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what time it ran. We would walk in midway through a film, watch to the end, and then sit through the next showing until the movie got to the point at which we’d arrived.
    This time was different. My dad and I saw Mary Poppins in order, from the splendorous overture to the final credits. We’d found a common passion—no real interaction, but a bond all the same. This time I was thrilled to “go be with my father” and sit silently to watch something in the dark. I begged to see the movie again and he said yes and we remained in our seats for a second full showing. It is the only time I can remember from my early childhood that my father and I shared something alone, together: a recollection so precious that I have sometimes wondered if I made it up.
    But my mother tells me that upon arriving home early that evening, I sang the entire score, reenacting the story of how Jane and Michael Banks didn’t see much of their father and then Mary Poppins came and they visited wonderful places and the daddy smiled and everybody flew kites together.
    A year later, when The Sound of Music came out, my family watched it from the bed of our red-chipped Ford pickup truck at a drive-in, complete with lawn chairs, blankets, and our own popcorn. The actual sound of music tinnily eked out of a wired metal speaker, no better than a transistor radio, but I was just as taken with this movie—same theme, different characters. However, a few days later it went a little sour when my father caught me in the garage with my mother’s skirt on my head as a makeshift nun’s habit, singing “I Have Confidence.”
    Having a high school band director for a father, however, had its advantages. I was only two when he plunked me in front of a microphone at a football game and I sang an iron-lunged, on-pitch “Star-Spangled Banner” to the cheers of the stadium. In the next years, it was common and convenient for the teachers’ own small children to participate in coronations for homecoming queen or basketball queen or wrestling queen or band queen or debate queen. We’d be dressed up in little suits with hook-and-bar bow ties, or crinoline stuffed dresses with shiny patent leather shoes, and were pushed onto the field or court or stage carrying velvet tasseled pillows with tiaras tied on. Or throwing rose petals before the feet of wrestling royalty.
    I’d pomped and circumstanced several times, but I hit the jackpot at age five, when I got to play little Jerome de Beque, one of the two mixed-raced Polynesian bastard children, in the Charles Page High School production of South Pacific. I wore a flowered loincloth, full body paint (Max Factor Egyptian Tan No. 5), and eye makeup that looked more like Agnes Moorehead in Bewitched than anyone remotely Polynesian.
    On opening night, I made my entrance from up left in all my Polynesian Bastard Child Glory, hand in hand with Dee Dee Shields, who played my sister, ready to slay them with the song “Dites Moi”—in real French.
    Unbeknownst to me, in the prior scene, one of the actors had dropped a drinking glass, which had shattered all over down center. As we began the song, Dee Dee and I walked, barefooted, toward the audience and after only one verse, I stepped onto a shard of broken glass, which drove straight up into the arch of my foot. I felt the hot bite of penetration and looked down to see a pool of blood spreading around my feet on the mottled wooden floor. I gasped and, for a split second, fell behind on the phrase of the song. A voice from within spoke loud and clear—some five-year-old-version of Suck it up, Harris, you’re in show business! I lifted my chin as Dee Dee glanced down to identify the wet stuff seeping between her toes. She screamed. I squeezed her hand like a vise, a warning, then smiled at the audience—row after row of silhouetted heads and shoulders in the hazy streak of the spotlight—and finished