on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 13

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods. See here for the entire series.

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A bit of fun

Any discussion of Dick’s influence naturally includes his command of his work and his welcoming others into it. But a discussion must also include his sense of humor. Although he felt increasingly slighted and irrelevant at St. John the Divine, Houston, he always maintained a wry sense of humor just under the surface, and he was always grateful when he found himself in company where he could unleash that humor freely (which he did). The apex I witnessed of his ability to shed work and enjoy life was a short trip he, Bruce Power, Richard Rhoads and I made to New Orleans beginning on Christmas Day 1991. Just four busy church musicians enjoying a few days off, with Dick leading the pack. We ate at the Camellia Grill one day and playfully concluded as a group that ‘Camellia’ was probably Dick’s drag name at Tulane. He went along with the gag.

Whenever he said something sarcastic or off-color, Dick would follow it with a smirk, a raised shoulder and raised eyebrows, or he would smile and tuck his chin in a demure pose of look-at-me-I-made-a-funny. He had a twinkle in his eye and a childlike smile. He never laughed out loud but rather grinned it out under a bulky caterpillar mustache I never saw shaved off.

He and I and several friendlies on the church support staff would giggle at the sincere but tragically all-too-frequent spelling ‘St. John the Devine.’ We snickered as we visualized champagne bottles and prows of ships when we heard of new parents asking to have their babies ‘christened.’ And we would snort at the strings of fashionable last names being given to babies for their full names; we imagined the future chaos when these children would be told to ‘print last name first’ and then an unsuspecting reader would have to recalculate which of all those last names was the real one.

Dick and I would always pass the Peace at the appropriate time and in quiet reverence, complete with handshake and the full exchange, “The Peace of the Lord be with you. / And also with you.” Then he would immediately exit that mood and make some characteristically Dick comment: “Where the hell is the choir today? This is going to be terrible.” … “Where would we like to go for lunch today?” … “Boy, that was some sermon. I should have gone to feed the doggies during it.” [‘Feed the doggies’ was code for ‘smoke a cigarette.’ Dick was a heavy smoker. When my non-smoking, teetotaling parents first visited me in Houston, we went to Dick’s one evening for dinner. Rather than smoke in front of them, Dick stepped outside several times, claiming he needed to check on or feed the doggies. That wasn’t entirely contrived: he had two small dogs that were quite the entertainment. ‘Ralph’ was an assertive, black, short-haired miniature Dachshund, and ‘Butch’ was an exceedingly lovable and gassy English pug.]

If Dick and I were planning a service and discovered we needed something from outside arm’s reach, I would ask, “Am I supposed to go get it?” And he would say, “No, I’ll get it. You just sit there, drawing salary.” I still use that line today in banter with colleagues.

As soon as dinner would be delivered at a restaurant, Dick would ask the table, “Well, you ready to go?” Or, “Well, I’ll see you in the car.”

Dick once accused a too-loud tenor of sounding like a braying donkey. He accused one person’s sudden vibrato of sounding like an English horn in a string ensemble. When a section of the choir would launch too loudly into a phrase or when a women’s section began to allow too much vibrato in, Dick would yell, “No, you can’t do it that way – you’ll scare the children!” He always said such things only to old friends and knew that they would take it in the banter from which it was intended, but I’m sure he would get quite the shock if he said any of that to anyone at all today. [By the way, ‘You’ll scare the children!’ was very briefly a contender for subtitle of this would-be published biography of Dick. I quickly decided against it, knowing that only insiders would get it, while other readers would think God-knows-what from it.]

Dick drove a white 1989 Chrysler le Baron with a black cloth convertible top. He looked quite the part in it, with a ball cap and sunglasses. He always wanted a fluorescent light frame around the rear license plate. Those things were still novelties back then, and whenever he’d see one on a souped-up car, he’d endearingly get so excited he couldn’t sit still. So I got him one for Christmas one year, but then one thing in life led to another, and it never got installed.

We had some fun with a little fiefdom cropping up in the receptionist’s office. The receptionist began to require staff members to mark themselves present or absent on a magnetic board in her office. For us, that meant a trip to another building and upstairs, just to slide a little magnet left or right. She insisted everyone play along, but she was endearingly quite appreciative of anyone who did. So we would just call her with our status, which was fine with her. A few times, Dick called to tell her that he was heading to the restroom and that he would let her know when he was finished. Not only was the overkill of that lost on her, but also a tiny, private restroom was located right next to Dick’s office, not eight feet from his desk. He could have carried the hard-wired landline phone in there with him, if it meant that much to him. (And it didn’t, of course.)

Dick hated having to answer to more and more people in his work, a growing percentage of whom had no idea how to do that work. So he understandably resisted being required to sign in and out of campus, as if his hours were being tallied. But the bit of fun he had with the receptionist was surely an entertaining (if admittedly passive-aggressive yet equally futile) protest of increasing encroachment on our professional privacy.

Dick didn’t like the tidal wave of paperwork beginning to invade. Purchase orders, work orders, pre-purchase approvals and all other manner of paperwork made their appearance in churches everywhere during this time. Dick nominally worked at the pleasure of the rector, but now we all – including the rector at times – were beginning to work at the pleasure of the church administrator. When Dick suddenly had to justify every expense as if it were a first-time expenditure, he tried very hard to stay cool on the outside even as he railed in private against this new management style. I, too, hated it and felt that artists were going to have to begin operating like oil companies just to get pianos tuned and music ordered. [That’s life in the modern world, of course. The paperwork I am now responsible for in my university teaching is staggering, and it makes a few handwritten triplicate purchase orders at St. John the Divine look like a dream job – or dream vacation.] We found the whole thing silly and trendy, IRS bullying aside. We were annoyed all over again when we learned that church administrators’ salaries everywhere were beginning to eclipse those of the clergy for whom they worked.

The Rt. Rev. William E. Sterling (1927-2005) served as Bishop Suffragan of Texas 1989-1999. He previously served as rector in several churches in the Houston area. And he was a good friend of Dick’s. When he would visit St. John the Divine on official duty, he didn’t hang out with the clergy between services. Rather, he and Dick hung out in Dick’s office, smoking. Bishop Sterling confirmed me at St. John the Divine in the fall of 1990. Dick told him to give me “an extra-special blessing,” which the bishop dispensed by doing a near-complete handstand of his entire 200+-pound weight on my bowed head. The short prayer uttered over each confirmand was never so long than when he uttered it over my head that day. But my neck and I survived, and Dick and Bishop Sterling had a little fun.

To my ears, Dick’s favorite story to tell was of a service of healing and Eucharist one of us would play every Friday in the chapel. Dick loved telling this story, and he would chortle at the punchline every time, as if he were telling it for the first time:

One Friday, I was playing … just … the dreariest, most depressing music for communion for that service. And one of those old ladies passed by and patted me on the shoulder and whispered, “Your music really makes this place come alive!” I could hardly keep playing for laughing!

Bruce Power, one of Dick’s true friends, still giggles at that story today. One day, when Bruce learned I was going to play a special concert with the choir at First Methodist in Houston, he instructed a buddy of his in that choir to come up to me during rehearsal break and say, “Your music really makes this place come alive.” That was the kind of thing Dick would have done. 

Next time: The tragic surprise