AUSTIN K. BROWN, NO SECOND BANANA

AUSTIN K. BROWN, NO SECOND BANANA

“You there in the third row. Yes, you, the tall dude with the fro….. Yes, you, son. Come on up here, come on, make it snappy. Time waits for no man, especially in the acting game. You want to be in show business or what?”

Or what is right. That’s the way it started. Or I should say continued. My brilliant career as an actor. An actor on the stage. In the theater. In the movies. That’s what I wanted. But this was only community theater, and it was beginning to feel like a go-nowhere trudge. I was beginning to feel like I was on the road to being what they used to call a ‘second banana’. And I might have been a might- have- been forever until I took matters into my own hands and decided to take a detour, you might say. Yeah, I saw that fork in the road and turned it into a knife in my hand so to speak.

How it started. Me, I’m Austin, Austin K. Brown and I am a tall biracial “dude” with a fro, like the man said. I was even tall as a little kid. And kind of gangly and awkward and worse, I wasn’t interested in the hoops or soccer or baseball. I just wanted to act. I wanted to be an actor up there on the stage.

I was happier in the library where I read the plays of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Arthur Miller and Samuel Becket than on any court or field. Reading and memorizing my favorite parts. No kidding. I knew King Lear by heart. Many a snowy Minnesota afternoon I spent in the library reading and silently speaking the parts I saw myself in –Falstaff, Iago, Banquo.I could even speak both the male and female parts. I was a one-man band. But I was in the library, not on the stage.

There was hardly a school play (even a musical or two) that didn’t have a part for Austin K. Brown. I was in Guys and Dolls, Chicago and Oliver Twist. And then I went on to community theatre. I kept waiting for my big break. But I was always number two (or three, to be honest). I was always too tall, too black, too soft spoken, too gangly, too young, too old, too something to play the lead. Second best, in the chorus, a stand-in, an alternative. That was me, Austin K. Brown.

But this dude with the fro was determined. I was still just a kid but I saved every dollar cutting lawns, shoveling snow, running errands for teachers and neighbors and helping other kids with their homework or their SATs. I was invisible because I was poor and I lived on the wrong side of the tracks, literally. Where was I going to get to –as a foster kid with two beer-belly loser parents and three mean- minded white girl “sisters” who stole my lunch and hid my sneakers out of spite? I wasn’t just going nowhere, I was going backwards by the time I was 18. I was a million miles away from my dreams of becoming an actor.

On the day of my 19th birthday, I was cast in yet another Stillwater community theatre play. “The Crucible” All I landed was the goat owner’s part! The Hinckleys (my foster parents) couldn’t afford to send any of us to real college, but since I was the one with the good grades, I got a “modest” scholarship to community college. And I majored in theatre. Well, it was a start. Even though the stage was a portable device set up in the gym between basketball games. But was it a start, or more of the same?

Then came my fork in the road.

Enter Mr. Peebles, stage left. Mr. Peebles had been a famous actor in his day on the London stage and in some small British art films. His house on a hill in the fancier part of town was a monument to theatre arts with photos of famous actors and actresses from the past on every wall. His house was filled with treasures, mementoes and awards reflecting his brilliant life in the arts.

Mr. Peebles was in the audience that night when I was on stage playing Porter the drunken gatekeeper in Macbeth. A minor character, of course. I thought I was pretty good. But the local press barely noticed me, and I didn’t take a second bow at the final curtain.

But Mr. Peebles shook my hand at the stage door and slapped me on the back, congratulated me, and invited me to his house on the hill for tea the next day! Me, Austin K Brown, a minor actor. An amateur!

We had many afternoons in his Edwardian sitting room, he in his great chair and me in the sunny window seat, discussing the many roles he had played on the stage over the decades. Not just Mr. Peebles and me, but his faithful dog, Bull's Eye, (named for the bull terrier in Dickens’ Oliver Twist). It was all the more remarkable that Bullseye had been in a number of movies himself where he would walk on his back legs, jump six feet in the air to catch a ball or a ring and even bark-sing!! But of course, he was still a dog and, like me, a second banana.

The day Mr. Peebles died was the saddest day in my life. I had to do something to repay Mr. Peebles for all he had done for me. So I adopted Bulls Eye and with the money I inherited from Mr. Peebles’ estate, I built a theatre, a small theatre, which I named The Peebles Art Center, right up on the hill right near his house where we put on all the plays he had loved in his life -- Hamlet to Waiting for Godot to Oliver Twist --starring me, Austin K Brown, and Bulls Eye in the leading parts.

There were no minor parts, no second bananas.