3-فرانک جیمز یاغی

The Outlaw Frank James

Whereas I was a goof as a kid, my brother Kim had a serious streak; he was introspective. He was smarter than me, not as athletic. But we were aligned in almost every other way. Brothers in every sense. And we both inherited the acting gene. Kim became my first director. He wrote and mounted the McNulty Avenue Garage production of The Legend of Frank and Jesse James, then cast me as Frank James. For Jesse, he looked next door to the Baral household. The Barals had five boys, and my brother chose Howard, the middle child, to play the heartless outlaw. Kim cast himself as the sheriff, several victims, townspeople, the coroner, and a newspaperman. I’m not sure why he didn’t cast others—there were plenty of kids in the neighborhood. Maybe he wanted them to pay their nickel like everyone else.

We draped white sheets over storage boxes, and they became snowcapped mountains. We fashioned a blue plastic tarp into a raging river. A stuffed alligator snapped at our heels. Alligators abounded in the Old West. Of course the denouement was a fateful shoot-out. We were boys, pretending to kill each other, playing with glee and abandon.

My first venture as a professional actor was a family production, too. My dad wrote, directed, and produced a series of ads for the United Crusade, which would later change its name to the United Way. I guess invoking a blood-soaked religious war wasn’t the vibe they were going for as a charity. My dad cast me as the lead. I was seven. The story went I was playing baseball with friends on a sandlot when a foul ball rolled into the street and I gave chase. Look out! I got hit by a car, put into an ambulance, rushed to the ER, and put into a head-to-toe body cast. Weeks later the cast came off, and I started physical therapy on the parallel bars and in the pool to learn how to walk again. In the last scene I held hands with a woman pretending to be my mother as we joyfully walked out of the hospital. Healed.

I remember shooting every one of those scenes. I remember feeling that there was something special about what I was doing. Maybe it was just the attention. But I think it was something more. A sense that I was part of something greater than myself.