Abraham Lincoln School - Part Two, The Kid's Summer Talent Show

The escapades of Hank Johnson in Hell on Earth, a love story, begin for the most part with him going off to college because that is where he made most of the mistakes affecting his sentence. Before that, he was a pretty average kid doing pretty run-of-the-mill stuff. Earlier, in Abraham Lincoln Playground – Part One, I wrote about our activities when we weren’t being supervised. In Part Two, I take a look at some of the more structured activities.
The Abraham Lincoln summer school program consisted mostly of craft activities that involved making and painting plaster of Paris plaques.
We did the fruits—apples and pears, the presidents—Washington and Lincoln, and the historic events—the Last Supper. We did these and then we would do them again. And when we weren’t doing those we did ashtrays, which you could never have too many of back in the days when both parents smoked from dawn to dusk without ever giving a moments thought to cancer or the dangers of secondary smoke.

I’m sure we did other activities but none come to mind. What does come to mind is the way each summer’s summer school program ended. It was the great, open-to-all-comers, free for all, Abraham Lincoln Summer School Program Kid’s Talent Show. A kid’s talent show in the 50’s meant you’d be lucky to find a parent in the building.

There were three categories—song, dance and other—and musical accompaniment was probably limited to a piano.

Generally I didn’t enter the talent show, preferring instead to sit in the audience and toss wisecracks at those brave enough to perform, but one year was different.


I hadn’t even planned on competing in the talent show. Did I mention that this was a competition? I didn’t dance or sing but as the summer progressed there was a slow, steady and ever-growing grassroots campaign urging me to perform. It seems a talent I possessed was becoming the talk of the playground.

It began with me showing off to small groups, most likely while waiting for our turn on the swings, but word of my talent spread quickly and soon I was being asked—I daresay egged on by popular demand—to perform my act for one and all.

My gig was a simple one. In vaudeville I would have been billed as a contortionist but in our little world I was simply double-jointed. Looking back I would have to say that what I really was, was skinny as a rail. I could take my little finger and twist it around and plant the tip into the joint between it and my third finger, and I could take my third finger and twist it and plant it’s tip into the joint between it and my second finger, and then I could do the same with my middle finger. And when I was done I could hold my hand up for all to see what surely looked like a club from a playing card or a four-leaf clover.

But that’s not all I could do. I could bend my leg at my knee and hook my toes on the front of my hip. To demonstrate that this was no fluke I would do it with both legs. For a finale I would cross my legs in front of me and hook my feet in my lap and then hoist myself up on my knees and walk around like a midget or a pirate on two peg legs—or a midget pirate on two peg legs.

I entered the show for the reason all entertainers perform—the attention. My playmates—sophisticated little twerps, as we all were—thought being able to twist ones fingers and legs was just about the highest form of entertainment. And who was I to argue with them.

The best act would be chosen by a show of hands and the early betting had me winning quite handedly. I knew I wasn’t getting the adult vote but the good news was there wouldn’t be that many adults voting and I had the kid vote by a landside.

But there are never any sure bets in the entertainment business. You’re only as good as your last show and you’re never as good as the next hot act. As it turned out the next hot act was one I was very familiar with—and it wasn’t even a new act; at least not to me.

My cousin Carmela had been performing Spanish dances at city events for several years now and was acquiring quite a following. Her introduction would be the music emanating from off stage, followed by the sound of her clapping castanets sending a message to the audience that she would be entering any moment from the side curtain in a multi-colored, many-tiered Spanish dress, Spanish heels stamping hard into the floor.

She didn’t go to Abraham Lincoln School because she lived on the city side of Norton Street in a different school district but even in those pre-cell phone days, news traveled fast and somehow she got wind of the show just as somehow I got wind that she might be entering the show. If she did I knew it would be a tight contest.

On the day of the show she was still a question mark but that was not my concern. I had my own act to worry about. I was prepared to put everything I had into the act to create the maximum effect—maximize the grotesqueness, so to speak.

There was very little adult coordination on the day of the show. If you signed up you were in and if you were in you could pretty much do what you wanted. I do remember that my act was last. I don’t know if this was saving the best to last or if it was the few adults in attendance deciding that singing and dancing were actual talents and that twisting your legs was a novelty. It didn’t matter. I was all right with headlining.

I still did not know if my cousin was coming as the curtain went up on the first act.

One forgettable song after another was sung and there was probably some tap dancing going on but I don’t remember. And then I got the call. It was my first official public performance and I gave them everything I had. I teased the audience and I shocked them, I amazed them and I wowed them. They loved it.

Twenty years would go by before I again witnessed someone going on stage and deliberately setting out to shock the sensibilities of an audience. That would be when Charles Bukowski did a poetry reading at a Huntington Beach pub on Halloween night. Both performances pushed the limits of tastefulness to much the same degree but I would have to say I had him hands down in the limber department.

My backers/pushers/enablers were going wild. I got a rousing and well-deserved applause as I left the stage but no sooner had I left the stage than the rumors began to fly. Carmela was in the building.

Now Carmela was just a kid, herself—just a year older than me. But in child development terms we were at that stage where that added year made a big difference—a very big difference.

The music began to play and she entered the stage from the stage right curtain, stutter-stepping across the stage, driving those heels into the floor like most of us boys killed bugs in the playground to gross out the girls and then she raised her hands above her head and began banging away on those castanets as if she were tapping out a Morse Code message—and I knew what it was saying.

I haven’t watched her do her routine in almost fifty years so I don’t know if its one of those things that turns out to be not as good as you remembered—but I think it probably was that good. What I do know is that the kids and parents in the audience knew how good it was.

What I learned that day is that even a bunch of unsophisticated kids from a town named Irondequoit could recognize the difference between a real act and a freak show—not that freak shows are a bad thing but they don’t really require a lot of practice and the fact that they don’t require accompanying music says a lot. If you could say anything about my act it would be that having castanets couldn’t have helped it and not having castanets didn’t hurt it.

Carmela definitely deserved to win that talent show and I have to say the whole event was an important step in my individual development because I don’t think I ever again publicly tried to hook my legs on my hips and walk across a stage. I also realized that if I wanted to get someone’s attention I was probably going to have to actually learn to do something.