“When you are on stage, you can do whatever you want,” he told me. “Just remember your lines, and you can even make those up as you go along. Your writing is just as good.”
That’s what Michael Sokolowski, or “Mike,” or “Mr. Sok,” my high school dramatics teacher said to me in 1972. If I had been more courageous, wealthy, and not such a naive home boy, I would have gone to acting school.
I was starting to live the life my dad, Jim, wanted: to be a thespian with an inclination toward dancing and musical drama. Mike brought out the stage actor in me. (That I became a professional equestrian would’ve left people aghast.)
I met him in 1969 at Lowell High School. We would go on to be lifelong friends until he passed too young at age 73.
Perhaps one of the funniest men I ever knew, Mike had a dour, sullen, yet humorous approach to popular culture. Counter-cultural, he mocked the crowd that followed in lock-step fashion and, for that reason, appealed to me and my high school subculture buddies both male and female, all full of teenage angst and animus.
Those who loved Mike really loved him. Those who didn’t really didn’t: “That one wants to fire me,” Mike would unapologetically say.
His school supervisors simply did not know what to do with someone like him: an anti-establishment often playing the “pagliacci” (clownish) fellow coming in each day in a suit jacket and tie.
Mike’s outright hostility toward authority did not match his Republican voting. In those days Republicans were very anti-fascist, pro-military, anti-Russia. Like establishment Democrats, Republicans used to be motivated by “noblesse oblige.”
Mike’s moment in the sun was a photo he had taken with Ronald Reagan, who is a far cry from the current Republicans. We respected him. Mike would be honing his imitation of Donald Trump today, and making us laugh.
Mike detested clownish conning politicians and saw right through them. He left an indelible mark on Lowell High-schoolers from the 1960s and 70s.
Mike told me once, “I am a closet liberal acting like a conservative so I won’t be hung.”
I roared with laughter.
I learned some valuable lessons from Mike, like: “Life is not what it seems. You see, that guy thinks he is a big shot. But he isn’t what he seems either.”
I usually howled when Mike said such things.
“The only thing we have learned about education is ‘nothing works’ because we have tried everything,” he said to more cynical laughter from me.
Mike would tell me, “Be careful. You don’t know what is around the corner. You only think you know.”
This was metaphysics at its best.
“You are full of assumptions, Mickey V.,” he said, then challenged me to be more careful about how I viewed people and the world around me.
His advice still resonates with me.
Mike taught for 38 years. Around year 30, I advised him to get out because I felt it might give him a nervous breakdown.
Three years before he retired, he was sent home from school one day citing “exhaustion.” He would return a year later with a doctor’s note deeming him to be healthy enough for work. He lasted two more years, against my advice.
A few short years later, Mike passed away, I think in part due to the stress teaching placed him under. I always believed teachers should have incentives to retire early or make age 60 mandatory retirement age.
Mike made me laugh yet again: “If it isn’t the kids, it’s the parents. If it isn’t the parents, it’s the bosses. If it isn’t the bosses, it’s my brother. If it isn’t him, it’s Julie (his wife.)”
Stage acting, like any worthwhile activity, gives students great confidence. Mike was very concerned about that and tried very hard to make introverted youngsters more confident.
He never had trouble with me. In fact, he told me once to tone myself down on stage and not to over-act, a common problem with high-school drama.
“You were the one person I thought might make it in Hollywood,” Mike told me a few years before he died. “But waiting on tables and kissing up to Hollywood royalty would have been too much for you, don’t you think?”
I would never know the answer to that.
In Mike’s final years as his health deteriorated, I found myself calling him every day. I needed the comfort of my former teacher. In a few short years, my own life would fall apart with the loss of my dad, my mother’s descent into dementia, the losses of my brother and my dog. There were big changes, too — a new job, new home.
Mike was gone by then, but I sure could have used him.
It seems most of us have someone who had a particular influence to fondly look back upon – a teacher, community leader, family member, athlete, service member, somebody who made a notable difference.
For me, it was Mike.
Maybe you will be thinking of yours today.
Michael Veves, 70, a retired teacher turned professional equestrian and ballroom dancer, lives in Haverhill. He can be reached at vevesmichael@gmail.com.