Up With People
POSTED:
Wed, Sep 07 2005 - 05:13 AM
I traveled nonstop for two years around the world with the performing group Up With People, beginning when I was 19. If you aren’t familiar with UWP, maybe you’ve seen The Simpson’s hilarious parody of it, “Hooray For Everybody.” Glenn Close traveled in UPW back in the 1970’s with my friend Bob, but she refuses to talk about it, other than to have implied in an interview that she had to seek therapy afterwards. My experience was kind of the reverse: I had a nervous breakdown during my freshman year and knew I couldn’t return to a university setting. Why not escape to an otherworldly on-the-go existence where the most arduous thing I’d do was twirl around onstage with an uptight coterie of likeminded closet cases?
Actually, my parents, in the thick of their religious cult years, suggested I join UWP. Cult kids had traveled with UWP in the past because the exalted octogenarians who controlled the cult viewed a year on the road quite favorably: if you traced UWP and the cult back far enough, you found something fun and frolicsome at the root called Moral Rearmament. Founded on the same retrograde dogma that’s served up today as Christian Family Values, Moral Rearmament advocated against drinking, drugs, premarital sex, women doing anything outside the home and homos, leading me to wonder why groups of this nature don’t simply cut to the chase and slaughter everyone at birth.
Rightly sensing that Moral Rearmament needed some jazzing up, more astute members (those who could read and write) branched out and launched better-marketed cults of their own, organizations that were based generally on the same restrictive moral principles, but wrapped in more appetizing packages. One of these was UWP, which broke with Moral Rearmament in the early 1960’s and quickly took off —“I’ve got a banjo, you’ve got a tambourine, let’s have a show!”—in response to the cataclysmic socio-cultural meltdown of the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s. America was coming unglued. The urban counterculture was intent on destroying every vestige of a corrupt, diseased and militaristic society while, conversely, UWP was cheerily, almost robotically optimistic, exhorting the nation’s small town “silent majority” to focus on the positive.
By the time I arrived on the scene in 1980, UWP was already a freaky relic, although no one seemed to know or care, including me. Along with 400 other 18 – 24 year-olds from approximately 30 different nations, I touched down during a sweltering Tucson July to begin the whirlwind pre-tour training. Within five short weeks we would: be taught the two-hour variety show we’d perform every other night for a year; get inculcated with all UWP rules, values and appropriate modes of conduct and begin getting to know our fellow cast mates, all while learning to smile like our lives depended on it. Because in certain respects, they did.
It would be several weeks before the 400 of us were split into four casts of 100 members each. At the conclusion of the five weeks, each cast would board a different bus or plane to begin its completely unique global itinerary, with all casts covering broad swaths of the US and each cast visiting either Europe, South America or Asia. Those first weeks not knowing were agony because of course, by the second day we had sized up exactly who we wanted to boink and who we absolutely detested and who we were very best friends with and couldn’t ever possibly live a day without and, um, let’s just say that of the 400 people, approximately 394 had been in high school drama so the emotions ran a teensy bit high. This fraught situation was heightened in that everyone had to do voice, dance and Master of Ceremonies auditions to determine who would be the stars and who would stand so far back on the risers humming they wouldn’t be recognized by their mother. During the auditions, if you were able to smile like Jon Benet Ramsey or you’d been electroshocked continuously as a child (if there is a difference) it boosted your chances by about 400% because many of us were so terrified of wetting ourselves that smiling wasn’t really on the radar screen.
This part needs a little bit of explanation. When you “audition” for UWP, there is no talent part—it’s just a series of interviews. That’s ostensibly because a lot of what you do on the road is community-service based, like performing in nursing homes, prisons, hospitals (they don’t care what you sound like?) and also because in every one of the 100 cities visited over the year on the road, you stay with host families (more on this later, oy) and finally because the year is meant to be highly-educational (it is, just not at all how they mean it to be), you are told repeatedly that the emphasis is not on the show. Uh-huh. And I’m Totie Fields.
So what happened is three kinds of people interviewed for and were accepted by UWP: 10% talented showstoppers who had every intention of performing their little hearts out in each and every show and didn’t give a shit about all that community crap; 10% earnest [mostly non-American] salt-of-the-earth types who bought the UWP bullshit hook, line and sinker, only to find out that, egad, the show consumed 95% of everyone’s time, attention and status, so they were first crestfallen and then really, really bitter; 80% cool, fabulous people like me and those I loved who had no idea what they were joining but thought it would be a hoot. (Not exactly true. Once I figured out the show was the thing and everything else was just lip service of course I began scheming for stardom, simply needing to surmount one weentsy problem, my utter lack of talent.)
OK, so nearly everyone wants to be right up front but only a few have the talent to be, and it’s during the five-week period where the merciless winnowing takes place. The voice part was basic—you stepped up to a microphone and sang for about 10 seconds. Even though I’d been in high-school musicals, I knew I was toast after the first three guys took a whack, hello High School of Performing Arts, fuck them. On to dance. We were put in groups of 40 or so, the Dance Captains (how friendly to have adopted military names for the sadistic production staff!) put on some music and we were told to “move.” Um, can you imagine anything more sadistic or embarrassing, to be given no direction at all except to flail about to music you’d never heard before, unless you happened to be a Solid Gold Dancer, which I swear some of these bastards were?
I, on the other hand, have always been a very self-conscious dancer, even as a successful graduate of an accelerated disco program in Stacey Ellison’s garage and can, to this day, pretzel like nobody’s business. Sensing that they were looking for something outré and modern, however, I kind of slithered around with my eyes closed, pooching out my hips while shaking and rolling my arms spasmodically which unfortunately resulted in my body hitting the wall with a resounding whack just as the music ended. Unsurprisingly I was not asked back for further dance training. I finally found my métier as an MC, always remembering to smile brightly.
Now that the dancer cream had been skimmed off the top of the jug, the rest of us klutzes had to be taught the basic steps we’d be doing back on the risers. The outrageous bitch in charge of choreography had been, unbelievably, one of the original “Golddiggers” on Dean Martin’s TV show in the ‘50’s and evidently was 7 years old when she did it, based on the age she was claiming in 1980. She had clearly watched “Fame” about 47 too many times, then had astral-projected into her own version of the movie, running 24/7, starring herself. Unsurprisingly, she always had a number of, um, sibilant, highly expressive male dancers standing by to rush into the terrorized crowd to correct our constant mistakes, (“SMILE, can't you smile and sing and dance at the same time, Jesus Christ”) as we shuffled our feet while attempting to sing into microphones perched high atop tiny risers. Hated her. And them.
The show was slowly coming together, highlighted by tried and true numbers like the anthem “Up With People” and contemplative “What Color is God’s Skin.” (If you’re dying to know, and who wouldn't be, “it’s red, brown it’s yellow it is black it is white, everyone’s the same in the good Lord’s sight.”) Plus all the [AARP] crowd-pleasing medleys that included snippets from the ‘20’s, ‘30’s and 40’s and international favorites from countries UWP had visited, including, for example, China, Poland and Spain. (We actually sang in those languages, oh dear.) We were constantly berated for not smiling even 25% as much as we were supposed to, and when we were smiling, it wasn’t at all big enough. Because no one in the history of the world has ever been asked to smile like people in UWP, our mouths actually twitched and shook, they hurt so much, until the vestigial muscles that were being phased out by natural selection but now, thanks to UWP, are probably staying with the species, got good and strong. Our costumes were atrocious, big blousy things that you stepped into and then pulled your pants over. If you weren’t a flaming fag before putting one on, you started lisping and prancing immediately thereafter.
Through all of this smiley cult-like creepiness I was, however, meeting the funniest, zaniest, warmest people. Each day I uncovered new treasure: two fabulous Scandinavians here, three strapping Iowans there, four Belgians yonder and a fiery girl named Gillian from Northern Ireland who I’m still halfway in love with, each of whom breathed precious bits of life into my diseased self. It was a full-time side-splitting I-wouldn’t-have-believed-it-but-I-was-there-and-it-happened love fest. We had journeyed from every corner of the globe for a multitude of reasons—who was I to judge in view of my own tortured path? My fritzed-out psyche wasn’t healing for real (that would take a few decades) but the excitement, the breathless possibility of it all had knocked the depression clear, leaving me gasping with an astonishing recollection of joy.
Next: On The Road With UWP
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