The Aqua Net Diaries (25 page)

At that moment, my mother, who had an uncanny ability to sense when I was about to make a horrible decision or endanger my life, appeared. “I found some cups in the other room,” she said, smiling tightly at both of us. “Jennifer, why don't you come help me pour?”

After refreshments, Joey and I performed our dramatic reading of
'Twas the Night Before Christmas.
The men were surprisingly attentive while we read—standing in front of them, side by side, the book open before us, alternating lines. At one point, two or three of the men started getting a little restless, whispering to each other and talking over us. We kept reading:

Joey:          “When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter …”

Jennifer:     “I arose from my bed to see what was the matter …”

The men kept talking, so we just spoke a little louder to be heard above them.

Joey:          “When, what to my wondering eyes should appear …”

Jennifer:     “But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer …”

Finally, one of the men—a great big, burly man with a head as bald and shiny as a melon and tattoos up and down both arms—stood up and shouted,
“Shut up, goddammit! I want to hear the story!”
The talking men stared at him and fell silent. We all stared at him. Joey and I didn't say a word until he waved us on. “Keep reading,” he said. “I want to hear the rest of it.” And he sat back down.

We kept reading, and for the rest of the story everyone was quiet.

We should have stopped there, of course. It would have been a perfect way to end the evening. Everyone was sleepy and settled and somewhat content. My mom and Joey and I were more than ready to leave. But Lois Potts had one more activity planned. Square dancing. I will never understand why she thought this could possibly be a good thing to do with eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old maximum security male inmates at a mental hospital, but she was very cheerful as she said, “I want everyone to join me in the Virginia Reel.”

It's hard to know who was more shocked: my mother, Joey, me, or the men, who began stomping and whistling.
You'd have thought she had introduced a stripper out of a cake or that she'd just passed around a box of
Playboy
s. I'd never seen a group of people so excited about square dancing.

“Now let's choose our partners,” she said.

“I want that one!” one of them shouted, pointing at me. My mother moved in front of me, standing between me and them.

“I'll take that one,” another yelled, pointing at my mother.

“Well, I'll have that one,” screamed the bald man, pointing right at Joey. No one wanted Lois Potts.

We paired up, standing across from our partners in two lines, most of the men forced to dance with each other, and Lois Potts explained that there would be no touching in this version of the Virginia Reel because we were leaving out the twirl. (Lois explained later that she thought it would be “overstimulating” for the inmates.) Then she lowered a needle on the record she had brought with her, unbeknownst to my mother and Joey and me, just for this purpose. Over the sounds of fiddles and banjo, we met our partners in the middle and began to promenade and do-si-do—something I had learned in gym class back in the fourth grade.

The men were very enthusiastic, especially Joey's partner, the big, bald tattooed man who had so loved
'Twas the Night Before Christmas.
He kept hollering along with the music, making up his own square dancing calls, which sounded more like the hog calling you heard at the local fair. I was looking everywhere for Andy, but he was nowhere to be seen and I wondered vaguely, as I was being jolted this way and that, if he had managed to escape. My partner seemed to be the leader of the inmates—a tall, lean black guy who looked almost exactly like Officer Bobby Hill on
Hill Street Blues,
only without the smile. My mother's partner kept trying to hold her close, even though there was supposed to be no touching.

When it came time for the twirl—when we reached that point in the dance where the twirl should have been, and we didn't twirl—my partner, the leader, stopped dancing and said, “I want to twirl.” He just stopped right in the middle of everyone, men bumping into him left and right, and stared right at Lois Potts with a look that said No One Has Ever Refused Me Anything and Lived to Tell the Tale.

She said, “I don't think we'd better.”

He said, “I want to twirl,” and he said it very, very firmly, so that you could imagine what he might have done on The Outside to get himself in here, in a facility where we were, after all, locked in behind bars.

They stood staring at each other for what seemed like twenty minutes or so, like the final showdown scene out of a western, before Lois Potts finally said, “Let's do the twirl,” as if she had thought of it all on her own. The men clapped and cheered, and Lois began the record over. I looked at my mother and Joey. Their faces were flushed. Their hair was messy. Joey's glasses were askew. I thought,
Dear Jesus, if you can hear me. You got us into this mess in the first place, if you want to be technical about it. We wouldn't even be here if it weren't for you. The least you can do is get us out of here alive.

The dance eventually ended and we gathered our things. We bundled ourselves up in our layers of coats and scarves and gloves and hats and then the guard escorted us out into the winter night. As we walked to our cars, we could still hear the sounds of the men clapping and cheering and singing “Turkey in the Straw.”

Laura Lonigro, Joey Kraemer, and Jennifer McJunkin from their
Judy on Purpose
photo shoot

Joey and I were talking on the phone last night, and we pondered on a terrible thought—all we talk about and think about now is Tom Dehner—what if he died? We would have nothing to live for, to fight for, to talk about, to dream of!

—Jennifer to Holly Ogren, AP History class

Joey and I thought up
Judy on Purpose
with Laura Lonigro on the back porch of Laura's house at the end of summer 1985. Over a bowl of macaroni, we made up our minds to write a play that would make us famous in the world outside Richmond and would also make us famous in the halls of Richmond High School. We planned to cast Tom Dehner in one of the leading roles. Laura loved him as much as Joey
and I did, and it was, we decided, the perfect way to get him, once and for all.

We met almost every day from the middle of July until school started, on the porch of Laura's house. Her parents were separated and her mother had just moved to Dayton, leaving Laura and her sister Monica alone with their dad, who was suddenly staying away from home more and more. We had the run of the house.

The three of us had very different working styles. “You couldn't put three more different people together,” Joey said to us one day that summer.

He was pacing and talking—and talking and talking without stopping for breath. Laura and I were mostly listening. Laura was smoking cigarette after cigarette and swearing at mosquitoes. I was writing my name in purple ink on my notebook and trying to decide if I liked my toenail polish.

Joey stopped and pointed at me. “Jennifer, so pretty and girly and flirty and sensual, writing everything in purple pen.”

He pointed at Laura. “Laura, so loud and Italian and messy and sexy, with those cigarettes and those hand-scrawled pages flying everywhere.”

He took her cigarette from her and inhaled. “And me, so shrill and uptight—funny, but wicked, and with a real mean streak, trying like a lunatic to organize this shit.”

I was writing
Jennifer loves Matt Ashton
over and over. Then I wrote
Jennifer & Matt. Jennifer Ashton.
Matt and I were still writing to each other all the time and seeing each other when we could on school breaks and holidays.

Laura looked at me and said, “Uptight? Joey? What the fuck's he talking about? Oh my God. I would never call him uptight. Shrill maybe. Uptight? I don't know, man.” She started laughing.

I was looking at Joey. I said, “Sensual? Why am I sensual and not sexy?”

Laura said, “Hey. Yeah. I'd rather be sensual. Sexy makes me sound like a harlot.”

Joey sat down on the edge of the porch and rolled his eyes. He kept her cigarette, crushing it out with his foot. He said, “We are never going to get anything written.”

We decided our play would be called
Judy on Purpose.
It would be about a girl named Judy Diamond, the girl next door, who was hapless and sweet, but who bad things happened to all the time even though she was very well meaning and good-hearted. The story would center on Judy and her struggles to live a somewhat normal life in a crazy, mixed-up world, which the three of us felt we could relate to. Judy would have a funny, awful, dysfunctional family, one that drove her to distraction and ruined her life, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident.

She would have a sister Lolita who believed herself to be Margaret Thatcher (and who would walk around singing “God save our gracious Queen, Long live our noble Queen!”), an adopted brother named Rock (cynical and sarcastic and sometimes suicidal—no one in the family was sure where he came from or how he came to be there), Rock's slut of a girlfriend Sharon (who was a fixture in the house), and Mother Diamond (le grand dame), who we decided would manufacture spotlights because it seemed like the most outlandish thing we could think of. Even before we knew the beginning or the middle of the play, we knew it would end with Judy in a clothing store choosing between an Izod, a Fox, and a no-brand-name shirt. It was to be very deep and profound.

After we briefly outlined the story and characters, we jumped to the most interesting part of the process—casting. Laura, who had acted in and worked on nearly every production ever to hit McGuire Hall, wanted to play Lolita Diamond. Joey wasn't interested in acting. He did, however, want to direct. We all decided I would be Judy.

That left the other parts. We pulled out the yearbook and went to town. We cast Holly Ogren as Mother Diamond because she had a certain overly bright quality that we thought suited the role. Jeff Shirazi would be adopted brother Rock Diamond because he had black hair like Laura and was smart enough to understand cynicism. Our friend Diane Armiger was Sharon (the “live-in slut”) because of her platinum hair color. A junior named Kelly Shepard was Father Douglas (the priest) because he was a good actor and had what we thought to be a very ironic yet understanding smile. Tom Dehner, of course, was Michael, the date, the boy who sweeps Judy off her feet—or tries to in spite of herself and her insane family.

“Do you think Tom Dehner can act?” Laura said.

“No,” I said.

“But does it matter?” Joey said.

“No,” we all said together.

Our target date for finishing was September 21. When we didn't make that deadline, we aimed for Thanksgiving. When we weren't done by then, we planned for Christmas.

We made detailed schedules for ourselves—scene breakdowns, deadlines. We met after school, during school, instead of school, and on weekends. Joey typed up the schedules for us.
It will be done Christmas Eve, 1985, or that's it,
he wrote.
Meeting times: Fridays at 3:15, various weekend dates. We've got to be willing to give up some weekends, even nights (now that
football is over) to get this done!! I'm not kidding!! We have to have goals and rules in order to obtain them! Let's sacrifice, got that, Laura!!! And no dates either, Jennifer. I'll even fork over the cigarettes, what the hell.

Part of the problem was that each of us had a lot to say and we loved to hear ourselves talk. And we didn't completely sacrifice our social lives because we were focused on parties with a whole new intensity.

But we were also dedicated. Joey and I had a meeting with Mr. Sizemore, head of the theater department, about getting our play produced. The Drama Club was known for its annual shows in McGuire Hall.
You Can't Take It With You, Annie, The Miracle Worker, The Sound of Music. Judy on Purpose
would be different from anything that had ever hit the RHS stage, but Mr. Sizemore seemed impressed and said he would take a look at it as soon as we could get it to him, that he would consider it for spring production.

That was when we got down to business. First and foremost, we decided to take some time off from school so we could work on the play. Because I was the conscientious one in the group, I made the mistake of asking permission the first time we took a “creative day,” as we called them. It was Thursday, November 21, 1985. My mother was getting ready to go on a research trip for her book on Carl Sandburg. She would be gone just a few days, and I wanted to take Friday off. My father would stay with me, working too much as always, running on the weekend, cooking, listening to his music, smoking his pipe. The three of us, once so inseparable, moving as a unit, now moved in our own distinct worlds more and more—my mom consumed by her book and her research, my father with Earlham-Earlham-Earlham, me with my friends, my play, boys, parties.