23-The Big Fat Park

My clothes were torn, my face was dirty, and I wasn't quite sure where my next meal was coming from. My brain was in a fog most of the time. But I loved my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and my companion Penelope, and I wanted to spread the word. I'm jimpoulling and this is my view from the middle. In nineteen eighty five, my soon to be wife and I were looking for a church to attend in South Orlando. My fiance's mother attended this United Methodist church in the little area of the city known as Pinecastle. Her mother spoke highly of the place, so we decided to check it out. Pretty soon, we are attending regularly, and my wife decided to audition for a play that the church drama ministry was putting on. Much to her delight, she got a part. My wife and I both had been involved with drama at our respective high school wolves growing up, so neither of us were strangers to working on stage, but neither of us had actually done anything on stage since high school either. But my wife was thrilled to be part of the cast. When it came time for dress rehearsal, she invited me to watch so I did. I loved watching what they did. It brought back fond memories of my time in the drama department at Garden City East High School in Michigan back in the mid nineteen seventies. So when the Pinecastle United Methodist Church drama industry known as Chicaina Theater had another audition, I tried out. Strangely enough, I got a part. Even stranger my part was that of a disc jockey. Strange because my actual career at the time was in the radio broadcasting industry. And if you've listened to some of the podcasts, and this is my view from the middle series, you know by now that throughout forty plus years in the business I did virtually everything there is to do in radio except be a disc jockey, which is why I wanted to be in the business to begin with. Well, this minor part in this church play was the closest I would come to actually being a disc jockey. She Kaina Theater produced two or three full length productions a year in those days. The congregation was pretty large then and very receptive to the performances. I got more and more involved in the ministry and took on more and more roles. In the full length productions. We did one called Catacombs, which was a play about people during the end Times. I played a preacher who had been tortured by the secret police with shock treatments to the brain. I had wild doc brown style hair and tattered clothing, and I spent most of my time on stage spontaneously blurting out verses of scripture since my brain had obviously fried to the casing during the torture sessions. Not a lot of laughs in this play, but if you sat and watched it and didn't start thinking about your relationship with the Almighty, then you weren't paying attention. The play was so well received we actually took it on the road and performed it at other churches in central Florida. Here's the thing about performing in a church drama that ministers to the audience also ministers to you too. So this play just served to endear me more to the Church and God and Jesus Christ more so than anything else in my past. Of course, my religious past experience was mostly made up of dealing with Catholic school nuns and their steel ruler discipline. What those nuns failed to realize back then is that their rules and corporal punishments did more to drive people away from the faith than to endear people to it. After a few years of doing full length plays at the church, we started realizing that the attendance at the performances were beginning to wan. These productions were expensive to produce, and we felt we weren't reaching enough people with them. Occasionally, the pastor would have us do short skits during the Sunday morning services on topics that supported his sermons. We started getting more comments on those short skits than we ever did on the full length productions, so we did what made sense. With the pastor's support, we converted our Chkina Drama ministry from doing full length three act plays to doing just ten to twelve minutes sermons supporting skits on Sunday morning during the services. We called the new ministry the Sunday Players. Our first exposure as the Sunday Players was a series of skits based on the parables called Welcome to the Mustard Seed Cafe. We decorated the sanctuary with checkered curtains and set up tables with checkered tablecloths just to make it look like a cafe. Before the first of the three services started, we started frying bacon and percolating coffee to make the place smell like a cafe. The congregation loved it. The pastor loved it because it gave him a platform from which to launch his sermons. We did have little old Lady complain because she didn't think it was appropriate that we converted the sanctuary to a cafe. But when the pastor found out about the complaint, he simply said, well, I guess she'll just have to get over it. That senior pastor was the late Bill Pickett. He was a big supporter of our drama ministry. We started doing skits twice a month, sometimes even more often. We had a pretty sizable group of actors, and we even started writing our own scripts. They weren't all as elaborate as mustard Seed, but they didn't need to be. Support from the congregation and the church of leadership for our drama sketches was strong. Our drama director started purchasing some drama scripts from a fellow by the name of Paul Joyner who was with a church in San Diego, California. Joiner was a very talented writer and later went on to produce a long running worldwide distributed television program for evangelist David Jeremiah called Turning Point. But during this era, Joyner was writing drama skits for his own drama ministry, the Shadow Mountain Players at Shadow Mountain Community Church near San Diego. Joiner had a knack for creating endearing, recurring characters for his dramas. Among them was a couple of homeless, mentally challenged individuals named Cecil and Penelope. Our drama director asked my wife, Melody and I to play Cecil and Penelope for the Sunday Morning Sunday Players skits. These characters were a challenge. Joiner cautioned actors not to overdo the mental disabilities of the couple who live in a public park, the Big Fat Park, as they called it. Cecil and Penelope were a happy, simple couple who didn't seem to mind being homeless or even mentally challenged, if they even realized they were that way. Cecil rarely looks you in the eye. His hand and armed gestures are contorted all over the place. He doesn't like being touched. Penelope is a sweet, innocent She sits in rocks and seems to always be in motion. She comes off as debilitatingly shy, but always winds up spouting a childlike wisdom that makes everyone stop and take a breath. It's never clear as to whether the two are just friends or if they're married. That's purposely left ambiguous, but as if out of the mouths of babes, the couple is able to preach the word, not necessarily in verbatim scripture, but in their own words and actions. The skits would usually involve another couple, a normal couple, if you will, who are in a crisis in some way and wind up in the Big Fat Park. They encounter our two characters and are not sure what to make of them. After the normal couple sets the stage to show the audience their crisis, Cecil and Penelope would burst on the scene. Cecil would greet the frightened out of their witch couple with HI, my name is Cecil, and this is Penelope, and we live here in the Big Fat Park. Through the sketches, Cecil and Penelope would wind up offering ministry and clarity and a lesson taught and learned through innocence and the minds of two people have nothing but their faith to live by and on. At the time we started creating these characters, our daughter was in Nebraska and happened to be working for a place that helped and nurtured mentally challenged individuals. We happened to visit her and she took us to meet some of her quote unquote clients as she called them, all were mentally challenged in some way. We met Cecil and Penelope that day. Through observing the patients in this home, their innocence, their mannerisms, their phobias, we were able to come up with the traits that became our characters. I met a fellow who didn't like to be touched and who didn't look me in the eye. My wife met a lady who was always in motion, rocking back and forth and yes, debilitatingly shy. This visit was enormously helpful for us creating these characters, and I'm convinced that our happenstance meeting with these people was not a coincidence but another God thing. But there we were in the middle, a challenge ahead of us to portray a couple of mentally challenged, homeless but happy people, and our own congregation back home awaiting the Ministry of the Sunday Players. My wife and I have been playing Cecil and Penelope at that church for more than twenty years. Occasionally we still dig out one of Paul join Your's scripts, or maybe even write one ourselves and perform it. Whenever we do, the congregation loves it. We're constantly asked when they can expect to see them again. Cecil and Penelope, simple godly innocence living in the Big Fat Park. I'm Jimpoula and that's my view from the middle. In the next episode. Sometimes life forces you off your chosen career path and you have to do things you may not like just to survive. You gotta do what you got to do next on my view from the middle,