The True Story of HOME BEFORE DARK

Even while my new show Home Before Dark was in rehearsals, I received quite a few questions about it from the cast. People noticed a great deal of similarity between me and the kid “Danny” in the storyline. After the show finally premiered this past weekend, those questions have only become more frequent and persistent. 

So to keep from any misconceptions occurring, I thought I should set the record straight here. I believe the truth may explain a little of why I wanted to tell this story and why I thought it was so important to tell it…

I’ve always said that Home Before Dark was a very personal show for me. What I held back from saying was that the show was specifically about my childhood experiences with my grandfather. I avoided saying that basically because the most narcissistic thing you could do is probably to write a show about your own life. It’s exactly what an only child who thinks the world turns on his axis would do!

IS THE SHOW ABOUT MY CHILDHOOD AND FAMILY?

The answer to everyone’s question is, for the more part… yes, this show was basically my story and a tribute to my own grandfather. He was a beacon of light during a very sad part of my life, my childhood. I seriously don’t think I would still be here now if it hadn’t been for his warmth, sense of humor, and strong faith. The show is set in Alabama during the early to mid 1970s, and I grew up in Huntsville, AL during that same time period. Of course, we didn’t break out into song in our family like they did in the show (well, maybe expect for me). I did change the names of most characters, though my maternal grandfather’s name really was Otis.

But remember the first thing the Narrator says in the show: “This is NOT how it really happened”. When I set out to write this musical, and the story within it, I most definitely used my own childhood as the template for it. However, I determined early on that some things needed to be adjusted or changed completely, for various reasons.

So what follows are the things from the show that are pretty accurate, but also the things that were pretty much fiction. There’s actually a good mixture of both, just like “the bitter and sweet mixed in horehound candy”…

*Yes, I was an only child and my mom often drove around town to pick up kids for me to play with.

*And yes, when she realized no one wanted to come over, she made me a doll about my size to play with. His name was Charlie. I didn’t realize how terribly bizarre this sounded until looking back on it as an adult.

*The poster of Laurel and Hardy on the wall in Danny’s bedroom is the exact same one that hung over my bed. I could in fact tell you what year each of their films had been released, and who the directors and writers were on them. 

*On the other side of the room from L&H was a life-sized poster of Bela Lugosi as Dracula. At Halloween, I always wanted to be Dracula.

*Yes, I did point my stereo speakers on the front porch and lip-synch to movie musicals as neighbors drove by in amazement. But in addition, in 4th grade I put on a show for the entire student body in my elementary school. One of the songs I lip-synched to was “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” (from GIGI).

*I did indeed have a bevy of skin, food, and respiratory allergies that kept me inside much of the time (I still have several of them). I never even once played a team sport, not even in a pick-up game.

*Yes, MisterRogers was a surrogate father-figure for me. I loved him and still do.

*The 1968 Valiant was actually my dad’s car of choice, not my grandfathers. He rarely bought any car when I was a kid that wasn’t a Dodge Dart or Plymouth Valiant.

*The horehound candy was introduced to me by my grandfather. He loved it, but I never liked it.

*The character of Brenda is mainly my own creation. She’s the vehicle by which I relay my current philosophy of life – hence the songs “Hands In The Air”, “Stir It Up”, and “A Miracle Might Take Time”. One of my favorite sayings is, “If it ain’t broke, break it”. Sometimes you just need to do things a new way to gain a fresh perspective on life.

*Like Danny, I also hate rollercoasters. And the operators indeed rarely have a full set of teeth.

*Papaw did had a gold pocket watch, just like in the show, that I adored. Wish I knew what happened to it.

*I did fantasize as a kid that I was adopted by various tv and movie families like the Patridges.

*The teenage character SKY was NOT patterned after my wife, Dawn, but after a girl I dated only twice. She was a bit too forward, so I cut things off quickly. I do indeed remember her name, and no, I’m not telling it. ;0)

*The wrestler in Scene 5 is called “Vlad the Impaler” because that was nickname of Vlad III or “Vlad Tepis” who was a ruthless ruler in Romania during the 1400s known for his cruelty. He was the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s “Count Dracula”.

*No, my dad really didn’t know how to wrestle or play with a son. The one time he tried he took it way too serious, and it ended badly like in the show.

*Yes, I did struggle with doubts about God’s existence and heaven even as a young adolescent. I believe it stemmed from not trusting anyone called a “father”.

*As opposed to the family in the show who never went to church, my family probably attended church once to twice a month. 

*Banana pudding was not my grandfather’s favorite, it is mine. But only the way my wife makes it. It is a fine art.

*Yes, my grandfather Otis came to live with us after his wife died of lung cancer. He was a retired insurance salesman and frustrated preacher.

*He did like to dance a jig when he came into the kitchen in the morning for breakfast. That irritated my dad, who was very introverted.

*Otis did actually die of a stroke in the parking lot of the Madison County Coliseum, headed to see a wrestling match.

*I really did make him go round and round the same blocks once when he got confused and couldn’t remember his way home.

*No, I didn’t drive away with my grandfather’s body from his funeral. BUT…at his daughter’s funeral (my Aunt Jewel), the funeral home mixed up her body with that of another elderly woman. They had to exhume both coffins and rebury both ladies. But that’s something Aunt Jewel would have done – she was the one non-Baptist in the family (a Methodist), who was considered a bit wild. After her first husband passed, she began recruiting several new husbands from the dances held at the local Methodist church!

DAD

It’s true that my relationship with my dad was very tumultuous from my early childhood through high school. For as far back I can remember, my dad was a very angry and distant man, just like Joe. However, he had pretty good reasons for being that way. His own father was an alcoholic who eventually abandoned the family. The fact he left them during The Great Depression made things even more traumatic. 

Although my dad had been a terrific student in high school and earned a scholarship to college, he had to refuse it in order to get a full-time job and support his younger brother and mother. Even at that, they barely made it and had to receive help from extended family members. So my dad had never really had a father and was now forced to play that role in his family. This made him resent his father even more and feel like he had missed fulfilling his own potential.

My dad and I are close now, and God truly did a work in his life. I didn’t have to wait until heaven, as in the last scene, for forgiveness to flow both ways. The anger I once saw in him is pretty non-existent now. Over the years, God has helped me see just how impossible it was for my dad to be the kind of dad I needed. 

The words sung by the Dad to Danny in the penultimate song “Across This Table”, had as its opening line “I was scared to be the father I had never known…”. This was the understanding I came to in forgiving my father: it’s hard to be a father when you never had one of your own. But he provided for us because he was determined not to be like his dad and run away. In that, he succeeded. He never stopped being willing to help me even when I reached adulthood. He never smoked or drank, he was faithful to my mom, and I never heard one single cuss word leave his lips. He succeeded in being the moral opposite of his dad. Unfortunately, he never learned how to express love or tenderness until long after I was grown and gone. 

When I began to write the show, I determined not to pattern the dad character too exactly after my own dad. I didn’t want it to appear like I was taking cheap shots at him or using my gifts to get revenge for my childhood. That would cheapen the show and was truly not my motivation. Another problem with patterning the show’s dad after my dad is that my dad is still alive, now approaching his 99th year this June. For however tough our family life was, he didn’t deserve being thrown under the bus after overcoming so many hardships in his life.

So I decided to change some unimportant things while leaving things I thought that mattered. 

While I don’t call what Dad did “abuse” as such, he would scream a lot and could deliver furious whippings. The chip on his shoulder that Joe had in the show was very present on my Dad’s as well.

But other things in the show were completely unlike my father. Where my dad had been a rural mail carrier and usually wore slate blue pants and lighter blue shirt, the Dad in the show looks more a corporate business type. Also, I never heard my dad speak in a demeaning way to any person of a different race as the dad in the show did. While I did grow up hearing fowl things from some other family members, that just wasn’t my dad. He was not arrogant – if anything, he seemed to feel inferior to other men who had gone to college. 

As far as the basic attitude of Joe’s character, I decided I owed it to my Dad to not pattern it specifically after him. So the extremely hateful sarcasm you hear onstage from Joe’s mouth was not typical of my dad, but of me. I gave Joe “my voice’, and put words in his mouth I have spoken when acting out in anger. My dad’s rage was not tinged with the hateful sarcasm I can wield so skillfully. So I thought making “Joe” an amalgam of both my dad and me in my worst moments was fair.

MOM

In the second scene, Mom gives Papaw of photo of his deceased wife to keep in his room. Onstage, the photo we used was actually one of my own mother. 

What the narrator says about Mom is the show was pretty much true of my mom. Instead of Courtney Mabe’s striking red hair though, my mom’s hair was an incredibly light shade of blonde. She never ever had to color it, and as she aged the grey just blended into it. She was as close to a platinum blonde as you could get without dyeing it.

If you could see that photo we used onstage, you would know she most definitely could have been a model. And I’m told she had a lovely singing voice, as she and her two sisters used to sing in competitions throughout the south. When she married my dad, she went to work at a switchboard (for the local newspaper), just like I mentioned in the play. She miscarried an earlier child and finally quit work when I arrived. I wasn’t born until their mid-thirties, so they considered me sort of a last chance at having a kid. That and the previous miscarriage is probably why I never had brothers and sisters.

Here again with Mom, I decided to make some things about the mom in the show decidedly different from her. Though many of the circumstances were the same, the Mom in the show is much more positive and a much stronger person than my mom was in real life. Mom in the show has the strength I wish my mom had in facing her trials. But Mom did not deal well with the stress of living with my Dad. I unfortunately became her only confidant about her hurts and frustrations with my father.

DANNY

But as I implied in the show, some of the problem was me and my mom’s enabling of me. She gave in easily to my whining and excuses way too often, and overdramatized some of my illnesses. As a result, I never played a team sport and still can’t throw a baseball or football well. That’s my fault really, not hers. She saw herself as my protector. She was doing the best she could.

But the same allergies rarely stopped me from hopping on my bike and going for long rides all over our city.  My hometown of Huntsville, Alabama had an amazing downtown area. The streets leading to the downtown square were lined with antebellum homes, many of them quite glorious. I would usually spend hours riding past them, imagining what living in them with a different happy family would be like. 

As a result of overprotectiveness and the absence of siblings, I managed to avoid many of the experiences that made other kids more “normal”. But Mom always thought I was something special, I guess because I was all she had left. In the show, the Mom sings, “Danny’s a boy who feels things deeper than others feel. Danny’s a boy who imagines what’s in his mind is real…” Mom always defended me, probably too much. But she was doing her best. 

WHY SO TRANSPARENT?

It’s clear I’m opening myself pretty wide with this show, and some make think it was too open. As the show was still being written, it actually got some push-back from people about some of the songs, especially the opening number that showed the twisted family dynamics at work. I guess they thought Christian theatre ought to only show the ideal of what God wants the family to be. But I believe there is much more power for healing in dealing with the truth, and then reaching toward the ideal.

Now with the advantage of hindsight, I believe this show and the overwhelming response to it from our audience prove the incredible power of taking the healing you’ve received, and then using it to heal others.

We hide way too many of our struggles, and this is usually out of pride. We don’t want people to know we are really as fragile and damaged as we are. So we put on a happy face and post only the most triumphant aspects of our lives on Facebook. 

I’m really too old to worry about that anymore. I’ve fathered too many broken foster children now to let them think they are alone in their brokenness. Like the Dad wisely sings in the show, “EVERYBODY’S broken”

Over this past weekend, I looked on in amazement as people watched my story and somehow saw it as their own. I’ve never seen so many people crying at the end of a show, and the words from many of you have moved me deeply. I believe that’s because the message of God’s forgiveness, and the freedom we find when we grant forgiveness, is one people need desperately in their own lives. I’m so thankful my dad was changed by God’s power, and that change gave us a new and redeeming relationship now!

I guess I just want to encourage you to do what I did in HOME BEFORE DARK: take the painful, awful things Satan used in your life to try to destroy you. Pick those things up in your hands and now make them your own beautiful instruments to heal others in the name of the greatest Healer, Jesus. 

Everything meant to destroy you can actually make you stronger. So look back over your story and I promise you will see the hand of Father was actually there all along, working in the midst of your most painful trials. As Otis sings to Danny at the very end, our God has a gift for working through the very things we assume are the most destructive:

“He is speaking in your night, He is calling through your pain.

He is singing through your raging storm, and whistling in your rain”