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Today's Featured Biography

Paul Johnson

I’m not ready to do this. But then again, I’m never “ready.” At a previous class reunion Steve Wolf told me “Life is not a dress rehearsal, Paul.”

I’ve been pondering possible meanings of that ever since. Maybe it explains my recurring dreams, such as the dream where I’ve not attended Mr. Halley’s solid geometry class for several decades and I’m taking his final exam, failing to figure out what the first question means. Soon everyone completes the exam and I’m still stuck on question one.

Oh. And then there’s the dream where I’m standing backstage wearing a costume and the curtain is about to open. I have not attended our class-play rehearsals, have not memorized my lines, have no idea when I’m supposed to enter onto the stage, or where to stand or move after the curtain opens. The best I can hope for is some amazingly adequate improvisation.

Since we graduated in 1959, my life has been a series of improvisations. Maybe that’s because during our time together at Southwest I learned how to “fake it” and somehow managed to graduate smack-dab in the middle of our class.

I cherished our moments together at Southwest. So much so that I got it into my head to attend high school again for another four years. That was after I faked my way through college and “earned” a teaching degree following a four-year hitch in the Air Force during the Viet Nam Mess.

During the four years I pretended to be a teacher I never once prepared a daily lesson plan for my eighth-grade and senior English students. And I had never learned how to spell like an English teacher spells, so I never wrote anything upon the blackboard.

I told my students that my English class was not about dead writers, grammar and research papers. “This class is about us. About how we relate to each other when we speak and listen, especially when we discuss together whatever we read and write.” It worked for them and it worked for me.

The best compliment I received from a former student went something like this: “You may not have taught us much about grammar and great writers, but you did something more important. We had spent 12 years together in our small town. From kindergarten up to entering your class in our senior year. During our senior year in your class we finally got to know each other. Who we were becoming, what we were desiring to become after high school, how to relate to each other in ways we valued. In your class we ceased being strangers to each other.”

I moved on from teaching to become a hot-shot manager in the advertising department for the Star Tribune newspapers (again faking it while lucky enough to be surrounded by people who knew what they were doing). Then I enjoyed subsequent success while posing as a career counselor for people who had failed to “follow their bliss.” All I had to do was listen to each of them for several hours and climax the sessions with a simple question: “What changes are you going to make, starting with your first small step toward what you want to become?”

It worked for them and it worked for me.

Presently I’m pretending to be a screenplay writer, spending my blazing days and nights passionately writing fictional screenplays about people seeking peace of mind and heart as the result of mistakes made while they muddled through lives that were not dress rehearsals.

Why have I chosen to do this? I was inspired by one of our classmates, Bruce Henricksen, who wrote Ticket To A Lonely Town, a collection of short stories filled with loveable losers who I can identify with; people who never seemed ready to live their lives but pressed on anyway. If you’re curious about Bruce’s book, I intend to include a review of it within this, our very own class reunion web site.

One last thought here: please show up at our class reunion on October 3, 2009. I look forward to sitting at a table with you and talking about how our experiences at Southwest may have led to some of our pleasant dreams and maybe absurd nightmares.

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