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Finding Tulsa 13

3. there is luscious hidden language

When a show closed, before the last performance, everybody from the
little kids like me to the older college kids signed their names on the backs
of a flat. Flats were painted over and used again, so you had to label the
show you were in.
Eric Shoemaker was very neat, making a small signature in paint be-
side each previous show he did. Mickey Steinbock used to draw cartoons,
until he used a Magic Marker that bled through the other side. We had to
keep putting pictures or plants in front of the stain to hide it.
Other student actors were more flamboyant, scribbling large John
Hancocks or funny sayings. That kept us together more than all the latch-
es and hinges and sandbags combined.
Whenever I was in a show as a boy, I remember pacing backstage and
counting the flats with my signature. But mostly it was with my brother,
our two first names stacked together above our last:

DAN & STAN
GROZNIAK

It was our little tribute to ourselves. I’m Stan. Stanley Valeri Grozniak,
officially. Nice name for a Polish-Irish kid, huh? Those flats were littered
with our names long before our first dates with girls, that activity being yet
another form of acting for me.
When a flat became too laden with layers of paint, cracked, or ripped
a few too many times for another patch, it was usually shoved away in a
vertical file along the side of the scene shop, the giant play space of saws,
hammers, drills, buckets of bolts, racks of lumber, and bins of pigment.
If we were short of wood, some techie would take out an old flat, rip
off the canvas and start all over again. There was no need to rip up a well-
made flat. They took too long to build.
Sometimes we scrubbed and thinned the layers of paint on a canvas so
we could reuse it. Dick Thorson and I would hose the flats down, scrub-
bing them in the driveway of the scene shop, both of us shirtless and wet
in the summer afternoons, our few hours actually spent in the sun. My