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In 1984, on a humid spring evening, my friends and I had just finished the opening night performance of Auntie Mame at my high school in Shawnee Mission, Kansas.
Senior spring plays are pretty wonderful; college acceptances are in, tree's are in bloom, and there is a kind of frenzied rush among the soon-to-graduate teens. Can you squeeze one last romance into the dwindling high school year? I had the part of Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, Mame's suitor and an oil baron to boot. The lead role of Mame was played by Brooke Brown, now Brooke Dillman, a reasonably famous and enormously talented comedian and actor who was a regular on Blue Collar TV, showed up in Super Bad as the Home Economics Teacher, and makes me laugh so hard I can't breathe on the Wayne Brady Show. I still have a photo of Brooke kissing me on stage during the show (my first and last stage kiss) and I feel that this is as close as I have to come to the lips of true celebrity.
So, after the play, we were all heading to our cars when the Tornado sirens went off. They were the same sirens that had been in place as nuclear attack warnings since the start of the Cold War, and I had grown up hearing them often. Tornados rarely hit the Kansas City suburbs, but still the sirens were tested the first Wednesday of every month. When I was younger I often worked predictable wailings into make believe games with toy soldiers at war defending democracy and freedom.
But this was different. It wasn't 2 pm on a Wednesday. It was a oddly quiet, star-less Thursday night, the air so electric that the hairs on my arms stood upright. Nevertheless, we'd pretty much grown up with this. My parents, who met in high school in Kansas City, rarely went to the basement even when a twister had been sited.
A twister has been sited. That's what the sirens mean. They mean that a funnel cloud has been detected in something like a 25 mile radius of whever you're standing when you hear the sirens. When this happened, when the sirens sang unexpectedly, it was called a "Tornado Warning," and I spent much of growing up learning where the shelters were in synagogues, churches, sports stadiums and educational facilities. I had learned to walk with feigned boredom through the motions of the 10 zillion drills we endured every year at school. "Tornado Watches", on the other hand, meant only the a tornado was possible. Tornado Watches were as common as the ice cream truck.
But a Warning was different.
So what did we do as we walked out of the building? None of us had more than a few miles to drive home. Do we get in our cars or head back into school? The tornado drills had never covered this particular scenario. Then, our drama teacher calmly told us that he'd feel more comfortable with our coming back into the school until the radio announced the "all-clear" bulletin.
This, we realized, was an invitation, from a teacher no less, for fun and camaraderie stretching far into the schoolnight with friends that would soon part ways at graduation in just a few weeks. We trotted back into the school and went to the designated shelter - the boiler room of the the circa 1958 building . The next few hours were passed singing the entire soundtrack from Grease, playing hide and seek among various plumbing devices, and stealing away for quiet moments to giggle in pairs.
Still, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that we had our ears open. We listened and we wondered what it would be like to have the roof go flying like a kite off the top of our school. I wondered if my used 1978 mustang would be turned over and over in the parking lot like a Kleenex in the wind. In retrospect, all that nonchalant fun was an attempt to mask fear. Mother Nature could get nasty fast, and we all knew it from stories and news casts that we'd heard our whole lives. It was the innocent assumed invincibility of adolescence that was challenged that night, all of us roaming the basement of our school like it was the island in Lord of the Flies. Thank God the twister didn't come.
And now I read, daily it seems, of one and then another and still another tornado, striking down towns I grew up near and in, and my heart goes out to these towns and their citizens. I intend to help however I can.
I also should admit that I have tried to shake the giddy nostalgia I recall for that night in the boiler room at Shawnee Mission East, but I can't feel what I don't. Memories are what they are. I know, though, that I am glad, very glad, that we were not hit that night.
