As Mom, Dad, and the chorus silently cheer on the Bears, Tiny speaks from the bench (aka our den’s lime-green couch):
TINY:
I fell into my parents’ religion not because it was required, not because they forced me into it, but because they invited me in and showed me the beauty of it, the faith it required, the devotion a person could give to something outside of himself. During that magical stretch from September to January, we would enclose ourselves in game time, watching the intricate, spontaneous choreography of each face-off, either on television or in the stadium itself. Only a nonbeliever looks at football and sees brute strength. A believer can see all of the layers—the strategy, the teamwork, the individual personalities clicking together. You can only control the game so much from the bleachers, so loving this game means having to give yourself up to the unpredictable, the unknowable. Your heart is bruised with every loss, but it’s never broken. You sing with invincible joy at every win, but you’re still vulnerable when the next game comes. My parents taught me all this, sometimes by telling me, but mostly by example.
Tiny now joins in with the song.
TINY, DAD, MOM, AND CHORUS:
In the cold,
in the wind,
we’ll be there for you.
Your agony,
your ecstasy,
we will feel it.
For four whole hours
there will be no other cares.
Just the sound of the play-by-play
of what happens to our Bears!
DAD (TO TINY):
You throw the ball and hope.
TINY (repeating, learning):
You throw the ball and hope.
DAD (TO TINY):
You catch the ball and run.
TINY (repeating, learning):
You catch the ball and run.
MOM AND CHORUS:
As you gather on the field,
we will gather in our homes.
And we will pray.
Yes, we will pray.
(TINY AND DAD JOIN IN.)
Every Sunday!
Every Sunday!
Every Sunday!
And sometimes Monday!
Try as hard as you can to convey what it’s like to be together on a Sunday with your family, watching the Big Game. This might seem like a superficial number in the overall context of Tiny Cooper’s life, but I assure you that it is not. The purity of his parents’ belief—even if it’s in the name of football—is one of the guiding lights for Tiny, and enables him to do all of the things he’s about to do. He won’t grow up to be a Bear himself (well, not in a football sense), and in truth, as his musical pursuits take hold, there will be Sundays when he will skip watching the game because of a badly timed matinee. But still he’s taking the energy that was generated in these early days and using it to find his own religion, which will serve him well, even if at times it’s confusing beyond belief.
Tiny’s parents don’t know it and will never understand it, but they’re his role models.
ACT I, SCENE 3
The chorus members leave the stage, with Tiny remaining on the bench, still flanked by his parents.
TINY:
My parents kept me sheltered, protecting me from the haters that were out there in the world. I was my mom and dad’s favorite thing, and this was always clear to me. But the older I got, they couldn’t be there all the time.
DAD:
I have meetings.
MOM:
So many meetings interceding. I have functions.
DAD:
So many functions we can’t function.
MOM:
We’re committed to commitments.
DAD:
So committed to commitments.
On the bench, Mom and Dad start to pull away, doing other things. Tiny changes his button so it reads AGE: 5.
TINY:
Because of my size, everyone always thought I was older than I really was. The kindergarten teacher actually tried to turn me away on the first day of school. She probably would’ve served me a vodka tonic if I’d asked for one. But even though my body had grown, my heart and my mind were still the age they were supposed to be. And as my parents drifted further and further away, other people came into my life.
Mom and Dad leave the bench. LYNDA appears in the wings. She is dressed like a very cool, down-to-earth sixteen-year-old girl.
TINY:
The first close relationship I had with anyone outside my family was with Lynda, my lesbian babysitter. I have no idea if my parents knew she was lesbian or not. I have no idea if I knew what that meant at the time. All I knew was that I worshipped Lynda. To me, she was everything that adulthood stood for . . . making phone calls, knowing what was on TV, driving a car. To me, sixteen seemed like the height of adulthood. And every now and then, Lynda would let me get close to it, to see what it was really like.
LYNDA:
Who’s my favorite guy?
TINY:
I am!
LYNDA:
And who will you never date?
TINY:
Jerks and assholes!
LYNDA:
That’s right.
Lynda sits down next to Tiny on the bench. Even though Tiny sees her as being effortlessly old, she’s really just a sixteen-year-old girl dealing with everyone’s shit, including her own. The time she spends with Tiny is her escape from the outside world, and she wants to teach him a few things about life before she inevitably leaves him for Oberlin.
“THE BALLAD OF THE LESBIAN BABYSITTER” is vulnerable and wistful, as if Joni Mitchell herself had come over for ten dollars an hour to share some world-weary wisdom with her big, gay babysittee.
Bonus points if you can find an actress for Lynda who has hair long enough to sit on. She was that awesome.
Cue music.