Little Boy Blues Read Online Free PDF Page A

made out of wood. They’re not a thing alike.”
    As my hands grew, I became more adept. By the time I was seven years old, I could manipulate my troupe well enough to put on shows at school myself. I did “Hansel and Gretel” and “Red Riding Hood,” and the minstrel performed on a toy piano I found that was just the right proportion for Bimbo to sit and play, although once he had played through a chorus or two, kicked over his piano bench (a big laugh) and then forgot to play, lifting his hand to scratch his head while the music went on without him (a bigger laugh when he did a little double take at the keyboard), there was nothing to do but go through the same gags twice, with diminishing results. My uncle paid a parishioner whohad a basement woodshop to build a stage. The stage was made of plywood and the proscenium stood six feet tall. It was too heavy for me to move alone and too big to fit into our apartment, so it stayed at my aunt and uncle’s. When I was eight, they moved to Lexington, a much smaller town twenty miles away, where Uncle Tom had a new pastorate, and the stage and most of the marionettes moved with them. That was fine with me, since I was going, too, because my mother could not find anyone to watch me after school (my father was gone again). I finished the second grade in Lexington and spent the summer with my aunt and uncle. Mother was in summer school, upgrading her teacher’s certificate, and she came on the weekends.
    There wasn’t much to do or much of anyone to do it with out there in the country except play with the marionettes or consult the magician’s catalog that I had found advertised in the back pages of a comic book and written away for. I spent hours lying on my bed staring into that wish book with its black and yellow cover that offered—or so it seemed—every magic trick ever invented, from trick card decks to elaborate stage illusions. I never ordered much and what I did order—Chinese linking rings, a set of cups and balls—I never got much good at. It was the catalog that was magic. For hours after school, I lay on my bed and consulted it like an oracle, imagining myself pulling scarves from canisters or pouring milk into a paper funnel from which the milk would later vanish. I didn’t need to actually own the equipment with which to perform these tricks, although I did pine for the milk pitcher for several months—dry months giftwise, with no Christmas or birthday coming up. The catalog was enough.
    My aunt and uncle had a new television, a color floor console—their first television of any kind, mine too. It had been aparting gift from their former church. But other than Walt Disney and Saturday-morning cartoons, there wasn’t much for kids on the two channels we got.
Captain Kangaroo
came on every morning, but even when I was small, I thought watching
Captain Kangaroo
was like volunteering for a coma.
    The rest of the time, I watched what the grown-ups watched, and with a total lack of discrimination—old movies, cooking shows, ball games, westerns, quiz shows, even the test pattern (an Indian chief in full headdress inside a bull’s-eye) if I got up before the station began broadcasting in the morning. And so one Sunday afternoon, I stumbled on
Jon Gnagy’s Learn to Draw
, aseries of fifteen-minute basic art instruction videos. Gnagy, an amiable, middle-aged man always in the same flannel shirt and sporting a Van Dyke beard—he certainly looked like what I suspected an artist looked like—taught you to draw a ball, a cube, a cone and a cylinder, and then demonstrated how to turn these shapes into a mountain range, a lighthouse or a water wheel. The best part was that you got to write off for Jon Gnagy’s Learn to Draw Outfit, which contained some basic—though to my mind very sophisticated—art supplies (charcoal, drawing pencils, a kneaded eraser), a ream of drawing paper and an instructional manual that reproduced the scripts from the television show.