throwingheat

There is a lot to be said for improvisation. The inspired moment, the unexpected twist, the providential accident; they’ve all made significant contributions to to human evolution generally and human careers specifically. 80-year-old Sanford, North Caroline resident Jeanne A Undy’s career in education owes much of its success and remarkable longevity to unscheduled departures from the lesson plan.

One of the more offbeat examples of this approach is the relationship that developed between Undy and a student named Leroy, early in her experience as a special education teacher. Challenged by a young man with extreme behavioral swings, and trying to restore a sense of order in the classroom for the rest of her kids, Undy one day acted on an impulse and walked Leroy out into the hallway.

She stopped in front of his locker and asked him to open it. Then she said “I think we need to put the bad Leroy in that locker until he can come back in and be good, don’t you?” Leroy gaped at her transfixed, then began to slowly nod his head as the terms of the incarceration dawned on him. “From that moment on I never had to worry about Leroy causing serious disruption in the class,” Undy remembers. “He was the lead detective on the case; if he started to act up I would get his attention and just give a glance out into the hall. He’d go out and put that bad Leroy in the locker every single time.”

If the student body that Undy has helped shape in her 38-year career as an educator were to gather together and celebrate her—or swap tales of her unique disciplinary measures—it might take a stadium to hold them all. And there isn’t a battle-tested vice principal anywhere who’d be able to keep them quiet. They would comprise a broad cross section of middle and high school-age students spread across three eastern seaboard states, kids who filled classroom after classroom with the exuberance of fresh discovery and a sense of belonging, in the capable hands of a caring veteran. “They were a challenge,” Undy recalls with a quick smile, “and I’ve always been grateful that a challenge was issued to me to meet their needs.”

One of a very select group of active North Carolina teachers over the age of 80 (an estimate provided by the NC Department of Public Instruction puts the number at two, though the identity of the other intrepid octogenarian was withheld), Undy got her start in 1951 after graduating from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. She returned to her home state of New Jersey and taught home economics at Pemberton High School, not far from where her mother taught rural children in a one-room schoolhouse during the 1920s and 30s.

One day, a school janitor approached her and paid a heartfelt compliment to the education he had received in that clapboard bungalow, with the visage of Margaret Aaronson moving adroitly from student to student, adjusting the curriculum to fit each desk in her rounds through the room. It was a vivid moment in a young teacher’s career, one that introduced her to a sense of both tradition and innovation that she recalls proudly, and with a persistent sense of wonder, almost 60 years later.

Undy left teaching to get married and start a family, sticking to the script of social convention in the post-war 1950s, which dictated that stay-at-home moms stand by their men with a vacuum cleaner in one hand and a casserole dish in the other. But by 1963 Undy’s life had been transformed by six children, a divorce, a remarriage, and two relocations ending up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Sizing up the future with her husband Harry Undy (to whom she is still married) Undy elected to return to teaching.

When the state of Maryland granted her a license, it informed her that the only local openings were for special education instructors.  Unfamiliar with this developing field, Undy tugged up her sleeves, opened a daily planner, and went to work. A lot of her early lesson plans relied on a combination of loosely expressed state standards, instinct, and good luck. “In those days,” she explains, ”the faces of special ed were so different. We got an alphabet soup of conditions we had to teach to, from behavioral and emotional problems to physical and mental handicaps, and we had to sort it out and figure the best way to move the entire class in the right direction.”

So during that pioneering era in special education Undy borrowed a page from her mother’s manual, and developed an improvised personal plan for each student in her care. In many ways that tailoring process became the core of her teaching philosophy over the years. “You have to teach to every kid in the classroom,” she emphasizes. “There’s no prize for getting the most talented kids over the finish line and leaving all the rest wandering around the course.” Each one of the hundreds and hundreds of pupils she’s encountered would likely tell a different story about ‘MizUndy’ and the ways in which she inspired them, humored them, and corrected them. But her fierce pursuit of a way in with each child, a unique route to the place where classroom communication could yield real individual progress, was the key with every one of them.

“There were so many times when I’d want to throw a kid out of the classroom,” Undy recalls, remnants of the original frustration returning to her face. “But that’s when you have to find a way to reach them. When a kid is most unappetizing and most unlikeable—when he’s acting out—that’s when he needs your attention the most. All kids like to have some structure, whether they admit it or not. And one thing that I know after all my years of teaching is that the kids who like it the most are the ones who have the least of it at home.”

In her own home, Undy worked at a completely separate job trying to provide that structure for her own children. With a dryer tumbling and the car keys still jangling on the hook from the last pickup of the day, she would talk on the long-cabled kitchen phone while stirring a pot of macaroni goulash, often thumbing through the pages of a schoolbook, or one of the novels that she read voraciously. Her own children were witnesses to the other side of life for a teacher, the prosaic, feet-on-the-ground existence that balanced the Olympian status generally assigned to those sagely individuals who would stand each day in front of the blackboard, dispensing knowledge that seemed to adhere to them by sheer mysticism.

The contrast was made vivid when Undy would make home visits to students in need of extracurricular attention. Sometimes it was to drop off a book she knew the kid was hungering to read, or to deliver materials for a project she knew the parents couldn’t afford. Other times it was simply to let the parents know that a missing student had been missing too long. For many years she delivered handmade holiday candles to students, bringing a flicker of light both literally and figuratively to households where children’s needs and wishes were not always the first ones met. This sort of mentoring, which would expand the boundaries of her classroom to remote corners of the county, became a model of professional conduct for her own children.

Her daughter Peg Flowe of Potomac, Maryland recalls that “She just did it saying ‘They’re not going to have anything if we don’t bring them this.’ What stands out was Mom’s wonderful ability to walk into a student’s home or sit across a table from them and invisibly cross the divisive lines of race, mental aptitude, and social behavior. She had the combined gifts of warmth, compassion, and sensitivity, and blended them with a firm teacher’s belief that ‘they could do it,’ no matter the task or the hardship. I will never forget how easily she crossed the line after the Cambridge riots and drove to school, a lone white woman going to teach at the Vo-Tech. (Following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, racial unrest intensified on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Undy’s school was located in the heart of Salisbury’s black district).  Not a soul bothered her. People knew she was a teacher and she was to be protected.”

Such fearless devotion to her students made a strong impression on her colleagues over the years as well. Fran Kasher, a fellow special education teacher at the Sykesville Middle School in Sykesville, Maryland, remembers that “When Jeanne began teaching at Sykesville in 1980, it only took a few weeks for me to realize that I’d found a partner who was there for all the right reasons. Yes, she wanted her students to learn the subject matter, but more importantly she wanted them to gain life skills and values that would lead to future success. Students knew she cared about them, and therefore put forth extra effort. I can’t begin to count the times she doled out lunch money or paid for a student who couldn’t afford a field trip. She lovingly gathered good used clothing for students in need, but was very discrete, making sure their needs were kept private. Jeanne did all those jobs required of teachers and did them well. But she showed by her actions that what matters most is the individual child.”

This theme is echoed by E. Lucille Chandler, a current co-faculty member at the East Lee Middle School in Sanford. “Jeanne is a motivator always going the extra step to ensure that her students are getting a quality education,” says Chandler. “She is positive and encouraging in and out of the classroom. She goes out in the community of students’ homes to make sure they have a Merry Christmas, and she is an advocate for her special needs students, always making sure that they are treated fairly at all times while at school. She knows these students love her as she loves them.”

In response to Undy’s admonition that “No teacher can be successful without the support of a good principal,” Tom Harvey-Felder, her current one at East Lee—where Undy will conclude her career on June 11, 2010 as a reading teacher—counters with “What can you say about a teacher who arrives at 6:30 in the morning to open the school? Her passion for teaching is undimmed after these many years.  Throughout her tenure she has maintained warm relationships with students, challenged each, and advanced them academically. Parents meet with her regularly and find her a friendly, helpful person to work with. Among the staff she is an encourager, and a shoulder to lean on for the younger ones—which is everyone. I have often sought her counsel.”

Throughout her career and its many venues and relationships, Undy has paid continuous tribute to the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. “Jeanne’s teaching was never static,” observes Kasher. “She always embraced new approaches and strategies to reach her students.” Engaged in conversation about the changing face of education and the way that modern teachers need to adapt, Undy returns frequently to the memory of her mother, who remains an icon in her estimation of what a teacher can provide for her students.  “You see so many changes in education,” she explains. “We sometimes get carried away thinking that we can redesign the wheel. I can say that we’re refining it, but the basics are still there. You still have to teach reading and writing, like my mother did in that one-room schoolhouse.”

When Undy turns out her classroom lights for the last time in Sanford, there will be those ready to burnish a similar image of her, as a lasting inspiration, as one of the best. “The moment when this lovely, educated, and intelligent lady will finally choose to leave the classroom will be lamented and celebrated at the same time,” says Harvey-Felder. And  Chandler adds “Jeanne keeps me focused and gives me a reason to come to work. I don’t know how I am to make it without her. I love this woman dearly…”

In the interest of full disclosure, writer John Oldach of Encino, CA admits to having been tangled in the long phone cord spanning Undy’s kitchen more than once. He is her son.

Readers are encouraged to send greetings to jeanneundy@gmail.com

We are never far away from the filmy embrace of the cinema, or the tittering laugh tracks of TV, and their suggestive power in our lives. We live, we breathe, and we Tivo for these celluloid and videotape mothers of us all. Along those lines I’d like to introduce you to a concept you may not be familiar with, but that has been flowing all around you for a long time, like gamma rays from solar storms, or teenagers heading out the front door. This concept happens to be Hollywood’s supervising paradox, and it’s a secret better kept than Rock Hudson’s Rolodex.

It goes something like this: Here in Los Angeles, the original Mecca of the entertainment universe, the capital of film, where the world is re-imagined in colorful and ingenious ways a thousand times a day, the primary goal of this prolific and artistic industry is not art, or enlightenment, or even cheap entertainment. Rather, it is the manufacture of the word “no.” That’s the product that occupies 98 percent of the daily pitching, lunching, and glad-handing that passes for business as usual in this town. This is an elegant twist of irony, this idea that the thing we crave is responsible for such a nonstop ticker tape of rejection. But it’s true, and it infiltrates everything that moves or speaks in Hollywood.

One you have become alert to the signals of denial, you’ll notice it everywhere. In L.A. there is high demand, for sure; it takes an awful lot of content to satisfy the vast marketplace. But there is a staggering excess supply of every element necessary for film, video, or stage production, from the CEO of the major studio to the skinny writer with the sure-fire script in hand to the unpaid intern backing up craft service (the sacred snack table found on film and television sets). Yet each of those stations is simply (to appropriate a classic phrase from Murray Mednick’s The Coyote Cycle) “the living tip of the long line of the dead.” In other words, for every paycheck that is issued in this town, there are at least 500 sofa cushions being flattened or unemployment cases being initiated.

“No” manifests in a multitude of ways. Probably the most common of these is ‘the stretch’—the interval between the time an aspiring phone call is made and the time it is either returned, or there is a 7.0 earthquake (that’ll stop anything, including the World Series), or one of the key figures in the aspirant’s concept moves to Nova Scotia and becomes a scripture-spouting lobster fisherman. The stretch is a cauldron of human evasion with no beginning or end, bubbling over with offstage climaxes and significant events that douse the importance of whatever is on the aspirant’s mind or in the aspirant’s contract. It is endless activity devoted to anything and everything except positive commerce. The original caller experiences the stretch as an orbit around the dark side of a distant planet, where optimism disintegrates into a long, strange silence. In that communication void the patient original caller begins to harbor dark images about his or her future while ‘round the long, smoky bend, where business flourishes as usual, the respondent merrily meets with a personal trainer, shops for a house, has plastic surgery, and goes skydiving.

Anyone acquainted with the stretch is also familiar with “the feint;” it’s an all-inclusive deal. The feint refers to the false enthusiasm with which a performance, pitch, or application is accepted by a Power What Is. It is a spring shower of feel-good pellets raining down on the hopeful petitioner, followed by an abrupt return to blank indifference and determined amnesia. The feint is the performance by which the judgers are judged, and they pride themselves on their exuberant excess—think Ari Gold when he wants to clear his office. The following phrases are typical markers for this reliable denial device:
“That really reminded me of Marty Scorsese’s early work. When his retrospective opens we’ll have to go.” (Here the arrow of friendship has been shot high in the air, off the top of a sand dune on beachfront property, on a 30-degree arc tilted toward Hawaii).
“I was moved. It took me someplace special.” (I went to see your play and sat in a lousy seat. But I fixed it by complaining. Then I left during intermission).
“I want to read it again.” (I’m going to make everyone on this floor read it, and I might call you back someday if I can find anybody who understands it).
“It’s a really lovely, heartwarming idea.” (Your idea is for suckers).
“One more draft and you’ve got a huge hit.” (I suggest you bring Preston Sturges back from the dead and have him take a crack at it).
“Wow! It’s great to see you working!” (I have absolutely nothing to say, but I say that in all sincerity).

Misdirection is another tried and true deviation from the affirmative. If you have ever been frustrated by the dense maze of a large company’s voice mail system, imagine that system spread among a thousand buildings within a radius of 30 miles from the Beverly Center, the approximate area of the Hollywood “studio zone.” Now imagine that you are attempting to have a live conversation with someone in a position to move your career up three levels with one exhale. You were only dabbling in junior varsity frustration before. By the time the system is done unbraiding your hope and tossing you around from office to office where they never heard of you—or anybody whose name you might be inclined to drop—you’re going to feel like a salmon that has swum upstream for nine months only to find that the spawning grounds have become a Bucca di Beppo. The person you need is nowhere to be found. Will never be found. Probably doesn’t even exist. This is an existential horn blat, kind of like the driving directions you get from down-Easters: “You wanna go wheah? Well, I hate ta break it to ya but you can’t get theah from heah…”

Getting the idea? Once you warm up to it, you’ll develop a sixth sense about the big NoNo. Stand on the patio of any industry hot spot and listen to the clinking, chattering buzz. People leaning tanned ears toward their tablemates, nodding profusely, eager to catch every utterance, take it home in a doggy bag and start the world anew. The laughter! The simpatico! The sweet aroma of potential profits! But watch and listen with discerning eyes and ears. That fit of giggles over in the corner was no more genuine than the rug on the head of the guy who produced it. The hugs. The handshakes. The European pecks on the cheeks. All as artificial and full of air as a squirt of Redi-Whip.

See now, that’s how it really works in Hollywood. Because, as any industry veteran will tell you, “Nobody ever got fired for saying ‘no.’” And you can fit more of that word on the bottom line.

A soft whimper coats the corner wall of a cell in the Leavenworth federal prison, seeking a way out. The dying tone of a howl of despair, there is no strength in it, no imperative sound that would last more than a moment in the outside corridor. It is cornered, subdued, and rendered practically inaudible in the dense tangle of noise that represents caged inmates, the noise as ubiquitous in this environment as the hardened materials used to build it. This is the soundtrack of budding mayhem most of the time: keys on bars, hands on railings, hands on hands, voices ricocheting off flat walls and floors like bullets. But this other small pocket of human vibrations, the lost sound curling upward but going nowhere, is a man crying.

It doesn’t belong here. It’s a white flag unfurled, a sign of weakness, of somebody giving up. Out in the open in a prison setting it signals impending sacrifice; somebody’s in trouble, somebody’s gonna pay the price. This sound of surrender has rough equivalents in the animal world. The bleating of a lamb separated from its mother and hobbling on a bad leg away from a coyote learning how to hunt. Or the lone chirp of a nestling bird, while all the others have gone silent during the passing of a hungry owl. Or the anxious panting of a reluctant dog thrown in a fighting pit to see what he’s got.

The man in the corner of that cell was Michael Vick. He could tell you a thing or two about that anxious panting.

“Hide your beagle, Vick’s an Eagle,” advised one of the hand held signs greeting the news that Michael Vick, paroled after 20 months of sentence served, had found fresh employment in Philadelphia. Bombastic, sloganeering protest was sure to follow Vick’s release from prison. The crimes were indisputably violent and inhumane, and a federal judge did order it earlier than the final date of the full sentence, which a lot of people thought was too lenient in the first place. So, modern America being the erasable board of excessively expressed opinion that it is, caustic commentary was sure to follow this particular felon’s journey out of the prison parking lot and into the future. To the extent he has curbed his desire to comment in return, he has succeeded in handling the ramped-up scrutiny of his life.

With Roger Goodell and the NFL hastening, in somber tones, to reinstate him as a fully participating player, and with the Humane Society declaring him fit for redemption—as long as he continues to make good on his promise to raise awareness about animal cruelty—Vick is in a highly workable position right about now. The Eagles joined in with their offer of $1.6 million for one year (and a team option of $5.2 million for a second), and it seems clear that, spent a little more wisely than money he has made in the past, it should create a nice cushion between Vick and bankruptcy. The only buzz kill in Vick’s return to society’s norms would be the insistence that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) made on psychological testing and an MRI of his brain to determine whether or not there was evidence of clinical psychopathy. Vick refused, and will thus have to make his way without the endorsement of that energetic organization.

He has expressed regret, and sorrow, and that is right and proper given the nature of his crimes. He’s insinuated that if he had it all to do over again, he wouldn’t make the same decisions that brought him to where he is now. Clearly, the way has been cleared for him to resume a useful life, including that part of it which isn’t measured in completions and third-down conversions. But for some of us, a couple of nagging questions remain. Is he aware that, like it or not, he is still the most public face of a twisted underground cult of men who supervise the maiming and killing of dogs for sport? And why was he crying?

Was it about the personal loss, or about the pain and suffering he inflicted? Was he bemoaning his outcaste state, the missing jewelry, the vanished lump of cash, the sudden unraveling of the world that was wired right into his expensive fingertips? Or was he confronting the enormity of his personal immorality and its effect on blameless animals, responsible owners, and impressionable kids? Feel-good endings demand the latter possibility, but we’ll never know for sure.

We can only watch and see. And yes, it will be an interesting observation. Fellows have left the world of sports before, and attempted comebacks after absences of several years. WWII and the Vietnam War provided dramatic examples of the sports hero interrupted; Ted Williams leaps quickly to mind. But never have we taken the before-and-after measure of a man from both sides of a criminal case of this nature. If Michael Vick was driven inward during the 20 months he spent in prison, and took a long, unflinching look at himself, then the tears he admitted weeping might have signified something valuable: Shame. And redemption. In that order.

What he can’t do is ever forget. And he’ll need to be very careful about how he enjoys life from here on out. There won’t be a moral statute of limitations on the things he did, no matter how many game-saving drives he may yet engineer, or how laden with incentives his future contracts may be. There will always be a roomful of kids somewhere, delighted to be in his presence, looking at him like he could easily pull the cure for cancer or the end of hunger or coupons for free Nikes out of his jacket pocket. And there will always be the parade of low-life men sneaking around with their satchels full of canine steroids, rejoicing in the foaming-jawed destruction of each other’s dogs, waiting for their role model to return.

Every Wednesday night for ten years I have transformed into a barefoot percussionist with a big rolling drum, clunking along my driveway with a black plastic timpani marked “Trash Only.” There are other guys in this far-flung orchestra, adding downbeats and rimshots to the echoing local rhythm line as each hurries to get his stuff to the curb. We do it in as few moves as possible, so that we might get back to whatever has been paused on the television before the pause turns stale.

There is also an unconscious motive for the brisk deposition of the waste created by our households out on the street. The garbage is one thing, and the detritus from our lawns, trees, and flower beds that layers the green drum is another. But in the biggest of the three city-issued containers, the enormous blue kodo chamber with a lid like a pickup truck door, the great prize resides. This one is full of cans still lightly sloshing with rinse water, jars crusted and scented with their original sauce, and the flattened husks of Girl Scout cookie boxes. It glistens like gold and adds the timbale and crash cymbal elements to the drum symphony. These are the recyclables, and it is our—well, my—perverse responsibility to make them presentable for the hard working scavengers who will come along any time now and pilfer them all.

Talk about your suburban dilemmas. We all want to do right by the environment, and as homeowners we’re searching for alternatives to the cycle of conspicuous consumption that has marked the culture for the previous century. Maybe there’s a solar collector up there on the roof, piping a little heat into the pool. Could be we’re reading by the light of 23-watt fluorescents posing as 75-watt incandescent bulbs. Some of us are conscientious enough to compost, introducing yesterday’s asparagus to next month’s tomatoes with biological courtship in mind. And more than a few fellows have figured out that the box of reusable polyester bags in the trunk of the car was put there by the woman in charge, so that the space in the pantry formerly occupied by brown paper or (gasp!) plastic bags can be used for fluorocarbon-free solvent storage.

When the city decided to get into the recycling business, we knew it was doing the right thing, and we became willing partners. In the ideal sense, the city reaches maximum efficiency if it gets the benefit of all the disposable income. A welcome thought, since it forks over more than the average Scott Boras contract to put this gargantuan fleet of bins to work. Paying our property taxes on time makes us, therefore, the micro managers at our individual collection points; hence the Wednesday drum circle.

When I first heard the telltale sounds of people removing the goods, I was bothered by it, but didn’t do anything. Who was I to take food off an immigrant’s table? When was the last time I worked such weird and thankless hours to take a kid to the dentist? The industry of this far-flung, moonlighting labor corps was a thing to behold; you wouldn’t believe that two guys and a 15-year-old mini pickup truck rattling away like the Joad-mobile could strip an entire block of its recyclables so fast, and with such precision. Last time I moved like that, something large was about to fall on me. The guilt fit like a seasoned wet suit.

After a couple of years of listening to bottles clattering on Wednesday nights after 10 p.m. I realized that I was nudging into the realm of pop neurosis. I’d hear the cacophony outside and whatever I was doing, I’d sit up straighter and cut loose with a few choice oaths about budgets and efficiency and the bastardized greening of America. Then I’d go back to what I’d been doing. End of diatribe. Better alternative stillborn.

One night I heard the deep rumble of a V-8 exhaust manifold burbling in front of the house, followed by the familiar clatter of the cans and bottles being repossessed. This inspired me to stick my head out the front door, and there I observed a pair of thirty-something guys in leather jackets tossing my bottles into some bins in the bed of a monstrous, gleaming GMC truck with dealer’s temporary tags still on it. All my previous inertia overcome, I trotted across the lawn and lit into these guys for the larceny that was letting them drive a better vehicle than me. They waved like I had just tipped them twenty dollars, climbed slowly into the cab, and laid a smoking rubber patch as they peeled out and turned the corner into the night.

The next time I heard that old familiar crashing and tinkling, I was ready, and strode out the front door like the new sheriff in Abilene, determined to send a message to any miscreants trying to upset the economic balance of our fine community. I was just getting warmed up when the shorter of the two guys pulled his head out of the blue barrel, placed his hands on its rim, and apologized. He gently lowered the lid so it wouldn’t bang shut, nodded at his partner, and turned toward the rattletrap old Datsun that was collecting the evening’s take. It was such a polished retreat I could tell in an instant that my little speech was something he was quite accustomed to hearing. They were simply cutting their loss at this site and moving on; all in a night’s work. I did some fast calculating, and arrived at the conclusion that if the carbon footprint had just been slightly enlarged at my house with the premature removal of our bottles and cans, it was bound to mushroom if these guys kept driving this oil-belching little truck all through the night. I called them back.

“Sácalo. Está bien,” I said. “I guess it’s all going someplace good.” The shorter guy returned to the blue bin and plunged his arms in deep, coming up with the easiest things to grab from its depths: two hands full of wine bottles. He raised one of those hands slightly in the air, and dipped his head in thanks. It looked like the Toasted Head label facing me there in the weak throw of my driveway light. 2008. A decent year.