I lied to get the job, and he knew it. August, 1983: my first week at Catawba, work-study assignments were going quickly, and though I’d seen sewing machines, I’d never actually run one. Still– how hard could ‘costume shop’ be? Down to the basement for gimlet-eyed scrutiny. Of course he knew. He knew everything. And yet– he took me on. I was one of four freshman assistants, and the only guy. Maybe I’d be handy lifting bolts of fabric.

My first week was a preview of the four years to come. Four Singer Featherweights, all in a row at the far end of the room. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: in at 2, out at 5:30. We went straight to our cubbies, where waited a packet of fabric, notions, trim– a single complete garment, tied with selvage scrap into a bundle, along with a handwritten set of instructions. Every last step– broken down, numbered, narrated, illustrated– idiot-proof. I was the idiot sent to test his system.

Someone (probably Carolie) had shown me enough of a sewing machine to keep me from self-harm. What did he start me out on? Probably a muslin peasant shirt. Cheap fabric, a bag with a hole and two tubes. The others whipped through theirs, back to their cubbies, on to the next. I entered a pitched battle. Snarl, snag, broken needle, wavering stitching. I poked myself with a pin (one of those sharp brass ones he loved) and said “ouch’. From behind me (he sat us with our backs to him, the door, and the clock) this voice called out, like half of a Yiddish vaudeville act, an echo of the Garment District, some supervisor from the Triangle Shirtwaist factory:

“Don’t get blood on the goods!”

My first Parkie-ism. I was hooked.

There’s really no overstating how terrible at this job I was. And yet, I kept showing up, and he kept not firing me. I came to understand that as ‘our deal’. If I could suffer through 10½ hours a week of failure and misery, he’d take on a like amount of shoddy incompetence. Because– here’s the thing, one of the base miracles of the man– he had absolute (completely justified) faith in his own ability to spin dross into gold. “With enough of the right nothing, you can make anything” he’d say as he turned soda can pull tabs into convincing armor, or me into a (much less convincing) stitcher.

I’ve never known anyone who worked harder or smarter. The mountains of costumes, the thousands of slides, his own translations of the classics– the rentals, oh Jesus, the costume rentals. Bane of his existence, source of his slush fund. Every Halloween, in would roll the worst people, with the most impossible, endless, moronic requests. He would suffer these fools, come back to the costume shop, vent, then slap on a smile and go do it again.

He cast me every year, in nice parts. I played Beralde in “The Imaginary Invalid” , the ‘raisonneur’, the one reasonable voice in a sea of madman. I imitated him, he knew it, and it cracked him up. I played Laertes to his Polonius, and we got to refine our ‘hunky loudmouth/peevish windbag’ act. I took every class he offered, even the one we both knew I’d never pass: ‘Principles of Costume Construction’. It was mandatory for shop assistants, and sure enough I failed it. He made me re-do and re-do the final project until it was barely credible, and so I could keep my job.

He taught me more than any other teacher, sturdy, practical lessons. Back when I ran a theater, we were, like most theaters, drowning in stuff. I called up Parkie and asked for a copy of “The Principles of Storage’. Three days later, it arrived in the mail, a fresh copy, in his unmistakable hand. I have it in front of me now. I quote him every day: “Make sure you’re sewing with thread”, “Wash the paintbrush till you’re willing to drink the runoff”, Wipe the blood off before you put it away”, “Don’t fuck with the Gods”, and, of course, his central mantra:

“Done is beautiful.”

Now he’s done, and wasn’t he beautiful? Except, of course, his work will never be done. Because we were his real work, we thousand lumps of ignorance, that he suffered with a joy all out of proportion to our potential. And we have gone on to teach and live whatever pale shadows of his vast, comprehensive knowledge we managed to hold onto. But more than the knowledge itself; what he really taught was the joy in the knowledge, the delight in finding the best way– treating life like one of his greatest hacks– the legendary ‘magic pocket trick’.

He said to me (on a stage, as my father, some thirty years ago, while I wore a blue velvet doublet that he [demon!] made me sew for myself): ‘To thine own self be true’, but it’s another little scrap of Polonius he seemed to relish most:

“More matter with less art!”

For you, James Parker, we will certainly try.

my treasured copy of ‘principles of storage’