "And our pee pees aren't poking out our underwear like Ronnie's. Don't worry, Danny. You got this." Danny looked at Ronnie and giggled pointed it out to Juan Ortega who giggled and started a chain reaction of giggling in the hallway.

        At the beginning of the final scene, with the lights down, Danny and the other members of the crowd took their seats in the actual audience; Danny sat in the first row closet to the aisle. Other cast members were seeded throughout the audience, to rise as the procession led by the Emperor in his state of undress passed them, and shout out their praise for his wonderful new garments, hopefully encouraging the members of the audience to join in. The parade began at the entrance to the cafeteria and proceeded down the center aisle. Danny was to wait until the last of the procession passed him by and mounted the stairs to the stage. While he waited, he looked down to the end of the row where he was seated and waved at his mom and dad at the other end.

       Finally, the parade passed him and the Emperor was just getting ready to sit down on his throne strategically located right smack dab in the center of the stage. Just before he sat, Danny rose up from his seat stepped out into the front of the the stage where a dedicated spot light found him, and yelled in his best Stanley Kowalski voice," "Wait a f#@king minute, motherf@#ker! You ain't wearing any f@#king clothes!"

      It wouldn't do any good to describe the total chaos that ensued. Someone, (me actually) had the good sense to cut the stage lights. Miss Franklin's planned remarks with which she obviously thought she was going to use to explain allegory to the assemblage, were scratched. And if you were standing near the front exit of that cafeteria that fateful night, you would probably have heard the phrase, "Well, I never, " a record number of times, along with the related question, "What the hell was that all about?" But there were some of us among that crowd that got it. Bill Christian, for example, became a doting acolyte of all things Danny Wilson until his own untimely death a few months later.

        Danny told me that he and Billy had sat out in the swing sets at Kindergarten Corner and talked for hours about what lay ahead for them that last day of sixth grade. He said Billy had asked him to go swimming at this bridge that spanned an irrigation canal a mile south of town. Danny told him he knew his mom would throw a fit and that he was trying his best to get back on her good side, so he couldn't. When Billy left, he ran and jumped, grabbed the top part of the fence and flipped over and landed on his feet like a circus acrobat. Then dropped down in a pose in the middle of the street and yelled, "Wait a f#$kin minute!" Then he laughed, and ran out of Danny's life forever.

        
          One night we were drinking beer, and I asked Danny how his mom and dad felt about what he had done, he laughed and said, "It was the strangest thing, Doug. My mom scolded me and whipped my butt that night, but I could tell that deep down inside, she was secretly proud, like she couldn't believe that I came out of her womb, and Dad? After my mom went to sleep, my dad, the Deacon of Seventh Street Baptist Church,  snuck into my room, bent down and whispered, "Danny, that was the funniest f#@king thing I ever saw." And on his way out, dressed in his wife beater and tidy-whities, he did the Stanley Kowalski, "Wait as f@#kin minute!"

        I can't speak for all the grown-up townspeople. It was a different time back time, but as far as the kids were concerned, Danny became as big as the Beatles. He was the pride of the Concord High class of 1970, and 1969 tried to claim him too, said that he was held back a year. He dropped out his senior year though and volunteered to go to Vietnam, where he served as a helicopter gunner, winning a bronze star for his actions in saving a downed copter's crew. He came back on leave once, landed in San Francisco, and was spit on and cursed at by a crowd of protesters. He immediately re-upped and was killed in action during his second tour. It's a local legend that Danny's headstone contains the only profanity permitted in the Concord Cemetery.

    There were enough people who remembered Danny fondly to encourage the city council to put up a bronze plaque above the water fountain in the cafeteria where a comprise solution resulted in the words Wait a minute being engraved under the mention of his medal for bravery. 
 
     At their 15th reunion of the class of 1970 and every reunion after, the class would stage a contest in the Mark Twain Cafeteria to see who could best act out those lines. It became a tradition until the reunion of 2020. It was the Covid year and only fifteen signed up. At the meetings, someone noted that the use of the particular word in question had lost most of the impact it once enjoyed with kids telling their parent much worse and students cussing out their teachers with much more elaborate phrases. It was agreed, that that truth would have made Danny very sad. Right before they voted to put an end to the tradition, someone suggested that instead they continue it with the original words of the play restored.

    "He's not wearing any clothes!"

​     The resolution passed unanimously.


        

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