Stageland

In which a Republican theater professor tries to get me to join the military

Tom Jones was, as far as I can tell, the only Republican theater professor at a state-funded college.¹ I ended up in his one-week, three-credit intro to theater class because I was behind on credits and worried I would graduate late, thereby becoming A Statistic. The course was supposed to run Monday through Friday, the week after spring semester (when everyone is already burnt out), and go from 9:00am to 4:00pm. 

Neurotic by temperament, I arrived a half hour early on the first day. I had a long commute and I wasn’t sure what the traffic would be like, and we had been warned that since the course was “accelerated” we couldn’t miss anything. Jones acted like I was insane. “No one needs to get here early,” he said. “In fact, no one needs to get here for 9. That’s ridiculous. Class won’t start until 10:00, at the earliest.” He then proceeded to institute a one-hour lunch and told us that we would get out early every day. One woman in the class started leading a daily trip to Olive Garden at lunchtime, and to his credit Jones didn’t comment on the fact that she was never back within an hour.

At this point you may be wondering—did we have to do any work for this class? I’m happy to report that we did indeed have a writing assignment. Jones told us that we had to give him a list of 50 things we learned over the course of the week.² As long as we wrote down ten things a day, he reasoned, we’d be golden. They didn’t even necessarily have to be about theater, so long as they came from the class.

But wait—the most important wisdom he could impart was this: “happy wife, happy life.” In fact, this dictum was so important that it counted as TWO things. So really, we only had to figure out 48 for ourselves.³ Everyone dutifully wrote down “happy wife, happy life.”

We also read two plays as preparation for the course: Oedipus Rex and Miss Julie.

Oedipus Rex is the one about the guy whose parents learn from an oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother; he grows up to kill his father and marry his mother. Most people have to read this play in a couple classes in undergrad.

Miss Julie opens with a servant inducing an abortion in a pet dog. The play focuses on hot-blooded yet fragile Julie, whose infamous mother was known for using the riding crop on men. Julie falls for a toxic servant, and she has sex with him while on her period. No one reads this play.

Jones informed us that the playwright, August Strindberg, was one of the most misogynistic men ever and this play was a prime example of his misogyny. “This guy had marital issues, he had female issues, he had male issues, mental issues, a lot of issues,” he told us. Then he made us watch the movie version,⁴ which was pretty miserable.

Jones was very preoccupied with sexism, in the way that older, fairly sexist men often are. I don’t think he ever offered an explanation for why he assigned the “most misogynistic play ever” in an intro to theater class. One assumes he was trying to drive home the whole “happy wife, happy life” thing. If your wife isn’t happy, after all, your daughter may have sex with the servants. Or something like that. That’s just how women are.

Professionalism, as I’m sure you’ve intuited, was never Jones’s strongsuit. I ran into him in the hallways once after I took his class. “G. Marie!” he yelled, “Wish me a happy birthday!” “Happy birthday!” I yelled back. And, because he was always roasting me, I added, “How old are you—104?” “Bitch,” he said, and kept walking.

My notes from that class are mostly just quotations from Jones, and none of them have anything to do with theater. “If no one was around,” he told us earnestly, “I would drink my own pee” (I think this was him explaining how he would survive on a desert island). Another day, he explained that extreme cold is better than extreme heat, as one can always add more layers, but “being naked hot is just… creepy.”

In general, it was very difficult to discern the context of Jones’s lines. Have you ever met someone who was so ADHD they basically just say every fourth sentence, leaving you to try to guess what the preceding three sentences were supposed to be? Jones was like that a lot of the time. His thought process was mysterious and his conversation was chaotic, but he always acted like we were crazy when we couldn’t follow him.

Like many of us, Jones was not very funny when he was trying to be. He loved to tell stories, but they tended to be very rehearsed and generally sounded made up. He kicked off the class by telling a vignette about his first time teaching: while addressing his students, he had stepped backward, tripped, fell, and hit the back of his head on the bottom of a rotating blackboard. The whole board then flipped and hit him in the face. I can’t remember if he claimed that it permanently altered the shape of his nose, or if the story was just so clearly cobbled out of cliches that I’ve added my own on.

The entrance to the college’s theater

But here was the miraculous thing—sometimes, in the middle of some ridiculous sexist vignette, or as an aside while he explained something about the theater, Jones would come out with lines that would actually astound me in their brilliance. They were brief but implied a kaleidoscope of possible storylines and were alive with sheer comic potentiality. That these lines were incoherent in the context of everything else he said only added to their brilliance—you could not pin down his meaning any more than you could get him to talk about theater for more than ten minutes straight.

I can remember one time where Jones was telling one of his overly rehearsed stories. As I sat there with my eyes glazed over, this series of lines broke through my lethargy and stood shimmering in the room for a brief moment: “She was a ho. There were so many hoes.” Then, with his intense earnestness, “They practiced there.”

I have wracked my brains trying to recover why he said this, but I really have no idea. I can’t tell you where “there” was, who the hoes were, or what they were practicing.

These lines always make me think of that scene in Flight of the Conchords where a group of women in matching sweatshirts are hitting on Brett and Jemaine. Jemaine assumes they’re a bunch of “sexy nurses.” “Oh no, we’re the Jersey University women’s water polo team,” one woman responds.

Perhaps the hoes had a water polo team. Perhaps they were doctors and had a joint practice.⁵ Who knows. There are whole narratives, whole worlds contained in these lines.

(If you respond to this with a vulgar comment about the hoes and their practice, I will block you. I have nothing but the greatest respect for the hoes, and nothing but the greatest disdain for the haters and the losers.)

On the last day of class, Jones took us on a tour of the theater, showing us what backstage was like and how the technical aspects worked. He showed us the machine they used to work on the lights—it was basically one of those construction vehicles you see where people stand in a little pen and get lifted in the air. “OK,” he said, “now everyone gets a turn being lifted to the lights.” Looking back on this now, I wonder if it was legal—the community college did not even allow us to have bake sales because it considered them a health risk and not covered by the school’s insurance. I was pretty terrified as Jones hoisted me up—I did not particularly trust him—and I clung to the little bar. But it was fun to be up so high and look out over everything in the weird half-light of the theater.

One of the last times I saw Jones was at the college’s renaissance fair.⁶ He asked me what the plan was, and I said I hoped to transfer to a four-year school and major in English literature. 

“No,” he said, “You should definitely join the military.”

If you’ve known me for more than five seconds, you probably have an idea of just how taken aback I was. There are many reasons why I should not join the military, but just to skim the surface, I “don’t believe in” exercise and have a deep-seated distrust in authority.

“No,” I shot back, “I would never do that.”

“G. Marie,” he said, “Think about it—if your parents had joined the military, you would never have existed.”

If anyone else had said this to me, I would have assumed I was being made fun of. This was Jones, though, and he was staring at me with what seemed to be extreme earnestness. His mind, I guess, was already elsewhere, thinking about some other scenario than the one he had originally posed.

“But Jones,” I said, deeply confused, “Why would that make me want to join the military?”

He shot me a disapproving glance, but his eyes weren’t quite focused on me anymore, and he was already moving away. I was making too much sense, or rather, I was trying to impose sense on him in a way that was antithetical to his way of being. And so Tom Jones drifted out of my life, about as chaotically as he had drifted in.

Sometimes I wonder how he’s doing. I hope he’s happy—or, I suppose, I hope his wife is happy.

1. He didn’t talk about politics in my class (as far as I can remember), but he was a known, avid Trump supporter in 2016 and apparently his Facebook page can be a ride.

On a separate note—my thanks to Kristina for her comments on an early draft of this.

2. I think there was some kind of pop psychology reason behind this, but I can’t remember what exactly.

3. Once, a friend who had just gotten engaged asked if there was a form of this saying that worked for his state in life. He decided on happy fiancée, happy Beyoncé, “because Beyoncé is life, so it’s essentially the same thing.”

4. He also had us watch the 1957 version of Oedipus Rex, which briefly features William Shatner and is pretty fantastic. Any day now it will have a revival through tiktok.

5. Thank you to Jasmine for this insight.

6. My job was to wander around and read out Shakespearean insults to people. I received a couple threats in return.