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SPEAKER 1: It was always a very sheltered, warm, loving place. I knew all the people who lived around. In fact, I never thought of it in any sort of pejorative sense until I was in college, and I was at Mankato.

And I was hitchhiking and on my way back to the cities. And a guy picked me up and asked me where I was going. And I told him. And he said-- this is a white fella, and he said, "Oh, the ghetto?"

And it was the first time I'd ever thought of that in my community in any other way than home. So it was a wonderful, wonderful life. I mean, the theater where I do most of my work right now is in a place where I played tag and hide and seek and all sorts of things in all these alleys and so forth and hills that I used to slide on and walks that I used to shovel or at least contract to, and then my dad would have to finish it. But this was a very warm, loving place for me.

SPEAKER 2: When I think of the Black neighborhood in St. Paul in a historical sense, I think of the Rondo neighborhood. Is that what you're talking about?

SPEAKER 1: Oh, yeah. Rondo was the linchpin of that neighborhood. Now we lived a little bit outside of that because my grandfather had a place on Sherburne between Dunlap and Lexington, which was a little West and North of those boundaries.

And we were reminded of that occasionally. For instance, there was a cross burned in front of that house. But those are sort of-- I don't really, really hang on that experience. I remember more all the people that used to park in our yard to go to the Saints baseball games. That was just a marvelous thing because I'd sit and get to meet all these people who'd suddenly fill up our neighborhood.

SPEAKER 2: Tell me about your parents, your mother especially.

SPEAKER 1: She had this demure veneer, but you could scratch that veneer very, very quickly. And there was something else that was more of the hood and everything beneath. Now, as an adult when I look back, I remember us sitting down to eat. We were living up on Dale.

SPEAKER 2: Was it a big family?

SPEAKER 1: Yeah, there were five children. And I guess that's big by today's standards in the United States perhaps. But anyway, we were sitting down eating dinner. And we were having scrambled eggs.

And I wasn't into these scrambled eggs for dinner. This is breakfast food. What are you doing? And she said, "Well, you eat the eggs.

And I noticed that she wasn't eating. And as an adult when I look back at that now, I realize there wasn't enough food. But we had no idea that that was going on. I mean, we always thought we were in very, very good shape.

My grandmother and aunt who were maids at Field, Schlick Department Store and my grandfather who was a domestic at the Minnesota Club, they would bring me downtown on Saturdays and dress me up. And it was very clear that I was the future. And I wasn't going to be what they're doing. It was just so crystal clear to me that I was going to go to college, that there was a better life for me. And I was expected to do that.

But I remember my grandmother. She was born, as she used to say, in 18 and 86. And she was quite wise. I remember I was studying history. And we were talking about westward expansion. And she said, "Well, it's there was this Indian, and he was sitting on a log."

And a white fellow walked up and said, "Do you mind if I sit down?" The Indian said, "No. Here." And he moved over and sat down. And another white fellow moved up and said, "Do you mind if I sit down?" The Indian moved over.

And well, you get the picture. Eventually, the Indian was sitting on the ground, and all the white people were sitting on the log. Well, that is [LAUGHS] very, very an astute evaluation of the westward expansion. And those old people had those sorts of wise ways about them.

SPEAKER 2: What kind of a kid were you? Were you shy? Did you study a lot? Did you do your homework? Or were you a little bit more gregarious, mischievous? I guess I'm trying to figure out how the actor was born.

SPEAKER 1: I was always very slight in build. Even in high school, I had names like frail and those sorts of things. And there were all kinds of jokes about running between raindrops and not getting wet and all that.

I wasn't the best student as an undergraduate certainly. In fact, I think, I ended up with a major in psych consoles because it's the only thing that I get grades in. I mean, really simply, it was that.

Meanwhile, I had been doing some theater. There was a fellow that still comes to our shows here Doc Paul-- Ted Paul-- wonderful man. And I was a freshman. And he was doing a play called Finian's Rainbow.

And he didn't want to do it in blackface. And these four or five Black people in the whole town were really easy to spot. We were all sort of huddled together in this dorm. And Doc came up and informed us really that we were going to be in a play. And I got into that, and I got a speaking role and--

SPEAKER 2: You were good.

SPEAKER 1: Well, yeah, I had a flair for it. And it was a satire on a number of things, one of which was racism and expectation, stereotypes, and so forth. And my mother drove down to see this play.

We had a '60 Plymouth Fury. [LAUGHS] Anyway, she drove down. And the part that I played, I was a college student that had taken this summer job. And old man Afinion wanted me to be able to shuffle and act like the other Blacks that were in his employ, and I just wasn't-- I wasn't of that experience.

Well, he through the course of the play, you find out that he's got something. And he needs this medicine very, very badly. And all the time he's been asking me to shuffle. And finally when he's on his knees in this medicine, he's called for me. And out I come shuffle and carrying this medicine very, very slow and the satire.

Well, my mother did not get the satire at all, at all, at all. And she stormed out of that theater and let me have it. "I'm not paying this money." And she really wasn't paying it. I mean I had-- I worked my way through undergraduate school on the railroad, Great Northern Railroad as a waiter.

But she-- that isn't why she sent me to school. And all of the humor and satire was lost on her. And so when I began to talk about theater after, that was the context within which she viewed it. So it was difficult to turn her around.

She's dead now. She died of lung cancer. And curiously enough, I did fences here a few years ago. And we have a archival tape of that.

And I was watching it the other day, and I could hear this faint cough in the audience. And I recognized it right away, that's my mother coughing, oh, just amazing. But eventually, she came around to seeing the power of theater and how it can help define in a different way in other people's hands.

SPEAKER 2: Were you aware of the Civil Rights movement?

SPEAKER 1: I remember my grandfather,-- my father's father, grandfather-- getting really upset because-- he shined shoes. And the man for whom he worked would not say Negro correctly. He wanted to say Negro, and grandpa let him know what that was. So there was a number of those instances where you had the sort of pride-producing situations that, I think, were part and parcel of the Civil Rights movement, although I didn't know it was a movement. It was just what we were doing at the time.