Happy Accidents

“Jane is fine. Chris is fine. But Jane and Chris are trouble.”

Chris seemed to live to make me laugh. I would be walking down the stairs between classes at Thornridge High School, and suddenly, a few steps above me, a guy would trip and tumble down the stairs, arms flailing wildly and books flying past. He would land with a thud at the bottom, then look up at me, all Cheshire cat. It would be Chris, throwing himself down the stairs to crack me up. Again. My own private Stooge.

He loved to make prank phone calls, which gave me anxiety. He was sly and could be snarky and loved to shock people, especially adults. They never knew what hit them. Once, he said to our Spanish teacher, “Your hair is such a beautiful shade of red—why do you dye the roots black?”

On Sundays, he was the organist at St. Jude’s. For most of the service, he would play standard church fare, but if you listened closely to his incidental music after Communion, you would hear the dulcet strains of something like “Afternoon Delight,” played in minor chords. He’d catch my eye and solemnly mouth the words: “Gonna grab some afternoon deliiight …” No one mocked piety like Chris.

He was also immune to Catholic guilt, despite St. Jude’s doing everything in their power to break his defiance. He had been in school there from first to eighth grade, and the one person who seemed to be on his side was the hip young priest we all loved because he related to us kids. And it turns out, he did, but not in the way we thought. We later discovered this priest was actually a pervert (the extent of his misdeeds have only recently come to light when he was removed from public ministry in 2005). He’d targeted Chris at one point: when he was in seventh grade, the guy had tried to show him his underwear drawer at the rectory, asking him, “Have you ever seen a grown man naked?” (hopefully unintentional in his quoting of Peter Graves’s line in Airplane). Before he could get any further, Chris said, “If you touch me, my father will kill you,” whereupon young Chris was sent on his way. Christopher John Patrick would not be intimidated by anyone.

My whole family adored Chris, but no one more than my sister, Julie, who loved it when he made fun of her dumb-blonde ways. She begged him to mock her. He had heard the tape of her attempting to sing “Edelweiss” and was merciless in his imitation of it. She loved it. “Do it again!” she’d plead. She also loved that he colored his hair and cared about how he looked, and he played it up for her. A few years back, my dad was battling that awful lung cancer and we were all so devastated. But Chris called and said, “Tell Julie I had a full face-lift.” She belly laughed hard for the first time in a long time. He knew just what to say. (He lied. He’d actually only had a partial one ….)

One Ash Wednesday, Chris convinced me to cut choir, my favorite class, and go with him to the Chicken Unlimited across the street. Over Cokes and fries, we used cigarette ashes to make crosses on each other’s forehead, intoning, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” When we got back to school, we told the campus cop we had been at Mass. Nothing was sacred.

On the flip side of this disregard for our family faith, Chris had a love, a reverence even, for the pageantry of the Catholic Church. On Friday nights, when most of Thornridge High was drinking itself silly at a kegger, Chris and I, plus our pal John Carr, would do what we called a “church tour.” John was another sly and witty fellow, soon to come out of the closet. His other big secret was that he wanted to be a priest.

John Carr hearing confession in Man of La Mancha.

Back in the late seventies, some churches kept their doors unlocked because they were supposed to be a place of refuge, a place you should be able to enter at any time to escape whatever was chasing you. We knew which ones on the city’s south side were kept open, and we high school snots snuck in. We were usually drunk and doing poppers and giggling our heads off, but there would always come a moment when it got absolutely serious. We would perform the Mass, and we’d mean it. If Chris could unlock the organ, he’d play the entrance hymn, and if not, he’d hum it solemnly. My role was to lead the imaginary congregation in song. John would play the priest, making his ceremonial walk up the aisle toward the altar, kissing the good book and performing all the other ritualistic gestures, and begin the Mass.

If we could get into the confessional booths, we would take turns playing priest to the others’ confessor. We would mostly goof around pretending to be people from our own parish. We had them coming clean on ridiculous sins like having VD or something. Chris told me that John would actually confess to him. Of course, Chris wasn’t really a priest, so he told me everything. John told him that he was afraid he was gay; that he missed his dad, who’d died when he was a kid; that he feared he wouldn’t get into the seminary because his grades were so bad. John Carr was a bright light—funny and smart—but not a fan of school or studying. He died of AIDS in 1996.

On some level, I knew Chris was gay. It became harder to ignore once he started driving into Chicago for the weekends, not so secretly going to gay bars and hooking up with guys there—but I still somehow managed to deny it to myself. He lived like there was no tomorrow—smoking, drinking, doing drugs; generally doing whatever he wanted. Chris couldn’t help but be himself. He has always been constitutionally incapable of anything else.

And he never felt shame about anything he did. Chris’s attitude was The world just needs to catch up with me. In this way, he and I were very different. I really wanted to fit in, wanted to want to have a boyfriend, wanted to want to have kids. I wanted to want what every other girl in the world seemed to want. I did not want to admit, to myself or anyone else, that I did not.

I tried to act like the straight kids, but I couldn’t even fake it. I went out on a couple of dates with guys, but it was a struggle the whole time. I’d be deep in my own head, thinking, This should be nice. I should want to kiss him right now. I knew how I was supposed to act, how I was supposed to feel, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t be that person.

Chris was a lifeline, because with him I could be myself. It was also hard to be worried with so much laughing and goofing around, and his self-acceptance was contagious. As awkward as I felt around others, I felt like myself with Chris.

Choir was where we really flourished. We both loved to sing, so we never cut this class (except that one Ash Wednesday at the Chicken Unlimited). We’d even sing on the way there. It helped that we had to go through a breezeway with awesome acoustics that ramped up our harmonies. Then we’d spend the first fifteen minutes of the choir hour in the girls’ bathroom, smoking with any boy or girl who wanted to share a hot-boxed Marlboro.

But the real joy was singing in that choir, with so many different voices coming together. District-wide integration meant that black kids were bused into our white neighborhood for high school. This had caused riots in our school, and cops patrolled the hallways to keep the peace. The choral room in A Building was one of the only places at Thornridge High School where integration worked effortlessly. Black and white kids, football players, cheerleaders, nerds, and wood shop guys all lifted their voices in song together in this room. It was an idyllic setting, not unlike the version in Glee. Our differences seemed to disappear as our voices were raised in song, and the harmony lifted us beyond ourselves. For Chris and me, it was a refuge.

The other times I felt at ease were when I drank. My drinking self was good and had nothing to fear or be ashamed of. If I was drinking and with Chris, the good fired on all cylinders. Dolton was right next door to a suburb called Hegwisch, a blue-collar area with a famous record store and more bars per capita than any other burg outside Chicago. Al Capone had loved the prairies and heavily wooded landscape of this place and was said to have hidden out there a lot. For us, the winding roads of Hegwisch led to cash-strapped taverns more than happy to sell drinks to teenagers doing poppers. I used to love going with Chris to this one real dive bar called Jeanette’s, a place filled with toothless old men. One obese and gummy guy called “Uncle Frank” would sit immobile in a dark corner and yell at us. “I love you kids!” he’d slur. At those moments, I loved him right back.

Chris introduced me to a few new things, too. The first time I smoked pot was with him, during sophomore year. He failed to tell me that he’d laced it with angel dust, so I began to hallucinate at Pizza Hut and was so out of my gourd that I had to spend the night in his garage.

Pot scared the hell out of me, with or without angel dust. I panicked when I smelled it. If I went to a party where someone was smoking it, I expected the cops to swarm the place, and judgment and paranoia must have been written all over my face. I began to be known as “the Narc,” and I started to notice that I wouldn’t be invited to certain parties. It hurt my feelings, even though I continued to feel that pot smoking was evil. I was, however, very happy to get loaded on booze.

IF YOU LOOK BACK THROUGH MY HIGH SCHOOL scrapbook, you’d think I was one of the popular kids. I was involved in a million activities—speech team, girls’ choir, basketball, tennis, theater guild. And despite earning the “quitter” label after The Ugly Duckling, I even managed to get small roles in a couple of plays my sophomore year, playing a male police officer (go figure) in Arsenic and Old Lace and a tomboy (ditto) in The Brick and the Rose.

But it wasn’t until my senior year that something transformative finally happened. That was the year my theater arts class put on Godspell.

Somewhere in the back of my head I was aware that Godspell was based on a Bible gospel—we sang “Day by Day” at guitar mass at St. Jude’s—but I didn’t care. I just wanted to put on a show! I loved the music, and we wouldn’t have to try out; if you were in the class, you were in the play. Chris and I listened to the original cast album over and over.

We also went downtown to see the show live at the Drury Lane Theater. Chris, our friend Ed (another soon-to-be-gay musical theater lover), and I went at least ten times. That professional cast added some funny bits and one-liners that we claimed for ourselves and brought home to Dolton. We were obsessed.

Our production played one Friday night only. Everyone in my family, extended and otherwise, came. We thespians were beside ourselves with excitement. We put everything we had into this thing and made a plan to drink real wine during the final betrayal scene that closes the play. We wanted to be crying real tears, and we were pretty sure we couldn’t unless we were tipsy.

Ed played Jesus, Chris was John the Baptist/Judas, and along with being in the ensemble, I played the hussy who sang “Turn Back, O Man.”

I was now a part of the magic that had so mesmerized me when I was a kid seeing my first stage play. I actually lost my balance I was so excited—I almost fell over several times the day of the show—and I smelled funny. I would have this smell many times in the future and would come to know it as the pungent odor of pure, unadulterated fear. But because it was mixed with pure, unadulterated joy, I survived.

We were all swept up in the electricity of putting on this show. We were more focused, disciplined, and committed than we had ever been in our young lives. We had all pitched in to build the set together, and showed up after school for rehearsals. When we finally performed, no one missed a line or a cue. We were a team, and we supported one another. Being a part of this group of fellow actors, feeling needed and valued and there for one another, was a high I would chase for the rest of my life.

We were playing pretend, but we were sharing the experience. I had always felt so different and thus “less than” my peers. I remember thinking that even if I, Jane Lynch, wasn’t worthy of friendship, then at least I knew the character I was playing was. In everyday life, I second-guessed myself relentlessly. But in a play, my difference was hidden and I was worthy. I was needed. Because it’s written—it says, I am.

And that was the heart of the matter: on stage, playing a role that was written in black and white—I could not be rejected. The only place I felt safe from that possibility was on stage, and I loved it. In fact, I still get joy from it, even today. In any movie, TV show, or play that I’m in, I’ll still have that fleeting thought: These people might not want to be my friend after this, but for the next 8.2 seconds, they’re all about me and I’m all about them.

Finally, I had found my place.

But unfortunately, right in the middle of this transcendent, fantastic experience, disaster struck. Jesus and John the Baptist, also known as Ed and Chris, started spending all of their time together, without me. I didn’t know what was happening—or didn’t want to. All I knew was that now I was the odd man out.

In response, I acted as cold and mean as I could. With this, I was starting a pattern that I would rely on for far too long in dealing with what felt like rejection. My hope in acting this way was that the person I felt had wronged me would ask what he’d done wrong. Chris didn’t, of course—I’m not sure he ever even noticed. My mom noticed, though, and she became worried that I had fallen in love with Chris—not a surprising conclusion, since I was acting exactly like a jilted lover. One afternoon, she finally gave voice to the fact that I was still too stubborn to admit.

“Honey,” she said, “I don’t want you to get your heart broken. But I think maybe Chris likes boys. Don’t you think that maybe he and Ed are boyfriends?”

“No, no, no!” I snapped. “Chris isn’t gay.”

It was getting harder to deny it to myself, though. I mean, even my mother knew. It was hard to miss. My wild and free-spirited Chris had always stuck out in our little suburb, but by the time we were seniors, he was taking it to a whole new level, with an afro and parachute pants. It was the late seventies, but still: to say he stood out is an understatement. But I still didn’t want to acknowledge that “gay” existed. Now it was right in front of me. Chris and Ed were having an affair. Chris even wrote “I will love Ed forever” in my yearbook.

In the pain of feeling dumped, I wrote Chris a scathing letter telling him that he looked like a freak and I didn’t want anything to do with him anymore. I was a stereotypical closet case, rejecting him for his open homosexuality that got him a boyfriend and left me alone. I pushed him away for what I was afraid of in me. Maybe I was also afraid of guilt by association, that other people would think I was gay, too. Whatever it was, I felt that he needed to be punished for flaunting his gayness. Didn’t he understand you were supposed to keep it under wraps?

But also, deep down, my heart was broken. I felt rejected on a soul level. In some ways, Chris was my first true love. I trusted him like I trusted no one else in the world, and I showed him parts of myself that no one else saw. Now he was gone. All that had been good in those final months of my senior year of high school was suddenly buried under despair.

After graduating from high school, I reluctantly set off for Illinois State University, which at that time was where the B and C students in Illinois went to college. I had absolutely no academic curiosity or drive, and I didn’t particularly want to go to college, but that was what people did. With my impressively low ACT score ISU was the only school that admitted me, so I packed up my things and headed for Normal, Illinois (of all places).

I was assigned to a room in an all-girls dorm, and at any given moment, I had at least three very severe crushes: I was obsessed with the ladies of Hamilton Hall. Perhaps getting out of Dolton and away from my family allowed me to admit these feelings … sort of. I still put them in a mental file labeled “intense feelings of friendship,” managing to continue to ignore the pounding refrain of “You’re gay!” knocking on my psyche’s door.

Before I left Dolton, my mother had said, “Jane, don’t major in Theater. Major in something like Theater but where you can get a job, like Mass Communications.” In her mind, a general smear of media would satisfy my need to trod the boards. I desperately wanted to be an actress, but wanting also to please, I followed my mom’s advice.

Unfortunately—or, really, fortunately—when I tried to register for Mass Comm 101, all the classes were closed. So instead, I started taking acting courses on the sly. It was truly luck that the one state school with low enough standards to admit the likes of me had one of the best undergraduate theater departments in the country. Several original Steppenwolf Theater ensemble members had been recent graduates, including Laurie Metcalf and John Malkovich. The professors were treated as minor celebs themselves and managed to inspire both respect and fear in their students. Freshmen weren’t allowed to audition for shows during their first semester, but as soon as second semester started, I tried out for Lysistrata, a very cleverly updated musical adaptation of Aristophanes’ classic about the Peloponnesian War.

The play had been rewritten with a Southern theme: the Athenians were Gone With the Wind–style upper-crust Southerners, the Spartans a big old tribe of hillbillies. I managed to land a speaking role, which was a huge coup for a freshman. I’m sure there was nothing subtle about the way I played the country bumpkin Karmenia of Kornith, but I also added a minor twist to her character—one that, in retrospect, seems a bit odd, considering how deep in the closet I was. I made her an open lesbian.

There was a line where the lady warrior from the Isle of Lesbos said something like “You know, we women hang very close on Lesbos,” intimating that island’s Sapphic past (as if the name of the island didn’t make that clear enough). So I thought it would be funny to be super-obvious and ad-lib, “You told me weren’t gonna say nothin’…” When I first delivered the line, the director cracked up. Which I guess wasn’t surprising; there was a lot of whispering that she was a closeted lesbian herself.

As far as I can recall, there was only one open lesbian student in the theater program. She was burly, with a deep voice and hairy legs and armpits: the perfect stereotype of a butch lesbian. She also had a chip on her shoulder and a demeanor that said “Fuck you. This is who I am, take it or leave it.” Looking back now, I can appreciate how brave she was.

Our theater department was full of closeted homosexuals. We were too afraid to look at this aspect of ourselves, so of course we marginalized the one person who had the courage to be who she was. Needless to say, I didn’t want anything to do with her.

I was so excited to be a part of the cast of Lysistrata, which was a huge production featuring all the big department stars. (It was like in the old days of Hollywood, when MGM would do a movie like Grand Hotel and the entire roster of studio talent would appear in it.) I was always taking a look from outside my body and marveling that I was now one of them. A few of the women were so talented and such bright lights that I worshipped them like they were movie stars. The comedy was very pithy and smart. The music was inventive and fun. I was over the moon.

Sophomore year, I auditioned for Gypsy. The list for principal cast went up before the chorus list, and I almost didn’t check it because I was pretty sure that if I got anything it would be chorus. But there it was: my name on the principal cast list. I was gobsmacked. I was cast as Electra, one of the three strippers.

I had always loved singing, which is perhaps not surprising given how musical my parents were. Our whole family sang together almost every day, mostly Christmas carols and show tunes—Funny Girl, Man of La Mancha, The Sound of Music. In fact, we were mildly obsessed with The Sound of Music. When it was playing at the River Oaks Cinema, my mom dropped me, my sister, and the Climack girls off for the first showing of the day, and we never left our seats. We watched it over and over until she picked us up later that evening.

Gypsy would be my first time really singing a solo on stage, and although I was terrified, I proceeded to “act as if” I could do it. I also had no reason to believe anyone in their right mind would ever buy my baby-dyke self as a stripper. Obviously the director thought I could do it—he had given me the part—but I was afraid that what he saw wasn’t really there, that I had somehow fooled him. Looking back, I can see that I couldn’t give myself credit for anything, like I felt obliged to bow to the altar of my fears and trepidations. Maybe it kept the bar low, expectation-wise. But unlike my reaction to this kind of inner challenge when I walked away from The Ugly Duckling in high school, it never crossed my mind to quit.

The big show-stopping burlesque stripper number in Gypsy is called “You Gotta Have a Gimmick.” My character, Electra, had the gimmick of electricity: she “did it with a switch,” an actual electrical switch on her costume that lit her up. “I’m electrifying and I ain’t even trying!” she squealed. I worked my butt off rehearsing, and suddenly I found this full, robust chest voice I’d never had before. It felt wonderful, like massaging my soul. And even though I was über-critical of myself at this point in my life, I was flushed with victory. I’d walk through the quad with a giant inner smile, thinking, I’m in the school musical.

Unlike the other shows I’d been in, Gypsy was practically a professional production. The auditorium was state-of-the-art, and we had top-notch sets, lights, costumes, and a full stage crew. I imagined that this was what it must be like to do a show on Broadway.

MY PARENTS, TRUE TO FORM, WEREN’T TOO CONCERNED about what grades I was making in college. They were more interested in whether I was happy and making friends, and whether I needed money. (My dad would periodically mail me $20, with a note saying, “Here’s some green for the scene, teen.” He also sent $1 rebates for Ten High Whiskey to my dorm room, because you could only cash in one per address.) When I changed my major to Theater Arts, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t notice, and they didn’t. The Theater Arts Department had talent-based tuition waivers, and I auditioned and got one. My parents learned of my new major when they received the tuition bill marked “paid.” “Hey! Good for you!” Suddenly, being a theater major was pretty cool.

I loved my acting classes, and I even loved my theater history class. I actually started to get good grades because I gave a hoot about what I was learning.

One Christmas break, I was particularly excited to go back to Dolton because I wanted to show off a new skill I’d been developing. In one of my acting classes, I was learning to speak in what is called American Standard English, which has the objective of neutralizing speech to get rid of obvious regionalisms. I not only took to this process, I loved it in the way only a pedantic, overcompensating, insecure young person could. I practiced and practiced and decided I would speak American Standard English all the time. When I went home for the holidays that year, I launched right into showing off my new skills at the family Christmas party. “I had an in-ta-view lahst week,” I declared haughtily, as my sister rolled her eyes. My mom had a squinty “say what?” look, and our neighbor, impressed, said, “Gosh, Jane, you sound just like you’re from Boston!”

But sounding haughty was only the beginning. With my newfound success in the theater, I suddenly discovered—and unleashed—my inner diva. The more comfortable I got and the more empowered I began to feel, the more I tried to force my genius on others. If something in a production I was in wasn’t to my liking or up to my standards, I’d pitch a fit. I never hesitated to tell everyone exactly what they were doing wrong, in the most condescending tones possible. After someone poured their heart into a scene, I’d protest with “I didn’t believe you at all.” And for some reason I was surprised that this behavior seemed to alienate people ….