Excerpt from the Introduction of I Was A Teenage Mennonite:
Carol Burnett was right. Comedy is tragedy plus time. I know this because I was a teenage Mennonite. Not just anytime, but in the sixties. Now forty years later it’s time to pull the brown paper wrapper off the hidden world of the Mennonites. Can adolescents survive and thrive with oppressive restrictions? Well, what if they’re Mennonites? How do they fare compared to the youth of their day? Better yet, how did I fare during these days? This is my story.
At the precise time the rest of the teenage world was tripping out, I was tripping up. When others were dropping out, I was trying to drop in to a new sense of normality. Certainly the concept of normal will always be a moving target. But for me the target I was shooting at seemed as far away as the moon. Little did I know that by 1969 both targets would be hit. Unfortunately, for me, the moon was the easier challenge!
Perhaps a bit of pain and teenage angst is good for the adolescent psyche. No pain, no gain. That’s the theory bandied about in athletics. But what if athletics isn’t your life? What if your life seemed to revolve around more and more restrictions? The kind attributed to God’s laws but probably linked closer to man-made rules!
What if you asked your dad for soccer boots and he said, “Nah, you won’t make the team!” Or you pleaded to join the Little League baseball team and the reply was,“No! They play on Sundays!” And what if you were thirteen and wanted nothing more than a haircut similar to your classmates. Especially on the night of the big church skating party? And you were forced to live through the night of half-a-haircut, not once but endlessly as the night was put on ice long before your skates hit the arena floor.
Tragedy+Time=Comedy. Well, Carol, let’s see if you were right.
Tragedy. These events are symbolic of the tragedies in to which I was unwillingly cast.
Time. Forty years seems like a long enough stretch!
Comedy. Only a clear look back captures the time and place so removed from the adolescent experience of the twenty-first century.
Is it comedy? Absolutely!
I believe if you can’t laugh, you’ll probably lament every negative experience that shaped your life. But if you laugh, now you’re in control. And isn’t that what most adolescents want anyway?
So, I’ve chosen to laugh. Not a little ha-ha-ha twittering but a full-blown belly laugh. Forty years later that’s what you can get if you gain a few pounds. Hey, I’m over 50. You didn’t think I’d still look like the picture on the cover, did you?
This is my journey from borscht to Broadway, from pain to laughter, from a shy Mennonite boy to shy Mennonite grandpa! OK, that’s a lie, the shy Grandpa part anyway. But everything else is the truth. Except when you speak to my father or mother. They’ll deny everything. And I know why. They weren’t there. At least not in my skin. So their perspective is all wrong. Please judge for yourself. And let me know if you don’t agree that the scariest creature you could have been in the sixties was a TEENAGE MENNONITE!
