Willing, Willing, & Willing

I'm not sure which blog to post this on, I guess here as my geneaology and ancestral roots vaguely tangent into the Mime Troupe.  First, may I say the obvious:  everyone has a personal history, which combines into a larger family history if you are fortunate enough to be born into such a nuclear system and learn of family histories.  When you are friends with people, and grow close to them you learn something about their family history and they about yours because you share campfire stories.  Usually people who are concerned with geneaology are first driven by person curiosity, but most who continue in such delvings into the past usually seek to determine their own pedigrees, or others of a more cultural bent hope to learn more about history and people in history and their actions and places and so on.

I did not have a large supply of relatives on my father's side (though he was one of eleven children, remember kids died off early back then) so I heard a bit of my mother's geneaology from her.  She was raised by her blind grandmother in the South as the unwanted child of vaudevillians who performed on the circuit.  My mother's mother (born in 1880 or so) left home or ran away from home and joined the circus so to speak at the age of fourteen, and she became a dancer.  Though sometimes she would play in skits, too, show business being what it was (comedic skits, once she was a maid in costume).  She would turn down other job offers (for instance, a promoter on Boblo Island amusement park outside of Michigan when she first left home offered her a $5 or $7 to dive from a high platform into a small tank of water.  Another or so it was said tried to get her to dance on a platform atop a flag pole, and she considered that but declined.  Whenever I saw historic films of ladies doing the Charleston on the top of hot air balloon floating through the air, cinema shot by a crazy cameraman seated safely in a nearby biplane, I would think of my grandmother).   

My grandmother met my grandfather, Charles Willinghurst, a Southerner, on the vaudeville circuit (Great Lake States, into New York, a little into unspecified regions of the South, and once she said she played Iowa) and so my mom was born and soon shuffled off to an old wooden house in Kentucky to be brought up.  Charles Willinghurst was a vaudevillian performer as well, part Irish so he could do a step dance and a jig.  But his act, the act he was famous for (with a friend) was as a black faced minstrel, and they called themselves Willing & Willing.  They brought a third guy into the act and renamed the act "Willing, Willing, & Willing" but soon dropped him because of disagreements and went back to the twosome for performance.

I used to have an old clipping from a newspaper of the time, held folded in a book, a clipping which had nearly disintegrated by the time I even first saw it c. 1960, a large nearly full page article and photo, showing a photograph of Willing & Willing in blackface and standing next to an old wooden dray cart hauled by a mule.  A publicity shot and show announcement or review.  My mother, raised in the South, for many good reasons I felt, grew to hate her father and his act.  She even dropped the use of his name and assumed the last name of my grandmother's second husband, another Southerner, who she had met several times.

Because I was a curious child, I would ask my mother sometimes about her (painful) memories, especially the blackface act.  She said all they did was sing and dance and make jokes and white people would laugh at the antics of white people pretending to be shuffling comedic black people.  For a number of reasons (his alcoholism, punching her in the nose and breaking it to steal the three dollars she had in her hand earned from sewing a dress when she was 8 years old all so he could run to the tavern and get a much needed drink, the cruelty, the abandonment, being forced to live with someone she hated), my mother detested her father.  And she was embarrassed always that she had been raised in the South.

These were my roots, my own real painful personal history as well, but I am happy to say I shared this story with my theatrical friends, and they eventually came up with a pretty damn good spin on this story.

We were Willing, too.  Can you guess which play I am speaking of now?  That my friends who I knew from the desert college and now the friends at Williams College put together and put on?

(This is a picture of me as a kid on Catalina [August 1953].  My mother didn't even want to pose by the cart, as tourists would, let alone get into it as just the sight and the notion of the photographs brought back painful memories for her.  As to the publicity photo of her father, I like her would just keep it folded in a book until it was pulverized by time and turned to dust.).

This is a very important part of the secret and now obscured history of the early origins of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.  At least to me. (I'm the one wearing the hat)

I am obliged to mention that my mother's father and mother were indeed married when my mother was born.  My mother went through much anxiety when she was trying to get her birth certificate once and discovered the local Kentucky building holding those records had burned down.  She was afraid.  She had to get a baptismal certificate, to prove that she was who she said when asking for proof of birth to be provided elsewhere ... which she did eventually get, but the church records she looked into also showed marriage records.  So at least she was "legitimate", which was a bit of relief to her.  She was quite embarrassed to be the child of vaudevillians (actresses, dancers, musicians were regarded as the scum of proper society), and the child of divorced parents (as no one was divorced back then in 1917, those who did were regarded as loose moraled people), and the child of a blackface comedian to boot who was himself raised in the South, and then ashamed of being raised in the South herself.  Some of that personal history of hers rubbed off on me, how could it not?  It all was part of who I was and eventually became.  But enough about me.