The first time I ever rode on a motorcycle was in a convent in Illinois.

I was a sophomore in a parochial high school in the western suburbs of Chicago. St. Joseph’s Academy was a formerly all-boys school that became co-ed when it merged with Mother Mary Academy, next door. I was a transfer student from a seminary in Indiana, and my younger brother, Matt, was a freshman.

Matt had been bitten by the theater bug and had gotten himself – and me - involved backstage on our high school’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie”, directed by Sister Helen. It was to be presented in Mother Mary Convent’s theater, and that’s where we rehearsed and built the sets.

I had been on stage in my freshman year, at the seminary. We were doing a one-act play called, “Mail Call”, about the shooting of a deserter during World War II. I don’t know what possessed me to try out; I wasn’t particularly stage struck. However, one of the characters in the play was a GI from New Jersey, and since I was the only guy in the seminary from New Jersey, I felt that it was my duty to play the part.

The whole play took place in a barracks, and after the production was over, it was decided by the director, Brother Nick, to expand the barracks set and produce a version of “Stalag 17”. This was convenient, as it had an all-male cast, and this was a seminary. Still, he had to do a lot of editing of the play’s language.

I was cast as a German guard, who comes in and says to Sefton, “Haben Sie Zigaretten? Ich habe Tee.” (“Do you have cigarettes? I have tea.”)

However, I was promoted to “Geneva Man” – that is, the person who inspected the camp to make sure the Germans were following the Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war. I had more lines to learn, and got to wear a trench coat and fedora and fake moustache, and to talk in English with a Swiss accent.

After the show, Fr. Jed, a Pole who had spent some time in a German prison camp, fervently praised my performance.

“You were so cold and aloof! Just like the Geneva Men who inspected our camp!” I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was bad acting on my part that led to such a standoffish performance.

That was my last attempt at acting until I began teaching. The play was a hit (but not because of me), but the experience had left me with a case of stage fright, and I had never wanted to be an actor, anyway.

Which leads us back to Sister Helen’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie”. Sister Helen, usually a sweetheart, was a tyrant when it came to directing. This nun should have been on Broadway. For the opening sequence where all the town’s teenagers are talking to each other on their phones, she had us build a set of large parceled shelves. They were three boxes high and four boxes across, each box large enough to hold a sitting teenager.

We also built the back end of a train on a large wagon, so that Conrad Birdie could wave goodbye as his “train” left the station for Sweetapple, Ohio. For special effects, it was my job to blow a fire extinguisher under the wagon, so that it looked like steam as the back of the “train” pulled away. Simple, but effective.

(I’m always amazed at the ingenuity of high school drama teachers. In “Stalag 17”, to get a fire effect, we shone an unseen orange light on a wall seen through a window, while the kid with the longest fingers in the school waved and fluttered them – offstage – in front of the light. It did look like the reflection of a fire.)

Sister Helen’s piece de resistance was the first appearance of Conrad Birdie. She had two students who owned motorcycles drive down the left and right aisles in the audience, up two specially made ramps and onto the stage. Conrad was to be a passenger on one of the bikes.

After the ramps were built, the time came, during rehearsal, to test them. That meant that each cycle had to have a test-passenger. My brother Matt volunteered me. They gave me a helmet, which I put on the wrong way. (Who knew they had earflaps?) And I got aboard the bike at the top of the aisle. The driver gunned the motor, and we took off. The theater and seats went by in a blur, and five seconds later, we were up on stage, exactly where we were supposed to be.

The play was a hit. There was probably more drama going on behind the curtain than out front, what with backstage romances, wardrobe fittings, bloopers, and set malfunctions. I enjoyed the experience, but for Matt, it was a turning point. He became involved in college theater years later and went on to become a professional lighting designer for buildings and discos.

I’ve gotten used to speaking in front of large groups of people since then, and every so often, I think I’d make a good character actor. I could play Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof”, for example. There are two other roles I would consider. One would be Dudley Smith, if they ever made a TV series out of James Ellroy’s L.A. quartet of books. The other would be Hannibal Lecter, if they ever made “Silence of the Lambs, the Musical!”

My Hannibal is quite effective. It scares my wife during television commercials when I give her that stare that Anthony Hopkins perfected and say to her, “Hello, Clarice.” Then, at the next commercial, she pretends to be a vampire and scares me back.

Years ago, in the Army, out at Fort Sill, I found that the post library had a number of rare books featuring George S. Kaufman’s plays. I was able to treat myself to such nuggets as, “Dinner at Eight” (written with Edna Ferber), “Of Thee I Sing” (written with Morrie Ryskind, with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin), “The Man Who Came to Dinner” (written with Moss Hart), and “You Can’t Take It With You” (also written with Moss Hart). It was then that I decided that – for me, anyway – writing was a lot more fun than acting.