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By Root 988 0

lights, backstage area and seating. Our limitations always became a plus. Our shows were funny, exciting and always on the cutting edge and what began as what some people thought of as an impossibility became the hardest ticket in town-we sold out every single production for every show three theater seasons a year for three seasons running. The Workshop still exists a full thirty-two years later. I'm not telling you this as a form of braggadocio-I'm informing you how our generation of kids refused to accept the status quo. We rebelled and it paid off-big-time.

That's an example of the power of not taking no for an answer. As a matter of fact-taking no and turning it into a giant gleaming Yes. I learned everything I know about experimental original theater and comedy-from acting to writing to painting and building goddam sets-by not taking no for an answer.

Now-part two of the same story. Kind of:

HOW I BECAME A PUBLISHED POET

During the summer certain members of the workshop would travel and perform at other colleges and theaters in and around New England. In order to do so, we had to take jobs that kept us close to Emerson during the summer months. At the end of our junior year, a guy named Eagle-he was bald at age twenty, got hit with the nickname and nobody ever called him anything else but Eagle ever again-said he had a job as the assistant head janitor at the Atlantic Monthly Building. The Atlantic Monthly was and still is a well-respected magazine zoned in on intellectual discussions of cultural and political matters and its offices were located in several brownstones built side by side half a block from the Emerson campus. Eagle needed four guys to work the night shift as janitors during June, July and August. Adam Roth, Chris Phillips, Reagan Kennedy and I volunteered immediately. We'd never been janitors before but between the four of us there had been plenty of experience cleaning up odd puddles of beer, vomit, cheap vodka and just general leftover after-party ooze in the various hellholes we lived in-some of which Eagle had witnessed firsthand, which is to say we were well qualified. So Eagle hired us on the spot.

The pay was good but the best part was yet to come: our first night on the job, Sully The Head Janitor-classic Boston Irish guy, fifty-something, barrel-chested, redfaced with a nose that doubled as a Bushmill's bottle-explained that we were to be on time every evening at five o'clock and we were supposed to clean all four buildings in the following eight hours. However, he said as he handed each of us our own official Atlantic Janitorial Staff short-sleeve button-down shirt (think basic bowling league red and blue), if we chose to work our balls off like slaves on cocaine, we could leave whenever the hell we got the work done.

After Sully split, Eagle said he guessed we could get through all four buildings in less than five hours if we worked like slaves on cocaine and didn't take cigarette breaks. And that's just what we did. Every night at five Sully would list off the areas where there may have been a large coffee spill or a water leak or an ink explosion and we would don our bowling shirts, grab our mops and buckets and run a full tornado sweep so swift and thorough it would have made Mr. Clean crap his tidy whitey pants. We were out on the town chasing tail and downing booze by ten-thirty almost every night. It was a dream gig.

After a few weeks we got so good we COULD take cigarette breaks-during which we started to take notice of all the office-type swag there was just piled up and lying around. It's amazing what you can convince yourself you absolutely need to have in order to survive-especially when it's stuff you have survived without up until that particular point in your life. Staplers, number two pencils, paperweights, letter openers, boxes of number two pencils, plastic coffee cups, paper clips, boxes of boxes of number two pencils, toner bottles, Sanka packets, Cremora jars, big boxes of boxes with boxes of number two pencils in them-you name it we took it. Hey-they were the