Let's start with the wonderful. My first year living in Amsterdam I spent as a copy editor and proofreader for a group of medical publications called Excerpta Medica. If I hadn't landed that job, I would probably have had to return to the States that very first summer. With the job I had a salary and a work permit.
One day at coffee break a friendly colleague turned to me and said, "Bear, I thought you said you're an actor. What are you doing here?" I explained that nothing would make me happier than to return to the stage, but how? And then she told me about the Dutch National Theaterschool. They were holding auditions through the spring. Their manner of choosing the few out of the many auditioners struck me as about the most sensible admissions process I'd ever heard of.
The pool of eighty young people who wanted to get into this fine school that spring (including yours truly as the only non-Dutch aspirant) were divided into three groups. Each group came to a series of twelve two-hour classes over a three month period, taught in turn by most of the faculty, alone and in pairs. At the end of the spring, the faculty met and, based on a rich variety of observations and criteria, chose twelve of us to be admitted. I got in. What followed was a marvelous five-year conservatory program (costing my happy parents $150 a year tuition ....ah, those crazy Dutch socialists!).
Around that same time I received an ominous envelop from the US Selective Service, forwarded to Holland by my conscientious parents. I had been drafted. (Dear reader, you may recall from a previous post that in the Draft Lottery of 1970 my birthdate got number 033 out of 366.) They'd discovered that I was no longer attending Stanford. My time had come.
The Vietnam war was raging. They were drafting young men by the thousands. And I had just been admitted to the school of my dreams AND I was and am a pacifist ..... AND I was and am as gay as a goose. Stories were circulating among ex-pats and in the gay press stateside that young men reporting for their physicals were being denied an exemption because just too many were suddenly saying that they were homosexuals. I knew I had to make a plan.
A few letters back and forth with the US Selective Service, and I was able to arrange to have my physical at a US base at a NATO headquarters in Belgium. Having been schooled in psychology at Stanford, and having taught myself to speak Dutch in my first year in Amsterdam, I set forth to implement my plan.
First, I visited a friendly mental health center for youth in the heart of town and made an appointment with a psychiatrist on staff there. I explained my situation to this sympathetic shrink and asked if he might be willing to write a letter I could take with me to my physical. He said to me (in Dutch), "You're clearly well-versed in psychology, and your written English is much better than mine, of course. How 'bout I give you a page of letterhead. You write it. I'll sign it."
And so I sat at a convenient typewriter in the office and created a letter so laden with cooly-stated, hair-raisingly-horrible neuroses-bordering-on-psychoses in my best Dutch-inflected psychobabble that the good doctor laughed himself silly as he enthusiastically signed it. At my request he enclosed it a sealed envelop which he also signed over the flap. To whom it may concern.
Intermission... ACT II here, click link.....