Tabishland

Seriously, if it weren’t for the dynamo Mr. Tabish’s bullying , meanness, intimidation, stubbornness, god-like teacher-ego, ISAIDNO!attitude… whatever!…Excruciatingly Shy Janine seriously would NEVER have taken a high school theatre class, would NEVER have appeared on stage, would NEVER have met or socially associated with anyone who called themselves Sendracians?, would NEVER have majored in theatre in college against her father’s wishes, would NEVER have enjoyed a professional theatre career, would NEVER have become a teacher who now in her fourteenth year, teaches thousands of dramatic type students just like her once-self to take risks and to always strive for more in all of their serious and not so serious dramatic endeavors inside and outside of the classroom and on the stage. (And a whole lot more.)

It all started in eleventh grade when some kind of guidance office mess-up (and she did consider it a SERIOUS, DISASTEROUS, LIFE THREATENING mess-up at the time) scheduled her for an acting class as one of her English classes. (Does anyone remember when IAHS students could select their area of English study???) Reportedly, she took her drop slip to the infamous TabishGod where she expected him to happily sign off his okay on the dotted line. (She was much more interested in the cool class that covered the Existentialism of Dr. Seuss’s poetry than in an acting class. Seriously.) Much to her dismay and then to her raging disbelief, he, Mr. TabishGod, REFUSED to let her drop the class!!!!! Needless to say she was furious, and used every arsenal at her disposal.(Which at that time amounted to about two things…whining (serious whining) and sulking, really award winning dramatic sulking, to get him to just sign the ridiculous drop slip. If anyone remembers, this was the era in public education when students would NOT complain to the office and especially NOT to their parents about this obviously serious violation of some kind of civil rights code…THAT would have made the problem nine million times worse and probably would have caused a SERIOUS grounding for Janine for the rest of the school year if not for her life time for being so disrespectful to an elder AND to a teacher.(A double oh-no))
He, Mr. Tabish, even more stubbornly held his NO! ground and refused to put Shy Janine out of her painfully obvious misery…with a smile on his face.
So…here she was, horribly STUCK in an acting class with REAL actors who felt no embarrassment at doing strange, weird stretches and unbelievably odd exercises at the beginning of each class, with no way out. She was bound and determined to ruin it for everyone. ( Back to a reminder of public education at that time, students didn’t really have the chutzpah to ruin class for the other students or for what they imagined to be their hated teacher.) She silently, but painfully, endured the class as best she could.

One day, a Miss Gerlach, tapped Shy Janine on the shoulder and said that she had been hearing from Mr. Tabish himself, some wonderful things about her work in his acting class. Janine thought, (but of course wouldn’t say out loud to a TEACHER), “Are you kidding me? I hate that class, and I hate that man who thinks he can ruin my life, and I hate all those overly dramatic Sendracians, who probably are the ones who are smoking in the back and getting us all in trouble and are ruining our high school, and I know I’m STUCK there for a WHOLE LIFETIME of a semester and everything, but if you think I’m going to show up in front of you and the entire universe after school ON MY OWN TIME and make a fool out of myself to audition…well, you’ve just got another thing coming. HUMMMMMPH.”
She must have really said something else out loud like, “WHAT? Me???” because she did go to that audition somehow…and was cast as Mrs. Gibbs… and then went on to act in a few more plays and sign up for every single English class that Mr. Tabish taught. She quit marching band for him, which she loved (weren’t there like nine days of rehearsals every week?), lost her “other friends”, whom she loved, because they didn’t understand, even defied her father, whom she really loved and respected, because she had been given that little taste of theatre and she was desperately hungry for more…
All because of a little man in polyester slacks whom had strange ideas about the first five minutes of every class, whom she still can only call MISTER Tabish, took a notice of her, and invited (well, technically, forced) her to take a risk.

That risk has guided and greatly fulfilled my entire life.
From my heart, thank you so much Mister Tabish.