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Tony Miksak's
Words on Books
as broadcast weekly on KZYX radio

(retro WOB)

"My, how you've expanded!" I was thinking as I shook hands with an overweight high school buddy named Paul, who I hadn't seen for thirty years.
Once, Paul and I were skinny crew-cut boys in white socks and loafers, whizzing through Stop signs in a borrowed Buick. Nothing ever happened to us, but we had wild imaginations. If you attended an all-boy's school and it was named Lick-Wilmerding, you HAD to have a good imagination.
Somehow we seem to have gotten older and grayer and fatter, Paul and me.
Paul used to live in San Francisco. Now he designs equipment for disabled people and lives in Fresno. His wife raises llamas.
We stood in a kitchen crowded with pot-luck goodies, surrounded by a talkative group of aging white men. I was sipping red wine and squinting to read name-tags.
We had gathered to celebrate "PROG" and the high school art teacher who invented it many years ago, Leonard Breger.
Many of us already have had five or six careers. Some of us have died. One of my former classmates, Stephen Drewes, directed two plays in Mendocino. I didn't know!
"What was PROG?" Joselyn asked me as we drove down Highway 128 to San Francisco. Well, remember this was in high school, right? Mostly it involved colored oils floating like amoebae on vats of water. The protozoan pseudopods were reflected onto old bed sheets by means of a borrowed overhead projector. There was a whiff of jazz and bongos.
PROG was a happening before there were Happenings. It began as a classroom prank and under the art teacher's tutelage grew into one of those high school events that can fill up an entire smelly gym on a Friday night. It came into being at a special time in San Francisco, at the interstice (in-TER-stiss) between Beatniks and Hippies.
I was glad that Mr. Breger remembered me. "You're not as SHY as you used to be!" he observed in a loud voice. The years melted away. My face turned red. I felt everyone staring.
"I've had thirty years to practice," I said.
To understand PROG think of spinning colored lights. Silhouettes dancing to a boogie beat. A somber-toned announcer. A light show that would have been right at home in the hippie-filled Fillmore Auditorium a few years later.
Stoked by the energy of adventurous adolescents in the mood for art and rebellion, PROG continued for a few precarious years. Eventually a combination of administrative disapproval and yearly graduations killed it.
The people who remember PROG are mostly the people who took part in it. Leonard Breger went on to a professorship and distinguished career as an artist. To us he'll always be Mr. Breger, Art teacher.
On Mr. Breger's TV upstairs someone was playing a student film called "The Canary." We stood around watching it and pretty soon we were topping each other's jivey cracks, just like thirty years ago. Mr. Breger asked, "Is it possible to be fascinated and bored at the same time?" We laughed.
On screen someone's borrowed Nash Rambler was disgorging Lick students and their girlfriends. One guy had a rifle. People ran around, sat around, waved machetes. The movie went on a for a very long time. "We didn't have a script," someone explained.
It's dangerous to go to events like these. You end up having strange thoughts about time and place, and you end up writing columns like this. As I wallowed in memories I had to tell Mr Breger's daughter Nanette, "You know, it's a reunion and everything, but we all are standing here in this house in San Francisco, and I like the people here, and we're all alive and it's actually the present, not the past in which this all is happening, and isn't that great?"
Then I took another mouthful of wine and shut up.

Aired Sunday January 4, 2009 at 10:55 am and Wednesday January 7, 2009 at 1:00 pm

NOTES:

(First printed in the Mendocino Beacon, January 20, 1994)

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