“The student feeling for their Gaieties is great. The director is not directing his show; he is directing the student body’s show.” That admonition came from director William Oyler, ’53, in his report on the 1950 Gaieties, and the affection shown to Gaieties before and since has proved him right.
Here are some additional peeks behind the scenes with Ram’s Head in its centennial.
Grand Allusions
Topicality is the salvation of Gaieties, and its scourge. Few are the alumni who can imagine with appreciation the 1926 sketch “Hemlet,” in which the melancholy Dane’s story was “couched in the dialect of Milt Gross.” (Gross, an influential cartoonist and animator who popularized the phrase “banana oil,” died in 1953.) Even the “I, Hamlet” sketch from the 1953 show would have a hard time finding its audience—although plenty of alumni might remember reading Mickey Spillane.
But the allusions of modern-vintage Gaieties still pack a punch. References to the Quadfather have abounded since the 1970s, and indie hit Being John Malkovich almost inevitably led to the 2000 show Being John Hennessy. The poster for 1985’s Poltergaieties had a horror-movie plot—“If we don’t get the Stanford family back into the Mausoleum by midnight, we’ll lose Big Game . . . forever.”—with a ready-for-prime-time tagline on the playbill—“Someone built a school over their graves.” In 1996, after Tom Cruise starred in a certain blockbuster, the show name was Admission: Impossible, and during Britney Spears’s heyday, it’s said someone sang, “Admit me baby one more time.”
Some titles manage to spoof Stanford, Cal and pop culture simultaneously: Achtung Weenie (1992), The aXe Files (1995) and Dazed and Calfused (2008). And the jokes are best when even a show’s poster designer gets into the act, as with 1997’s police lineup for The Usual Gaieties.
Ready for My Cameo
The exception to the rule that Gaieties is acted by students is its fondness for University guest stars. The tradition started when Lex Passaris, ’79, and Keith Light, ’80, asked admissions dean Fred Hargadon to appear in the 1977 show. Since then University presidents and other campus notables have followed suit. In 1991, for his final Gaieties cameo, President Donald Kennedy feigned a heart attack in order to identify an imposter. When someone suggested taking him to the Cowell Health Center, he recovered instantly and declared, “Only a Weenie would be stupid enough to suggest taking a dying person to Cowell!” President Gerhard Casper danced the Macarena onstage, and that’s his head with tinted spectacles and bald pate in the poster for 1994’s Natural Born Gaieties. In 2009’s Apocalypse Cal, President John Hennessy arrived at a crucial moment, punched the Cal villain and urged the crowd to “go whip those Cal weenies and WIN BIG GAME!”
But Hargadon, who appeared in seven shows, is probably the Farm adminstration’s best-loved star. He was questioned by Lieutenant Columbo (played by Passaris). In a scene set at the campus bookstore, the dean went unrecognized while he bought a dartboard (that would help “a great deal with the decisions I have to make in my job”) until he pulled out a credit card and delivered the spiel: “American Impress, don’t get admitted to college without it.” Like TV’s mysterious Charlie, he commanded a crew of Freddie’s Angels. He came onstage one year by descending from the rafters on a swing.
In one show, Hargadon’s famous ’66 Mustang convertible (its tank nearly empty for safety’s sake) was given a parking ticket onstage. The issuer was Bruce Krempetz, the University building supervisor who oversaw endless hours of Ram's Head construction, rehearsal and performance time in MemAud. Two cameos in one.
Among the era’s Gaieties writers, Light says, “It was always, ‘What would Fred do this time?’ ” For his part, Hargadon doesn’t remember his acting career as heavy lifting. “Every time I’m reminded of Groucho Marx’s comment that 90 percent is just showing up,” he says. “All I had to do was just show up!”
The Mid-Show Encore
The 1978 Gaieties included a show-stopping number that contemporary students might have a difficult time understanding. “P.O. Box Blues” was a product of the snail-mail era, a time when long-distance phone calls were a rare, budgeted-for expense but a postage stamp cost 15 cents. The daily ritual for a homesick freshman meant biking by the post office at noon to see if anyone outside the Stanford bubble had remembered your existence by sending you a letter or—even more joy-producing—a package of comfort food. (Not only was there no email, Facebook, Skype or Twitter to facilitate constant contact; there wasn’t a cupcake store on every corner, either.)
In “P.O. Box Blues,” a variety of students checked their mailboxes with happy results before Martin Moran examined the void in his mail shot and sang about the loneliness of the long-distance freshman. Moran, ’82, yearned for “just a note from Mom, or an official notice from Congressman Pete [McCloskey, ’50, JD ’53].” It’s recalled that at one of his heart-wrenching performances, the audience demanded he do the number again before they let the show continue. The song, composed by Mark Swanson, ’81, with lyrics by him, Vicki Horwits, ’79, and Audrey Thylin, included such plaintive thoughts as:
What do I come here for?
Why do I bother anymore?
It just makes me feel sad and rejected...
To think that no one’s there,
To find that no one cares.
I get dejected.
Moran, in the words of Gaieties cast mate Dawn (Atkinson) Prestwich, ’82, who recently saw him in Wicked in Southern California, has become “a very seasoned, successful Broadway star.” His Great White Way roles include Huck Finn in Big River, wireless operator Harold Bride in Titanic and Sir Robin in Spamalot. He won a special citation Obie Award in 2004 for his autobiographical one-man play, The Tricky Part.
From the Correspondence
Archival material about Ram’s Head, patchy though it be, contains lots of anecdotes that illuminate distant eras. Take the letter, at the height of World War II, asking an alumnus who has joined the Navy if he remembers whether a certain fellow was promised $20 as a copying fee. The contemporary reader is dumbstruck both by the realization that these elaborate shows were put together without the benefit of Xerox and by the pettifogging accounting concern. The serviceman, on active duty in the Pacific Theater, typed both a formal reply to Ram’s Head and an informal one to a friend. His understated answer: The copyist might indeed be owed but that “It was quite a time ago and mcuh has happened sicne them to obscure my memory of the matter.”
A few years later in the files, there’s Ram Head’s request to buy a mimeograph machine. You can almost smell the purple ink.
In a 1952 file, there’s a handwritten letter from Ted Lassagne, who worked on music for many student shows until 1954. Lassagne, ’54, MS ’64, addresses concerns, as he applies for musical director of an upcoming show, that he might be a little over-invested in Ram’s Head work.
The story behind the letter? “I flunked out,” Lassagne says. “There was a point system: zero for a C, minus-1 for a D. I set a record with minus-21.” But he—now and in the letter he wrote at the time—says he understood what he was doing. As his letter says, “[T]he show means much more to me than three nights of sweating and applause. It’s training ‘on the job,’ which anyone will tell you is worth more than years in classrooms. . . .
“Please tell those who have fears that I have learned to live my own life. And that’s exactly what I’m doing now.”
Lassagne finished an undergraduate degree in music at San Francisco State, still hoping for a career as an arranger or composer. Then years in the Air Force and navigator training changed his focus. He returned to Stanford for his master’s in statistics and then finished his military career and had a second career as a software designer and engineer during Silicon Valley’s boom years. He has fond memories of his Ram’s Head work and of his show colleagues, some who worked in show business and others who found other callings. For all of them, Ram’s Head offered “an internship for better things.”
YOU'RE ON
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