The Fine Art of Pretending to Be What You Don't Want Other People to Think You Are

By Paul Briggs

When I was thirteen, I took part in a production of Of Mice and Men in Minneapolis. This was kind of a big deal — it wasn't just community theater, it was professional.

The casting was just about perfect. Our "George" was played by Howard Schloss, a tall, dark man with just a touch of gray in his hair. He had big hands, kind of a long face, and a deep voice that was a little bit hoarse. He usually played villains (he'd just got done being Jonathan Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace), so this was a big change of pace for him. Our "Slim" looked a bit like Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard, but with more gravitas. Speaking of bosses, "The Boss" was almost a dead ringer for R. Lee Ermey, except for being bald as a bowling ball.

The role of "Candy's dog" was performed by the stage manager's dog, Bobo, an aging Lhasa apso that looked like a big dust bunny and farted more than any other man or beast I have ever encountered in my life. We're talking loud, wet, splatty-sounding farts here. This lent an unexpected bit of low comedy to the first act.

And I hope you've already guessed what role I played. The theater actually sent me a letter inviting me to try out. The director had read an article about me in the paper, one of those feature stories that somebody does once every few years. (I think it was the one that told how I was learning to make my own shoes.)

This was just about the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life up until then.

See, the character of Lennie is everything I've always tried not to act like, and tried to let other people know I wasn't. He's simple-minded, clumsy, and in spite of all his good intentions, he tends to destroy things by accident. People feel sorry for him right up until they're in the same room with him, and then all they can think is "please God don't let him kill me."

Also, I try not to complain about this too much, but I've often met people who expected me to be some kind of moron just because I'm a giant. I guess the thinking is you can have either brains or brawn, but both in the same person would be just too much. So playing Lennie… think about how a Jewish actor would feel about playing Shylock. I wouldn't say it was that bad exactly, but I was having a hard time getting comfortable with it.

And on top of all that, I had to dress like a man, get my hair cut like a man's, get made up to look like a man, and generally do everything I could to look and act like a man… having been mistaken for a man more than once while trying to look like a woman.

* * *

People don't usually make that mistake anymore. This is partly because I have a decent set of curves, and partly because a 7'9" woman is not much stranger than a 7'9" man.

There was a time when this was more of a problem. It started, I'd say, the year I turned ten, and ended when I was about thirteen. Usually, it would happen when I was using the restroom in a strange place. Some girl or woman would come in, see me out of the corner of their eye or catch a glimpse of the top of my head over the side of the restroom stall, and panic. After the first couple of times this happened, I made a point of saying something like "it's okay, I'm a girl," but sometimes they didn't even stick around long enough to hear me. (I have to admit — when you're a normal-sized woman and you walk into a restroom and see something six foot eight or so and dressed in Big & Tall Men's clothing, it's perfectly understandable if you don't want to try for a closer look.)

But people who did get a good look at me generally didn't make this mistake. I wasn't proportioned like a grown man, and my skin was too smooth and hairless. There were only two times I can remember when I was actually mistaken for a man.

The first time, I had just turned ten and I was about six-one, maybe a hair over. Grandma and Grandpa Harris were moving into a gated community in Florida — not a real retirement community, but with so many old people it might as well have been. Mom and Dad had come to help them move. After a week of packing up a whole household, hauling it halfway across the country and setting it up again in a much hotter and muggier place (I managed not to break any furniture while moving it) Grandma and Grandpa were all settled in, and decided the family should put in an appearance that Sunday at the local Baptist church. (Mom wasn't technically a Baptist, but they were willing to overlook this.)

As it happened, my parents and Jody had packed a set of good clothes, but I had none to pack. Even at this age, Mom was having trouble getting decent women's clothing in my size. But, as it happened, Grandma had a late birthday present for me — a dress that fit. (Of course, it was a little behind the fashion curve and it made me look like a supporting character in "Little House On the Prairie," but it was a dress and it fit. This was becoming something to celebrate.) So now we were all ready to go to church.

I didn't understand at the time about gated communities. You'd think they'd be like small towns, but they're not. The people who live there — to start with, they're already self-selected for fear of the outside world. That's why they moved there in the first place. And when you put a bunch of like-minded people together in one place, they push each other towards further and further towards the extreme — this is very basic psychology.

Then the siege mentality starts to kick in. One of the things I learned from Justin (and he knows as much about horror movies as any man alive) is that when you hide something scary, or hide from something scary, that makes it even scarier. In a gated community, what you're hiding from is basically the whole world.

The point I'm trying to make here is that people may start out close to normal when they move into one of those places, but over the course of years they slip, little by little, into deep paranoia. This represents my one attempt to come up with a charitable explanation for the behavior of all those people in what was advertised as a Christian church.

Even before the trouble started, I felt a little weird. I'd never been in a church that looked this new — I was used to the Catholic church in Rieseland, which was built about a hundred years ago. This wasn't one of the big Six-Flags-Over-Jesus megachurches you see nowadays, but to me it still looked modern and cheesy and… just not what I thought of as religious. I know I wasn't judging it fairly.

Not only that, everybody was giving me these sidelong looks. Of course, I was already used to people looking at me funny, but this was different. Usually they were curious, nervous or pitying. This bunch looked more… suspicious. Hostile, even.

Grandma and Grandpa were doing their best, introducing themselves and the rest of us along with them, mentioning to anyone who happened to listen that I was only ten and, yes, I was kind of a giant, but there was nothing wrong with that. But a lot more people saw me than heard them, especially since so many of them were old and hard of hearing.

So I was already feeling pretty uncomfortable when I sat down, like I wasn't actually supposed to be there. You can imagine how I felt when this happened.

First, the preacher came up to the end of my pew and said, "Excuse me, sir."

Naturally, I looked around to see who he might be talking to.

"Sir?" Now he was poking me in the shoulder. I looked up.

I don't remember his name. He was a small, balding guy with thick glasses. (Looking back, it must have taken a certain amount of nerve for him to confront me like this. A real six-foot-plus trannie could have socked him into the middle of next week's sermon before anybody made a move to defend him. At the time, though, I wasn't inclined to think so much of him.)

"I'm sorry, sir, but the Bible clearly says the man shall not dress in the clothing of the woman—"

"What's that got to do with me?"

"Who's dressing how?" said Dad.

"And why do you keep calling me 'sir'?"

Mom was a little quicker on the uptake. "Excuse me — are you calling my daughter a transvestite?"

Now I was getting it. "THESE PEOPLE THINK I'M A MAN?"

That got Dad off his feet. "I'm her father, you little shit!" he said in front of God and everybody.

"I think you should all leave," said the preacher, backing away nervously.

Meanwhile, everybody in the room — and this was a pretty big room — was staring at me angrily. You can imagine how humiliated I was. Then I happened to notice a door in the front, not too far away, that said "EXIT." Just what I needed.

I ran straight for the door. Somebody tried to get in my way, but then thought better of it and stepped aside. It didn't even register on me that this was an emergency exit until I crashed through it and the fire alarm went off. When I looked back, the door was just barely hanging on one hinge.

(By the way, at this point I weighed less than two hundred pounds. I should not have been able to do any damage at all. If a man or a woman that size comes along and knocks your door off its hinges, don't get mad at them — take it up with the contractors.)

My whole family followed me out of there. Uncle Hank turned back just long enough to shout "THIS IS WHY I LEFT THE SOUTHERN BAPTISTS!" (Off topic, but I've always wondered why the Southern Baptists never got back together with the original-flavor Baptists like the Methodists did, now that we've all agreed slavery was a bad idea.)

The alarm was still going when we left. Most of the congregation had gathered outside to get away from it while the pastor tried to figure out how to turn it off. I have to say I took a little satisfaction in knowing that their Sunday morning had been ruined almost as thoroughly as mine. We flew back to Wisconsin that evening.

* * *

The second time was at Aunt Josephine's wedding. She was my mother's youngest sister. She babysat me and Jody for a couple of years when she was at Chippewa Valley Tech. I had a lot of fond memories of her, so I was really looking forward to this.

At this point, I was thirteen and around seven-two or seven-three. Jody was ten and a little too old to be a flower girl, so she and I were what they call "honorary bridesmaids." That's actually just like being a regular bridesmaid, only hopefully nobody tries to hit on you. Also you get to hang out with the other bridesmaids after the ceremony, even if you don't really have anything in common with them.

Before the wedding, we went to a dressmaker in Columbus who outfitted me, Mom and Jody in matching dresses. In exchange for a discount, I appeared in some ads that he ran in the paper. One of them showed me, Mom and Jody all wearing our dresses, with the caption "We can fit everybody in." In the other, I was admiring myself in a full-length (for some people) mirror, smiling at the camera and giving it a thumbs-up with one hand while my other hand was holding up the mirror at an angle where I could see myself in it. (And that thing was heavy.) The caption read "All shapes and sizes welcome."

It wasn't until later that I found out one of his competitors in the city had gotten into an embarrassing public dispute by refusing to outfit an obese woman. When I walked through the door, the first thing he thought was "Here's an awesome chance to make myself look good at the expense of the competition." My kind of businessman. And it was a nice dress, too. I didn't know at the time about things like gathers and style line, but it did a great job of showing my figure without constricting movement. It also accentuated my bust, which at this point still needed a little help.

Back to the wedding. I was in this dress, Mom had done my makeup, and I was wearing some nice simple pearl earrings. The point is, I was looking as female as I could at this point.

Everything went great. After the ceremony, Jody and I were hanging out with the "real" bridesmaids, not making a lot of conversation with them but feeling very grownup because they'd given Jody a little sip of champagne and let me drink the rest of the glass. (At that, we might have been the two soberest people in the room.)

Then along came Craig. He was a friend of the groom's, apparently he hadn't heard about me, and he was kind of drunk. Now to help you place this in time, it was right after the movie "Crocodile" Dundee came out. Have you seen the movie? Do you remember the scene where he's in the bar with the cab driver and he cops a feel of the cross-dresser's crotch? You already know what's coming, don't you?

Yep. He grabbed me right there. The look on his face when he realized this wasn't a man's junk he had hold of would've been funny if I hadn't been so ticked off.

He was very apologetic. He said he was very, very sorry, and he didn't mean anything by it, he thought I was a man dressed as a woman, not that I didn't look feminine, he just didn't think anyone my size could possibly be female, and he hoped I wasn't mad at him, he was just doing something he'd seen in the movies, he wasn't trying to offend, and did he mention how sorry he was, and arrrrrgh would I please let go of his arms before I broke something?

So I did… but by that time, Daddy had already come staggering to my rescue.

"DID YOU DAUTCH MY TUTTER?" he bellowed, and started laying into Craig with both fists without waiting for an answer. Even as drunk as he was, he still had decent form, and Craig was too embarrassed to fight back. (Also I'd managed to dislocate his right elbow.) A couple of Craig's buddies looked like they wanted to come to his rescue, but I stood in their path and they decided not to.

Finally they had to break it up. The groom's mother wanted to call the police, but Craig begged her not to. Even back then, sexual assault on a minor wasn't something you wanted on your permanent record, no matter how major the minor. Everyone agreed that it wasn't my fault, but the whole thing was still pretty humiliating.

* * *

Getting back to the play… there were other reasons it was a challenge for me.

First of all, everyone else there was a real actor or actress, and this was the first play I'd ever been in. (There aren't a lot of dramatic roles suitable for giant girls. If I were to play Juliet, that balcony had better be up to code. If I were Nora in A Doll's House, Torvald would look even dumber than usual with all that "my lark, my sparrow, my little turtledove" crap.) They were all very supportive, but I knew perfectly well that if it wasn't for my size I'd never have been cast for anything, let alone one of the great tragic roles in American drama.

I started out trying to make my voice deeper than it really was, but the director, Mrs. Kuzmick, said I should just use my normal voice. (My normal voice, by the way, is a sort of contralto, and can be quite loud if I'm not careful to control it.)

And playing a dude with a mental disability is harder than you think. You remember the running gag from Tropic Thunder about how "you never go full retard" if you want to win an Oscar? The joke, of course, is that actors almost always get it wrong, and they way they get it wrong is by overdoing it, hamming up all the little mannerisms.

Of course, when I first started rehearsing (at least as soon as I had the lines memorized well enough to do more than just read them off the page) I did even worse, playing the role as sort of cartoonishly dopey. Howard said, "Reenie, stop mugging."

At least this was an instruction I could follow. Mrs. Kuzmick kept saying mysterious-sounding, useless things like "Don't act. Don't perform. Just be." I could tell I was doing something wrong, but I wasn't getting a lot of helpful advice. After a while I started to feel a little like Lennie, too dumb to know what was really going on. Maybe this was what she had in mind, but I doubt it.

And I wasn't as patient as Lennie, either. I didn't know it at the time, but in all plays there's a certain amount of experimenting that goes on in rehearsal, as the director and the cast work out the best way to approach the performance. If you're new to it, you can get the feeling that everybody's just treading water and not making any progress as opening night gets closer and closer.

Finally I shouted "Goddammit, speak English!" And of course, this brought everything to a screeching halt. (If you've ever wondered where the idea of the "gentle giant" came from… if you couldn't show the slightest bit of temper without everybody in the room freaking out and somebody calling 911, you'd learn to be gentle too.)

"Please," I said. "I want to get this right. I don't want to be the worst actor on stage. Just… help me figure out what I'm doing here."

Just for a moment, Mrs. Kuzmick looked (to me at least) like Jody when she had to put away her toys and start her homework. She was really enjoying being all mysterious and aggravating.

"What I mean is," she finally said, "at this point, try not to think so much about Lennie and how simple he is. Just… be yourself."

I didn't have time to say What's that supposed to mean? Even as I was drawing myself up to my full height and the expression on my face was changing, she said, "Oh god, wait, stop, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that like it sounded… How about this? Try saying the lines as if there wasn't anything retarded about them. Say them like they were perfectly normal, sensible things to say. Once you've gotten the hang of that, we can sort of build the character up from there."

This, at least, was something I could understand. Later on, Howie added, "Listen, I've played enough bad guys to know… you can trust the audience to understand the character you're playing isn't you." God bless him. He was really my first big crush.

Speaking of crushing, there are three scenes where the "gentle giant" roughs up another character. The first was the scene where Curley starts pounding on Lennie and Lennie grabs his hand and squeezes it into handburger. To get this right, first we had to get Kevin (our Curley) to hit me and make it look real. That involved slipping a sheet of hard rubber under my costume so he could punch me in the stomach without hurting me. Then we had to work out exactly how much I could squeeze his hand without hurting it for real. "A little more, a little more — WHOA-STOP-ENOUGH… that's perfect."

The next scene was the "WHO HURT GEORGE???" scene between Lennie and Crooks. All I had to do there was sort of lift him by his shoulders and shout in his face. Just as well — our Crooks was kind of an old man. He turned off his hearing aid before the start of the scene so my shouting wouldn't hurt his ears. (Crooks and Lennie kind of talk past each other for half the scene, so he didn't really need it.)

Then, of course, came the tricky one — the one where Lennie accidentally kills Curley's wife. Obviously, I couldn't experiment with Fiona's neck the way I did with Kevin's hand. She was kind of a petite, waifish-looking woman — I got nervous handling her. (If she was at all afraid, she hid it very well.) I managed it by making a very sudden movement when it was time to put my hand over her mouth, then slowing it down about it an inch in front of her face. (This was less chancy than it sounds. There's nothing like tennis practice to give you millimeter-level control over your arm muscles.) Then, when she was "dead," I had to shove the body between a couple of hay bales in a child's attempt to hide the damage. For some reason, the audience always laughed at this.

I know I've gotten a little off topic, but I just have to mention the last scene. You know — the big tear-jerker. There I am, center stage forward, sort of hunkered down on an imaginary riverbank, leaning over the edge. George is standing behind me, left hand on my shoulder, right hand on Carlson's luger, pointing it at my brainstem. He's choking back tears as he tells me one last time how lucky the two of us are to have each other in a world so full of loneliness, and about the wonderful place we're going to have someday where I get to tend the rabbits… the lights go down until all that's left is one spotlight on him and me… "I can see it, George! I can see it! Right over there — I can see it!" Lights out. Bang. We both go backstage in the dark to wait for the curtain call.

The first time we rehearsed this scene, Howie's hand wasn't on his shoulder, it was on my arm. That nice, big, callused hand was on my upper left arm — not gripping it, but holding it gently. My sleeves were rolled up far enough that he was in contact with my skin. He was speaking to me in that low, soft, smoky voice of his…

You guessed it. I was really liking this. I was getting seriously aroused. My face was all hot, my heart was pounding, my insides felt like they were made out of warm butter, goosebumps were spreading out in ripples from where his hand was touching my skin…

"Hey! Reenie!"

Oh right. Lines. I had some. Um… what were they again?

About this time he noticed that I was flushed and trembling.

"Are you all right? You look like you're coming down with something." He put a hand on my forehead. "Feels like you got a fever…" At this point my brain was reasserting control, saying Act normal, act normal.

But of course it was too late. By this time Mrs. Kuzmick, who unlike Howie had been looking at my face all this time, was trying very hard not to laugh.

"Let's take a five-minute break," she said. "Reenie, go… lie down." If I'd realized at the time that she knew exactly what was going on, I would have run away and never come back.

No, I didn't go off and masturbate. I got a two-liter bottle of Coke out of the greenroom fridge and drank half of it, wrapped some ice cubes in a paper towel and pressed them against my face, then lay down on the couch like a good girl. It wasn't exactly comfortable, since I could only lie on it sideways and my legs hung over the armrest, but it gave me a chance to cool off and lose the feeling that I was either going to melt or explode in the next minute or so. Then Bobo came into the room to serenade me with his flatulence. That did the trick.

Afterwards things went on more or less as before, but Howie looked at me a little differently and was more careful with his hands. Like a lot of creatures, we giants stop being cute when we get old enough to breed. (And yes, I'm sure he didn't do it on purpose. In fact, I found out later that when Mrs. Kuzmick told him he was turning me on, he was horrified and said, "Well, how do I turn her off again?" After all, I was underage.)

Back to the play. Most of the reviews were… mostly positive. For example: "Once you get over the initial shock of seeing Harris, you can appreciate the understated and touching performance she delivers." Or: "Irene Harris, though undisguisably female, is young enough to give the role of Lennie an authentic touch of childlike innocence."

Not everybody liked it, of course. This guy in particular:

"One of the unspoken rules of theater is never to put anything real onstage. Ten years ago I saw a performance of A Christmas Carol in which the child actor who portrayed Tiny Tim had cerebral palsy. I'm sure everyone had good intentions, and he did the best he could, but the reality of his disability made everyone and everything around him look fake.

"The fact that she can remember her lines proves that Miss Harris is only pretending to be a simpleton, but she is definitely a giant. Whenever she was onstage, all I could see was a pitiably oversized girl surrounded by actors and scenery. I honestly have no idea if she's a good actress or not." I, I, I… anyone would think he was reviewing himself. At least he was honest. And none of the critics mentioned Candy's dog, which was tactful of them.

The one thing everybody agreed on — the critics and the audience members I talked to — is that I didn't come across as male. My hair was cut short, I was wearing overalls and a man's shirt, no makeup, no earrings, even some fake beard stubble on my cheeks and jaws… the harder I tried to look like a man, the more obvious it was that I wasn't one.

The fake stubble was probably over the top.

Other Writings, Main Menu