How I Met Jake

The very first time I stepped on stage was in 1965 when a teacher from the Lake Erie Girls’ College French Club, in Painesville, Ohio, asked a teacher at my high school if there were any boys who were proficient enough in the language to play the role of Mascarille in a production of Moliere’s Les Précieuses ridicules being mounted at the exclusive all-girls college. They required a male to play the part. I was a straight A+ student and my French teacher, Miss Hamilton, recommended me.

Lake Erie College was wall-to-wall women, around the ages of nineteen to twenty-one. I was only seventeen.

I met with the theatre director and she showed me the 500 lines I would have to memorise for the lead role. I was terrified. I didn’t think I could do it, but she encouraged me and said there would be a prompter behind the curtain to feed me lines if I stumbled. I agreed to take the risk and for the next two months faithfully went over to the college to rehearse. My co-actors secretly snuck me into their dorm rooms (strictly against the rules) where we would run over lines together.

Searching around for more information about Les Précieuses ridicules, to help me prepare my pronunciation, I found a recording in the college library and discovered a song on the LP that my character sang—which was not in the version we were performing. I memorised the song, showed it to the director, as a surprise, and she agreed to let me perform it in the play! This was the first time I had ever sung on stage. The first time I had ever sung anything. And a cappella! First time acting and singing. And in French. If they say speaking in front of an audience is scarier for most people than death by fire, I was on fire and drowning at the same time.

The play was incredibly funny—the girls held me up—and a great success, with standing ovations. I forgot dozens of lines—some I improvised my way through, others were whispered to me by the prompter. But the song was the high point of my performance. My character’s persona was like that of the pirate Jack Sparrow, only in full seventeenth-century French court regalia.

Jake Rufli, head of the college’s drama department, attended the show and afterwards came up to congratulate us. He grabbed me by my throat with both of his hands and said, “That voice!” I had never met him before.

Jake later asked me to play a French-speaking role in another major play he was directing, Eurydice by Jean Anouilh, set in a railway station in Paris in the 1930s. It still remains one of the most moving theatrical dramas I have ever experienced. You have to remember where I was coming from: small town; Italian-American family; Dean Martin on the record player; big Italian dinners on Sunday after church. This new world I had stumbled into was like a parallel dimension.
Jake and I became occasional friends and I would hang out at his place. I have no recollection what we discussed but there was something special there. We enjoyed each other’s company. Older man, younger man. Mentor, apprentice. Shelter from the storm. A little of everything.

Thirty years later, I travelled from Melbourne to visit my folks in Ohio, and did a small solo show for my family and old high school friends—and an elderly Jake Rufli was sitting in the audience. I sang a song I had written titled “Orpheo, Don’t Look Back”, one of the first song lyrics that I had had published as a stand-alone poem, and I dedicated it to him.

When I was a boy, Jake Rufli gave me Eurydice, and, as a man, three decades later, I gave him back Orpheus. Full circle.

He was one of the key influential guardian angels who saw me, before I could see myself, and who set me on my destined road.

Vale Jake.